Lie in Plain Sight (5 page)

Maeve opened the front door and let him in. “This is a surprise.”

“What a day,” he said, walking into the kitchen and placing the pizza on the counter. “I need to shake off everything that's happened.”

“I'm sure you do,” Maeve said, taking two mismatched wine glasses from the cabinet over the sink. One was a red wine glass, the other a white wine glass from a collection that seemed to be dwindling quickly. “Do you want chicken? Or do you want pizza?” Maeve noticed that it was from her favorite place a town over, and although her chicken and gravy was one of his favorites as well, they both opted for the pizza so they could eat outside without making too much of a mess.

They each made a plate and took it outside. Cal had installed a porch swing after they had gotten divorced—some kind of home renovation peace offering, she supposed—and Maeve had put new cushions on it at the beginning of the summer. They had weathered the heat and the rain nicely. She settled into the side of the swing she considered hers and stabilized herself until Chris lowered his much bigger body onto the other side. She gave him a long kiss to let him know just how much she had missed him over the last few days.

“I missed you, too,” he said. “I thought we were going to get some time together, but with this girl going missing…”

“Yeah, that,” Maeve said. “Why was everyone so concerned about her so soon after she didn't show up at home? If that had been Heather, I would have given it a couple of hours, and if nothing bad had happened, she would have shown up eventually. Kids need to eat, after all,” Maeve said, attempting a joke that fell flat. “But really. It was an all points bulletin immediately. What's going on?”

Chris took a long sip of wine, a screw-top cabernet that Maeve knew was one of his favorites. “I don't want to say too much.”

“Like what?” Maeve asked. She had proven to him already that she could keep a secret or two, that she could be trusted.

“I really don't want to talk about it, Maeve,” he said, but he really hadn't said anything at all. He stared straight ahead as he devoured first one piece of pizza and then a second. He paused before getting up to get a third to ask her a question. “Does Heather know this girl?”

“Told me she was a typical teen who hates her mother,” Maeve said, trying to make it sound less hurtful than it had felt at the time.

Chris turned and looked at her, not responding. He was careful not to say too much about how Heather treated Maeve, but his eyes told Maeve that he didn't approve. “Another slice?”

She held up her plate. “Still have this one.”

She could hear Chris's footfalls in the hallway when she saw Cal pull up in front of the house. She ran down the porch steps and to the curb, where she banged on the passenger-side window until he rolled it down. “What are you doing?” she said, trying to keep her voice at a whisper. The baby was in the backseat, and Cal had a radio station blaring that was playing a reggae version of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” She leaned in and blew the baby a kiss; no reason why he should feel the negativity emanating from her every pore. “Go home,” she said.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, lowering the volume on the radio. This elicited a low moan from the baby, followed by an earsplitting shriek, and he turned it back up. “He loves this song.”

“Go home,” Maeve said, turning to see Chris coming from the house, two slices of pizza on his plate, a puzzled look on his face. “We're done.” When Cal opened his mouth to protest, she banged her hand on the car door. “So, good night! I'll see you tomorrow!” she said, all fake cheer and happiness. “Thanks for stopping by, but we can work this out tomorrow!”

“We can't be done,” Cal said to Maeve's back. She turned and mouthed, “But we are.”

On the porch, Chris was eating his pizza and looking at the minivan. “Everything okay?”

“Tuition payment,” Maeve said, hoping that the lie falling from her lips sounded better to Chris than to her own ears. “I thought he paid and he thought I paid…”

Chris chewed his pizza slowly, looking first at the car, its headlights twinkling in the distance, and then back to Maeve. “I hate when that happens,” he said, but his tone suggested that it was just filler, a way to respond to Maeve until he figured out what he really wanted to ask her.

Never lie to a cop. That was one piece of advice that Jack had given Maeve but she hadn't been able to take, having lied now to more than one cop in her life, her father included.

 

CHAPTER 6

Jo was waiting for her outside The Comfort Zone, in the parking lot, when Maeve showed up for work the next morning, her bike propped up against the brick building, Jack nowhere in sight.

“Where's the baby?” Maeve asked. “And why are you here?” she added, an alarm bell going off in her head. Jo had never been here this early when she had worked for Maeve; her early-morning appearance was concerning.

“First of all, my mother spent the night and told me to do whatever I wanted to do today.”

Maeve narrowed her eyes. There had to be a catch.

“What I want to do, more than anything, is help you at the store again,” Jo said, standing up and stretching. “Do you always open this early?” she asked, knowing well that Maeve did; otherwise, she wouldn't be by her friend's side, her work outfit of jeans and white T-shirt on her slim body, Doc Martens on her feet.

“You. Want to help me. At the store,” Maeve said, her disbelief halting her speech. “I must be dreaming. You didn't even want to help me at the store when you actually worked here.”

“Now, that's not nice,” Jo said, but she knew it was true, smiling at the memories of having been Maeve's only real employee for many years. She followed Maeve into the kitchen. “Anything changed since I left? Everything still in the same place?”

“Nothing's changed. Everything's still in its place.”

Jo donned an apron. “Still sleeping with your ex-husband?”

Maeve didn't answer immediately, choosing her words carefully. “Technically, no.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that it happened once and it won't happen again.” She pulled the money pouch out of her tote bag and threw it onto the counter. She sat down and started counting the money from the previous day's receipts, coming up short by four hundred dollars after three different attempts at settling the tally. “Jo, do me a favor. Count this?” she said, pushing the stack of bills toward her.

“Eight thirty,” Jo said after riffling through the money. “Is that what you've got?”

Maeve nodded, even though she knew the total should have been well over a thousand dollars. She thought back to the day before, to Trish, to Evelyn, to everything that happened. Evelyn had been known to “borrow” the odd head band, or an old nail polish Maeve didn't even know she had. But money? That was a different story. Evelyn had her own money, and Maeve wasn't even sure she knew the value of it. Money held little interest for her. Relationships were her currency, and seeing Maeve and the girls was the thing she craved.

Back-to-school night came into her mind's eye, as did Trish's very short job interview.

Jo pulled some cupcake liners from the shelf in the pantry and set about putting them into a tin. “Just so you know, it's getting around. I don't think anyone knows it's you, but Patsy Morrow overheard Gabriela crying in the bathroom at the gym and telling someone else that she thought Cal was cheating.”

“What?” Maeve asked. She looked down at the stack of bills, finally pushing them all into the money pouch and zippering it shut.

“Patsy Morrow. Gabriela. Crying at the gym.”

“What's she got?” Maeve asked. She'd worry about the money later. “What does she know? Did they say?”

“Said he stayed out late a few nights, and one night in particular, when he came home, he smelled funny.”

“Funny?” Maeve asked, sniffing her hands. They always smelled a bit like nutmeg, a little bit like cinnamon. There was always a smudge of icing under the cuticles. “Funny how?”

“I don't know,” Jo said, concentrating on the cupcake tin. “Apparently, Gabriela burst into tears during spin class, jumped off her bike, and ran into the locker room. Of course, that was far too juicy for the rest of the spin class to ignore, so one or two women did reconnaissance and then reported back to the others.”

“Good old Patsy,” Maeve said, shaking her head. The village had more gossips than it needed, and Patsy was often in The Comfort Zone at one of the café tables, her head bent conspiratorially in the direction of some other disaffected housewife, dishing the dirt on someone who, nine times out of ten, had just left the store.

“You're done with that, right?” Jo asked. “The cheating? I kind of never took you for that kind of girl, Maeve.”

“What kind of girl, Jo?” Jo herself had been known to blur the lines of what was right over the years, but Maeve guessed that now she was married and had a baby, her moral compass had recalibrated. “The kind of girl who gives in to something familiar and comforting?”

“Is this about your dad?” Jo asked.

“Oh, God no,” Maeve said. Jo blamed every one of Maeve's emotions on her father dying, not realizing that of all the things she had been through, all of the traumas, that one had been the most normal and the easiest to move past. Yes, she missed him, but he had been old and frail and, worst of all, had kept from her for her entire life the reality of a developmentally challenged sister, whom she now knew and loved. No, this had nothing to do with her father and everything to do with an unsettled score between her, her ex, and his second wife.

She wasn't proud to admit that, even though she only admitted it to herself.

“It was one time,” Maeve said. “One. So why is this all around town?”

Jo voiced a thought that Maeve had had more than once. “Maybe there are others.”

Maeve went to the sink and washed her hands. When had a roll in the hay with your ex become one of the top ten crimes committed against man? She looked down at her hands and scrubbed the icing from around her cuticles, Donna Fitzpatrick's Thulian pink more stubborn than any other color she had created. It was a mistake. It had happened once. Everyone could move on with their lives.

The back door opened, bringing with it the smell of the rain, which had started falling after Jo and Maeve had entered the store. Trish Dvorak came in, her face drawn, looking as if she had lost twenty pounds since the day before, attempting a smile to lighten the mood.

“Trish,” Maeve said, her eyes going to the pouch on the counter. “I didn't expect you today.”

Jo lifted her head and smiled sadly in greeting, returning to stuffing the cupcake tins with liners, a job that was taking an inordinately long time. The more things change, Maeve thought, the more they stay the same.

“I can't sit around the house, Maeve, so I wanted to come in. To do something normal,” Trish said, doing her best not to cry but failing. “I can't not work,” she said. “I have to work. I have to make money.”

Jo stopped what she was doing. “I'm going to go out front and get ready for the morning rush,” she said, picking up the money bag and taking it with her. “Take your time. I can handle whatever we get.”

Maeve pulled out a stool and told Trish to sit. She pulled a muffin from the refrigerator and put it in the microwave to warm up before she went into the front to get some coffee. She had one pot that was on a timer so the coffee was ready when she arrived every morning, one of Cal's suggestions that she had employed. Trish picked at the muffin but drank the coffee, silent in the kitchen.

“Nothing on Taylor, Trish?” Maeve said as gently as she could.

“Nothing.”

“What's the next step, then?” Maeve asked, thinking that she would have asked Chris, but he didn't seem to want to talk about the case or anything having to do with the girl's disappearance.

“I don't know.”

“Do you think maybe she ran away?” Maeve asked.

Trish looked up at her. “Your boyfriend asked me the same thing,” she said, her tone sharp. “No. I don't think she ran away.”

“Her father? Maybe she went there?” Maeve was assuming there was a father somewhere; maybe the girl had gone to him.

“Taylor never would have gone there.”

“A boyfriend?”

Trish gave Maeve a hard look. “What are you a cop now? What's with all of the questions?”

“I'm sorry. I was just wondering…”

“What? What were you wondering, Maeve?”

“I was wondering if she had any reason to want to leave Farringville,” Maeve said. To her, it was a legitimate question. To Trish, obviously, it was as if Maeve had thrown a verbal Molotov cocktail into the conversation.

“What were you wondering? If our home life was so bad that having a mother who can't afford the things everyone else has was enough to make her want to leave? That living in an apartment behind a half-empty strip mall embarrassed her and made her want to run? That not being able to pay for college is the only thing she thinks about because it's the only thing I think about? Is that what you were wondering, Maeve?”

Maeve wasn't wondering that, but she did question how the conversation had taken such a wrong turn, how it had become a conversation on the socioeconomic realities of life as a single mother. She wanted to remind Trish that she was a single mother, too, and practically had to break her back to make ends meet, but the woman didn't seem to want to hear anything. A deep-seated hostility came off Taylor's mother in waves.

“Maybe you should take a few days off, Trish. Focus on finding Taylor. I'll get by here,” Maeve said, hoping that she wouldn't have to be more forceful in her suggestion. The woman's hostility coupled with the missing cash was all Maeve needed to convince her that she was doing the right thing after having done the wrong thing in hiring Trish so precipitously. “I'll need help for Founders Day if you want to come back in a few weeks.”