Satisfaction.
He had left her so unceremoniously years earlier, and that wound, she had come to find, had never closed. Now, the morning after, the feeling of his chest and his cheek and his mouth all coming back to her, she remembered when it had been good before it had become bad. It wasn’t her; it wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive enough, or adventurous enough, or sexy enough. It was him and what he needed and wanted. And what he wanted right now was her, and that was enough.
She had looked at herself in the mirror the next morning. She looked the same; she smelled the same, with maybe a little more cinnamon about her than a normal woman. She was exactly the same except that now, she was no longer the dowdy ex-wife, the junker that had been traded in for a new model, but the shiny new thing that her ex-husband—him with his self-diagnosed adult-onset ADHD—couldn’t get enough of.
“We’re done with this, Cal,” she said, pushing him away now. “I was just about to have some leftovers, and you’re welcome to join me. But if you’re not hungry, then you should go home. To your wife.” She pulled the leftover chicken out of the refrigerator, the containers with the mashed potatoes and gravy, the plastic-covered bowl of string beans. She knew that at his house, carbs were never on the menu and gravy was something of an urban legend, served at the local Greek diner but never in the Tudor. Beside her in the small kitchen, she could practically feel Cal salivating over the feast that she was about to prepare, even though it was two days old.
“Where’s Devon?” she asked.
“With Gabriela. She’s making an effort to get home earlier so she can spend time with him.”
“Really?” Maeve asked. In the child’s short life, Maeve had never seen his mother hold him. “Why the change of heart?”
“She doesn’t like the baby stage. Now that he’s a toddler, she’s bonding with him more. He can talk now. Interact. She likes that.”
Maeve prepared two plates of leftovers and put one at a time in the microwave. “And where does she think you are tonight, Cal?”
“Bible study at church.”
“I don’t know whether to laugh or gag.”
“You can do both.” He came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. “I’m really bad,” he whispered. “I probably should go to Bible study.”
“You probably should. You should throw in a couple of stints in the confessional as well.” Maeve pulled his plate out of the microwave and placed it on the table. She was one to talk. “Here. Eat this.”
He dived into the food like a man on death row eating his last meal. “I forgot how much I love your gravy.”
“It’s all about the roux,” she said, pouring them both a glass of wine and joining him at the table with her own plate. “Listen, Cal. I’m not kidding. This has to stop.”
He looked up from his plate long enough to give her a Bronx cheer. “Says who?”
“Says your wife.”
He dropped his fork onto his plate and gave her his undivided attention.
“She had a meltdown during spin class, and someone overheard her telling a friend that she thinks you’re cheating.”
“Huh,” he said.
“We’re done. The thought of her crying at the gym is not one I want to carry around.”
“You feel sorry for her? After everything?” Cal asked.
“I feel sorry for any woman who is saddled with a lying, cheating asshole for a husband.”
He looked, at that moment, as if he felt coming here had been a huge mistake, the delicious gravy notwithstanding.
“Are you sleeping with someone else? Other women?” Maeve asked.
His denial was so vociferous and swift that it had to be a lie; she knew him well, something he failed to take into account. “No! How could you even imply that?” He pushed his plate away. “You really know how to break a mood, Maeve.”
She didn’t believe him but that didn’t matter. “It’s my gift,” she said. “More potatoes?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “No. No more potatoes.”
“Lost your appetite?” she asked.
He had the same expression on his face that Heather used to get when Maeve put her in time-out. His plans for the evening changed, he pushed his chair back. “I’m gonna go. Will you bring Heather over later?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” she said. “Cal, I won’t bring Heather over later because you’re in a snit because I won’t sleep with you and you refuse to wait for her. I won’t bring Heather over because I’m completely exhausted from work and from lying awake at night wondering where Taylor Dvorak may have gone. I won’t bring Heather over because it’s your responsibility to make sure she gets to your house when she is supposed to be there.” She realized she was yelling. “I won’t.”
He grabbed his sweatshirt on the way out. “Remember when I said that you had changed?”
Maeve was halfway between the kitchen and the front door, her hands wound up in a dish towel.
“Well, you haven’t,” he said, pulling the sweatshirt over his head. “You’re exactly the same.” He slammed the screen door on the way out, not unlike an adolescent being sent to his room.
Maeve watched him drive off in the minivan and, without a second thought, returned to her leftovers, scraping his uneaten food onto her plate and having herself a feast.
CHAPTER 8
Jo found a daycare in town that would take Jack for the hours she needed and came to work the next day complaining that her husband, Doug, was none too happy that the stay-at-home wife and mother he thought he married was really someone who, if she spent another minute pushing the baby’s swing at the park and didn’t go back to work at least part-time, might go completely insane.
“He’s kind of old-fashioned,” Jo said, stating the obvious. Maeve had known that from the moment she met the guy, touting Jo’s pot roast on her single friend’s behalf; that was all he needed to hear to make a beeline for the divorcée, and it wasn’t long before they were engaged, getting married, and having the baby Jo always wanted. “But I told him that I would be a better wife if I could get out of the house for a few hours every day.”
Maeve turned and looked at her. “Who are you?” Gone was the free spirit that Maeve had become friends with, and in her place was a woman who promised to become a “better wife.”
“I know, I know,” Jo said, grabbing a bottle of window cleaner and a rag and spraying the glass counter in the front of the store. “I can hardly believe some of the things that come out of my mouth.” She rubbed at a crusted bit of icing. “Hey, this is a nice color. What is it? Is it ‘Fitzpatrick pink’?”
“Yes, it’s a cross between Thulian pink and salmon,” Maeve said. “The Fitzpatrick twins are being christened tomorrow. You have no idea what I’ve been through with Donna.”
“I can only imagine. I run into her at the park occasionally, and it’s ‘organic’ this and ‘gluten-free’ that.” Jo pointed at the smudged icing. “I guess that only counts when cupcakes aren’t concerned. I’m surprised she didn’t ask you to incorporate the twins’ placenta into the batter.” Jo opened the drink case and counted the number of iced teas on the right side. She turned to Maeve. “Thirty-six. I think we’re good for a while.”
Maeve rearranged some cakes in the case, making sure that the tart she had made the day before was front and center, so hopefully it would be gone by the end of the day.
Jo had made a few notations about the drink inventory on a napkin that she handed to Maeve. “Anything on Taylor?” Jo asked. “Someone put a sign in front of our house with her photo and a number to call with information. That was fast. I didn’t think you could get signs printed that quickly.”
“I only know what I’ve seen on the news, Jo. And it doesn’t sound like there have been any leads.”
Jo stopped what she was doing and stood up straight. “I don’t know if I would have understood this as well before Jack. But right now, when I think of that girl and
where she might be or what could have happened, I get a little sick.”
“Me, too.”
“A lot sick, actually.”
Maeve knew the feeling. “The last two days have been hell, Jo. I can’t stop thinking about where she might have gone.” Maeve pulled a newspaper from the stack by the front door. On the front page of the local paper, Taylor’s photo was large and surrounded by text. Maeve was struck by how at first glance, the photo could have been of Heather; the girls had similar looks. Long brown hair. Brown eyes. A grim set of lips. Similar facial bone structure.
Jo went into the kitchen as Maeve was spreading the paper open to continue reading the story of the investigation past the front page. It didn’t seem that a lot had changed or that the police had any leads. One tip said that she had been spotted on a southbound train, heading toward the city, even though the police had been all over the station asking people who had been there. Another said that she was seen walking along the side of the road by the dam. Still another reported that she had been seen in the middle of town, carrying a coffee cup, looking like she didn’t have a care in the world.
Chris Larsson came in the front of the store, the pleasant jingle of the bell above the door at odds with his stern face, his serious demeanor. His usual greeting—“Hiya, beautiful”—accompanied by a kiss or a hug, was replaced with a barely audible sigh and a tone that suggested this wasn’t a social call. Maeve grabbed a blueberry muffin from under the footed stand and put it on a napkin anyway. The guy was a sucker for her muffins, and she hoped that one bite would change his black mood.
She came around the counter and joined him at a café table by the drink case. “That’s a lot of iced tea,” he remarked.
“Biggest seller,” she said, wondering why things were so uncomfortable. A tingling starting at her toes accompanied the dreaded thought that flashed through her head.
He knows.
But he started with something else. “Tell me again what you said to the school nurse.”
Maeve squirmed in her chair. She wasn’t used to being on the other end of a line of questioning, and the fact that it was Chris doing the questioning made it more uncomfortable, not less. “I told you everything already, Chris.”
“Tell me again.”
“Judy called and said that Taylor had a headache that she was afraid was going to turn into a migraine. She said she wanted to go home. I asked if she needed a ride, and she said that Taylor was going to walk home.” Maeve looked at him expectantly.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“Is that what?” Maeve asked, unable to keep the annoyance out of her voice. “Yes. That’s it.”
“A girl is missing, Maeve,” Chris said, as if that needed to be repeated.
“I get that.”
“So anything else you might remember would be helpful.”
“There’s nothing else, Chris,” Maeve said. “What’s going on here?”
Chris pushed the untouched muffin toward her and stood, his face still grim, no evidence of his usually playful demeanor beneath the surface. “Judy Wilkerson said that Taylor was very ill and needed a ride, but that you refused to pick her up.”
The sentence was so far from the truth that it nearly took Maeve’s breath away.
Chris continued. “She said it was your idea to let her go home alone.”
CHAPTER 9
All around town, signs like the one Jo had described had popped up on lampposts, on telephone poles, in front of people’s houses.
HAVE YOU SEEN TAYLOR?
A large photo accompanied the query, the same one that Maeve had seen in the newspaper and that was now the official photo of the missing-person case. There wasn’t one lawn, or so it seemed, that didn’t have a sign, not unlike the kind you would see during village elections, when red signs appeared on some lawns, blue on others.
Maeve was still reeling from Chris’s revelation earlier that day about Judy Wilkerson. Maeve hadn’t had much to do with the school nurse over the years, but she hadn’t thought she was a liar, or someone who would go to great lengths to maneuver the truth into a space that would cast her in a better—more blameless—light. Rebecca was one of those perfect-attendance kids and was loath to miss a school day, or even come home sick in the middle of the day if she had a sore throat or felt nauseous. Heather, despite being a pain in Maeve’s ass, had a pretty good attendance record as well, so Maeve’s contact with Judy throughout her girls’ high school years had been minimal.
She left Jo to close the store. She parked in the one tiny spot she could find, sandwiched between a sleek convertible and a big SUV. While she waited for the students with cars to drive away and the buses to transport other kids had left the parking lot, she thought about her conversation with the detective. She’d been flabbergasted when Chris told her what Judy said, shocked that the school nurse would tell a lie so blatant to cover her own ass. And even if Maeve had done what Judy said, had said to send Trish home, why did Judy listen to Maeve? That was some faulty logic there that even Chris couldn’t make work. He’d looked perplexed, but when he heard what Maeve had to say, that it hadn’t been her idea, he had believed her. She thought. Before he left, there was no hug, no kiss, no promise of a late-night drop-in to see her once more before the day ended. It was just him, a trace of incredulity still on his handsome face, professing to believe Maeve. He didn’t know, and he never would, that she did keep some secrets from him, but this wasn’t one of them. What this was was one school nurse trying to keep her job after making what turned out to be a tragic error in judgment, despite her following protocol. And the law. Let’s not forget that, Maeve thought as she watched kids stream out of the school.
When it was clear that the school was down to just the regular staff and a few student stragglers, Maeve got out of her car and walked through the back doors and up to the second floor. The smell of the place brought her right back to her own high school days; the smell of teenage funk and old lunch meat was the odor of every high school in America, or so it seemed.
Judy Wilkerson was sitting behind her desk doing paperwork when Maeve knocked. “Maeve, hi,” she said, her eyebrows rising at Maeve’s appearance in her doorway. “What can I do for you? Terrible thing about Taylor, right?”
Maeve closed the door behind her. The office itself was incredibly small, adjacent to the room that held the cots for sick kids and the area for the ones who awaited a pickup by a parent. Maeve poked her head into the room and determined that it was all clear before sitting down in front of Judy. She had thought about how this would go: if she would ask after family first; if she would make small talk, a little chitchat, before getting into the reason for her visit. When she saw Judy’s face staring across at her, both of those ideas went out the window. “What you can do for me,” Maeve said, “is tell me why you lied about our conversation to Chris Larsson.”
Maeve could almost see the wheels turning in the other woman’s head, the smoke that her thought process was producing under a copse of dyed-blond tresses, a spiky pixie cut on a woman far too old to be sporting one. Clearly she fancied herself “the cool nurse,” one who would be down for a rap session with her high school students. “What do you mean?”
There were a few things Maeve hated. Obtuseness was one of them. She leaned forward and put one hand on Judy’s desk. “Let’s not play games, Judy. Our conversation was short and sweet. I asked you if it was okay to send Taylor home, and you said that it was fine.”
“That was before she disappeared.”
“So the conversation changes based on the outcome? If she had arrived home and her mother had raised a fuss, would you have still thrown me under the bus, so to speak? Or would you have handled it like an adult, telling the truth?” Maeve watched Judy’s face for any sign that she understood just how angry she was, how angry she could really get. There was none. “You need to tell Chris Larsson that I questioned you before telling you it was okay, that I wondered if it was standard procedure to let the
girl go home by herself.”
“But that’s not what happened, Maeve,” Judy said. “That’s not what you said.”
Maeve felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience. She remembered the conversation word for word. “So which is it, Judy? That you lied after you found out that Taylor disappeared or that you remember an entirely different conversation, one that, if you indeed heard it that way, speaks to an inability on your part to do your job?” Maeve said, losing her breath midsentence. “Because if that’s what you heard, then you are either deaf or have dementia.” She leaned back in her chair, afraid of what she might do to this school nurse, someone for whom pushing paper around on her desk came so naturally, it seemed to be her calling.
Judy stared at her for so long that Maeve feared she had gone into a trance. Her blue eyes, unblinking, held Maeve’s gaze, the silence in the room finally broken by the principal’s voice coming over the PA system, asking that Judy come to his office as soon as possible. Judy stood. “I know what I heard, Maeve.”
Maeve stood in front of the door. “Well, you heard wrong.”
“What? You’re going to trap me in my office?”
Maeve realized that as much as she wanted to trap Judy Wilkerson in her office, keep her there until she admitted that she lied, it was a faulty gambit and one that would only result in Maeve finding herself in the local paper’s police blotter. That was the last thing she needed, particularly if she was now not getting the Emergency Contact of the Year award for “refusing,” as Judy had told Chris, to pick Taylor up. “If I hear anyone repeat what Chris Larsson told me yesterday or see it reflected in any news account of Taylor’s disappearance, Judy, I will—” Maeve stopped herself, straightening when she saw the look on Judy’s face. Great. Now she was Maeve Conlon, Crazy Baker. It would be all over the school, then the village, and reported to the police if she didn’t back down, let this go. “Thank you for your time, Judy,” she said, the buzzing in her head alerting her to the fact that at any moment, she was prone to losing it completely. She smoothed her hair back and squared her shoulders, righting her emotional compass.
Lie in Plain Sight Page 5
