“And still, he never acknowledged his own daughter?” Maeve asked.
“How easy it would be,” Chris said, turning back around to look out at the bar and not at Maeve, “if we could just either demonize or canonize.” He signaled the waitress for another beer. “But it’s not that easy because people are complicated. Life is complicated. Sometimes good people do bad things and vice versa.”
“You’re feeling pretty philosophical tonight,” she said.
“You know what I mean. Heck, with what I’ve been seeing since this case started, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were things I didn’t know about my closest friends,” he said, finishing his beer just as the second one arrived. “About you, even.”
Inside, her stomach gurgled slightly, acid trickling into her digestive tract. “There’s nothing, Chris. You know it all.”
“I don’t know, Maeve. You have seemed kind of preoccupied lately.”
She took a deep breath, knowing she had gone pale, hoping that the guilt she felt about how she had lied to him would be mistaken for something else, something that would throw him off the scent of her betrayal. “It’s this,” she said, waving a hand between them. “This missing girl. How I’ve been implicated. How I feel.”
That softened him a bit, and it seemed as if he realized he had come on too strong. He turned on his bar stool and pulled her close, putting his nose into her hair and inhaling deeply. “I was only kidding. Bad joke.”
“Good,” she said into his shirt, putting a hand to his chest, feeling his heart beat beneath it.
He inhaled again. “I can’t get enough of the way you smell.”
There it was again. Her smell. The same thing that Gabriela had mentioned about Cal, how he had “smelled funny” when he returned home that night that seemed like a thousand years and a minute ago. She had an expensive bottle of body wash—a gift from a grateful customer—way at the back of her linen closet, just waiting to be opened. She had decided to save it for a special occasion. Nothing like two people commenting on the scent you emitted to get her to break it open the minute she got home.
“What have you been up to?” he asked. “Besides making my favorite blueberry muffins?”
Nothing really, she thought. Just following a guy that you should have on your radar. “This and that. I saw Rebecca last night and had dinner with her.”
“How is she?” he asked.
She thought about their conversation, sorry now that she’d brought the visit up to him. She put on her best poker face. “She’s good,” she said, a little too brightly to her own ears, but he didn’t notice. “We had Italian food.”
“Great,” he said, checking his phone, distracted until the bartender came back with the drinks. He rubbed his hands over his face, the mood suddenly changing.
“Chris, what’s wrong?” she asked. “You seem…”
“We had a lead, but it’s nothing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“God, Maeve,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like to be a detective in this village when something like this happens? What it’s like to have every single person you run into ask you about a missing teenage girl and what you’re doing to find her? This,” he said, running his hand along the bar, “is not what I signed up for.”
She watched a few minutes of the baseball game on the television above the bar. “What did you sign up for?”
“Being a small-town cop. Busting DUIs. Chasing speeders. Investigating drug buys. Teaching the odd DARE class. Not this,” he said. “Not a guy jumping to his death from the dam a couple of years ago and not a girl vanishing into thin air on her way home from school. Not having to look at the guy’s remains and tell his wife that we had found him and that he was dead. Not facing Trish Dvorak every day and saying, ‘We’ve got nothing. I’m sorry.’”
Maeve wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t worry about the guy from the dam and telling his wife. She was happy that he was gone and could now live her life knowing that she was safe because he was dead. As for Trish Dvorak, she didn’t know what to say.
He hadn’t signed up for this.
She wondered about that. Was he really so naïve as to think that being a cop in the little village would never bring him a case that he found repulsive, that he probably couldn’t solve? She had misjudged him, then. She thought he had a stronger constitution than that, that he was stronger. She thought of her own father and what he had seen in the city all those years ago when he wore the badge. Never once had she heard him cry or complain about what he encountered in a day’s work. He never brought it home. His job was to try to keep her safe, and keeping her safe meant shielding her from that unpleasantness. Maeve looked at Chris, the attraction dulling just a little bit at the thought that he couldn’t handle this. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He was quiet.
There was nothing else to say. He had fallen into a horrible mood, and it was obvious to her that their date, if it could be called that, was over.
“I think I’ll go,” she said, when it was clear he was done talking. He seemed slightly embarrassed at what he had said but didn’t stop her from leaving. Out in the parking lot, she looked back at the restaurant and saw that he was on his phone again, punching at the face of it, his own face a mask of pain. Whatever had appeared on his phone between his drinking in the smell of her and his sudden blackness, it had thrown him off completely, another dead end in a series of dead ends.
The house was quiet when she got home, Heather at the library again according to the note she had left for her mother, the kitchen clean, the leftovers put away. Maeve stood in the kitchen, her hands on her hips, looking around, wondering how she got here, alone after what she had hoped would be a night with the guy she loved.
Behind her, there was a short rap at the front door; she turned and walked down the hall. She had locked the screen door after coming in, which was why, when she returned to the door, Cal stood on the other side, wondering why he was locked out. He said as much.
“Because you don’t live here anymore?” Maeve said, unlatching the door.
He walked in and looked around. “Heather?”
“Library,” Maeve said, returning to the kitchen. “What’s going on?”
“She left me,” he said. “Gabriella.”
She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms. “Really. Where did she go?”
“No idea!” he said. “And she took Devon.”
“Really?” Maeve said again. She wasn’t sure Gabriela even knew she had a child, let alone would take him when she left. She’d always figured that if the marriage broke up, the baby would stay with Cal.
“Yes,” Cal said. “I’m devastated.”
“I don’t think you have the right to be devastated, Cal,” Maeve said. “You’ve been making a mess of things for a long time, and as a result, a lot of us now have really messy lives.”
“Like who?” he asked, defiant.
“Me. The girls. Devon. Gabriela, even.” She looked at him, rumpled and distressed, but only felt exhaustion at the thought of still being with him, still having to deal with his immaturity and inability to cope. “I wish I could feel bad for you, but if there ever was a classic case of reaping what you’ve sown, this is it.” She, too, could be defiant.
Still, the minute he started crying, loud, terrible gasps that emanated from deep in his chest, she melted just a little bit and took him in her arms and let him stay there for a long time, her shoulder becoming soaked with his tears.
“You’ve got to make this right,” she said into his ear. “This is on you.”
She wasn’t sure if he heard her. In the hallway, the sound of footsteps made him bolt upright and turn around, his tear-stained face and her surprised one what greeted Chris Larsson, who looked like he was in a worse mood than the one she had left him in at the restaurant.
“I didn’t know you were busy,” Chris said.
“I’m not,” Maeve said. “We’re not.”
He lo
oked back and forth, from her to Cal, and back again to her.
He knows, she thought.
“I thought you might be interested to know that there’s been a development. I stopped here first because you were so worried.”
“A development?” she asked. “Taylor?”
“Yes. We found her car.”
CHAPTER 19
An older couple who lived on the other side of town, the Rathmuns spent the better part of the year in Maine but fled before the snow hit, driving down to their house on the outskirts of Farringville in mid-October, hopefully timing it before the first flake flew. They had arrived home that afternoon after their long drive, wondering why there was an unfamiliar car parked in their driveway, one tire flat. As anyone in a small village would do, they called the police department before doing anything else, not knowing that what they thought was an abandoned car had belonged to a missing teenage girl, someone everyone was looking for. Her backpack lay on the front seat, her cell phone on the passenger-side floor.
Chris described where they lived, and to Maeve, it sounded like it was very close to David Barnham’s house. She filed that away.
“I didn’t even know she had a car. Judy Wilkerson,” Maeve said, practically spitting out the woman’s name, her anger growing with each passing day that Taylor didn’t come home, “specifically said she was walking home.”
“She walked to school that day and most days,” Chris said. “Her car was at the apartment.”
“Parking has always been an issue at that school,” Cal said, an indictment evident in his voice of someone or something that offended his delicate sensibilities about teenagers unable to park their rides.
She didn’t know why Chris had come to her house rather than texting her this development; she suspected it had something to do with the way they had parted, but she didn’t ask.
Maeve rolled her eyes in Cal’s direction, hoping that he would busy himself with blowing his runny nose and not get within punching distance of Chris, who was becoming, clearly, as tired of Cal’s insinuations into Maeve’s life as Maeve was.
Chris didn’t stay long after giving Maeve that news, and watching him go, she wondered if she would ever see him again. He had become depressed over the last several days and now seemed angry, a side effect of his inability to solve the case, or of seeing the woman with whom he had spent so much time comforting her sobbing ex-husband.
Maeve took Cal’s hand and led him to the door. “As much I would like to help you, I need you to leave.”
“Now? With everything that’s going on with me?” he asked.
“Yes. Particularly now.” She opened the screen. “I’m not your friend. I’m the woman you left with two children for another woman. I am not your confidante.” You’re lucky you’re still alive, she thought. Do you know how easy it would have been to kill you? Hide your body so that it would never be found? But for some reason, the girls still adore you, despite your breaking their hearts as well, and I couldn’t do that to them. “Despite my complete lapse in judgment, Cal, I need you to go and not come back unless it has something to do with the girls.”
Under the porch light, he looked younger than when she had first met him, vulnerable in a way that she would have found heartbreaking if she were swayed by vulnerability. But all she felt was numb. She closed the door and leaned back against it, waiting to hear the sound of the minivan leaving the front of the house, her street, and then the neighborhood.
Upstairs, alone in her room, a thought went through her head, chilling her to the bone: This girl is not getting found. She wondered how badly Charles Connors had wanted to keep his paternity a secret from the world, if he could have done something to harm his own flesh and blood.
She texted Poole. They found her car.
I know, he texted back. She wondered how that could be and decided she didn’t want to know; Poole’s reach was beyond her comprehension. What do you need, Maeve Conlon?
Not sure, she texted. Can I get back to you?
You can, he wrote back.
She texted him some sketchy details about her meeting with Mrs. McSweeney, asking if he had had any luck locating information about Evelyn’s biological father. In addition to thinking about Taylor, she thought about Evelyn, about who her father might have been. It wasn’t lost on her that paternity had become a dominant theme the last few days, starting the year before when she found out about Evelyn for the first time. The text Poole returned took a few seconds longer than she was used to, and she stared at her phone, willing a positive response.
No was his one-word answer.
She turned off her phone, and it was only when she woke up at four in the morning that she realized she had fallen asleep with her clothes on, the phone clutched in her hand. She bounced up quickly, knowing that she had a mission, had found that hobby that Cal always bugged her about. Some women played tennis. Others were in book clubs. She did other things, things she couldn’t talk about over a glass of wine with the girls, things she would never tell Chris Larsson.
She showered and dressed in no time flat, figuring she could do what she needed to while it was still dark and before she had to open the store. On her way to the car, she opened the coat closet and grabbed the headlamp that Jo inexplicably had given her a few years earlier for Christmas. She’d thought about tossing it during her last de-cluttering phase; now she was glad she hadn’t. That and the shovel her friend had bestowed upon her on another holiday made Maeve wonder about her friend’s gift-giving tendencies.
The Prius made its way silently through the quiet streets to her destination. She pulled into the same spot where she’d parked a few days earlier when she had spoken with David Barnham. This time, instead of walking straight ahead, she put on her headlamp and walked to the left and found the Rathmuns’ house easily, yellow police tape ringing the trees at the front of the house, a depression in the soft mud where the car had been, the tracks visible in the beam of light that the headlamp provided.
She wasn’t sure why she needed a visual, but she did. If this was the last place Taylor had been, surely it held some kind of clue as to where she had gone, maybe even a hint toward with whom. Maeve walked the dark road first one way and then the other, back toward the car, not seeing anything that would lead her in the right direction, the direction that would help her find Taylor.
She passed one long driveway and then another, the houses out here farther apart than in the old part of town where she lived. A car drove up behind her, and she broke into a jog, trying to give the impression that she was an intrepid and determined runner, hoping that the jiggling above the waistband of her yoga pants wasn’t visible to the driver. The car slowed and then pulled around her, a fancy foreign job with vanity license plates: HOTT #.
Classy, Maeve thought, as she stopped jogging at the bottom of one driveway, bending over at the waist to catch her breath. She didn’t feel very hott right now; the short jog had her wanting to throw up on the street. She looked up at the big houses that sat at the top of the ridge overlooking this bucolic neighborhood, wondering how long it had taken, how much banging and sawing and hammering had gone on before the houses had been built. Had it been a blessing to these older homes below to know that the noise of the stone yard would be gone, only to be replaced by the sound of people splashing in pools and having large parties on their expansive lawns?
A noise not unfamiliar to anyone with a garbage can on wheels got her attention—someone coming down the long driveway. Instinct told her to turn, the light from the headlamp catching the owner of the garbage can by surprise. The man, bathed in the white light, let out a startled cry at the sight of her.
“Maeve?” he said. “Is that you?”
She aimed the headlamp at the street and tried to figure out who it was. The voice was familiar but not one she heard often enough to identify.
“It’s Kurt. Kurt Messer,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, Kurt,” she said, relieved. “Just out for a j
og.”
“In clogs?” he said, pointing at her footwear with his free hand.
“These?” she said, lifting one foot. She had to think fast. “You’ve caught me! It’s really more of a walk than a jog.” She kept talking. “Garbage day? Ours gets picked up on Monday.”
“Yes. Forgot to put the can out last night.”
“That’s what kids are for, right?” she said. “Although mine aren’t very good at remembering, either.”
“Mark moved out last year. Got a place in the village,” Kurt said. “So it’s just me here.”
“Well, at least you’ve got in an ‘in’ at the DPW,” she said. “That ought to help if you get overrun with garbage.” She was babbling, and she knew it. She closed her mouth and then smiled insipidly. See, old man? It’s just the crazy baker from down in the main village.
“Be careful out here, Maeve,” Kurt said. “They found that poor girl’s car last night.” He shook his head. “She went right past my house, but I didn’t see a thing.”
“It’s awful,” Maeve said. When it was clear that they had nothing else to say to each other, Maeve started down the street.
“Mark loved the cupcakes!” Kurt called after her.
“Thanks, Kurt,” she said, and in order to keep up appearances—and support her lie—she jogged down the street toward her car, where one more visual sweep confirmed that Mr. Barnham was at home, the red truck in the driveway, and no one else seemed to be around.
Maeve stood and looked around. The dam was to her right, the woods to her left. “Where did you go, Taylor?” she whispered in the morning air. But all she heard was the rustling as the wind whipped through the trees, their leaves changing from the vibrant green of summer to the even more vibrant hues of autumn.
CHAPTER 20
“I owe you an apology.”
Maeve looked across the counter at Chris, Jo having practically fled at his arrival in the store. Maeve had filled her in on what had happened the night before, and by the contrite look on his face, it was clear that he had a few things he wanted to get off his chest, things that Jo had no interest in hearing but would surely want to know about after he left. That’s how their friendship worked. Jo gave her privacy when she needed it but relentlessly peppered her with questions about the details later on.
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