Lie in Plain Sight

by Maggie Barbieri

  “Is there somewhere we could go to talk?” he asked.

  Maeve swept a hand in front of her. “This, my friend, is all I’ve got.”

  Jo had been listening at the kitchen door. “Go! I can handle it!” she called from the other side.

  “There’s your answer,” Maeve said, stripping off her apron. They walked out to the front parking lot; she saw that he had come in a police car. “Should I get in the back?” she asked.

  He looked at her across the hood. “Have you committed any crimes? Anything you’d like me to know? Something to get off your chest?”

  If he hadn’t smiled at the end, she would have thought he knew something, but it was clear he was teasing. “Do you want to push my head down so I can get in the backseat?” she asked.

  “Just get in,” he said, laughing.

  The inside of the car smelled like old gym socks with a layer of nicotine on top. “Who smokes?” she asked.

  “Chief Carstairs,” he said. “But she’s a closet smoker. She doesn’t think we know, but as you can see, or smell, it’s not a secret.” He headed toward the river.

  She didn’t wait until he pulled into the parking lot to ask him the question that had been troubling her since the night before. “I have to ask you something.”

  “Shoot,” he said. “No pun intended.”

  “So you became a cop but you didn’t think you’d ever have to do anything as unpleasant as find a teenage girl? You aren’t that naïve, Chris. I know you aren’t.” She folded her hands in her lap. She didn’t want to touch anything in this mess of a car; a grease-covered bag from a local takeout place lay on the floor at her feet.

  He pulled into a spot that offered them a great view of the river and turned to her. “I was exhausted. I was…”

  “Scared?”

  “Yes. Scared,” he said. “What if we don’t find her, Maeve? What does that mean?”

  “Well,” Maeve said, choosing her words carefully, “it means that a family will never be whole again.” By the look on his face, she could tell that she hadn’t chosen her words carefully enough. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Chris. It’s the truth.” She looked away, out her window. “I know how I felt knowing that my sister was out there somewhere but not knowing where, and I didn’t even know I had a sister until last year.” She turned and faced him again, grabbing his hand. “This is someone’s child.”

  He put his head on the steering wheel and sighed for so long that Maeve was afraid he was going to cry. She couldn’t handle comforting two crying men in as many days. But when he looked back at her, he looked composed, less stressed. More determined. She took the opportunity to find out more.

  “So what do you have?” she asked.

  “We think she was taken. The father was contacted. For ransom.”

  “And Trish? Anyone contact her?”

  Chris raised an eyebrow.

  “Right,” Maeve said. “Not likely she could raise the ransom.”

  “Exactly. Connors made a ton of money.”

  “Right. The stone yard. The sale.”

  “Didn’t make a lot of friends with that one, but it was his to do with what he wanted, right?”

  “I guess.” She looked out the window at the water. “You’re a local. How did you feel about it?”

  “Lots of jobs just vanished. That wasn’t a good thing.”

  “Anybody with an ax to grind?” she asked.

  “How much time do you have?” he asked. “Tons of people with an ax to grind. That old trailer park out at the edge of town?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d say that there are about fifty suspects right there,” Chris said, immediately regretting that he had gone there; he grimaced before shutting his mouth and looking out his window. “Guys who lost their jobs and never recovered financially from that. Their wives and girlfriends. Their kids, even.”

  “What was in the car?” Maeve asked. She wanted to know more; changing the subject to what he had discovered actually seemed the best way to go.

  He didn’t hesitate, telling her everything without the caveat that it was confidential. He trusted her. “Blood on the steering wheel. A fingernail.”

  “A struggle. She didn’t go willingly.”

  “You either know a lot about kidnapping or you watch a lot of police shows,” he said.

  “Police shows.” It was clear to Maeve what had happened. “She was taken.”

  “That’s what it seems like.”

  “Anything else?” she said, his willingness to talk her entrée into finding out everything he knew.

  “Backpack was still in the car. On the front seat. Nothing in her school notebooks to indicate that she was thinking of leaving or that she felt like she was in danger.”

  She went for broke. “The boys. Donnell. Morehead. Connors. What do they have to do with this?”

  He was stunned. “What do you know? How do you know?”

  “I saw their names. In your notebook.” He opened his mouth, but she stopped him. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t snooping.” Rebecca had told her more, but he didn’t have to know that. This was her purview, her mystery. The girls were to stay out of it at all costs.

  “It’s an angle we’re looking at. What do you know?”

  “I hear things. I know what you know, probably. They throw parties. I know that they are sometimes up to no good.” She watched a young mother push a baby in a stroller, avoiding a goose that stubbornly sat in her path. “That they’re rich. That maybe they hurt Taylor.”

  “You know a lot.”

  “I hear a lot.” She took a deep breath. “And what about that other missing girl? Is there a connection? Her mother used to work for Charles Connors.”

  He shrugged. It wasn’t a casual gesture but more a gesture of defeat. Resignation. “I don’t know.”

  Through the windshield, she could see the playground where she used to take the girls, long before she owned the bakery, a time when she was still married, happily, or so she thought. She would push them on the swings, and Heather would scream “Higher!,” her mother’s love for just a little bit of danger running through her veins. Rebecca would stand at the top of the slide, and Maeve would try to coax her down, Heather squirming on her hip, anxious to get her turn. They would eat little sandwiches under one of the oldest trees in Farringville, and she would tell them stories about growing up in the Bronx, about riding her bike down the hill toward Broadway. How Jack said he was the strongest man in the world and how he called her his “perfect girl.” How her mother had been beautiful and kind and loved by everyone in the neighborhood. How Jack had been a policeman who had a lot of friends. How she learned to cook at a young age and how her father pretended to like every single thing she served him, even if it was a culinary misstep, and how she pretended to like his gustatory mistakes as much as the meals he didn’t screw up. She left out that she had lied to keep him safe and had held horrible secrets in her heart for the whole time he had been alive and she had been his daughter.

  After finding out about Evelyn, Maeve had realized that the same was true of him.

  “It’s like she’s disappeared into thin air,” Chris said, shaking his head.

  “And the county police? Nothing there?”

  “No one has seen anything or said anything that has been useful to any of us,” Chris said.

  “You’re smart, Chris. Keep thinking.” She flashed on Poole’s words. “Start at the beginning and go from there.”

  He looked surprised. “That’s actually good advice.”

  “Something I heard once.” She thought about bringing up Trish and her visit to Cal but thought better of it. His mood had improved and she didn’t want to break the spell.

  “Hey, do I tell you how to make baba ghanoush? Stay out of police work,” he said, but there was a lightness to his tone that suggested he was trying to get off the topic by joking with her.

  “I don’t make baba ghanoush.”

  “You know, that cho
colate cake with the swirls in it. The one I like.”

  “Babka. Not baba ghanoush,” she said, smiling. They had fallen into their old pattern, their conversation coming easily now, the romantic ship righted again.

  “You say babka, I say ghanoush,” he said.

  “And by the way, you haven’t met a cake you don’t like.”

  He grabbed a chunk of flesh above his belt. “True enough.” He leaned in and gave her a kiss. “Can you make me a babka?”

  “At your service,” she said, running her hands over his arms, up to his neck. “I also know how to make baba ghanoush if you want a batch.”

  “A batch?”

  “It’s a dip. A spread. Made from eggplant.”

  “A vegetable?” he said. “No, thank you.”

  He dropped her off at the store, pulling into the back parking lot, driving straight through the giant pothole that had appeared the winter before. “Jesus!” he said, his car swerving to the left.

  “Be careful,” she said, too late.

  He pulled up next to the kitchen door. “Listen,” he said, turning to face her. “Don’t tell Jo what we talked about, okay?”

  “I would never,” she said. “No one knows more than I do how big Jo’s mouth is.”

  “She actually said that she heard my ex-wife left me to join a cult.”

  Maeve burst out laughing. “She didn’t?”

  “She told you that, too?” Chris asked, looking chagrined.

  “No,” Maeve said, wrapping her arms around her neck. “But to make me feel better, she told me that she was patently unattractive and that I was way better-looking.”

  “That’s true. And you’re not a liar, either,” Chris said. “And you don’t cheat. And then lie about it.”

  Maeve held the smile on her face, the one that told him that he was right on both accounts. “Hey, let me go inside and start on the babka,” she said. Before she got out of the car, she took both of his hands in hers. “Start at the beginning,” she said again, thinking that just by being with her, he had. Maeve felt as if she were ground zero for the Taylor investigation, the person who had set the whole thing in motion. She got out of the car and watched him drive away, hoping that he didn’t let his lack of confidence stand in the way of doing the most important thing he would ever do: finding that girl.

  CHAPTER 21

  After he drove away, she stood in the parking lot for a lot longer than was necessary, staring out at the traffic going by, thinking about the ingredients of a good babka and the things she knew about Taylor Dvorak.

  She knew a lot about one but not about the other.

  Jo was having a heated discussion on the phone when Maeve went back inside. “He’s fine, Doug. You said so yourself. And I can’t be there all day with a baby. I’m losing my mind.” She turned at the sound of Maeve’s footfalls in the kitchen. “I’ve gotta go.”

  “Please don’t leave me,” Maeve said, trying to sound lighthearted, trying to keep the desperation at bay.

  “I won’t,” Jo said, resolute. “I won’t leave you.”

  The “yet” hung, unspoken, in the air.

  It was implied in her tone, written all over her face. One more fever or one ear infection and the baby was out of daycare and Jo was back at the house, taking care of Jack and doing nothing else, leaving Maeve to pick up the pieces again.

  She was a great baker but a terrible manager and even worse at hiring employees. That was why she valued Jo so much. Sure, Jo wasn’t great at her job and would probably be considered lazy by other people’s standards, but she knew Maeve and anticipated her needs—both in the store and out—and that kind of sensitivity couldn’t be replaced.

  In the kitchen, Maeve turned on the tiny television that she kept on the stainless steel counter and put on the local news. There wasn’t a lot to report besides Taylor’s disappearance: the nuclear power plant was being evaluated for safety (again), the weather would soon turn cooler, there would be repair work on Route 8.

  And Trish Dvorak had made another statement.

  There she was, in front of a group of photographers and reporters, the sound of cameras clicking and people shouting questions, a huge, framed portrait of Taylor in her small hands. Maeve couldn’t tell where she was, but she had an imposing-looking lawyer by her side, his big hand on her tiny shoulder. Maeve moved closer to the television.

  “Taylor,” Trish said, her voice cracking, “you can come home now.”

  The lawyer held up his free hand. “Ms. Dvorak won’t be taking any more questions. Thank you.”

  Maeve leaned back against the counter and turned the television off. Odd choice of words, she thought.

  You can come home now.

  If she could come home, wouldn’t she?

  Maeve knew that the parents of taken children sometimes appealed to their kidnappers’ emotional side, trying to make the captor see that the person they held was a living, breathing human being with a family. Someone had coached Trish to do just that, it seemed. Still, her choice of words haunted Maeve.

  Alone with her thoughts for the rest of the day, the hum of the refrigerator unaccompanied by Jo’s constant chatter, mindlessly cleaning the same piece of glass for over a minute, Trish’s words still in her head—You can come home now—Maeve decided that tailing Barnham was leading nowhere and that it was time to take another tack.

  After she left work, she drove back out to the other side of town and sat in her car on the side of the road, not too far from the Rathmuns’ house, and thought about her options. Maybe, along this lonely stretch of road, where the houses were set back and no one would know whether you were home or not on any given day, she’d start that exercise regimen she never had time for, always wanted to start. She put the Prius in drive and headed into town again.

  Exercise. It was as good a cover as any.

  There was the gym where the muscle heads and high school boys lifted weights, and then there was the gym where the ladies who lunched, as Maeve thought of them, went to work out, usually following that activity with a scone and a coffee at The Comfort Zone. It was a combination gym and social scene, complete with a state-of-the-art weight room, a mirrored room with a barre for the middle-aged new-to-ballet crowd, and a full-service spa. Maeve touched her neck as she passed it, feeling jowly at the thought of lying back on a table and having someone use lasers or blow-dryers or whatever they used to help her skin become more taut, youthful again. There was also a store that sold high-end yoga pants, Tshirts, and fancy workout clothes, as well as a raft of very expensive “sneakers,” as Maeve thought of them, “athletic footwear” to the rest of the world. She wandered into the store, wondering if she could afford one athletic shoe, never mind a pair. It was worth a shot.

  She headed straight to the sale area, where a pair of hot pink shoes caught her eye, not because they were anything she would ever wear, but because they were listed as half off—of a hundred and fifty dollars, she came to find out. She held them in her hands, noticing that the sample size, the last pair in the store, would fit her tiny feet. She looked around the display and didn’t see anything cheaper, so she took them to the register, where a bored and vaguely hostile woman—the latter trait coming off her like a scent in the air—regarded Maeve, her look saying, “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you look lost. You don’t belong.”

  Maeve put the shoes on the counter. “How are you today?” she asked, eyeing a package of socks; her right toe was going through the sock she was wearing. Maybe it was time to upgrade that fleet as well; she took the package and placed it on top of the sneakers. She dug around in her bag for her wallet, her fingers grazing something sticky and not entirely pleasant to the touch. “I can use my debit card, right?” she asked, and it was only after a few moments that she realized that the salesclerk wasn’t engaging with her at all. Maeve looked up from her purse, wondering if, in the time it had taken her to put the sneakers on the counter and locate her wallet, the woman—Tammy from her name tag�
��had had a massive coronary, an aneurysm, or some other life-threatening event that had rendered her speechless and inert.

  Tammy looked as if she were struggling to come up with just the right thing to say, the words that would level Maeve emotionally, that she would recount later at book club—which really should have been called “wine club,” in Maeve’s estimation. “And then I said…!” she would tell the ladies, and they would all look at her with admiration, because she had told the bitch in the wrinkled The Comfort Zone T-shirt, the one with the stretched-out neckline and icing-covered sleeve, just where to go. Because that’s how she was looking at Maeve: like Maeve was a bitch who needed to be taken down. It was all there, visible all over her Botoxed face, parts of which she couldn’t move.

  “You’re Maeve Conlon, right?” Tammy asked, pushing the sneakers to the side, the package of socks falling onto the floor behind the counter.

  “I am,” Maeve said, grabbing another package of socks, trying to ignore the woman’s hostility. Bad day at the gym? Who knew. Something told Maeve that Tammy wasn’t going to start extolling the virtues of her cupcakes. Maeve wanted to buy her overpriced items and beat a hasty getaway, far away from a place in which she normally wouldn’t be seen, a place where people went after they had eaten her muffins and scones and cupcakes, cursing her with every footfall on the treadmill, every step on the stair climber.

  Tammy went in for the kill. “I’m Gabriela’s best friend.”

  And there it was. Maeve’s first reaction was to back away from the counter but in the back of her mind, she knew that that would be an admission of guilt. She stood her ground, her credit card under her hand on the granite-topped counter, and held the woman’s steely gaze. “You take Visa, right?” she asked, her debit card lost to the miasma that was the interior of her purse.