Heather focused on the essay, making the correction that Maeve had pointed out. “Everything is good.”
Maeve looked around the room, wondering if Heather would leave it as it was now when she left, a virtual time capsule of her teenage years. Rebecca had lived more like a Spartan when she was in the house and was the same in her dorm room; the few possessions she had besides her clothes had gone with her to Vassar and returned home during the summer, only to disappear again when she left in September for her sophomore year. “Nothing going on? Nothing new?”
Heather shook her head and crossed something else out on the essay.
“I could use you at the store a little more. Is that okay? Or is soccer taking up too much of your time?”
“I need the cash,” Heather said. “I don’t want to work my freshman year, so I’m saving. I’m not getting a ton of hours at the grocery store. They just hired a bunch of new people.”
That showed a maturity that Maeve hadn’t known existed in her daughter. Rebecca had assumed that she would get a monthly allowance in addition to whatever money she had saved, not realizing that paying for an expensive private school was her monthly allowance. Her dream school, her sacrifices to make as well.
They seemed to be communicating well, so Maeve decided to up the ante a bit, asking the question that had been on her mind since her dinner with her older daughter. “Anyone new on the horizon?”
“What?”
“You know. Boys. Anyone new?”
Heather turned and glared at her, any goodwill that Maeve had earned from her comments on the essay gone. “Why would you say that? There’s nobody.”
“Oh,” Maeve said. “I just…”
“You just what?”
“I just,” Maeve said, “I … nothing.”
“I’m here every night. I’m doing well in school. You should be really happy with me right now,” Heather said, lying back on the bed and putting her arm over her face. “Stop interrogating me.”
“I am really happy with you right now,” Maeve said, underscoring her words with a jocular nudge to Heather’s side.
Heather darted to the edge of the bed. “Leave me alone.”
As Maeve left the room and went down the stairs, the urgency of her previously planned mission now gone, she realized that all she had done for the past year and a half was leave Heather alone. Maybe that wasn’t just part of the problem but the whole problem.
CHAPTER 26
The next morning, Maeve knew that she would be exhausted later, but she got up early and went back to the street where Taylor Dvorak had gone missing anyway, stumbling around in the dark, which was a great way to describe her life in general, she thought. What had happened to her to make her so focused on things that were dark? What had triggered her obsessions? Driven by something—guilt? responsibility?—she traversed the road where the girl had been last seen, wandering aimlessly, hoping that something would point her in the direction of Taylor’s whereabouts.
She should let the police handle it. She knew that, and if the message wasn’t her own, it was definitely coming through loud and clear under the guise of her late father. She could hear him in her brain every time she walked this road, his never-modulated, booming voice calling, Stay out of it, Mavy! You’re in over your head! Jack’s faith in the police department, even Farringville’s, was unwavering. But he had never met Chris Larsson, who, like Maeve, was definitely in over his head. He had admitted it himself.
Suzanne Carstairs? She was a different story. Behind those seemingly warm eyes lay the heart of a sleuth; Maeve could tell. Maybe a killer. Maeve wasn’t sure why, but she felt as if she were looking at a kindred spirit. Another woman whose life was altered by abuse? Hard to tell. If Maeve hadn’t had so much to hide, she would engage the chief a little more, maybe grant her a free supply of scones just to get her talking. She would cozy up to her, and Maeve was pretty sure the chief would never see it happening. It was too risky, though, too irresponsible to try to befriend the chief when she had some secrets that she didn’t want to get out. Chris didn’t count. He had made it abundantly clear that he preferred the head-in-the-sand approach to investigation, the easy “get,” the maybe-only-partially-true solution.
Right now, in the early-morning gloom, she was a small woman on a dark and deserted street, something she would caution her girls against, but that she couldn’t resist doing. She got back in the Prius and drove up and down the street on a silent quest for God knew what, even continuing on the unpaved stretch of road that ran alongside the little lake—Laurel Lake, as it had come to be known—and driving to the end.
Jack’s voice was in her head again. Nothing to see here. Show’s over.
But the show wasn’t over. It was just beginning. She just didn’t know it yet.
She went by Barnham’s house and parked on his street and waited there, not seeing another car besides his truck, wondering what she was doing. Would she confront him if she saw him? Ask him herself what he had been doing? She didn’t have to wonder, because he left her no choice. He appeared at the end of the driveway, looking both ways before peeling out onto the street and driving back toward the place he had been the day before.
But before he could get to Laurel Lake, he took a sharp turn, one that Maeve recognized as the same one she had taken the day she had delivered Donna Fitzpatrick’s special cupcakes. She followed him in the gloom, at a safe distance, losing him for a time before she picked him up again at a place she had never seen before, the last vestige of the stone yard, an undeveloped piece of land. His truck could traverse the tough terrain and disappeared over the side of the hole, but the Prius was daintier. She parked at a distance and got out, walking along the side of the road until she could safely peek over the edge and down to where the truck had gone. It was still dark, the moon not offering much in terms of illumination, but it was enough to make out where he was going.
She wondered how this gaping monstrosity had been left to become overgrown and wild. The last house on the street was farther up the road, but surely the inhabitants of this relatively new development weren’t pleased with a hole in the ground as one of their neighbors. In the hole, a crater, really, were some porta-potties and a rusted-out truck left over from a time when the homes were being built and the crews needed a place to relieve themselves before plumbing had been installed. She took a safe place behind a tree and observed the activity below, which amounted to Barnham going into one of the few porta-potties that hadn’t been overturned and then coming out immediately. Whether he had left something in there or taken something out was something she couldn’t see, and while she waited for him to do something else, to give her some indication as to why he was there and what he was doing, he surprised her by getting in the truck and driving back up the hill, out of sight before she had a chance to figure anything out.
She waited until the sound of the truck’s engine died out to start down the side of the hill, sliding on her ass most of the way, ripping her pants in the process. Never really sure what she was doing, but always sure of why, she grabbed an errant branch here, an outcrop of rock there and managed to make it to the bottom before looking up and thinking, But how am I going to get out?
She didn’t spend time worrying about that, getting out of holes becoming just something else that she needed to do lately, opened the door to the porta-potty that she had seen Barnham go into and poked around the desiccated wads of toilet paper and clumps of dirt that lived at the bottom of it, avoiding looking at the toilet and trying even harder not to breathe.
“There’s nothing here,” she said out loud, thinking that if the odor of cinnamon had followed her everywhere before, it would be the odor of old, baked-in sewage that would follow her now.
Getting up the hill proved less challenging than she’d thought it would be, but she added a ripped Comfort Zone T-shirt to the torn pants to complete her ensemble. Once in the car, she opened all of the windows and drove through town with the chilly, morning wind
whipping through, thinking that a shower with the special gel was in order if she had any hope of not offending every single person with whom she came into contact.
At home, in the shower, she realized that she wasn’t ground zero for the disappearance, as she’d thought previously, but she couldn’t figure out who—or what—was.
The shower did wonders and she felt well enough to open the store and start her Founders Day preparations; she figured the exhaustion would hit later. That was the life of the small businessperson; you opened when you felt like shit and you put a smile on your face, lest people think that you weren’t reliable, weren’t open to deliver to them exactly what they needed when they needed it. That birthday cake that you forgot to order? She’d have it for you in two hours and it would be the best birthday cake you’d ever eaten. Need a quiche for a brunch that your wife is dragging you to? Here you go. Just out of the oven.
The store was a bit of a mess when she arrived, the kitchen even worse, but she chose to ignore it for the time being. She went into the front and made a small pot of coffee for herself, looking at the clock. Six thirty. She had had a text from Chris the night before asking if they could have dinner, and she had agreed. It was a full twelve hours until they were to meet, and the thought of it exhausted her. She wasn’t sure if it was what had happened with Cal or just the general ennui that is sure to set into a relationship that lasts more than a few months, but her relationship with Chris—Chris, really—was wearing her down. The light, boyish qualities that he had brought to the early days of their relationship, that adorable twinkle in his eye, had turned into a sometimes wooden, heavy demeanor that she just didn’t need right now, not when she felt as if everyone looked at her as if she were personally responsible for the disappearance of a girl in town. She knew that she was imagining a lot of that, but it was the way she felt. She realized that she had stopped making eye contact with many of her usual customers, not wanting to engage them for fear they’d look at her with that curiosity, the one that said, “Why did you let that poor girl go home?”
The swinging door that separated the front of the store from the kitchen fluttered slightly, indicating that someone had entered the prep area from the back parking lot. Again, she could hear her father admonishing her to lock the door after herself; did she want to end up a “dark stain on the floor”? It was too early for Jo, but it wasn’t too early for Cal, who was always out of coffee and usually on his way home from the gym at this time, or Chris, just about to start his day and eager to see her before he did. She prayed that it was one of them and not someone who had gotten wind of the fact that sometimes she didn’t cash out at the end of the day, leaving a few hundred dollars in the register because she was too lazy or too pressed for time to go to the bank and make a deposit.
She looked through the round window in the door, and of all the people she expected to see, the one she saw would never have crossed her mind.
David Barnham.
He saw her before she could really focus on him, and rather than give her a little wave to let her know that he was just a guy in need of a muffin, he glared at her from across the kitchen, standing in a tense posture at the end of the big prep area. She took a deep breath and went through the swinging door, a smile on her face.
“Coach,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here. Out of coffee? Need a muffin?” She wasn’t afraid of him, but she didn’t want to tell him that—or the fact that he should be a little afraid of her.
“No. None of those things,” he said, one hand wrapped around a melon baller, his hand flexing and flexing, as if he thought he could do some serious harm with a cooking implement he didn’t realize was broken and was on its way out before he showed up.
“So what is it, then?” Maeve asked, even though she knew the answer.
“Why are you following me, lady? What do you want?” he asked.
“I’m not following you,” she said and that “truth,” if it could be called that, was as flimsy as one of her crepes when it came off a hot pan. She was also no lady, but he didn’t need to know that.
“What do you call it?” he asked. “First you were at the field. Then you came to my house. You weren’t lost,” he said, holding up his free hand before she could dispute that. “You weren’t. Don’t lie.”
She noticed that he left out the most recent place she had seen him. “And I saw you kayaking in the dark. Don’t forget that.”
“No. You didn’t,” he said, and while he didn’t seem confused by the statement, he didn’t seem clear either. He didn’t mention that very morning. He must not have seen her. To her, it seemed like he was trying to figure out how to play this, despite his consternation at her repeated presence, her showing up at places she didn’t belong. He had rehearsed. “What do you want?”
She tried honesty; it hadn’t been her stock-in-trade of late, and she wondered how it worked. “I’m looking for Taylor.”
“So are the police,” he pointed out unnecessarily. “Why do you think you can find her?” Disdain was not a good look on him.
Did he really want to know? Did he have that kind of time? Did she? She had found her sister, Evelyn—that needle in a haystack—because as good as she was at keeping secrets, it turned out she was even better at finding things, even better than that at getting to the truth, the heart of the matter. Should she take the time to explain that to him, or would that be a waste of breath? “You wouldn’t understand,” she said.
“Try me.”
“I don’t need to,” she said. She watched his hand flex on the melon baller. “Put that down,” she said, a mother scolding a child. The baller made a clanking sound as it hit the counter. “I understand you’re very close to your team. To certain girls,” she said, going for broke.
“I’m a coach. A mentor. It’s part of my job,” he said.
“Is it?” Outside, she could hear the traffic becoming heavier as commuters made their way to that popular early-morning train that started in Farringville and shot like a bullet to the city, making only one stop before it hit Grand Central. People were at the front door. Probably wondering why the store hadn’t officially opened. “From what I understand, you’re very close to certain girls, closer than a mentor would be. Were you close to Taylor? Was she a special player?”
He didn’t respond directly. “And who told you that?” he asked, his face getting red. “Heather? Rebecca?” He shook his head. “I thought she was better than that. That she didn’t care. That all she cared about was getting out of here. Getting away from you,” he said. “From what Rebecca told me, you were a little pathological with the overprotectiveness.”
She tried not to wince, the blow hitting its intended target: her heart. After reading Heather’s essay the night before and now this, she wondered if there was enough time left to right the ship that was her relationship with her girls.
Maeve stood her ground at her end of the counter. “Why were you out there?” she asked in the same tone she would ask if the lemon poppy seed or the chocolate chip muffin would be preferable to a customer.
“I’m going to tell you what I told the cops: I was not kayaking. I was in bed.”
“Yes, with a Farringville cop, from what I understand.” She smiled. “We have something in common, then.”
“Lady—”
“It’s Maeve.”
“You’ve got a screw loose.”
“Maybe so.” Behind her, the oven timer went off. “But I know what I saw.” She put on oven mitts, her back to him, and pulled out the two trays she had put in earlier. “Muffin?” she asked, sweeping her hand over the tray as if she were displaying precious goods.
“No, I don’t want a goddamned muffin,” he said. He leaned across the counter as if he wanted to start toward her but had forgotten about the obstacle in his path. “Don’t do this,” he said, waving a hand around. “Don’t go down this road.”
“Or what?” she said, wondering just how far she could push him before he lost it completely; he was
certainly close by the looks of it.
“Just. Stop.”
“Or what? You won’t play Heather? I’m sure that’s not even a consideration. She hasn’t played soccer in over ten years. Frankly, I’m not even sure why you took her on the team. Is she that good?”
“No.”
“What, then?” She turned the muffins over onto a large cookie sheet.
“We’re shorthanded.”
“So you take girls midseason?”
He shrugged. “Why not? It’s not like we’re going anywhere. Might as well let as many girls play as want to.”
Maeve had forgotten: This was Farringville. Everyone was a winner. Everyone got a trophy. Everyone played if they wanted to.
She focused on her muffins. “See, here’s the thing you don’t know about me: I don’t stop. I can’t stop. Not until this is resolved.” She looked up at him in what she thought was a kindly way, a way to make him feel better about her and her intentions. But he blanched when he met her eye and turned tail quickly, leaving the store.
Maybe what he had said had been correct.
Maybe she did have a screw loose.
CHAPTER 27
Jo stopped in later that day, even though she had the day off thanks to Maeve, who wanted to repay Jo for running things the day before. The purpose of her visit? To complain about motherhood. Again. Maeve wanted to tell her that the baby slumbering in the stroller wasn’t really all that challenging as babies went. She reached into the cold case and wiped away a smear of grease that had appeared some time during the day, hoping that by putting her head into an enclosed space, she wouldn’t have to listen to more of this. Had she been like this, complaining to anyone in earshot about the “witching hour,” the hour when children start to fall apart, their naps being too long or not long enough, their blood sugar plummeting, a time when it was too early for wine but too late for more coffee? It felt good inside this case, Maeve thought, Jo’s voice muffled by the glass on three sides.
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