Lie in Plain Sight

by Maggie Barbieri

  “Cupcakes. Picking up my platters.”

  “Right. Cupcakes. Platters,” Carstairs said, shaking her head. “What a bullshit story.”

  “I’m sorry about your boyfriend,” Maeve said, and there weren’t enough words to say just how sorry she was. It sounded empty, emotionless, and she guessed it was. She had been wrong. “I’m sorry about Chris,” she said in the midst of a heart-wrenching sob.

  “Nice guy,” Carstairs said. “Not sure he’s the greatest cop, but a really nice guy.” She tapped the steering wheel, drumming out a methodical beat. “Isn’t cut out for this line of work, I don’t think. Has too much heart. A lot of soul.”

  Maeve nodded. That much was obvious. She wondered when the numbness would go away and when she would feel the weight of everything that had just happened. She hoped never. “Is he going to be okay?” she asked.

  Carstairs looked out the window. “Hope so.”

  The chief didn’t speak for a while. “Assholes,” she said finally.

  “Who?”

  “Teenagers.”

  Maeve had to laugh in spite of the situation, but as soon as it came out, a sob followed. And then another one, and one more, until the car was filled with the sounds of her crying, raw and wretched, emotion that she hadn’t felt in a long time making itself known. I’m here, it was saying. And I’m not going away.

  Carstairs waited until it subsided before asking Maeve another question. “You done with County?”

  Maeve nodded. She had spent two hours talking to a man who reminded her of her father, down to the perfectly parted, slicked-to-the-side old-school haircut, a man who believed her story more than the local chief. There was no way that this little woman, all one hundred and twenty pounds of her, her face freckled and sweet, had gunned down a murderer herself in cold blood, not feeling an iota of shame or guilt before, when she had made the decision, or after, when the deed was done.

  “Self-defense, I suspect,” Carstairs said.

  “What else would it be?” Maeve asked. “You saw what went on here.”

  The chief started the car. “I’ll take you home.”

  Before they reached her street, Maeve tried one more time to figure out one of the remaining pieces of the puzzle. “Your boyfriend?”

  “I hate that term. I’m a little long in the tooth to be calling someone my boyfriend.”

  “Barnham.”

  “Yes?”

  “Witness Protection.”

  The chief tried not to flinch, but she wasn’t as good as Maeve in the lying department. “What made you say that?”

  “I don’t know.” They pulled up in front of Maeve’s house. “Any chance you can get him to drop the charges?”

  “Maybe if you stop saying things like Witness Protection.”

  Maeve felt that she was right, but she let it go. She had bigger mysteries to solve, including one that involved Heather. She thanked the chief for the ride. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing more of you.”

  “You can count on that,” Carstairs said. “Maybe try baking a little more, perhaps take on a renovation project at the house here?” She leaned over and looked out the passenger-side window. “Looks like it could use a coat of paint.”

  “I understand.”

  “That might go a long way toward clearing up the mess you’re in with my boy—”She stopped herself. “Well, you get it.”

  “I do.”

  “You killed a guy, Maeve,” the chief said, looking straight ahead.

  More than one, Maeve thought.

  “How does that feel?”

  Maeve smiled, even as she felt the wet on her cheeks. “It feels okay.”

  Maeve stood on the street and watched the chief drive away, not sure she had the strength to mount the short set of steps up to the front porch. She tried her legs, but they were uncooperative; she sat down on the first step and waited until the dizziness and weakness passed before getting up again and lumbering up the rest of the way.

  The front door was unlocked, something Maeve hadn’t remembered when she left and there was a light on in kitchen, the one over the sink. A glass of milk, half-drunk, sat on the counter. With newfound energy that she hadn’t had previously, she raced up the stairs to the second floor and found the door to Heather’s room ajar, the girl asleep in her bed.

  Maeve stood in the doorway, solving the mystery that had previously been unsolvable.

  She was the last person to have seen or talked to Taylor.

  “Get them.”

  Mark Messer.

  Jesse Connors.

  Maeve resisted the urge to brush the damp hair that had plastered itself to the girl’s forehead, remaining in the doorway and watching her sleep. If she closed her eyes, breathed in the scent, it could be years earlier when things were simpler and life had its own predictable rhythm. It would be when the big bed in there was really a toddler bed, two actually, with two tiny, lovely little girls asking for one more book, another glass of water.

  “We love you, Mommy!” they would cry in unison as she pulled the door almost shut, waiting on the stairs to hear what they talked about. They would debate who loved Maeve more, who was the better daughter. Who was just like her, and who would be the best baker.

  “I’m just like her,” little Heather would say to her sister when she didn’t know Maeve was listening. “I’m going to be just like her when I grow up.” At three and four, it was the best thing she could think to be, not knowing that in several years, it would be the sentiment that would make her cringe, cause her to do everything in her power to distance herself from Maeve and her own emotions.

  I’m just like her.

  Maeve came back to the present and looked at the girl, sound asleep, sleeping more deeply than she ever had.

  You are just like me, Maeve thought.

  I just wish that weren’t true.

  CHAPTER 47

  The day that Coach Barnham quit the team, leaving Farringville in his wake, Heather also quit the team, citing a lower-back problem.

  Like father, like daughter. Cal constantly complained about lower-back pain and had once thought that medical marijuana was the answer, rather than the services of a good chiropractor.

  Chris Larsson was still in the hospital. She had visited once, and when it was clear that whatever that had been between them had vanished into thin air, was more gone than the day he had broken up with her in the store, she had left, hoping that he would do as Chief Carstairs was going to suggest and take early retirement, putting the unpleasantness of being a small-town cop—something he hadn’t signed up for—behind him.

  He was a nice guy. He would find a nice girl to love him, someone who didn’t come with as much baggage and have as many secrets as Maeve did. It was small comfort as she lay alone in her bed at night, wondering how everything had turned so dark and so deadly. She finally concluded that it was her; she brought those things to every life she touched, or so it seemed.

  It was a few days later, days of uneasy détente in the house, when Maeve pulled the envelope out from between her cookbooks, leaving it on the kitchen table in front of Heather, who regarded it coolly while eating a bagel.

  “I still have this,” Maeve said.

  Heather shrugged.

  “Get them?” Maeve said. “How did you think you were going to get them?”

  Heather put her bagel down. “Yes. I wanted to get them. For what they did.”

  “For raping Taylor?”

  “For that. For ridiculing her. For letting it happen.” She pushed her plate away. “And if I had known about her mother earlier, I would want to get her, too.”

  Trish Dvorak had instructed Taylor to go the Rathmuns’ house, which as the housecleaner she had a key to, until they got the money. They never got the money, and Mark Messer found Taylor first.

  “You know what, Mom?”

  Maeve stood by the back door, focusing her attention on the overflowing garbage in the bin rather than see the look on her daughter’s face.
It was a look she saw every day when she regarded her own reflection. It was resolute and determined. Fearless. Righteous. “What?”

  “Bad things should happen to bad people. That’s the way the world should work.”

  Maeve froze, half bent over the garbage can, her back to her daughter. “Don’t say that, Heather.”

  Heather stood and put her plate next to the sink. “I’ll say it because I believe it.”

  Maeve turned. “So you were going to get them? How?”

  “I just wanted them to tell the truth. To let everyone know what they had done.” She stared at her mother, no trace of the little girl she once was evident on her face. “To get what they deserved.”

  “But then Taylor went missing.”

  “And I tried to find her.” Her tough facade crumbled only slightly. “Mark said he would help me.”

  “But he had her almost the whole time.”

  The petulant teen returned. “I know that now,” she said as if she were talking to someone of limited intelligence.

  “Why did he take her? That other girl?”

  Heather wasn’t sure how much to say.

  “Why?” Maeve asked. “And what did you find out? Anything?”

  Heather was calm, and it was that calmness that troubled Maeve the most. She had been that calm, too, once, right after she had shot and killed a man who had made her early life miserable. “I didn’t find out as much as I wanted to. As much as I needed to. I tried with Jesse but I didn’t get anywhere.” She paused. “As you know.”

  “This was never your responsibility, Heather,” Maeve said. She could have been talking to herself, the words washing over the girl without taking effect. And it wasn’t lost on her that the advice she was giving was advice she should have been taking.

  The newspaper lay folded on the kitchen table; Maeve had brought it in from the sidewalk but hadn’t had a chance to read it. Heather reached over and unfolded it, revealing the story of why Mark Messer kidnapped two girls—one long deceased and beside whose bones Taylor had lived for sixteen days. It was creepy and horrifying, and if it was true, and Maeve wasn’t sure it was, the local media not being above making things up for ratings and sales, it was something that she would never entirely believe because it was unthinkable.

  She looked at Heather, whose expression was flat, emotionless. “This can’t be true.”

  Heather nodded. “But it is. He was trying to bring his sister back.”

  CHAPTER 48

  There were two things Maeve still didn’t know and might never get the answers to:

  Who Evelyn Rose Conlon’s father had been.

  Why, if there were witnesses, Tim Morehead got off months ago scot-free for raping a teenage girl.

  Money, some people said.

  Connections, said others.

  True, Judy Wilkerson’s father had been a chief in Farringville long before Suzanne Carstairs arrived on the scene, but did he really carry any weight anymore? Apparently so. They were an old Farringville family, and that, more than money, more than status, assigned you a certain credibility in this little tiny village.

  Lack of evidence was a prevailing theme and theory among some townspeople, even with veiled references to the attack having been on Facebook.

  He said. She said. No one knows the truth. They were good boys, people said. Their families were institutions in Farringville.

  Yes, Taylor was back, but she wasn’t talking, and as a result, the case was dead, despite Chief Carstairs’s tenaciousness, her personal history, her willingness to take this as far as it needed to go.

  Maeve wondered about all of it, but not that much, because trying to get her life back on track, back to a more normal rhythm, was all she cared about.

  She kept a watchful eye on Heather, but there was nothing other than genetics to explain why her daughter felt that she had to become so deeply involved in something that was none of her business and way out of her league, not to mention incredibly dangerous. Maeve tried, and failed, to get her to understand that some things were better left to the professionals and that her involvement had just jeopardized everyone involved.

  The same could be said for herself.

  She put on a clean shirt and jeans, tucked her feet into a pair of clogs, and drove away from her house, not looking in the rearview mirror as she did, knowing what it looked like, bad paint job and all. She headed south.

  You can go home again.

  Whoever said that you couldn’t was wrong. Maeve parked on her old street, where she and Jack had lived for so many years, just the two of them, happily for most of the time, despite what Maeve had endured, in silence, as a child. Maeve walked up and down the street, unnoticed, taking in the fall colors, the row of houses, the little well-tended yards. Her cousin’s house was at the end of the street, and she assiduously avoided that. There were new people there now, but it still held memories of hurt, both physical and mental, and she wanted to avoid going down that prickly memory lane.

  Poole had been surprised when she had suggested meeting at a place on the same avenue where her mother had died. Been killed, really. To say that she had died—after telling Maeve “Be back soon”—was an understatement. She had been mowed down by a drunk Marty Haggerty and left to die in the street, her clothing torn and tattered, a pool of blood surrounding her body. Maeve had heard all of the gory details, ever watchful, always hearing what she shouldn’t as she lay in her bed, a floor above where the mourners had come to support Jack, but really to hear what had happened. One thing about her childhood neighbors: They loved a tragedy. The more tragic, the better.

  “Will you be selling the house?” one had whispered, hoping to get in on the ground floor of the amazing deal that a brokenhearted Jack would make, only to be roundly rebuffed by her father.

  “What will happen to the little girl?” another had asked, wondering if Maeve would be shipped off to live with a relative who was a mother with her own children, people not confident that a grieving Jack could raise a daughter while working as a policeman.

  And then later, when what they thought was an appropriate amount of time had passed, “My sister … she lives in Poughkeepsie. Lovely girl. Beauty in her day. Makes the best Irish soda bread this side of County Cork.” But Jack wasn’t interested. He had a woman in his life who needed his undivided attention, and that was his little Mavy, the most perfect girl in the world. It was just the two of them, and that was the way he liked it.

  That, and he would never find a woman to love the way he had loved Claire, despite the child she had conceived with another man.

  Poole was waiting for her in a bar on the avenue, one that Maeve remembered being kind of dodgy in her day but that had been turned into a proper pub, right down to the brass bar she was still too short to rest her feet on. She climbed up on a bar stool and ordered a glass of wine, remembering in that instant that Poole didn’t drink.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”

  “Not a problem,” he said. “About three years in, I decided that I was going to have a very boring life if I couldn’t hang out in bars with the guys.” He smiled. “And the occasional girl.”

  “Divorce final?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But that door has closed. She lasted as long as she could. I hope she finds someone who makes her happy.”

  “Did she make you happy, Poole?”

  He looked down. “I’m not sure anyone can make me happy.” He looked at her. “What do you think, Maeve Conlon? Your guy make you happy?” He realized, too late, what he was asking, that the relationship had ended.

  She thought about it. “He did.”

  A look passed across his face. “Sorry. I…”

  “It’s okay,” she said. But it wasn’t. It never would be. There would always be that lingering feeling that the end of their relationship had been her fault alone. He had made her happy, but as Poole had once said, and she now believed about herself as well, there were no good parts with them, her an
d Poole alike. Just sadness and grief at what they never had a chance to be. Happy. Whole. Content.

  He understood. She could see that. She could also see a glimmer of hope in his eyes, something she needed to shut down.

  “That’s not what this is about,” she said, reminding him. “It never was.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  She couldn’t handle the weight of what he was implying. There were other, weightier topics to discuss. “My sister. Marty Haggerty?”

  He didn’t look surprised that she had figured out the truth. Something on his face told her he always knew she would. “I never wanted you to know.”

  The bartender delivered her wine, an interruption that gave her a chance to gather her thoughts. Around them, the bar was abuzz with the after-work crowd, the people disembarking express buses and the commuter rail, darting into a warm place where they could slough off the stress of the day before going home to an even warmer, cozier house, she expected. She took a sip of her wine, looking down at the coaster that was placed beneath the glass. HAPPY DAY! it cried in a jaunty typeface. But it wasn’t a happy day. It was never a happy day when you discovered that a sister you had only known for six months was the daughter of the man who had killed your mother. Maeve wasn’t sure she would ever have a happy day again. “How did you find out?”

  “That old lady? McSweeney?” he said. “I flashed the badge. Asked her what she knew. She knew it all.” He paused. “That day when we saw each other? I followed you to her house, wanted to see what you had up your sleeve.”

  Maeve downed the wine and asked for another one.

  “Easy there,” he said, pushing the empty glass toward the edge of the bar. “And how did you know?”

  “My sister doesn’t remember much. But she remembered being there. She remembered their house. It just made sense.”

  He nodded. “You’re a smart cookie.”

  “I guess I should have known, Poole. I guess I should have guessed that this one would have a tragic ending, too.” She thought about it. She had known the minute that Evelyn had recognized the Haggerty house. She traced it back. That was the moment she knew but didn’t want to acknowledge at the time.