Lie in Plain Sight

by Maggie Barbieri

  “They’re not all tragic endings,” he said.

  “They’re not?” she said, angry. “In my world, they seem to be.” She laughed. “I’m turning into Job, Poole, right before my very eyes.”

  He leaned in, placing a hand on her knee. Anyone who was watching would have seen a woman with tears in her eyes being comforted by a handsome, kindly man, one who clearly adored the small woman and would do anything for her. He kissed her lightly on the lips, and she relaxed just a little bit, letting herself be taken into his warm embrace. “I’ll help you get through this, Maeve Conlon,” he said.

  “With one condition.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “That you stop calling me ‘Maeve Conlon,’” she said.

  He laughed, the first real laugh she had ever heard him emit. “Deal.”

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “There’s more?” he asked.

  “There’s a lot more. I’m responsible for more death than the actual angel of death, Poole.”

  “Job. The angel of death. Been reading your Bible a lot, Maeve?”

  She watched two other people at the end of the bar, laughing and chatting, and wondered why she and Poole couldn’t be like them. “I don’t know if you remember, but a guy died at the dam two years ago. In my town.”

  He knew where she was going; she could tell by the knowing look on his face. “You were there.”

  “I was.”

  He waited for more.

  “He was abusing his child. A little girl. Her name was Tiffany. He broke her arm.”

  “Like your cousin did to you.”

  She didn’t remember telling him about that specific incident, but he knew somehow. That knowing was what they shared. “I couldn’t stand it, Poole.”

  “So you made him disappear.”

  She did. And now, a little girl and her younger sister were living somewhere else, hopefully safe and sound. Maeve would never know.

  “Good riddance,” Poole said. “Feel bad about it?”

  Maeve thought about that. “Nope.”

  “My warrior queen,” Poole said, the respect evident in his tone.

  Her wine appeared, but she didn’t drink it. “If I drink this, I won’t be able to drive home,” she said, feeling the effects of the first, hastily consumed one. “Walk me to my car.” She threw some money on the bar and got up.

  Outside, they kept a distance between them that would suggest that they didn’t know each other, not ready to make what they felt public. Theirs was a tenuous relationship, one that would have to build over time. “I wonder where it was,” Maeve said as they walked along the avenue. “The exact place where my mother died.” She had thought about that a lot over the years.

  “You don’t want to know that,” Poole said from his spot in front of what Maeve had known to be a five-and-dime when she was a kid but was now a shop that only sold olive oil. She wondered how it stayed in business, if the people of this neighborhood needed that much olive oil to sustain them. “Some things you’re better off not knowing.”

  Maeve turned her back to the avenue and stood on the curb near the bus stop. “This is the bus I used to take to the city. The real city. Manhattan. I thought I’d live there one day. Who knew that I would move further away and that this was the closest I would ever get? That I’d be a kid here and never come back?” Behind her, down the street, the bus approached. People would get off and maybe go into the bar that they had just left, happy to be out of the “city,” even though they lived in its environs. That was a funny thing about the people in the boroughs; they never considered themselves part of the main borough where everything happened all day, all night. They considered themselves, their particular borough, different, distant from where everything else was happening.

  “You were where you were supposed to be,” Poole said.

  “So philosophical, Poole,” she pointed out. “You know, Poole, the whole philosophy thing aside, I think we might be made for each other.” She was only half kidding.

  “How so?” he asked, even though it was clear that the proclamation made him profoundly happy.

  “Somewhere in our shared pain, we might be able to find happiness,” she said. “I’m starting to believe that.”

  He reached out to take her hand, and she let him, feeling her small palm nestled within his larger, calloused one. Working-man hands. That’s what Jack would have called them.

  There was her grammar school and the place where she got on the bus to go to high school. “That’s where I busted open my chin,” she said to no one, remembering taking a step off the curb and hurting herself, Jack bundling her up and flagging down a police cruiser on the street and whisking her to the emergency room, holding her down as they put three enormous stitches in her chin. She sometimes looked at the scar and laughed. Of all of her scars, that was the only one that was visible, and it was one she had gotten all on her own.

  She continued down the street. Unlike any other man she had been with, he didn’t feel the need to speak to fill up the silent spaces; he just needed to be near her. That was enough. No talking, no laughing, no asking questions. They were just beside each other, and it was all he needed.

  “I’m enjoying this trip down memory lane, Maeve,” he said, “But I have to go.”

  “Back to work?” she asked.

  “Back to work,” he said and put his big hands on her face, drawing her in for a kiss.

  When she pulled back, she looked at him, the man who now held her heart. “You were wrong, Poole.”

  “About what?” he said, smiling the biggest smile she had ever seen on his face.

  “There are a few good parts with you. More than a few, maybe.”

  CHAPTER 49

  It was a lot to think about, a lot to absorb, but in spite of all of that, one thing continued to trouble her.

  It wasn’t the fact that David Barnham seemed to have disappeared without a trace himself. And it wasn’t the fact that he had mail from the U.S. Marshals in his kitchen junk drawer. It wasn’t even the fact that despite his nebulous background, the rumors about him, he had managed to con a seemingly bright and suspicious woman in the person of the local police chief.

  It was what had happened that morning she had followed him, why David Barnham had been out at that lake, testing the water’s depth.

  Start at the beginning, she thought, laughing to herself as she drove down the dirt road to the little patch of beach, still a little giddy from her meeting with Poole, or maybe a little insane, given what she had learned. It felt wrong to be happy with all that she had wrought. She had already been back to the giant crater at the edge of the neighborhood built on the backs of people who had labored for Charles Connors, making him rich beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. There was nothing there, the rank porta-potties still reeking but empty, nothing to indicate that David Barnham had ever hidden anything there. There was still Laurel Lake, though, and what had happened that morning, a morning that seemed like it had been yesterday and a thousand years earlier.

  She had struck up an uneasy alliance with Suzanne Carstairs, their fates linked together by everything that had transpired. Suzanne had stopped in at The Comfort Zone right before Maeve had closed that day, eyeing her suspiciously.

  “You look guilty,” she said, taking a big bite of a cupcake. “Like you’re up to something.”

  Carstairs was good. Maeve felt her cheeks go hot. She figured that this one time, she would tell the truth. “I’m thinking of going kayaking tonight.”

  Carstairs gave her the once-over. “You kayak? At night?”

  “Yeah,” Maeve said, laughing. “Laurel Lake. Seems like as good a place as any.”

  Carstairs had regarded her for longer than Maeve would have liked, finally breaking the silence by updating Maeve on a subject she had no business being updated about anymore. “Chris did retire. Officially,” she said. “Heading up to the Finger Lakes.”

  The thought of him in a remote area,
on a lake somewhere, gave her peace.

  “You’ve got a mole in your department,” Maeve said.

  “Yeah, we’ve got roaches and chipmunks, too,” Carstairs said.

  “No, a mole. Someone feeding stuff to the media,” Maeve said.

  “You think?”

  “I know,” Maeve said. “Too many coincidences, too much media knowing things before they could. I just think it’s weird. I think it’s one of yours.”

  “I’ll be sure to check that out, Maeve,” Carstairs said. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Maeve said, going for broke. “Why did you lie for him?”

  The chief was silent. “That’s a little more complicated.”

  “How so?”

  “Let’s just say that I didn’t think I had.” She looked at Maeve and Maeve decided not to press it. There was something beneath the surface of her answer that hinted at things better left unsaid.

  They had left it at that, the chief diving into another cupcake before Maeve closed, following it up with a cigarette in the back parking lot before getting in her car and driving away.

  Now, at Laurel Lake, Maeve surveyed the landscape, walking to the water’s edge. She would never know how deep the water was because she would never venture out in one of the County-sanctioned boats at its edge. Sure, she had once had a gun, but without the benefit of a wetsuit—and an ability to actually swim—she would dream of getting in the chilly water to see if there was something down there that Barnham wanted.

  She’d never know.

  The sinkhole, once filled in with fresh dirt and smoothed over, if she had thought about it, could have been the work of Mark Messer, but she’d never know that either. Who else had access to a lot of dirt and a large rake to fill in a hole? Landscapers? Gardeners? She had had to beg and plead with Kurt to get the pothole fixed, so a big hole in the middle of a deserted beach certainly hadn’t been on anyone’s mind, particularly the DPW’s. Maybe he had had sinkholes to fill. She stared out at the water and considered everything she knew, coming to the conclusion that what she knew amounted to exactly nothing.

  “I knew you’d be back.”

  She turned at the sound of the voice. David Barnham walked down the beach, soccer shoes on his feet, the requisite warm-up clothes on his body. His hands hung at his sides, and in his right one was a gun slapping lazily at his thigh.

  With all that she had done, with all that she had been through, it wasn’t lost on her that this might be where it all came to an end, out at the edge of town on a little stretch of beach whose name she hadn’t known a few weeks earlier, a woman and a guy with a gun.

  She was used to it being the other way around.

  “Where have you been, Barnham?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Around. Here and there.”

  “That sounds like a whole lot of ridiculousness. You’ve got to come up with something better than that,” she said. “How did you find me? Did you follow me?”

  “You’re not as smart as you think.” He used the gun to point over his shoulder. “Back there. The transmitter. I’ll get rid of it once I get rid of you.”

  “You had a tracker on my car?” she asked.

  He didn’t respond. “What is wrong with you exactly?” he asked, moving closer in the gloom, training the gun at a spot right in the middle of her forehead, squinting. “What makes a woman like you get into other people’s business?”

  “Well, it’s a good thing I do, don’t you think?” she said, shoving her hands deep in her pockets, her fingers grazing her phone.

  “Let me see your hands,” he said.

  She pulled them out of her pockets and held them in the air.

  “Let’s not be dramatic,” he said.

  “What are you hiding?” she asked, keeping her hands up.

  “You really don’t want to know,” he said.

  “Try me.”

  He considered that, wondered how much he should say. “Just money. Nothing else.”

  “Now who’s being dramatic? If it’s just money, who cares?” she asked. “You put money in the water?” He must have owned stock in Ziploc.

  He ignored her question, inching closer, looking as if she might spring at him and break his neck. She was good, but she wasn’t that good. Plus, her jeans were too tight, the result of having consumed more than her fair share of loaf breads over the past few weeks, and there was no way she was springing anywhere. Waddling, maybe. But springing? No chance in hell.

  There was something, though, and not even that deep below the surface, that gave her a measure of satisfaction at the idea that this guy, whatever he had done, was terrified of her and of what she might do. She smiled at the thought.

  “Why are you smiling?” he asked.

  “No reason,” she said. “Listen, if you’re going to kill me, could you just tell me what’s going on so that I can die knowing that I was right about something? Just this one time?”

  “Why don’t you seem scared?” he asked.

  “Because I’m not.”

  “Someone is holding a gun on you and you’re not the least bit terrified?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  It was her turn to shrug. “Seen a lot. Been hurt a lot. What you do to me can’t be any worse than what’s already happened.”

  “Death?”

  She thought of her mother and of Jack’s contention, all these years since her death, that yes, they would all be reunited one day. She had believed her father because there was no reason not to. If it wasn’t true, and the lights just went out, the pain going away forever, that was one thing. If it was true, well, that was the best thing that could happen.

  It was a win-win in her opinion.

  She tried another tack. “Why here? Why Farringville?”

  “It’s as good a place as any to get lost, don’t you think?”

  “But you were never going to stay lost,” she said. “That was a problem.”

  “It wasn’t until you got involved.” He came closer and grabbed her by the hood on her jacket.

  “Were you sleeping with any girls on your team?” she asked.

  He laughed. “Um, no. But thank you for asking. It’s flattering to think that I could seduce a bunch of teenagers. I read a book on team building. They said to have parties.”

  “With girls?” Maeve asked. “That sounds kind of messed up.”

  “Well, maybe not girls, but I figured it couldn’t hurt,” he said. He realized that talking about team building wasn’t the purpose of their unexpected meeting. “This is scintillating but we have other things to discuss. Like why you’re crazy.”

  “Before we get to that, what about Suzanne Carstairs?”

  “Great girl. Lots of fun. We had a good thing going.” He motioned toward the water with the gun.

  “That morning. The morning I saw you. Why were you here? Where were you going? What were you hiding? Why did she lie for you?”

  “You’ve got a lot of questions. I’ve told you everything you need to know.”

  “The construction site. The porta-john. What was in there?” she asked. “Why did you go there?”

  He was tiring of her questions. “Let’s go.” He waved the gun menacingly, and if she hadn’t known his background, she would have thought that he didn’t really know how to use it.

  “Where?” she asked.

  He pointed to the water, and right then, she decided that there might a fate worse than death, than being shot in the head.

  Drowning.

  An upside-down canoe rested at the water’s edge, the little waves brushing up against it making a soothing noise. Barnham pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and grabbed her wrist, slapping one cuff on and fastening the other to a tree branch. The branch was much higher than her head, and Maeve listed uncomfortably, one foot touching the ground with just the tips of her toes. She watched as Barnham wrestled with the canoe with one hand while trying to keep his gun trained on her. Her
new phone, in the opposite pocket from her free hand, was useless to her, her one hand not being dexterous enough to punch in a number.

  Why hadn’t she paid closer attention to the girls when they texted and video chatted and used technology that remained an elusive ideal to her? When she was little, Jack had told her that one day, you would be able to call someone and see their face on the phone. That day was here. It was a smartphone world, and she was a rotary phone.

  This is rich, she thought. I’m going to be killed by a guy who can’t get a canoe into the water while a perfectly good phone sits in my pocket.

  She watched him a little longer. “I see what the problem is!” she called. “It’s chained to that tree over there.” Maybe that would take him some time to undo and she could figure out how to call someone.

  See, Mr. Killer Man? I’m nice and helpful. Please don’t murder me. And please, maybe, get distracted so I can get away? Make a run for it, a run by a middle-aged lady having the same chance for success as that one time she tried to make a chocolate soufflé during a heat wave.

  He looked up at her, mystified. “You are an insane person.”

  In the distance, a car pulled up beside the beach, the sound of a door closing something she never knew would sound so good. She craned her neck but couldn’t see who had arrived, but Barnham could. He raced to the tree, unlocked the handcuff, and pulled her in front of him like a human shield, pushing the barrel of the gun into her temple.

  “Hiya, David!” Suzanne Carstairs walked gingerly on the beach in her high heels, picking her way around a cluster of roots here, a rock there. “You left without saying good-bye.” She looked at Maeve. “Kayaking, my ass.”

  “I’ll kill her. Don’t move,” he said.

  “Wow, you’ve got some balls there, my friend. A U.S. Marshal on the run from the Marshals themselves. But that money you stole from El Gato really didn’t get you far enough away,” she said.

  Jo hadn’t done a follow-up presentation on the El Gato story since her first recitation all those weeks ago. The minute Carstairs said the name, Maeve remembered that day in the store, how the local police blotter had been devoid of juicy stories, how Jo had turned to the Times for some entertainment.