Lie in Plain Sight Read online

  Chris took a long sip of wine, a screw-top cabernet that Maeve knew was one of his favorites. “I don’t want to say too much.”

  “Like what?” Maeve asked. She had proven to him already that she could keep a secret or two, that she could be trusted.

  “I really don’t want to talk about it, Maeve,” he said, but he really hadn’t said anything at all. He stared straight ahead as he devoured first one piece of pizza and then a second. He paused before getting up to get a third to ask her a question. “Does Heather know this girl?”

  “Told me she was a typical teen who hates her mother,” Maeve said, trying to make it sound less hurtful than it had felt at the time.

  Chris turned and looked at her, not responding. He was careful not to say too much about how Heather treated Maeve, but his eyes told Maeve that he didn’t approve. “Another slice?”

  She held up her plate. “Still have this one.”

  She could hear Chris’s footfalls in the hallway when she saw Cal pull up in front of the house. She ran down the porch steps and to the curb, where she banged on the passenger-side window until he rolled it down. “What are you doing?” she said, trying to keep her voice at a whisper. The baby was in the backseat, and Cal had a radio station blaring that was playing a reggae version of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” She leaned in and blew the baby a kiss; no reason why he should feel the negativity emanating from her every pore. “Go home,” she said.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said, lowering the volume on the radio. This elicited a low moan from the baby, followed by an earsplitting shriek, and he turned it back up. “He loves this song.”

  “Go home,” Maeve said, turning to see Chris coming from the house, two slices of pizza on his plate, a puzzled look on his face. “We’re done.” When Cal opened his mouth to protest, she banged her hand on the car door. “So, good night! I’ll see you tomorrow!” she said, all fake cheer and happiness. “Thanks for stopping by, but we can work this out tomorrow!”

  “We can’t be done,” Cal said to Maeve’s back. She turned and mouthed, “But we are.”

  On the porch, Chris was eating his pizza and looking at the minivan. “Everything okay?”

  “Tuition payment,” Maeve said, hoping that the lie falling from her lips sounded better to Chris than to her own ears. “I thought he paid and he thought I paid…”

  Chris chewed his pizza slowly, looking first at the car, its headlights twinkling in the distance, and then back to Maeve. “I hate when that happens,” he said, but his tone suggested that it was just filler, a way to respond to Maeve until he figured out what he really wanted to ask her.

  Never lie to a cop. That was one piece of advice that Jack had given Maeve but she hadn’t been able to take, having lied now to more than one cop in her life, her father included.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jo was waiting for her outside The Comfort Zone, in the parking lot, when Maeve showed up for work the next morning, her bike propped up against the brick building, Jack nowhere in sight.

  “Where’s the baby?” Maeve asked. “And why are you here?” she added, an alarm bell going off in her head. Jo had never been here this early when she had worked for Maeve; her early-morning appearance was concerning.

  “First of all, my mother spent the night and told me to do whatever I wanted to do today.”

  Maeve narrowed her eyes. There had to be a catch.

  “What I want to do, more than anything, is help you at the store again,” Jo said, standing up and stretching. “Do you always open this early?” she asked, knowing well that Maeve did; otherwise, she wouldn’t be by her friend’s side, her work outfit of jeans and white T-shirt on her slim body, Doc Martens on her feet.

  “You. Want to help me. At the store,” Maeve said, her disbelief halting her speech. “I must be dreaming. You didn’t even want to help me at the store when you actually worked here.”

  “Now, that’s not nice,” Jo said, but she knew it was true, smiling at the memories of having been Maeve’s only real employee for many years. She followed Maeve into the kitchen. “Anything changed since I left? Everything still in the same place?”

  “Nothing’s changed. Everything’s still in its place.”

  Jo donned an apron. “Still sleeping with your ex-husband?”

  Maeve didn’t answer immediately, choosing her words carefully. “Technically, no.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that it happened once and it won’t happen again.” She pulled the money pouch out of her tote bag and threw it onto the counter. She sat down and started counting the money from the previous day’s receipts, coming up short by four hundred dollars after three different attempts at settling the tally. “Jo, do me a favor. Count this?” she said, pushing the stack of bills toward her.

  “Eight thirty,” Jo said after riffling through the money. “Is that what you’ve got?”

  Maeve nodded, even though she knew the total should have been well over a thousand dollars. She thought back to the day before, to Trish, to Evelyn, to everything that happened. Evelyn had been known to “borrow” the odd head band, or an old nail polish Maeve didn’t even know she had. But money? That was a different story. Evelyn had her own money, and Maeve wasn’t even sure she knew the value of it. Money held little interest for her. Relationships were her currency, and seeing Maeve and the girls was the thing she craved.

  Back-to-school night came into her mind’s eye, as did Trish’s very short job interview.

  Jo pulled some cupcake liners from the shelf in the pantry and set about putting them into a tin. “Just so you know, it’s getting around. I don’t think anyone knows it’s you, but Patsy Morrow overheard Gabriela crying in the bathroom at the gym and telling someone else that she thought Cal was cheating.”

  “What?” Maeve asked. She looked down at the stack of bills, finally pushing them all into the money pouch and zippering it shut.

  “Patsy Morrow. Gabriela. Crying at the gym.”

  “What’s she got?” Maeve asked. She’d worry about the money later. “What does she know? Did they say?”

  “Said he stayed out late a few nights, and one night in particular, when he came home, he smelled funny.”

  “Funny?” Maeve asked, sniffing her hands. They always smelled a bit like nutmeg, a little bit like cinnamon. There was always a smudge of icing under the cuticles. “Funny how?”

  “I don’t know,” Jo said, concentrating on the cupcake tin. “Apparently, Gabriela burst into tears during spin class, jumped off her bike, and ran into the locker room. Of course, that was far too juicy for the rest of the spin class to ignore, so one or two women did reconnaissance and then reported back to the others.”

  “Good old Patsy,” Maeve said, shaking her head. The village had more gossips than it needed, and Patsy was often in The Comfort Zone at one of the café tables, her head bent conspiratorially in the direction of some other disaffected housewife, dishing the dirt on someone who, nine times out of ten, had just left the store.

  “You’re done with that, right?” Jo asked. “The cheating? I kind of never took you for that kind of girl, Maeve.”

  “What kind of girl, Jo?” Jo herself had been known to blur the lines of what was right over the years, but Maeve guessed that now she was married and had a baby, her moral compass had recalibrated. “The kind of girl who gives in to something familiar and comforting?”

  “Is this about your dad?” Jo asked.

  “Oh, God no,” Maeve said. Jo blamed every one of Maeve’s emotions on her father dying, not realizing that of all the things she had been through, all of the traumas, that one had been the most normal and the easiest to move past. Yes, she missed him, but he had been old and frail and, worst of all, had kept from her for her entire life the reality of a developmentally challenged sister, whom she now knew and loved. No, this had nothing to do with her father and everything to do with an unsettled score between her, her ex, and his second wife.

  She wasn’t p
roud to admit that, even though she only admitted it to herself.

  “It was one time,” Maeve said. “One. So why is this all around town?”

  Jo voiced a thought that Maeve had had more than once. “Maybe there are others.”

  Maeve went to the sink and washed her hands. When had a roll in the hay with your ex become one of the top ten crimes committed against man? She looked down at her hands and scrubbed the icing from around her cuticles, Donna Fitzpatrick’s Thulian pink more stubborn than any other color she had created. It was a mistake. It had happened once. Everyone could move on with their lives.

  The back door opened, bringing with it the smell of the rain, which had started falling after Jo and Maeve had entered the store. Trish Dvorak came in, her face drawn, looking as if she had lost twenty pounds since the day before, attempting a smile to lighten the mood.

  “Trish,” Maeve said, her eyes going to the pouch on the counter. “I didn’t expect you today.”

  Jo lifted her head and smiled sadly in greeting, returning to stuffing the cupcake tins with liners, a job that was taking an inordinately long time. The more things change, Maeve thought, the more they stay the same.

  “I can’t sit around the house, Maeve, so I wanted to come in. To do something normal,” Trish said, doing her best not to cry but failing. “I can’t not work,” she said. “I have to work. I have to make money.”

  Jo stopped what she was doing. “I’m going to go out front and get ready for the morning rush,” she said, picking up the money bag and taking it with her. “Take your time. I can handle whatever we get.”

  Maeve pulled out a stool and told Trish to sit. She pulled a muffin from the refrigerator and put it in the microwave to warm up before she went into the front to get some coffee. She had one pot that was on a timer so the coffee was ready when she arrived every morning, one of Cal’s suggestions that she had employed. Trish picked at the muffin but drank the coffee, silent in the kitchen.

  “Nothing on Taylor, Trish?” Maeve said as gently as she could.

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s the next step, then?” Maeve asked, thinking that she would have asked Chris, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about the case or anything having to do with the girl’s disappearance.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think maybe she ran away?” Maeve asked.

  Trish looked up at her. “Your boyfriend asked me the same thing,” she said, her tone sharp. “No. I don’t think she ran away.”

  “Her father? Maybe she went there?” Maeve was assuming there was a father somewhere; maybe the girl had gone to him.

  “Taylor never would have gone there.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  Trish gave Maeve a hard look. “What are you a cop now? What’s with all of the questions?”

  “I’m sorry. I was just wondering…”

  “What? What were you wondering, Maeve?”

  “I was wondering if she had any reason to want to leave Farringville,” Maeve said. To her, it was a legitimate question. To Trish, obviously, it was as if Maeve had thrown a verbal Molotov cocktail into the conversation.

  “What were you wondering? If our home life was so bad that having a mother who can’t afford the things everyone else has was enough to make her want to leave? That living in an apartment behind a half-empty strip mall embarrassed her and made her want to run? That not being able to pay for college is the only thing she thinks about because it’s the only thing I think about? Is that what you were wondering, Maeve?”

  Maeve wasn’t wondering that, but she did question how the conversation had taken such a wrong turn, how it had become a conversation on the socioeconomic realities of life as a single mother. She wanted to remind Trish that she was a single mother, too, and practically had to break her back to make ends meet, but the woman didn’t seem to want to hear anything. A deep-seated hostility came off Taylor’s mother in waves.

  “Maybe you should take a few days off, Trish. Focus on finding Taylor. I’ll get by here,” Maeve said, hoping that she wouldn’t have to be more forceful in her suggestion. The woman’s hostility coupled with the missing cash was all Maeve needed to convince her that she was doing the right thing after having done the wrong thing in hiring Trish so precipitously. “I’ll need help for Founders Day if you want to come back in a few weeks.”

  Trish looked at her. “Are you firing me?”

  “No. I’m not firing you. You have other things to attend to. You have to find your daughter. Coming to work every day may not be the best thing for you right now.”

  But Trish wasn’t buying what Maeve was selling.

  “Really. Come back when Taylor comes home,” Maeve said.

  “And what if she doesn’t come home?” Trish asked, clearly without any hope that the situation would change. Maeve just couldn’t figure out why. There had to be more to this story than she knew, and by the look on Trish’s face, Maeve wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Jo poked her head into the kitchen. “There’s a kid here from the high school who says you have something for him. A donation?”

  Trish was silent as Maeve rooted around her desk for the envelope with her donation for the Mississippi trip. “Here. Give this to him.”

  “Bye, Trish,” Jo said, making herself scarce, wanting to be part of the drama and eschewing it at the same time.

  Maeve turned back to the bereft mother, the woman with the shortest employment in history on record at The Comfort Zone, trying to find some kind of common ground with her. “Trish, you have to have hope. Chris and everyone else in the police department are going to do everything they can to find her.” Now she was defending the Farringville police, who, as a group, sometimes needed a little help in the investigation department. They tried, but for something like this, Maeve suspected that they were all in way over their collective head, something she would never articulate to Chris.

  Trish stood next to the counter for a few minutes, looking at Maeve for an uncomfortably long time. “Thanks for nothing, Maeve,” she said.

  “Founders Day, Trish. I’ll need help.” Maybe in the meantime she would find out that she had lost the money herself, that Trish wasn’t to blame. Until then, and only then, she would stand by her decision.

  “I don’t need help in a few weeks, Maeve, I need help now.”

  With nowhere else to look, Maeve looked up at the ceiling, thinking. Having Trish in the store didn’t seem like the right thing, particularly in light of the missing cash, not to mention her missing daughter. Trish took the silence to mean that Maeve was standing her ground, that she didn’t want her back.

  “Thanks for nothing,” she said again.

  She needed someone to blame. Maeve could see that. She remembered the advice of the adolescent-expert author and tried not to take it personally, but Trish’s anger was ten times stronger than it had ever been from either of her daughters. Like an altercation with a teen, the ones the author claimed had underdeveloped brains, this conversation had gone south quickly, and there was no getting it back on track. Maeve watched as Trish exited the kitchen and got into her car, the engine roaring to life just before she drove away, leaving a trail of exhaust in her wake.

  Jo came back into the kitchen. “She’s a mess.”

  “Understandably so,” Maeve said, wrapping her arms around herself. She looked at Jo. “If I give you a three-dollar an hour raise and you only have to work from eleven to close, will you come back?”

  Jo smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Heather had the late shift at the grocery store that night, something that Cal knew and tried to take advantage of. He showed up at Maeve’s a little past eight, and although she wasn’t expecting him exactly, she’d had a feeling he’d show up, despite their last conversation.

  She didn’t open the door. “I wasn’t kidding.”

  “Don’t worry. We’re safe,” Cal said, letting himself in. “Larsson is working the n
ight shift. I saw him at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  “Maybe he was just getting a coffee.”

  “Or maybe he was getting a doughnut.” Cal shrugged off his sweatshirt and hung it on the newel post. “As cops do.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t like him, Cal,” Maeve said, picking up the sweatshirt when it fell to the ground. “He’s a great guy. I love him, actually.”

  Cal raised an eyebrow. “Really? You love him? Could you?” He waved a hand in the space between the two of them. “With this going on?” He leaned in and nuzzled her neck. “This is kind of hot, don’t you think?”

  It had started out innocently enough, a mistake that she wasn’t planning on making or repeating. The summer coming to an end, he had come to pick up Heather, forgetting about her job at the grocery store, that on certain nights she worked late. Rather than drive the one mile home to his gorgeous, spacious Tudor, complete with adorable toddler and gorgeous wife, he had elected to stay to wait for his daughter, diving into the bottle of Falanghina that Maeve had opened up for herself and had planned to finish. She was three-quarters of the way through it, her senses pleasantly dulled, when he arrived, telling her things she didn’t want to hear. Gabriela didn’t love him. It wasn’t working. He needed a change. It was all stuff she had heard before, and it bored her, but that night, delicious white wine running through her veins, she felt loose. And he felt familiar. So she had let him kiss her once, and then kiss her again, knowing it was a mistake, understanding that it could never happen again but powerless to stop it. Before she knew it, it was more than she had bargained for, a cry leaving her lungs that she hadn’t heard herself utter since her marriage had ended.

  She had awoken the next morning with a pounding headache, and had leaned over the sink while filling her palm with water and drinking it down, the thought of what she had done not eliciting the feelings she had expected upon awaking. There was no shame, there was no guilt. There was one strange, unfamiliar feeling, a feeling she shouldn’t have had.