Lie in Plain Sight (19 page)

She thought about what she looked like, a tiny woman hanging from a tree, the ground beneath her gone, a large hole in its place, a hole that she'd have trouble crawling out of on her own. There had been trees in the Bronx, but growing up, she hadn't invested a lot of time in tree climbing as a hobby. She was small enough to have been a gymnast but was short on athletic ability, and as she hung there, her arms now matching the numbness of her feet, she wondered how this would end, how Chris Larsson would feel when his fellow officers told him that a woman had been found, her neck broken, in a hole by a deserted lake. How he would react when he realized that the woman was Maeve Conlon. How he would wonder why she had been at the lake and how she had afforded such expensive sneakers on a baker's salary.

“But I loved her!” he would cry, and they would circle him and offer support, and by Christmas he would have a new girlfriend; a guy that good, not to mention handsome, wouldn't stay on the open market very long.

Her laughing soon turned to crying, and right before she let go, hitting her head on a protruding branch on the way down, she thought, This is not the way I thought I'd go.

 

CHAPTER 23

Her bed felt soft and moist, and at first she wondered if she had spilled a cup of water overnight. Then water poured down from above, and she sat up with a start, wondering how much rain had to have fallen to cave in her roof. Her hands sank into deep mud on either side of her body, and as her eyes focused on the world around her, they landed on her new pink sneakers, now wet and dirt-splattered, their laces black.

I'm outside, she thought.

She was at the lake, in a hole that had formed beneath her feet. She looked at her hands, red, raw, and streaked with chafing, and felt the lump at the back of her head that had formed after she had hit the tree branch. The lake. Barnham and his kayak. She felt around in the light jacket she was wearing and found her phone.

“Chris?” she said when he picked up. “Can you come get me?”

By the time he arrived, she had crawled out of the hole with considerable difficulty, made her way to the road, taking a seat on a big rock and hanging her head between her knees, waiting for the nausea to pass. Lack of food, the damp, and the headache that pounded behind her eyes combined for a woozy, hungover feeling that she doubted would go away with an ibuprofen and caffeine intervention.

It was six thirty, and the bakery was supposed to have opened a half hour earlier. While she waited for Chris to come, she sent several frantic texts to Jo, letting her know that she would be late and asking her to please get to work as soon as possible. To give every customer a free cup of coffee. She had described to Chris as best she could where she was and told him, not entirely convincingly, that she had embarked on a new fitness regimen, one that had her running before work began and that was started with the goal of making her the hard-bodied woman that she had never been and hoped to become. Lies, all of it. Fortunately, her head hurt too much to let her feel any guilt at the untruth.

Besides, the minute Chris got there, she was going to spill the rest of it. Barnham. The kayak. Testing for the water's depth. That gave her some measure of contrition, that her lies would lead to the discovery of Taylor Dvorak's body, down at the bottom of this little lake that it was getting harder and harder to get to.

She turned and looked at the water, peaceful and placid in the dawning day. She alternately hoped and feared that the girl would be there, because if she was, she was dead, not off on a great adventure that no one really believed she'd embarked on. But at least she'd be found, and then everyone would know, and the investigation could start anew, the police finding out if she had taken her own life or been taken by someone else.

Maeve's clothes were wet, but the urge to fold herself up as small as possible was still there, and she brought her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, wondering what was taking Chris so long to get there. She felt confident that she had gone undetected, but who knew? Out there in the rain, everything was upended, a morning run turning mysterious, her questions growing by the minute.

She pulled her phone out; its screen was black. Dead. That explained why she hadn't heard back from Jo, why strong protestations of Jo's annoyance over having to run the store herself hadn't come in, fast and furious. She shook in the cold, happy when she saw headlights crest over the hill that she had trudged up hours earlier, the sound of Chris's Jeep and crunching gravel marking his arrival, his appearance the most welcome sight she had seen in a long time.

He pulled the Jeep over to the side of the road and got out, looking a little disheveled, bags under his eyes. “Maeve?”

She stood up and waved, the motion bringing the nausea into sharp relief. “Over here!” she called, walking toward him.

They met each other halfway, he a short distance from his car, she a hundred steps from the rock on which she had sat to wait for him.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “What are you doing out here? Who's at the store? Why are you out in the rain?” The questions came at a rapid clip. He took off his windbreaker and wrapped it around her; it was so big that it went around her two times, like a straitjacket, something she was starting to think she might need.

“Is that your normal interrogation style?” she asked. “Do you pepper all people with ten questions in a row?”

“It was only four, and no, that's not my normal interrogation style. Glad you still have your sense of humor,” he said, looking a little sour. She wasn't sure if it was the early-morning call or the sight of her that made him that way.

Under normal circumstances, the setting and the sentiments would have been romantic, a guy finding his love shivering and cold, his arms and jacket around her, him whispering into her hair, kissing her forehead, but she was Maeve, and nothing was ever normal or right or romantic when it was supposed to be, and what she had seen, that morning in particular, colored everything.

This is crazy, she thought, but I have to say it. She looked up at Chris, the cop who didn't have a stomach for the macabre and grotesque, the mysterious and the unsolved, and said what she was sure was the last thing he wanted to hear.

“You have to drag the lake.”

 

CHAPTER 24

Maeve told Chris everything she knew and remembered.

“Here's the thing, Maeve,” Chris said. “He's denying everything.”

They were in her kitchen now, a few hours after arriving home, and she was in dry clothes, a scalding cup of tea on the table. Farringville didn't have divers or any of the equipment necessary to search or drag a lake, so they would have to call in County; Chris had completed his phone calls up the chain and was awaiting word. Maeve didn't have a lot of faith in the county police; they hadn't turned up anything related to Taylor's disappearance and hadn't been a tremendous amount of help to the Farringville detectives as far as she could tell.

“I saw him, Chris. He was there. Does he have an alibi?”

“As good as anyone else's at five in the morning,” Chris said. “He was sleeping.”

“Alone?”

“No,” he said, and that made Maeve wonder who the coach might be involved with, who would vouch for his whereabouts. Someone stupid, obviously. Someone willing to get caught in a lie.

Chris shrugged. “I think I would have been happier if you had been with me and not running around the backwoods of Farringville, alone with an almost dead phone.” He leaned over and brushed some damp hair from her forehead. “What were you thinking?”

What was she thinking? She didn't know. “Hey,” she said, trying to make a joke of it. “I have a hot boyfriend. I also have love handles. I was thinking I should make one of those things go away. I chose the love handles.”

“Lucky me,” he said.

They both turned at the sound of a knock at the front door, and Chris let in his boss, Suzanne Carstairs, who came in trailed by the smell of cigarette smoke.

“Hiya, Maeve,” she said, her aging, former-prom-queen good looks at odds with the job she held. “Do you have another one of those?” she asked, pointing at the tea. “An errant scone lying around?”

Maeve made her a cup of tea and found a frozen scone in the freezer; she put it in the microwave while the chief asked her a series of questions, all of them similar to the ones that Chris had asked her already.

Suzanne raised an eyebrow. “Out for a run, you say?”

Maeve placed the tea and scone in front of the other woman. “Why does everyone find that so hard to believe?”

Suzanne shrugged. “I don't know. You run a business that opens at the crack of dawn and closes ten hours later. Doesn't seem like it would leave a lot of time for a regular exercise routine.” She patted her own stomach. “I should know.”

Maeve stayed quiet. The less said, the better.

The chief picked at her scone. “You're a better woman than me, Maeve. I can barely find time to eat during the day, never mind exercise.”

Chris shot Maeve a look that said her statement wasn't entirely accurate. The takeout wrappers that Maeve had seen in the police car were another indication that the chief didn't miss many meals, despite her lithe frame. She was probably one of those people who could eat anything and not gain an ounce. Maeve wanted to hate her for that, but she couldn't. Suzanne seemed plainspoken and warm, but Maeve could also tell that she was canny and sharp underneath the choppy brunette bob and behind her dark eyes. She had been appointed chief only recently, no doubt because of her ability to see through the lies as well as navigate the political, shark-infested waters of a small-town department.

“Laurel Lake, you say?” Suzanne asked, pulling a little notebook out of her blazer pocket, a blazer that matched her slacks. Slacks, that was the only thing you could call them. Practical, functional, and perfectly suited to the woman's line of work but stylish nonetheless. Maeve wouldn't be caught dead in a pantsuit, but Suzanne managed to pull it off, particularly because what her clothing lacked in style, she made up for with a pair of very expensive leather boots.

“Is that what it's called?” Maeve asked. “I didn't know it had a name.”

“Yep. Laurel Lake. Story goes that someone named Laurel drowned there,” the chief said, sipping her tea. “Hence the name.” She wrote a few words in her notebook; Maeve couldn't read them upside down and wasn't sure she wanted to know what they said anyway. “So, Barnham? The coach? He was down there in a kayak?” she asked.

“All true,” Maeve said.

“And you sustained a head injury upon falling from a tree branch?”

Chris leaned against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest. Maeve looked at him. Clearly he knew where this was going, but he kept his mouth shut.

“I know what I saw,” Maeve said.

Suzanne pursed her lips. “I'm just concerned that you may be misremembering,” she said. “And by the way, is your head okay?”

“My head's fine.”

“Need to get checked out?”

“No.”

“Okay,” the chief said, returning to her scone. “The problem we have is that Barnham has an alibi. So who was it that you saw?”

Maeve put her head in her hands and thought back to the events of a few hours earlier. It had been Barnham; she was sure of that. “I know what I saw. It was him.”

“I'm just not sure I can call in County divers to search a lake based on this story, Maeve.”

“I'm just not sure you shouldn't be doing everything in your power, including listening to me, even if you think my story is cockamamie, to find Taylor Dvorak.”

Suzanne smiled sadly. “Here's what I've got, Maeve: I've got a woman who took up running, God knows why, who saw someone doing something in a little lake, but who hit her head and may not be our most reliable witness, accusing a guy with an airtight alibi, and a pillar of the community to boot, of kayaking in the wee hours of the morning. You see my problem?”

Maeve looked at Chris and then back at his boss. To her ears now, it was a completely ridiculous story. “And why is his alibi airtight?”

“Well, he's sleeping with someone on my force, Maeve,” Suzanne said. “Is that airtight enough for you?”

 

CHAPTER 25

It wasn't until she was in bed that night that it occurred to her to call Poole. Unlike her daughters, he always answered the phone when she called, no matter the day, no matter the time. Tonight was no exception.

“So, I've had a bit of a day,” she said, touching the back of her head. This was her second bump on the head this year, and she wondered if getting hit on the head twice in a short amount of time would lead her down the same road her father had been on prior to his death. Confusion. Anger. Disorientation. Moments of resignation, but not many. She pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the task at hand. “I'm looking for background on someone named David Barnham.”

“Spell it.”

When she was finished, she added, “I don't know, Poole. Something isn't right about this guy.”

“Just because he kayaks before dawn?”

“That and he seems to get involved with the girls on his team.”

“What do you mean ‘get involved'?”

She realized she didn't know. “I don't know. Has parties. Invites the girls.”

“How do you know this?”

“I hear things,” she said.

“Good sources?”

“Maybe?”

He let that go. “Anything else?”

“I don't know.”

“That's not a lot to go on, Maeve. Lots of coaches have parties.”

“Single men with teenage girls?”

“It's not unheard of,” Poole said. “Listen. We're different, you and me. We've been changed in a way that we don't even understand. If this guy has an alibi, and the alibi is a cop, I'm not sure you saw who you think you saw.”