Lie in Plain Sight (20 page)

She ignored that. When Poole turned against her, didn't believe what she was telling him, that was the time she knew she was starting to lose it. “What about the fact that he was testing the water's depth from his kayak this morning?”

“They gonna drag the lake?”

“I don't know. The chief and Chris weren't too forthcoming with the next steps in the investigation.”

“Chris the boyfriend?”

“Chris the boyfriend.”

Poole paused. “Maybe they don't want you to know what's happening next. Ever think of that, Maeve Conlon?”

“Maybe. Hey, I was just giving them my opinion. Telling them what I saw.”

“Police don't like amateur sleuths,” Poole said. “Messes up our game.”

“The Farringville PD has zero game, Poole. Trust me.”

“Even the boyfriend?”

Especially the boyfriend, she thought. But she didn't answer. “So, can you help me? Find out about this Barnham guy?”

“I can try.” In the background was the noise of the city—cabs honking, pedestrians talking, a train going by overhead. He was close to his precinct, still at work. “I'll see if I can find him the usual ways. Find out what he may have been up to before he became coach. Will that help?”

“Thanks, Poole.”

“You get yourself into a lot of messes, Maeve Conlon. But this is a new one on me.” He chuckled. “Running at dawn? Following a kayaker? If I didn't know you so well, I'd say that you were a little loco.”

But you don't know me that well, she thought, as she listened to silence on the other end. You only know my secrets.

“Hey,” she started, before realizing she was talking to a dead connection. “Anything on my sister? Her paternity?” But he wasn't there any longer, and knowing him the way she did, she knew that if he had something to tell, he would have told it. Poole was a man of few words, and the words he used always counted.

She got out of bed, having already made the decision to close the store the next day, her head still aching to the touch when she reached back.

Downstairs, sitting on the bottom step of the long staircase that led to the second floor of the old Colonial, she laced up a different pair of shoes, old hiking boots that she found in the hall closet, left over from the days when she and Cal were dating and his idea of a fun date was a picnic at the top of Bear Mountain. Her ideas had been much different; sipping a Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the cozy confines of a dark-paneled bar, a plate of paté or oysters in front of the two of them. But he had had no money and she even less, so sandwiches that she prepared and an eight-dollar bottle of Chardonnay had been their reward for reaching their destination.

Maeve stood and wiggled her toes in the boots; they were definitely more comfortable than the sneakers and would serve her well on her latest excursion. She leaned on the banister and called up the stairs. “Heather!”

She discerned a low grunt from behind the girl's bedroom door.

“I'll be back in a few minutes,” she said, not adding anything else that could be used against her later, make her fudge an alibi when none was available. She wasn't going to see Jo, which would have been her first convenient go-to for a lie. She wasn't heading back to the shop. And although she was in desperate need of a haircut and eyebrow wax, there wasn't a salon in Farringville open once the streetlights came on. The art of the lie. She had honed it over the years, learning a few things along the way from Heather, curiously. Sometimes she thought the kid was better at it than she was.

She opened the closet door and grabbed the hooded sweatshirt—owner unknown—that hung in the overstuffed downstairs storage. Her headlamp, she remembered, was still in the trunk of the Prius. She was zipping up the sweatshirt when Heather appeared at the top of the stairs, a sheet of paper in her hands.

“Would you read my essay before you go?” she asked in an uncharacteristic display of neediness.

“What essay?” Maeve asked, a little too sharply to her own ears, and judging from the look on Heather's face, hers, too. Damn it, Maeve thought. Just when they had reached a permanent state of silent, brooding détente. Foiled again.

“Forget it!” Heather said, starting for her room.

Maeve counted. One, two, three … door slam. Happened every time. She raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and let herself into Heather's room without knocking, finding the girl on her bed, sobbing into the sheet of paper. Maeve sat down next to her on the bed. “What's going on? What essay?”

“My college essay,” Heather said, balling up the sodden paper. “For my application.”

“To where?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “All of my schools are on the common application.”

That would have meant something to Maeve if she had been even half awake during Rebecca's own college search, but Cal had insisted that he drive the figurative bus on the search and paperwork, and Maeve had acquiesced gladly. Now she needed to engage; that was clear. She took the essay from Heather's hand and smoothed it out on her lap. She read the title—“My Father's Daughter”—and steeled herself for the inevitable rapture that would spill out before her, Heather's words rhapsodizing about her wonderful father and all he had done for her.

And she wasn't disappointed. Heather's essay started with a story about how her father had taught her to ride a bike and how because of that and the patience he had shown, Heather had learned everything she needed to know about perseverance. Dedication. Love. How being taught by her father how to make lasagna (really?) and drive and care for her younger brother had made Heather the person she was today. How he had cared for her when she got chronic ear infections, spiking fevers. Heather knew what it took to get through hard times—her dad had taught her that, too. She knew what it meant to work hard because she saw her father work hard every day of his life, even now, in his early retirement and in his role as full-time father to her stepbrother.

“You hate it,” Heather said. “It's terrible.”

Tears blurred Maeve's vision, the paper reading as if Heather didn't have a mother at all. She wiped them away so that Heather wouldn't see how she really felt. “Actually, it's lovely, honey,” she said. “There's a typo in paragraph two. It should be
t-h-e-i-r
instead of
t-h-e-r-e.
”

Heather laughed. “Oh, man. Rookie mistake.” She walked over to her desk and made the correction on her laptop. “Anything else? Does it say enough about me and what I'm like? My English teacher said that it should be a story about me and tell the person reading the application who I am. Give them a window into what I'm like.”

“Yes,” Maeve said. “It says that.”

“It's not too much about Dad?” she asked.

It's way too much about Dad, but I'm a little biased there, Maeve thought but did not say. “It's perfect, honey. Really,” she said, the lie catching in her throat slightly, making her cough.

“I think I'll send it to Rebecca to see what she says,” Heather said.

“Good idea.” Maeve stood thinking back to her dinner with Rebecca and her insinuation that Heather had a new person in her life. “How is everything else going?” Maeve asked.

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.