Lies That Bind (7 page)

CHAPTER 11

So there it was: the proof she hadn’t wanted, didn’t need. The photograph to prove that there was a sister whom Maeve had never known, who existed somewhere out there, probably not knowing about Maeve’s existence either.

The thought of that made her heart hurt just a little bit.

Although she and Jo joked about the secrets kept in families—Jo’s mother still swore that she went to Florida in 2004 on vacation, not to recuperate from a tummy tuck—Maeve thought she was the only one who had any in her family. She had kept things from Jack, things he would never want to have known, but she never imagined that he was keeping one from her as well.

There had to be a reason.

The photograph in her hand, she made the decision to drive south. Before she pulled out of her parking spot, she called Jo, who was disappointed to learn that she would be working a longer day than she had originally planned. “It’s been a little crazy,” Jo said, but that usually meant that three people had come in at once, not that the store had been full of people demanding quiches or scones.

“Crazy is good,” Maeve said. “Good register day?”

She heard the bell ring as Jo opened the drawer. “Eh,” she said, confirming for Maeve that her crazy and Jo’s crazy were two different things. “A hundred and forty-eight bucks.”

“Are we good on sugar? Flour?”

“We’re good,” Jo said. “No flour fairies have visited us recently.”

“Good to hear.”

“Oh, but some guy came by looking for Heather.”

“Guy?” Maeve asked, her antennae going up.

“Yeah. Guy. Kid. Billy something or other?” Jo said. “He said he was looking for Heather.”

“DuClos’s Billy?” Maeve asked.

“Not a clue what that means,” Jo said. “DuClos has a Billy?”

“His new associate,” Maeve said. “Remember? Going to be collecting my rent. The guy that came the day my father died. You remember, right?”

But Jo didn’t, “pregnancy brain” being the most likely reason.

“He was looking for Heather?”

“That’s what he said.”

“What did he look like?”

“Kind of cute. Light hair.”

Yep. That was DuClos’s Billy.

“He was kind of mad, too.” She paused. “Said he’d find her.”

Maeve felt a frisson of anxiety shoot through her body, something that was quickly replaced by anger. She didn’t know who Billy was or what he wanted with her daughter, but if it happened to be something not good, something not on the scale of acceptable, Billy would find himself in very hot water indeed. She had nothing to suggest that his intentions weren’t pure toward her daughter except that he worked for DuClos and her relationship to Sebastian was a tenuous one, garlic breath aside. Something about the guy had always given her the creeps. “It’s the middle of the day, Jo. Heather would be at school.”

“Just reporting what went on here,” Jo said. “Now I’m worried.”

“Don’t worry,” Maeve said even though she could feel her own heart pounding. She dug Chris Larsson’s card out of her bag and called him, his phone going straight to voicemail. “Now this Billy person is looking for Heather,” she said, trying to keep her voice modulated but having no success. “There’s another reason to find him and talk to him.” She heard how she sounded. “Not that I’m telling you how to do your job.” She took a few deep breaths and brought her voice back to a low timbre. “And thank you.”

Maeve hung up and started driving, making a mental note to ask Heather who the mysterious Billy was, beyond Sebastian DuClos’s henchman. Eventually, she found herself in her old Bronx neighborhood, the place she had been headed all along without really knowing, driving slowly down every street, letting the memories in. Maeve had never called Margie back, not wanting to know what she had to say. But Dolores? She was a different story.

Although Margie had never done anything else to make Maeve not trust her, the memory of her missing key colored her thoughts and opinions of the younger girl always. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear Mrs. Haggerty screaming at her daughters in a way that Maeve hoped she never did to her own. Margie was her usual target. She was stupid and lazy and a host of other unattractive adjectives that Maeve could only imagine had seeped into her brain and made her think that she was actually all of those things. It would take a lot of work, she imagined, to convince yourself otherwise if all you were fed on a daily basis was a steady diet of disparagement.

Maeve had Jack and he thought she walked on water, as he often used to say when he thought she wasn’t listening. Dolores and Margie’s experience hadn’t been the same; she tried to cut the girls some slack for that, going so far as to stick up for Margie once at school when an older boy had knocked her down and stepped on her lunch. Margie had wanted to be Maeve’s friend then, and Maeve suspected now, but that ship had sailed and while she would visit the neighborhood again, she would never revisit the fractured relationship she had with those girls.

Dolores Donovan still lived in the same part of the Bronx, but had moved to an exclusive enclave a few blocks south of where they had all grown up. As Jack used to like to say, “That girl stepped in shit and hit the big time,” mixing his metaphors as always. Maeve had known what he meant, though.

Something like that. To Maeve’s thinking, she had sold her soul to the devil for a seven-thousand-square-foot home and a Mercedes M-Class. That bargain, it seemed, included marrying Sean Donovan.

She pulled up in front of their old house, hers and Jack’s, a semi-detached brick dwelling with a small patch of scrubby grass in front of it that Jack had tried desperately to turn into something approximating a lush green lawn. Not much had changed since she left almost three decades earlier, going off to school, never to return. The front door still held the lion’s head knocker and the transom still showed a crack in the glass that had been there for as long as she could remember. Someone had replaced the brass numbers on the front of the house, opting instead for press-and-stick markers to let someone know that they were at Eighty-Five-Twenty-Three. That was an interesting change, Maeve thought; the brass numbers had been there since the house was first built in the twenties. Stolen, was her guess.

It seemed like a hundred years since she had last lived here.

While she sat there, she pulled out her phone and did a search on the Gaelic name “Aibhlinn.” A site that was devoted to Gaelic names and their meanings came up immediately. She read the information out loud in the car.

“Aibhlinn, pronounced ‘ave-leen,’” she said, “translates to ‘the longed-for child.’”

Longed for.

She thought back. Her parents had married in 1959, her father in his mid- to late-twenties, her mother a few years behind that. In that era, if an Irish-American couple who followed Church law weren’t pregnant within a few months of marriage, Jack had once told her, something was wrong. People talked. They asked questions. They wondered why there were no children.

Aibhlinn was “longed for.” Prayed for. She had come quickly only to go away not long after her arrival. Had she died? Or was it something else, something more sinister? That’s why Maeve was here. For answers.

She looked out the window at her old house. Where was Aibhlinn’s room? Where did she sleep? Was it the same room that Maeve had occupied years later? Did she brush her teeth on the same stool at the bathroom sink and eat her breakfast at the table under the cuckoo clock that seemed to have gone missing at some point between her living there and Jack moving?

Most importantly, where did she go?

It pained her that the Haggertys knew something she didn’t, something that they could hold over her like an emotional cudgel. She could almost hear Dolores Haggerty’s voice on that street, making her horrible presence known. “Where’d you get that shirt, Maeve? It’s ugly.” Or “Who cut your hair? A blind man?” Maeve had turned a deaf ear to her taunts and had remained confident and strong. She wanted nothing to do with Dolores Haggerty, something she didn’t feel comfortable saying out loud, even when Dolores asked her to be a bridesmaid at her wedding to Maeve’s cousin. “Too good for us?” Dolores had asked when Maeve declined. “You always thought you were. Your father didn’t do you any favors telling you how perfect you were.”

I
am
better than you, Maeve had thought at the time. I’m better and smarter and kinder; all the things that you’ll never be, the qualities that will always elude you.

Maeve tried to find common ground with Dolores but was never entirely successful; Margie had a softer edge and Maeve found it easier to tolerate her. She imagined it had been hard growing up in the house of an alcoholic and his shrill wife, two people who rarely uttered a nice word, even as they were processing toward the head of the communion line, confident in their goodness and religiosity. Maeve had had her own troubles, but instead of dwelling on them and letting them eat her alive, she had made herself become stronger and more loving, because when all was said and done, she believed in good.

In being kind. In love.

Poor Dolores, Maeve thought, as she headed south. She had been “fat” and “stupid” and worst of all, “useless.” The words stayed in Maeve’s memory in association of that time and place, those girls who were now women and mothers themselves. She wondered if they had learned anything, had carried anything good forward. Or if it was only dysfunction and verbal abuse, something that they had known so well and that was probably embedded in their own moral fiber.

They had never had a chance in hell.

The Donovan manse was as grand and foreboding as Maeve remembered from the last time she had been here, before Sean died, and even with Christmas lights and a perfectly manicured lawn, it still made Maeve think of a house from a horror movie. There were topiaries and professional plantings that were designed to survive winters in the tony part of the Bronx. She pulled into the driveway, right behind Dolores’s Mercedes, and walked to the front door, stopping to marvel at the landscaping. Just how much money did these people have? Maeve was lucky if she got one of the girls to cut the grass every two weeks in the summer. Maybe, like Dolores, she should get a team of gardeners.

Nah, the perfection that Dolores was trying to convey just masked the darkness that permeated her life.

A sneak attack was best; Maeve didn’t want Dolores to know she was coming so she could prepare her story, be ready with her lies. Although she could have started with Margie she decided to go with Dolores, the original messenger; she seemed so sure of what she had said that Maeve wanted to get her information first. Maeve wasn’t sure if Margie would tell her the truth, whereas Dolores would only be delighted to spill it, particularly if the story cast Jack or Maeve in a bad light. Why she had it out for Maeve’s family was beyond her. All Maeve could figure was that they were poison, all of them.

When Dolores answered the door, after looking through the peephole, Maeve could tell that cocktail hour had started at lunchtime, a few hours earlier. Or maybe at breakfast. Dolores seemed to be feeling no pain, as Jack used to like to say. Three sheets to the wind. Boxed.

“Maeve,” Dolores said, holding open the door. “You’re the last person I expected to see.”

And you’re the last person I
want
to see, Maeve held in, but there you have it. Deaths and funeral revelations make strange bedfellows. Dolores brought Maeve into the kitchen, outfitted with appliances that Maeve could only dream of owning. Instead of her ubiquitous blue suit, Dolores was in a tight velour tracksuit, her short auburn hair uncombed. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m just back from the gym,” she said.

If by “gym” you mean “bar,” then I believe you, Maeve thought. “Thanks for letting me in, Dolores.” She took a seat at the oak table in a sunny alcove in the kitchen. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said last week. At my father’s funeral?” she added when it was clear that Dolores had no recollection of what she had said or what the effect might be. “My sister?” The words sounded odd on Maeve’s tongue.

“Oh, that,” she said, waving a hand. “So, you didn’t know?”

Apparently, they were cutting straight to the chase. “Of course I didn’t know, Dolores,” Maeve said. “Would I be here otherwise? Would you have told me with such obvious relish?”

Dolores swigged from a water bottle that Maeve was pretty sure didn’t hold water. She leaned against the counter and regarded Maeve coolly. “Need to rehydrate first.”

The silence was more than uncomfortable; it was unbearable. Maeve looked down at the burnished wood and, using the Lamaze breathing that she now remembered how to do thanks to Jo’s class, she waited.

“Retarded,” Dolores finally said, slurring. Maeve checked her watch. It was two o’clock on the nose.

“Who?”

“Your sister,” Dolores said, drinking some more.

Like father, like daughter, Maeve thought, their language, their words spoken without any art or compassion. “We don’t use that word anymore, Dolores. Did she have Down’s syndrome? Something else?”

She shrugged, and even that gesture looked off-kilter, blurry. “How should I know?”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

Dolores looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I was little. I don’t know what year it was.”

“Please. Try to remember.” Maeve didn’t know why it mattered so much but she needed to know, needed the details so she could put the pieces of this puzzle together into one coherent whole.

“I don’t know, Maeve,” Dolores said, as if Maeve’s questions were an incredible inconvenience. “She went away. She never came back.” She finished the “water” in the bottle. “I don’t know where she went. For all I know, she’s dead.”

Maeve did her best to remain impassive. In her bag was the gun she had bought, the one that her old friend Rodney Poole had helped her get so that she could feel safe again. In control. In a display of bad judgment, she had retrieved it from its rightful place under the driver’s seat in the Prius and put it in her bag, and at that moment, her palms itched with her desire to take it out and use it.