Once Upon a Lie (11 page)

It was rush hour, commuters fleeing the parking lot of the train station as if they were being chased by zombies. People were running to their cars, hurling themselves into the rides waiting for them, or hustling toward bus stops that would take them to various points in town and beyond. Maeve steered the Prius toward the drop-off point at the bottom of the stairs to the ticket office, giving Jo a quick peck before sending her on her way. In front of her was a minivan with a Mad River Glen bumper sticker on it, and descending the stairs, walking right past Jo, was Michael Lorenzo, the last of the commuters exiting the most recent train to arrive in the station.

Maeve put the car in drive but noticed something on the seat next to her: Jo’s wallet. She put the car back in park and jumped out, calling Jo’s name, even though she knew Jo couldn’t hear her. As she passed the Lorenzos’ car, she could hear Michael screaming at Tina for being late, for not being where she said she was going to be, for not doing exactly what he wanted at exactly the time he needed it. As Maeve stood beside the car, staring in through the passenger side window, Tina stared straight ahead, not making a sound, doing nothing to defend herself from the verbal attack. Maeve clutched the wallet in her hands, the zipper pressing into the soft flesh of her palm, the pain of it not registering in her overcrowded brain.

The abuse continued while both children in the backseat began to cry. Michael was screaming, “Drive!” while his wife sat behind the wheel, seemingly frozen, incapable of moving forward, getting out of the car, or even reacting. He responded by reaching across the backseat and slapping Tiffany, the girl to whom Maeve was the “cupcake lady,” across the face, silencing her. Her stunned, tearstained face was the last thing that Maeve saw before the car drove away.

She was still standing there when Jo came back down the stairs, muttering about forgetting her wallet.

“Hey!” she said, not getting Maeve’s attention on the first try. “Can I have my wallet, please?”

Maeve turned slowly and looked at her, not really seeing anything but the face of the little girl. She handed Jo the wallet, her head still somewhere else. “Do you need a ride home or will you get a cab?” she asked.

Jo regarded her with her own strange expression written on her face. “Cab. Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I’m fine,” Maeve said. The van was reaching the crest of the hill that led out of the train station.

Jo looked at her watch. “I’ve gotta go or I’ll miss my train. See you tomorrow?”

Maeve waved but didn’t answer. She was walking around to the driver’s side of the car, her destination clear.

CHAPTER 14

Maeve waited until she was sure that they would be back and she called Cal. Gabriela answered. “Hi, sweetie!” her ex’s new wife cooed into the phone, as if they were best friends and she wasn’t the woman who had created an irrevocable division between Maeve and the only man, besides Jack, that she had ever been able to trust.

“Is Cal there?” she asked, skipping the niceties. She was civil to Gabriela, but that was it.

“Oh, sweetie, he’s with the baby.”

“I really need to speak to him.”

Everyone wore two faces; Maeve had heard that somewhere. But Gabriela wore only one, and it was as dumb as a sack of hammers. “With the baby,” she repeated in that annoying chirp, the one heavily inflected with Portuguese, that she had.

“Put Cal on the phone, Gabriela!” Maeve yelled into the phone. If she wanted to play games with Maeve, that was fine. But this had to do with Jack, and Maeve wasn’t in the mood for the runaround.

Cal was on the phone in seconds, out of breath and clearly having gotten a little tongue-lashing from his wife. “Did you have to yell at her?”

“Yeah, I did.” She looked at the clock. “I only have a minute. How did things go with my dad and the detective?”

“Fine. I think they just wanted to see firsthand how out of it he really is,” Cal said. “When he went into his whole theory on the Marilyn Monroe suicide, I think that sealed the deal. Once they realized that he thought it had just happened, they were content to let him go. They may want to talk to him again, but I didn’t get the person-of-interest vibe from them.”

Maeve hadn’t realized that she had been holding her breath. She exhaled loudly.

Cal mistook her relief for embarrassment over her father’s dissertation. “It wasn’t a big deal. He always blames the Mob. Never the Kennedys. The Irish Mafia is still held in high regard.”

“Not that,” she said. “I couldn’t care less if he gave them every theory he has. As long as they think he’s as confused as he really is, I’m happy.”

“They definitely got that impression,” Cal said. “But one question.”

“Shoot.”

“Where was he on the night Sean was killed?”

“What did he tell you?”

“Stations of the cross at St. Margaret’s.”

“He told me he was at the K of C meeting. He apparently got into a fight with old Mr. Maloney. Guy’s been dead since 1982.”

Cal laughed. “But he seems happy, Maeve. He’s actually happier than when he had all of his faculties.”

She knew that, and as a result, she prayed for early-onset Alzheimer’s for herself.

She told Cal to give the girls a good-night hug from her before she hung up. She put her coat on and grabbed her purse. She was going out.

The thing about hobbies is that you never know if you’re going to be good at them until you jump in and try.

That’s how Maeve had learned that she could bake.

It was also how she learned that she was a good shot.

Nothing had scared Jack more than letting Maeve go off to Hyde Park, a land that seemed so far away to him; but let her go he had, and she got her degree at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, with pastry her specialty. Not too many fathers would require that their daughters get not only a gun, but a gun license, and learn how to shoot, but Jack Conlon wasn’t most fathers. He was a father who saw danger around every corner, one of the perils of his job. He was also a father who had one daughter, and he was going to do everything in his power to keep her safe.

He had tried. But he had failed. How much he knew of his failure Maeve had never figured out.

People hurt other people every day, but people hurting children? That was just something by which Maeve could not abide. And if you were so quick to hurt your own child’s mother, you were hurting your child by extension. That was a fact. Hurting the mother was a gateway; abusing that little girl, if the slap to Tiffany Lorenzo she had witnessed was any indication, was rapidly on its way.

Maeve wished someone had been looking out for her, but that was a long time ago and people—her family—didn’t know as much about the topic. It was years before anyone wrote about spanking as an ineffective and abusive disciplinary method, never mind child abuse. Kids played outside in those days and they got hurt. They played in the street, and slid off slides, and jumped off swings, all activities that could lead, reasonably, to an injury. Maeve showed no signs because Sean knew how to do it, how not to get caught. And the people in her life didn’t see the signs because they didn’t know what the signs were. So she had suffered in silence, just as she had been taught to do by the other women in the family, the ones who occasionally got a rough slap to the face or a push to keep moving, and no one was the wiser. That way, no one else got hurt and she was never to blame.

She pondered this as she sat in front of the Lorenzos’ house, a brick monstrosity that spoke of a large mortgage and high taxes but which had no pleasing aesthetic qualities whatsoever. If she were to guess, she would have surmised that they lived in this part of town, the one where new money moved in and looked down on the longtime villagers and even those with old money. Old money, to them, spoke of the past, and they were only about the future, if you asked them. New money sat on the zoning board and allowed these “homes” to be built. Build the tax base. Keep the local Hummer dealer in business. That’s how it went these days.

Maeve looked at the house; it seemed as if every light were on, even though the family couldn’t have been in every room of the house. It was just that big. She wondered if Mr. Lorenzo turned the lights on when he beat his wife and slapped his kids or if he preferred to do that in the dark. Maybe she’d ask him the next time she saw him. This wasn’t the direction she had planned on going, but in her mind, it was a good way to start.

She wouldn’t have to wait long. The garage door began its slow ascent as taillights winked beyond it in the garage. She sat up in the front seat of the Prius, just enough to see over the bottom of the window, and watched as Michael Lorenzo took the minivan out for a spin. She’d had no idea that he would be going out; this was just a bonus.

She was going, too. She made her mind up in an instant and pulled the Prius away from the curb, keeping a safe distance between it and the van.

It didn’t take her long to figure out where he was going. The man-made dam in town afforded the perfect cover for anyone meeting up with someone. At this time of night, it was empty, all of the people out for a hike or taking their dog for one last stroll already safely behind the locked doors of their homes. It had started raining lightly, too, keeping away even a stray nighttime jogger. She waited on the main road above the dam until she was sure he was in the parking lot and then started her silent descent, her Prius making not a sound as she rolled down the hill, her lights off, and into the far end of the lot.

Even in the dark, the mist turning to a steady drizzle, she could make out the structure below. It defied her own limited comprehension of physics and construction in general, but she knew a little about the dam’s history, mainly that it had taken fourteen years and countless men to construct and what was left, after all that time, was something majestic and awe-inspiring to behold. While most women took their kids to the local parks with their rubberized turf floors and safe gym equipment, Maeve had always preferred a picnic beside the churning waters of the dam, a Wiffle ball and bat to keep the girls occupied when the sandwiches and chips were gone.

Circling the dam were hiking paths that led nowhere and stone edifices that spoke to structures long gone and never to be rebuilt. Hiking along those paths, Maeve had always joked that they should never stray from the path lest they get lost in the thick copse of trees that flanked either side of where they walked. The girls were as taken with the mystery and aura of the dense woods, the water bellowing in the background, and the feeling of relief and awe when they finally emerged on the footpath over the crescent-shaped pool at the bottom, where water collected, still on calm days, roiling and angry on stormy ones. Their faces pressed between the secure bars, they stood there for longer than two little girls should have been able, impressed with something that their mother found endlessly fascinating.

She could make out one other car in the lot, a sleek-looking sports car, the furthest thing from a sensible hybrid that she could imagine. She wondered to whom it belonged and, more important, who would think that an evening tryst with Michael Lorenzo was a desirable way to spend time. She waited, in the dark, watching the car rock slightly, resisting the urge to gag. The guy was fouler than she had imagined.

Twenty minutes later, a woman emerged, adjusting her yoga pants and walking, a little shakily, toward her car. Six feet if she was an inch, she wasn’t moving her mouth for once, but Maeve could still tell who she was.

Maeve had a newfound respect for Michael Lorenzo. Finally, someone had found a productive use for Julie Morelli’s constantly moving—and open—mouth.

Maeve waited until Julie drove by, the woman yakking on her cell phone as if her life depended on it, and then emerged from her car, a baseball cap pulled down over her eyes, the collar on her denim jacket pulled up to her ears. Maeve knew that it would be only a few seconds before he started the van and pulled out of his spot at the opposite end of the lot, so she jogged, her sneakers slipping on the wet macadam. She circled around the back of the car, surprising him when she appeared in the driver’s side window. She tapped lightly on the glass.

He rolled down the window. “What are you doing here?” he asked, the zipper on his pants still down. Perfect. The irony wasn’t lost on her. It was almost identical to the way her cousin had been found. “Is this about the party? The money?”

She fingered the gun in her jacket pocket. “Sort of. That and other things.”

He looked around, the realization dawning on him that seeing her at the dam, at night, was not the most normal thing in the world.

“How much will it take to make all of this go away?” he said, suddenly willing to negotiate. He must have realized that she had seen Julie.

“Nothing.”

He looked back at her, blank faced. “Nothing? Come on. We’re talking seventy-five bucks.”

“Your wife already paid me,” Maeve said. She had changed her mind, the reason she was here not clear to her anymore. “You need to stop hitting her. And your daughter.” She was sure about Tina, but not about how much it affected Tiffany. Though if he wasn’t hitting her on a regular basis yet, it was only a matter of time.

He zipped up his pants. “And you need to mind your own business.” He put his seat belt on, the conversation over as far as he was concerned. “It’s none of your business.”

He was right, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to make it her business.

“Leave her alone. Leave me alone. Go back to your little bakery.” He smiled smugly. “Everyone will be much happier that way.” He started the car. “I’ll send you a check. Just forget what you saw.”

The butt of the gun was smooth against her fingers. It wouldn’t take much, just a quick draw and a simple shot and he would be taken care of forever. He’d never know what had hit him.

That’s not who I am, she reminded herself. I’m better than that.

Then he laughed, and in her head all she could hear was Sean Donovan’s high-pitched bray as he pushed her—not long after her mother’s death—in the swing set in the backyard of his parents’ house. So high, in fact, and with such force, that the chain link, rusted and weak from years in the scrubby backyard, broke free, sending her hurtling toward the metal garbage cans at the side of the house, her arm snapping on impact. She touched the gun in her pocket, but the car was gone and all that was left was a puff of dust where it had been.