Once Upon a Lie (20 page)

“You should probably do that,” Maeve said, sounding more confident than she felt. Her eyes never left Poole’s.

He looked as though he had something else to say, but then the weariness that seemed to engulf him from time to time returned. “So,” he started, not sure where he was going anymore if his inability to form words was any indication, “we’ll be seeing you.”

Maeve nodded. For some reason, she wouldn’t mind that.

CHAPTER 27

Jo had opened and closed the store for Maeve countless times, but every time she did, Maeve had to go over the alarm code, the way to deal with orders, and the closing routine. Since it was Halloween, she had parked Heather at the store with Jo after school, Jo being a better disciplinarian than Cal and a person Heather actually respected. Maeve didn’t know if Heather had plans, but since making mischief was her specialty, Maeve thought it wise to keep her occupied on the most mischief-prone day of the year. Maybe it was their unspoken, mutual love of pot that bonded them, but Jo had conversations with Heather that Maeve could never picture herself having with her daughter, and for that reason alone, she was glad that Jo was in her life. She certainly didn’t make her workday any easier.

“Where are you going again?” Heather asked, reluctantly pulling a Comfort Zone apron over her head, careful not to mess her perfectly styled, flat-ironed locks.

“The Jersey Shore,” Maeve said, handing Jo the keys to the store. “This should be a pretty straightforward day. All of the orders have been paid for.”

“What do we do if someone wants a cake?” Jo asked.

“Send them to Homebake,” Maeve said.

“The competition?” Jo gasped, putting her hand to her heart.

“Yep. Or you could actually bake,” Maeve said, swiping some lipstick across her mouth while looking into the chrome of the toaster on the counter. She gave her hair a finger comb. “I’ll be gone all afternoon.”

Jo followed her into the kitchen. “Tell me again what you’re doing?”

“I told you,” Maeve said, grabbing her purse from the shelf. “I’m visiting a friend.”

Jo eyed her suspiciously. “Who’s the friend? I didn’t know you had a friend down the shore.”

“He’s an old friend. From the neighborhood. He’s sick,” she said, and that wasn’t a lie. When she had finally tracked down Pepe Pollizzi, he had been happy to hear from her, telling her that he didn’t get too many visitors this late into the fall, especially now that his own kids had moved to Florida and he was pretty much housebound, his oxygen tank keeping him from being footloose and fancy free.

He had asked her to bring Jack, but she had lied and said that Jack wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t make the trip. She had a feeling, she didn’t know why, that even if she asked Jack, he wouldn’t want to go along for the ride. Something nibbled at the edge of her brain, a memory that was whitewashed and faded but that spoke to a falling-out, some kind of disagreement between Jack and Pepe. She couldn’t summon it, as hard as she tried, but it was there, either begging her to remember or imploring her to forget. She couldn’t decide which it was.

When Pepe asked her why she was coming, she was brief. “I just want to know about my mother,” she said, a statement to which he had no response, the only sound on the other end of the phone the
whoosh
of his oxygen.

Jo looked happier to be spending the afternoon alone with Heather than Heather did at the prospect. Heather leaned disconsolately against the shelf behind the counter, picking at a cuticle that seemed to demand her full attention. With Rebecca at soccer practice, Heather was the next best thing to a co-worker for Jo, but that was stretching it.

She left the store, grateful for an afternoon away from work, a box of cupcakes and an applesauce cake in a bag to be given to Pepe. She didn’t know if he was on a restricted diet, but she had come to learn that nobody honored their diet when cupcakes and buttercream were involved.

The ride down the Garden State was smooth and Maeve made better time than she’d hoped, arriving at four, her goal to leave shortly after five. Pepe didn’t sound like the man she remembered, and she wondered just how much time he would have to give her. When he opened the door to his tidy apartment in an over-fifty-five community off a main drag, she was surprised to see that he looked very much like the man whose younger face she could still conjure up after all these years, tall, tan, and fit, but now with a yellow cast to his tan, the result of a lack of oxygen, which now came in a large can and went everywhere with him. He smiled widely when he saw her, telling her she looked just the same as she did when she was little.

“Maybe that’s because I’m still little?” she joked, putting her small hand in his big one, feeling his rough fingers close over her own.

He led her into a small living room that held a matched set of furniture, sofa, love seat, chair, and ottoman, the chair seeming to be his go-to spot if the worn seat was any indication. She took a spot on the couch, noticing that he had put out some coffee in a stainless-steel urn as well as some packaged cookies on a plate. She placed the bag of treats that she had brought from the store on the coffee table and told him to save them for later.

“Help yourself to some coffee,” he said. “And if you wouldn’t mind, pour me a cup, too?” He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a few seconds, taking in some deep breaths of the oxygen, the air going into a clear tube that sat beneath his nostrils. “I hope you don’t smoke, Maeve. It’s a terrible thing. I never imagined that this is how I would end up, but I guess I did it to myself.”

“I don’t smoke,” she said, handing him a cup of coffee. “I eat too many sweets, though. I’m sure that will come back to haunt me.”

“Not like this,” he said, pointing to the tubes. “Not like this…,” he repeated, trailing off.

She didn’t have a lot of time; she could see that. She cut right to the chase. “I wanted to talk to you about my mother, Pepe.”

“You mentioned that,” he said.

She looked around the room, not sure where to start. Her eyes landed on a picture of Pepe’s wife, black and white and posed, taken years earlier. It had a prominent place on the mantel, placed purposely front and center, the kids and the grandkids taking a backseat to this photograph of a gorgeous, dark-haired woman whose image was the focal point of the entire room.

“Jeannette,” he said.

“She’s beautiful.”

“I wish she had stayed longer,” he said.

She waited, not wanting to bring the conversation back to her mother until he was done reminiscing.

“Probably how you and Jack felt about Claire,” he said.

She nodded.

“That was a terrible thing that happened to your mother,” he said. “How was…” He trailed off.

“How was what?” she asked.

“Your life. After she was gone.”

Talk about complicated. Pepe wore his sadness like an old bathrobe, and it emanated from every pore on his body. She held back. She didn’t want to tell him how it really was, or how he could never imagine what he had left behind once he and Jack stopped talking. “It was good. My dad took very good care of me.”

“I hope so,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

“He did,” she said. “It was just the two of us, but that was enough.”

“Jeannette didn’t think that Jack was up to the job of being both a mother and a father to you,” Pepe said. “I didn’t agree, but that’s a mother for you.”

“He did a great job,” Maeve said, even though in the back of her mind, she sometimes felt he could have done more.

“She wanted you to come live with us,” he said, an old, sick man with nothing left to hide and more to say. “Jack wouldn’t hear of it. Told her that your family was all around and that that’s all you needed. Your family. They would take care of you.”

Maeve looked at Pepe, wondering what her life would have been like living with this big bear of a man and his wife. What it would have been like to have brothers and sisters, even if they weren’t her blood. What it would have been like to have been loved by someone other than her overworked and exhausted father, someone who tried desperately to give her the best life possible but who hadn’t been able to achieve that goal.

“Did they take care of you?” Pepe repeated to Maeve, who was lost in the fantasy of being part of a large Italian family where there was no Sean. No pain.

“My family?” She thought about that for a moment. “In the best way that they could,” she said, not willing to place blame.

“That sounds like ‘no.’”

She shrugged. “It was a long time ago, Pepe.” She let out a little laugh, but it could have easily been a sob. “I turned out all right.”

The air in the apartment was charged with the things that neither of them wanted to say, but with so little time, for the man who was at the end, and for Maeve, who needed to return home, they left a lot unsaid. Pepe did say that Jeannette’s persistence in hounding Jack for the right to raise his motherless daughter was the wedge that drove the two men apart, something that explained Pepe’s sudden absence in Maeve’s life and Jack’s reluctance to ever see him again. Jack was nothing if not proud, and pride had ended more than one relationship he had had in his lifetime.

It was after a silence, uncomfortable and laden with unanswered questions, that Pepe cut to the chase.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Who did it? Who hit her?” she asked, knowing that there was a good chance he still didn’t know the answer. Or had forgotten.

“Oh,” he said sadly. “Is that why you came down here?” He shifted slightly in his chair, disappointed that the trip down memory lane wasn’t going as he expected. “I thought maybe you wanted to know what she was like. How she acted.”

“That, too,” Maeve said, although that wasn’t the purpose of her visit. She remembered every single thing about her mother, down to the way she cut her food: knife in right hand, fork in left, more refined and continental than any other woman she knew. She remembered how she always wore a full slip under her dresses and how she rarely wore pants. She thought back to how her mother always kissed her good night after tucking her in tight, running back one more time to give her an extra one before leaving Maeve’s room.

Pepe’s head fell to his chest while she thought about the woman she had known for only a short time but whose absence had such a profound effect on her. If Claire had lived, Maeve was sure, she wouldn’t have been as vulnerable. She would have been protected.

Maeve cleared her throat, hoping to stir the old man from his slumber. She worried that she wouldn’t get Pepe’s observations on the case before he drifted off to sleep, which even after a few minutes of their together seemed like a distinct possibility.

“The wives were good friends,” he said, looking over at the picture of the late Jeannette. “Jeannette was devastated when Claire died.”

Maeve had little recollection of Pepe’s wife, the photo of her bringing back a distant memory, but something that she couldn’t grab hold of completely.

“We didn’t see a lot of you after that. Jack kind of kept to himself. I think seeing me and Jeannette together reminded him of what he had lost,” Pepe said. “And he was furious that we would even broach the subject of taking you in as our own.” He took a deep draw of oxygen and kept going. “I kept coming around for a little while, though. I liked to keep Jack in the loop on what was going on with the case.”

She waited.

“But we really had nothing,” he said, again looking sad and exhausted. “Someone hit your poor mom and we never found out who it was.” To Maeve, etched on his lined face were years of disappointment for that and other unsolved cases.

“It was a red car,” Maeve said, harkening back to a sentence she said over and over when she was small, as if that would help someone figure out the person behind the crime.

He nodded. “Yes. It was red. Lots of red cars out there. Even then.”

She couldn’t bring herself to say it, even though it was what she was told, what she believed all these years. It was as if telling—the most grievous crime, according to Sean—would bring him back and allow him to do the bad things that he purported to do every day that he was alive and in her life. The things he did to her while he was in her life.

Pepe was getting tired and his head fell slowly toward his chest again. They had been together less than twenty minutes and she had no way of knowing if she would ever see him again, but she couldn’t bring herself to indict the one person she thought might be guilty of murdering her mother. Turned out she didn’t have to. Before he fell asleep, Pepe let out a small laugh.

“Funny thing was Jack always thought he knew who did it,” he said, raising a shaking hand to adjust his oxygen. “And he said if he could prove it, he would kill him.”

She didn’t need to ask who it was. She already knew.

CHAPTER 28

She was exhausted by the time she got home, the emotional weight of her visit with Pepe, a man she was sure would be deceased in a few short months, bearing down on her with such intensity that she could feel the approach of a blinding headache. She turned off the lights in the hope of dissuading little ghosts and goblins from ringing her bell in their quest for candy. The Pollizzis had wanted her as their own, something that she found perplexing and that she knew would have sent Jack into a blind rage. The implication that he couldn’t raise her on his own would have been a blow to any parent, but to one who loved his daughter as much as Jack loved Maeve, it must have been exponentially harder. He was proud; he loved his daughter. To think that anyone wouldn’t trust that love explained a lot about how he had raised her, trying to keep her close while relying on family members to pick up the slack, a decision that turned out to be the worst one he had made.

She stopped by Cal’s to say good night to the girls. She put on a happy face, the one that she had perfected throughout the years, as Cal came outside to brief her on the plans for the evening and the next day.

Maeve got out of the car and leaned against the passenger-side door, trying to look relaxed when all she felt inside was a roiling pot of emotion. Cal cut right to the chase.