Once Upon a Lie (22 page)

Rodney nodded, the information not deterring him from taking a big bite of what had seemed to become his favorite dessert.

“Did he say why?”

“He says he can’t remember.”

“He probably can’t.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said, and finished his cupcake. “Boy, I wish you still had some coffee.”

She smiled slightly, feeling a little sick to her stomach. “Where does this leave us, Detective?”

“I’m not so sure on that one, either,” he said, getting up. Again, she was struck by his solitary performance, his solo investigation into Sean’s death. His partner had made just that one appearance, that one time. She wondered what that meant, if anything at all.

Detective Poole had taken an interest in her, and she wasn’t sure what was at the heart of that interest. Either way, professional or personal, it was starting to make her uncomfortable.

CHAPTER 30

Doug of the Dockers seemed to be ingratiating himself with Jo. Maeve wasn’t sure what he had done, but after their third official date—the visits to Jo’s while she was recuperating did not really count in Maeve’s or her friend’s mind—Jo’s emotions seemed to take a very positive turn when it came to the man who was doing everything in his power to make her like him.

Maeve was trying to get out of the store, on her way to Rebecca’s soccer game; she didn’t want to be late. Although she knew there would be a wide berth around Marcy Gerson and the sound of her perpetual screaming, she wanted to make sure she could sidle up to her unimpeded by other mothers in the stands. Cal would also try to get there, but he was always late, always bogged down with the menial tasks that every woman in town did with grace and ease but which seemed to present obstacles for him that were almost insurmountable now that he had an infant again.

Jo was still recounting the story of the date, something she had started at eight o’clock in the morning but which didn’t have a natural or linear trajectory, work continually getting in the way of a straight retelling. Maeve had lost the thread of the story, not really sure where they were but knowing she would have to leave without hearing the end. “Cut to the chase, Jo,” she said, stripping off her apron and finger combing her hair, then applying lip gloss using her favorite reflective surface, the toaster, to make sure it looked okay. “I’ve got to get to Rebecca’s game.” In the store, she heard the bell over the door jingle, indicating a new customer. She looked pointedly at Jo.

“I’m going,” she said, her sense of urgency when dealing with patrons not matching Maeve’s. Her exclamation when she entered the front of the store was far more jovial than Maeve had ever heard, and it took her a few seconds to process the name that she had heard Jo call out.

Jack.

Jack, Maeve’s nondriving, wandering, ready-to-be-evicted, losing-his-marbles father. Maeve steeled herself for the inevitable confrontation, pushing through the swinging doors into the front of the store.

“Dad,” she said, half question, half statement.

“Mavy!” he said, digging into a piece of cheesecake that Jo had served him. She was pouring him a large cup of coffee and making it to his specifications: lots of cream, even more sugar. “Gorgeous day. Went for a little walk.”

“Four miles is more than a ‘little walk,’ Dad,” she pointed out. She took the cup of coffee from Jo’s hand and poured it down the sink. “No more sugar,” she said.

“I’m a—,” he started.

“Grown man,” she finished. “I know. We’ve been through this.” Jo, sensing a negative turn in the conversation, went back into the kitchen to hide. “We’ve also been through the fact that you should not be leaving the facility without letting someone know.”

“I let Moriarty know,” he said, forking in a huge piece of cheesecake. “He’s someone.”

Maeve wondered how to play this. If she got angry, he would get angry in turn and they would get nowhere. She didn’t have time to get him back to the facility and make the start of the game, so she decided that the easiest thing to do would be to bring him along for the ride. “Dad, I’m going to Rebecca’s game. Do you want to come? We can have dinner after that and then I’ll take you back.” She pulled the plate of cheesecake away from him and tossed it in the garbage.

“I’ll go. I love Rebecca’s games,” he said, and by the way he said it, Maeve was sure that he didn’t know what sport she played but that didn’t matter.

“Let me call Mrs. Harrison first,” she said, concocting her story before she picked up the phone. The gods were with her, and she got Charlene’s voice mail. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Harrison, it’s Maeve Conlon. I realized, with alarm, that I forgot to sign my dad out when I picked him up today, but he’s with me and he’s safe. I’ll have him back after dinner,” she said, keeping an eye on Jack, who gave her a toothy grin and an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

“Good job,” he said after she hung up. “Where’d you learn to lie like that?”

“Oh, Dad,” she said, leading him through the kitchen to the parking lot, “I’ve had lots of practice.”

On the way over in the car, Jack kept up a running commentary about his fellow “inmates,” as he called them, at Buena del Sol. In her mind, she kept going back to Poole’s assertion that Jack had beaten Sean at one point—she didn’t know when—and wondered what that meant. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask her father, but she knew he wouldn’t remember. And even if he thought he did, it might not be for the real reason.

She thought back to a phrase that came out of Watergate—what did he know and when did he know it? She felt certain that at no point during her time in Sean’s care did her father suspect what was happening. She was clumsy. That was the story that everyone told, that everyone believed. Jack worked day and night to keep her comfortable; she knew that, and she loved him for that. But had he finally learned at some point of this horrible aspect of his daughter’s childhood and executed some ham-fisted revenge?

She let it go. It was water under the bridge. And she had to move on.

Marcy Gerson was sitting at the top of the bleachers as always, all the better for the masses to hear her screams of agony and ecstasy during the game. It was times like this, when they had to hoof it somewhere, that Maeve was grateful Jack was as nimble and agile as he was, his illicit walks through the village keeping him robust and healthy. They climbed to the top of the bleachers and settled in next to Marcy, who was surprised to see anyone take a seat near her, let alone Maeve, who often sat by herself until Cal arrived and inserted himself into her personal space.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Marcy said, smoothing down her tailored jeans, the ones that purported to hold everything in while lifting one’s buttocks. Maeve figured she’d have to host a lot more than kids’ birthday parties to afford them; unfortunately, her wholesale business was still in its infancy. “What’s going on, Miss Maeve?” she asked.

Maeve pointed to Jack. “Marcy, do you know my dad, Jack?”

Jack held out his hand.
“Enchanté,”
he said, ever the gentleman.

Marcy giggled like a schoolgirl; old Jack could still turn on the charm. “Nice to meet you, Jack.” She turned back to Maeve. “What brings you up here in the cheap seats?”

Jack looked at his daughter, sensing that their visit, and their placement, had a purpose. “Yes. What does bring us up to the cheap seats?” He crossed his legs and gave her a wry smile while waiting for her answer.

It astounded Maeve that it never failed: when she needed Jack to be checked out, he was incredibly checked in. She shot him a look that basically told him to shut his pie hole. “Well, I just had to engage in some idle gossip,” Maeve said, going for the truth.

Marcy put a hand over her mouth in embarrassment. “The blotter,” she said. “With the amount of money I give to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association in this town, you’d think they’d have the common courtesy to keep my name out of these things.”

Maeve tried to make a face that reflected both the awe she felt at Marcy’s generosity and the indignation she felt on her behalf for seeing her name in the police blotter. By the look on Jack’s face, she guessed that she had failed miserably at both.

Marcy leaned in, dropping her voice to a whisper. “What goes on over there is beyond crazy.”

Maeve assumed “over there” meant the Lorenzos’, but Marcy was off on another tangent within seconds, this one having to do with the response time of the village PD, men and women, she asserted, who couldn’t get “real police jobs.”

“I think I like you,” Jack said, considering himself retired from a “real police job.”

Maeve wanted information, but it seemed that Marcy only had eyes for what was going on on the field, where MIRANDA!!! was setting up midfield, Rebecca across from her on the far side. Maeve decided to give her a little prod before the game started. “So what goes on next door?”

Marcy rolled her eyes. “You don’t want to know.”

Yes, I do, Maeve thought, but she could tell she wasn’t going to get anywhere. Marcy took a lipstick out of her pocketbook and applied it expertly, even without the benefit of Maeve’s toaster. The game started and they turned their attention to the field. The Farringville girls scored two goals almost immediately, which sent Marcy into paroxysms of glee. It didn’t help that Miranda scored the second goal and looked to be on her way to scoring the third when the whistle for the first quarter was blown and she lost her last chance for glory.

Maeve tried to reopen the conversation during half time. “So your neighbors. Lots of problems there?”

Marcy was loud, but she wasn’t stupid. She put a hand on her hip and gave Maeve a look that shot a frisson of terror through her; she didn’t want to get on Marcy’s bad side after seeing that look. She wondered what was behind it. “Why are you so interested in my neighbors?”

Maeve decided to come clean. “They had a birthday party at the bakery for their little girl and I felt like something was ‘off’ with them.”

“Yeah, something’s off,” she said, turning her attention back to the field. “They fight like cats and dogs.”

Maeve already knew that, but she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Maybe she was more interested in hearing how the children fit into the cycle of abuse or what, if anything, Mrs. Lorenzo did to protect them. But the subject was closed if Marcy’s body language was any indication. The last thing anyone wanted in this village was to have their name printed in the blotter, and Maeve knew that. She had touched a nerve and needed to let it go before she turned Marcy off completely.

Maeve had almost forgotten about Jack and realized with alarm that he wasn’t by her side any longer. She scanned the small crowd that had assembled, not seeing him in the stands. Finally she spotted him by the fence at the edge of the field, talking animatedly to Rebecca, who had left the sidelines to greet her grandfather. Maeve excused herself, but Marcy didn’t seem to care; she’d taken up a new conversation with a person on her right whom Maeve didn’t know, discussing Miranda’s college application essay topic, which was, not surprisingly, soccer.

Original.

Maeve headed down the bleacher steps and reached Jack just as his impassioned plea for Rebecca’s team to adjust to a man-to-man defense was coming to a close. Rather than the glassy-eyed look she usually got when talking to adults, Rebecca seemed rapt, hanging on his every word. She barely gave her mother a glance before running back out to the field. Maeve was accustomed to that kind of treatment. With her girls, she was on a need-to-know and speak-only-when-spoken-to basis. Rebecca was the better of the two, but even she had her limits, and apparently they included not talking to her mother in public.

“Man-to-man defense, Dad?” Maeve asked. “These days, we prefer to call it person-to-person.”

“Why are you so interested in that insufferable woman’s neighbors?” Jack asked, hanging over the fence that separated the spectators from the players, his eyes never leaving the field.

I’ll tell him everything, she thought, right here, right now, and I won’t leave anything out. He’ll forget by dinnertime anyway. He’ll tell me why he beat Sean, why he broke his nose. I’ll tell him that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I knew that another little girl was being hurt and I had done nothing to stop it. She stared at his wide-open face, the one with the blue eyes that looked like hers, now guileless and filled with an innocence that stemmed from a lack of memories, the ones that made her own eyes look so sad. Something made her hesitate, though, and that’s when she saw that he remembered something, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, judging from the look on his face. She decided that that’s the way she wanted to leave it, a distant memory for a guy who had done his best with nobody to help him do it.

They were in the midst of the fourth quarter, still standing by the fence, when Jack announced he had to “see a man about a horse.” Maeve threw a thumb over her shoulder, telling him that the Porta Potties were right beyond the entrance to the field and that after he used the facilities, he should come right back. No wandering. No walking about. It was just void and return.

He gave her his patented salute and took off, climbing the steep hill toward the entrance. She watched him enter the portable john and then turned back to watch the game, which was not quite the runaway it had seemed it was going to be in the first half.

Five minutes passed and then ten, and her exasperation turned to worry as she saw not one but two people who weren’t Jack exit the big blue structure and return to the game. She looked around, but as she knew would be the case, he was nowhere to be found. She started up the hill herself, feeling her calves burn as she raced toward the entrance, her heart starting to pound.

If she found him, she would kill him.

But she knew that was just her worry talking. She wouldn’t kill him. She wouldn’t even reprimand him. He didn’t know where he was or that he was supposed to return to her or why he was at a soccer field at a school unfamiliar to him. A lump lodged in her throat and stayed there. She wondered how far he had gotten.

She crested the hill and turned the corner toward the parking lot, people jockeying for spots so that they could see whatever sporting event was taking place at a distant field. To her left was a playground that she knew was right outside the kindergarten wing of the elementary school that the fields surrounded, and from it, she could hear voices, including one like hers and one her dad’s.