Lie in Plain Sight (12 page)

Maeve didn't remember ever having seen him in the store, so either he was as adept at lying as she was or, as she feared on a regular basis, her mind was going just like her father's had prior to his death. “Great!” she said, smiling so wide that all of her teeth showed.
See? I'm not dangerous at all. I'm not following you. I'm just a doddering middle-aged woman with saggy jeans and an icing-covered T-shirt under a zipped Farringville High School hoodie.

He waited for her to reveal why she was on his driveway, hidden in the trees that fronted his property. The dog sat at his side, nothing interesting to him about the lady talking to his master. “Are you lost?”

“I guess I am, a little bit,” she said. “Uphill Terrace. I can never remember where that is off of this street.”

“Well, the reason you can't remember is that it's not off this street,” he said, pointing to a spot over her shoulder.

No wedding ring, she noticed, but then again, she didn't expect one. Everything about him said “single,” from the small log cabin in front of her to the free and easy way he carried himself. This was a guy with few responsibilities and no one else on his mind. She could tell.

“It's off of Shady Lane,” he said.

“Oh, right!” she said, laying it on thick. “You'd think after all the time I've lived here, I would remember.” She stood for a moment, wondering how far to take this, but given that she wouldn't have much of an excuse to talk to the soccer coach again without it seeming odd or suspicious, she brought up Taylor and her disappearance. “The girls on the team must be really upset about Taylor Dvorak.”

She studied his face for some kind of sign, but there was none. All she saw was concern and nothing else. “Terrible. I've already spoken to the police at length,” he said.

“Really? Did they question you?” she asked, adding just the right amount of righteous indignation to indicate that she was appalled at the idea of it.

“I volunteered,” he said. “Offered to tell them what I knew about her.”

“She seemed…,” Maeve said, trailing off. She didn't know the girl from a hole in the wall but hoped he would insert the proper adjective.

“Sad?”

“Maybe,” Maeve said.

“Depressed?”

“I guess.”

“It was hard to say what it was exactly,” he said, offering up more information than Maeve could have hoped for. “But she was troubled. Soccer was a way for her to be free, to let herself forget about whatever it was that was bothering her.”

Maeve wondered if he'd heard about her part in the story. “Well, let's just pray that she's found.”

“Yes. Let's do that,” he said. “I'm glad Heather has decided to try soccer.”

“Me, too,” Maeve said, wondering if he had picked up her hesitation about Heather as an athlete. She felt off-kilter about seeing Heather on the field, wondering if the story about needing extracurriculars was true or if there was some other reason that her daughter had joined the team but she couldn't think of what that might be. She studied the coach's face for a clue to his intentions toward her daughter, or any girl for that matter, but all she saw was an open and honest expression, nothing seeming to lurk beneath the surface.

Either he was telling the truth or he was a complete sociopath.

Takes one to know one, she thought. Would she still know one or had she lost her touch?

The dog had lain by Barnham's side throughout the entire conversation but perked up as a bird flew low overhead. “Ready to go, Cosmo?” the coach asked, the dog jumping up. “I'm sorry. I should have introduced you. This is Cosmo.”

“Hello, Cosmo,” Maeve said, keeping her distance. She hadn't been raised with dogs, and her first memory of canines was of the Doberman who lived next door who had tried to take a bite out of her ass as she rode her bike down the street. Cosmo did what came naturally to all dogs and planted his nose right in her crotch. She pushed him away as gently as she could, his persistent nuzzling making a wet spot on her right thigh. Barnham did nothing to help her. “Well, thank you for pointing me in the right direction, Mr. Barnham.”

“Please. Call me David.”

“David, then. Thank you. I guess I'll be seeing you at some games,” Maeve said as she turned and walked back down the driveway. When she got to the end, she turned around to wave, but he was gone, as if he had vanished into thin air.

As if the day couldn't get any weirder, when she got home, Heather had made a meat loaf, and it was the first thing Maeve smelled when she walked into the house. Heather was at the kitchen table typing on her laptop, which she slammed shut when her mother walked in.

Maeve peered into the oven. “Looks good. Smells even better,” she said. “What possessed you to make a meat loaf?”

“Ground meat was on sale at the store, so I brought some home last night. But it was the last sell date,” Heather said, knowing even more about sell dates than Maeve did. “Aunt Evelyn called,” she added.

“What did she have to say?” Maeve asked, smiling. Evelyn's conversations ran the gamut from the last movie she had seen to remembrances of Maeve's father, the man who had secretly taken good care of her until he died, something that Maeve was trying to forget, trying to forgive.

“She said she saw The Comfort Zone on television,” Heather said.

Maeve turned so quickly that she got a pain in her side from the exertion. “What?”

“The store. She said she saw it on News 12.”

News 12 was Evelyn's favorite station, showing county news, weather, and sports all day and all night. “News 12?” Maeve went into the living room and turned on the television, knowing that the station rebroadcast the top stories throughout the day.

Heather joined her on the couch. “What's the matter?”

“I'm wondering why the store would be on television.” Maeve suffered through high school sports scores, the weather, and a story about a bedbug infestation at a local hotel before the top story, the disappearance of Taylor Dvorak, was run again. The details were the same as the ones Maeve knew. A shot of The Comfort Zone flashed on the screen, as did an old photo of her from the Farringville Chamber of Commerce dinner from two years earlier—yes, she had put on weight since then, thank you for noticing—where she was smiling while standing next to the mayor.

The blonde doing the report sounded a little judgmental to Maeve's ears. “A new development in this case … we have just learned that the girl had an emergency contact, a woman named Maeve Conlon, owner of The Comfort Zone. Conlon gave the school nurse permission to send Taylor Dvorak home. Where she is now is anyone's guess, but the Farringville Police Department assures the citizens of Farringville that they are doing everything in their power, including bringing in the county police, to find the girl. If anyone has any information on Taylor's disappearance, please call—”

Maeve turned off the television and looked at Heather, hoping her teenager would have something to say that would make it better, that would let her know that although she felt responsible, she wasn't. The entire viewing population of the local news was now privy to her role in the teen's disappearance, and she felt hopeless, trying not to let it show.

Heather stared at her, wondering how her mother was going to react. “It's not your fault.”

“I think it is,” she thought to herself, realizing when she saw Heather's face that she had said it out loud. She had done a lot of things in her life—some of them not the right thing—but this felt like the worst thing of all.

 

CHAPTER 16

Cal showed up just as Chris Larsson was leaving later that night, the memory of Heather's meat loaf writ large on the cop's friendly face; he was pale and a little shaky. Maeve wondered if the sale meat was really a good idea. She hadn't touched her own helping of meat loaf, her appetite gone after seeing the store and her photo on the news report. Heather's appetite seemed to disappear as well. She wondered how long it would be until the story was picked up by the metro news, until it was the lead story for the networks. She shuddered at the thought.

Evelyn called every time the story ran, which turned out to be more times than Maeve could count. “I see your store!” she would say when Maeve picked up, not getting that it wasn't really the kind of publicity that Maeve wanted.

Chris has been tight-lipped during dinner, but it was clear to Maeve that they still had no leads on Taylor's disappearance. She wondered if the awful meat loaf, in conjunction with the sickness that he felt in his gut every day that the girl was missing, was the reason that he had left so quickly, if seeing Heather, so reminiscent of the missing girl, had started to make him physically ill.

Cal stood in the hallway, pointing over his shoulder as Chris ran down the front porch steps to his car. “He has time for dinner?” Cal asked. “Shouldn't he be pulling double duty looking for that girl?”

Maeve didn't have time for Cal's sarcasm, nor his implication that Chris was doing anything but looking for Taylor. “Why are you here?” she asked, her mind flashing on the sight of Trish leaving Cal's house a few days before.

Cal looked up the long flight of stairs to the second floor of the house to make sure that Heather was in her room and that the door was closed. “She knows.”

“Who knows?” Maeve asked, too exhausted for the guessing game that he wanted to play.

“Gabriela,” he said. “She knows.”

“Knows what?” Maeve asked. “There's nothing to know. We've been done for a while.” There was nothing to know except what had happened that one time, and that was between them—but clearly the cat was out of the bag if Jo's intelligence on what had come out of Gabriela's spin class was any good.

Payback's a bitch, huh?
Maeve wanted to ask but wisely kept her mouth shut.

“Well, she knows that something happened between us specifically.”

Interesting choice of words. Clearly there had been others. “How?”

“Trish.” When Maeve looked at him for more information, he came clean. “She heard you talking to Jo.”

“Shouldn't she be worried about finding her daughter?” Maeve asked.

“Oh, she is,” Cal said. “But she's also holding you responsible.”

“Okay, now you're just being ridiculous,” Maeve said, trying to sound calm, the high-pitched timbre of her voice belying that. “Responsible?”

“She came to me and told me she'd be quiet. Not make a bigger deal out of you and what you did. For money.”

“Why didn't she ask me for money?” Maeve asked, thinking back to the missing money from the short time Trish had worked for her. Oh, right, she preferred to just steal it, Maeve thought. Now she had the reason for Trish's car being in front of Cal's house. She was almost relieved that the reason was blackmail and not something more salacious and for that, she wasn't proud.

Cal raised an eyebrow, implying that everyone knew the truth: Maeve didn't have any money. For once, she was grateful for that fact.

“Did you give her any?”

“No!” he said. “That's why Gabriela knows. Trish told her what she overheard in the store.”

Maeve thought back to the day when Jo came in and figured out that she had slept with Cal. She hadn't seen Trish but that wasn't to say that the woman hadn't heard every last sordid detail. Just Maeve's luck.

“And Gabriela confronted you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I denied everything.”

“And I'm sure you were really convincing,” Maeve said. What was that thing her father always said? No good deed goes unpunished? The missing money would have been enough to make her change her mind, but extortion was another thing entirely. Desperate people do desperate things; she knew that. But what she hadn't known was exactly how desperate Trish Dvorak was. “We never should have done it, Cal. You're married. You have a child.”

He didn't respond to that, preferring to focus on Trish's shaky moral code. “What kind of woman has the time to blackmail someone when her daughter is missing?” Cal asked, shaking his head.

“Did you tell the police?” Maeve asked.

He nodded. “Yes. Chief Carstairs.” He smiled. “Have you met her? She's kind of hot.”

Maeve ignored the remark. He was a like a walking, talking cauldron of testosterone. Or a sixteen-year-old boy. Maybe both.

Behind him, Heather charged down the stairs. “I'm going out,” she said as she breezed by them, running down the front steps and jumping into a car that was unfamiliar to Maeve.

“Wait!” Maeve called after her, but it was too late. “Be home by curfew,” she said to the ceiling.

Cal waited a beat. “So what are we going to do?” he asked.

“I don't know, Cal,” Maeve said. “Right now, I need you to leave. That's as far as I can get in my thinking.”

“Thanks for nothing,” he said.

She opened the front door, holding it for him. “You're very welcome.”

After he left and she had cleaned up the dinner dishes, she went over to Chris Larsson's, just to see if he was still alive. He was, but barely, from the sound of things. She could hear him moaning as she stepped up on the porch. Giving the doorbell a quick push to announce her presence, she let herself in with the key he'd given her.

“Chris?” she called.

He responded by retching loudly from behind the door to the bathroom off the front hall.

She knocked on it lightly. “Chris? Do you think you have something besides food poisoning?”

“Maeve? Please go away,” he said as gently as he could before resuming his activities behind the door.

Maeve went into the kitchen, where it was clear that the minute he had walked through the door, he had divested himself as quickly as possible of his clothes and the things he had been carrying. His gun was next to a bowl of apples; Maeve traced her fingers lightly over the metal. His belt. His tie.