Lie in Plain Sight (15 page)

The next night, Maeve had a date with Chris, but she built enough time into her afternoon schedule to take a ride to a tony part of town that she rarely visited. It was close to the reservoir, wooded, and, like many developments with multimillion-dollar homes, quiet and serene. Maeve cruised up and down the street, spying Taylor Dvorak's father's home, the last house on the right, the gate closed, a camera mounted to the brick pillar on the right side. He lived below the former location of the stone yard, where the bigger and newer houses had been built. She stayed inside the car but noted a late-model Mercedes in the circular drive as well as a brand-spanking-new BMW SUV. The house itself was understated—something that couldn't be said for the rest of the houses on the block—but it certainly spoke to the owner having money and a lot of it.

The gates swung open, and a low-slung sports car shot out of the driveway. Maeve sank down in her seat and watched as it drove off, kicking up gravel and dust in its wake. The gates swung closed slowly, and the house went back to being just another silent architectural monstrosity set in a beautiful landscape, cold and quiet and dark.

She was tapping the steering wheel, thinking about what she might want to do next, when a late-model sedan pulled up to the gates, the driver speaking into the microphone and gaining access to the house. She scrolled through her phone, checking the local news station app for any new developments in the case, and hit the jackpot as a headline popped up saying that Charles Connors was in the process of preparing a statement to the media about Taylor Dvorak.

As she drove away, she passed a news van on its way toward the house, the people inside the vehicle, she suspected, readying themselves for any additional coverage that might be needed.

Maeve had an hour before she was to meet Chris for a drink at a local restaurant, one not unlike the Italian place she had taken Rebecca three nights earlier. She went home and put on the television, pouring herself a glass of wine while she waited for the meteorologist to finish talking about the impending thunderstorm. She settled in on the couch to watch the report on Charles Connors's statement.

The reporter, now standing in front of the Connors home, read the short statement. Yes, Charles Connors was Taylor Dvorak's father, something that he hadn't admitted publicly up until this point. A brief affair with his former housecleaner, Trish Dvorak, had transpired many years prior, and a settlement had been reached upon Taylor's birth for her care. He appreciated the village granting his family privacy during this difficult time and said it would be the last he spoke on the subject.

Maeve put the glass on the coffee table and stared at the television. The phone rang and she picked it up, still stunned.

“Can you believe that?” Jo asked.

“You saw the news?”

“You'd better believe it. You weren't kidding when you said this village had secrets.” Maeve heard Jo soothing the baby. “‘Grant the family privacy'? There's a girl missing. You've got no privacy anymore, buddy.”

“Something tells me this only scratches the surface of the secrets here,” Maeve said.

“Well, ask your buddy Larsson when you go out tonight. See what you can get out of him. This is the most exciting thing that's happened since Jack's umbilical cord fell off,” Jo said before hanging up.

Chris was already at the bar when she arrived a half hour later, a glass of wine waiting for her. She touched it to his pint glass, even though he didn't look like he was in the mood to celebrate.

“This whole thing is getting weird,” she said.

“You can say that again.”

She thought she'd have to press him to get him to talk about it, but he was particularly chatty that night. “He came to us early on. Didn't want to appear that he was hiding anything from us. He doesn't know anything.”

Maeve wondered why he had come to that conclusion so quickly. In her experience, people knew more than they let on. She thought about the list she had seen at Chris's. Jesse Connors. “His kid is in Heather's class. Like Taylor.”

“He's the uncle. Adopted the kid after his father and mother died in a car accident. Raised him like he was his own son,” Chris said.

“Any other kids?”

Chris looked at her, leaning in close so that no one else could hear them. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “No. He and his wife don't have biological children.” He stopped her before she could ask. “I don't know why and I don't care why.”

“And still, he never acknowledged his own daughter?” Maeve asked.

“How easy it would be,” Chris said, turning back around to look out at the bar and not at Maeve, “if we could just either demonize or canonize.” He signaled the waitress for another beer. “But it's not that easy because people are complicated. Life is complicated. Sometimes good people do bad things and vice versa.”

“You're feeling pretty philosophical tonight,” she said.

“You know what I mean. Heck, with what I've been seeing since this case started, I wouldn't be surprised if there were things I didn't know about my closest friends,” he said, finishing his beer just as the second one arrived. “About you, even.”

Inside, her stomach gurgled slightly, acid trickling into her digestive tract. “There's nothing, Chris. You know it all.”

“I don't know, Maeve. You have seemed kind of preoccupied lately.”

She took a deep breath, knowing she had gone pale, hoping that the guilt she felt about how she had lied to him would be mistaken for something else, something that would throw him off the scent of her betrayal. “It's this,” she said, waving a hand between them. “This missing girl. How I've been implicated. How I feel.”

That softened him a bit, and it seemed as if he realized he had come on too strong. He turned on his bar stool and pulled her close, putting his nose into her hair and inhaling deeply. “I was only kidding. Bad joke.”

“Good,” she said into his shirt, putting a hand to his chest, feeling his heart beat beneath it.

He inhaled again. “I can't get enough of the way you smell.”

There it was again. Her smell. The same thing that Gabriela had mentioned about Cal, how he had “smelled funny” when he returned home that night that seemed like a thousand years and a minute ago. She had an expensive bottle of body wash—a gift from a grateful customer—way at the back of her linen closet, just waiting to be opened. She had decided to save it for a special occasion. Nothing like two people commenting on the scent you emitted to get her to break it open the minute she got home.

“What have you been up to?” he asked. “Besides making my favorite blueberry muffins?”

Nothing really, she thought. Just following a guy that you should have on your radar. “This and that. I saw Rebecca last night and had dinner with her.”

“How is she?” he asked.

She thought about their conversation, sorry now that she'd brought the visit up to him. She put on her best poker face. “She's good,” she said, a little too brightly to her own ears, but he didn't notice. “We had Italian food.”

“Great,” he said, checking his phone, distracted until the bartender came back with the drinks. He rubbed his hands over his face, the mood suddenly changing.

“Chris, what's wrong?” she asked. “You seem…”

“We had a lead, but it's nothing.”

“I'm sorry.”

“God, Maeve,” he said. “Do you know what it's like to be a detective in this village when something like this happens? What it's like to have every single person you run into ask you about a missing teenage girl and what you're doing to find her? This,” he said, running his hand along the bar, “is not what I signed up for.”

She watched a few minutes of the baseball game on the television above the bar. “What
did
you sign up for?”

“Being a small-town cop. Busting DUIs. Chasing speeders. Investigating drug buys. Teaching the odd DARE class. Not this,” he said. “Not a guy jumping to his death from the dam a couple of years ago and not a girl vanishing into thin air on her way home from school. Not having to look at the guy's remains and tell his wife that we had found him and that he was dead. Not facing Trish Dvorak every day and saying, ‘We've got nothing. I'm sorry.'”

Maeve wanted to tell him that he shouldn't worry about the guy from the dam and telling his wife. She was happy that he was gone and could now live her life knowing that she was safe because he was dead. As for Trish Dvorak, she didn't know what to say.

He hadn't signed up for this.

She wondered about that. Was he really so naïve as to think that being a cop in the little village would never bring him a case that he found repulsive, that he probably couldn't solve? She had misjudged him, then. She thought he had a stronger constitution than that, that
he
was stronger. She thought of her own father and what he had seen in the city all those years ago when he wore the badge. Never once had she heard him cry or complain about what he encountered in a day's work. He never brought it home. His job was to try to keep her safe, and keeping her safe meant shielding her from that unpleasantness. Maeve looked at Chris, the attraction dulling just a little bit at the thought that he couldn't handle this. “I'm sorry,” she said.

He was quiet.

There was nothing else to say. He had fallen into a horrible mood, and it was obvious to her that their date, if it could be called that, was over.

“I think I'll go,” she said, when it was clear he was done talking. He seemed slightly embarrassed at what he had said but didn't stop her from leaving. Out in the parking lot, she looked back at the restaurant and saw that he was on his phone again, punching at the face of it, his own face a mask of pain. Whatever had appeared on his phone between his drinking in the smell of her and his sudden blackness, it had thrown him off completely, another dead end in a series of dead ends.

The house was quiet when she got home, Heather at the library again according to the note she had left for her mother, the kitchen clean, the leftovers put away. Maeve stood in the kitchen, her hands on her hips, looking around, wondering how she got here, alone after what she had hoped would be a night with the guy she loved.

Behind her, there was a short rap at the front door; she turned and walked down the hall. She had locked the screen door after coming in, which was why, when she returned to the door, Cal stood on the other side, wondering why he was locked out. He said as much.

“Because you don't live here anymore?” Maeve said, unlatching the door.

He walked in and looked around. “Heather?”

“Library,” Maeve said, returning to the kitchen. “What's going on?”

“She left me,” he said. “Gabriella.”

She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms. “Really. Where did she go?”

“No idea!” he said. “And she took Devon.”

“Really?” Maeve said again. She wasn't sure Gabriela even knew she had a child, let alone would take him when she left. She'd always figured that if the marriage broke up, the baby would stay with Cal.

“Yes,” Cal said. “I'm devastated.”

“I don't think you have the right to be devastated, Cal,” Maeve said. “You've been making a mess of things for a long time, and as a result, a lot of us now have really messy lives.”

“Like who?” he asked, defiant.

“Me. The girls. Devon. Gabriela, even.” She looked at him, rumpled and distressed, but only felt exhaustion at the thought of still being with him, still having to deal with his immaturity and inability to cope. “I wish I could feel bad for you, but if there ever was a classic case of reaping what you've sown, this is it.” She, too, could be defiant.

Still, the minute he started crying, loud, terrible gasps that emanated from deep in his chest, she melted just a little bit and took him in her arms and let him stay there for a long time, her shoulder becoming soaked with his tears.

“You've got to make this right,” she said into his ear. “This is on you.”

She wasn't sure if he heard her. In the hallway, the sound of footsteps made him bolt upright and turn around, his tear-stained face and her surprised one what greeted Chris Larsson, who looked like he was in a worse mood than the one she had left him in at the restaurant.

“I didn't know you were busy,” Chris said.

“I'm not,” Maeve said. “We're not.”

He looked back and forth, from her to Cal, and back again to her.

He knows, she thought.

“I thought you might be interested to know that there's been a development. I stopped here first because you were so worried.”

“A development?” she asked. “Taylor?”

“Yes. We found her car.”

 

CHAPTER 19

An older couple who lived on the other side of town, the Rathmuns spent the better part of the year in Maine but fled before the snow hit, driving down to their house on the outskirts of Farringville in mid-October, hopefully timing it before the first flake flew. They had arrived home that afternoon after their long drive, wondering why there was an unfamiliar car parked in their driveway, one tire flat. As anyone in a small village would do, they called the police department before doing anything else, not knowing that what they thought was an abandoned car had belonged to a missing teenage girl, someone everyone was looking for. Her backpack lay on the front seat, her cell phone on the passenger-side floor.

Chris described where they lived, and to Maeve, it sounded like it was very close to David Barnham's house. She filed that away.

“I didn't even know she had a car. Judy Wilkerson,” Maeve said, practically spitting out the woman's name, her anger growing with each passing day that Taylor didn't come home, “specifically said she was walking home.”