Lie in Plain Sight (7 page)

Jo went into the kitchen as Maeve was spreading the paper open to continue reading the story of the investigation past the front page. It didn't seem that a lot had changed or that the police had any leads. One tip said that she had been spotted on a southbound train, heading toward the city, even though the police had been all over the station asking people who had been there. Another said that she was seen walking along the side of the road by the dam. Still another reported that she had been seen in the middle of town, carrying a coffee cup, looking like she didn't have a care in the world.

Chris Larsson came in the front of the store, the pleasant jingle of the bell above the door at odds with his stern face, his serious demeanor. His usual greeting—“Hiya, beautiful”—accompanied by a kiss or a hug, was replaced with a barely audible sigh and a tone that suggested this wasn't a social call. Maeve grabbed a blueberry muffin from under the footed stand and put it on a napkin anyway. The guy was a sucker for her muffins, and she hoped that one bite would change his black mood.

She came around the counter and joined him at a café table by the drink case. “That's a lot of iced tea,” he remarked.

“Biggest seller,” she said, wondering why things were so uncomfortable. A tingling starting at her toes accompanied the dreaded thought that flashed through her head.

He knows.

But he started with something else. “Tell me again what you said to the school nurse.”

Maeve squirmed in her chair. She wasn't used to being on the other end of a line of questioning, and the fact that it was Chris doing the questioning made it more uncomfortable, not less. “I told you everything already, Chris.”

“Tell me again.”

“Judy called and said that Taylor had a headache that she was afraid was going to turn into a migraine. She said she wanted to go home. I asked if she needed a ride, and she said that Taylor was going to walk home.” Maeve looked at him expectantly.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“Is that what?” Maeve asked, unable to keep the annoyance out of her voice. “Yes. That's it.”

“A girl is missing, Maeve,” Chris said, as if that needed to be repeated.

“I get that.”

“So anything else you might remember would be helpful.”

“There's nothing else, Chris,” Maeve said. “What's going on here?”

Chris pushed the untouched muffin toward her and stood, his face still grim, no evidence of his usually playful demeanor beneath the surface. “Judy Wilkerson said that Taylor was very ill and needed a ride, but that you refused to pick her up.”

The sentence was so far from the truth that it nearly took Maeve's breath away.

Chris continued. “She said it was your idea to let her go home alone.”

 

CHAPTER 9

All around town, signs like the one Jo had described had popped up on lampposts, on telephone poles, in front of people's houses.

HAVE YOU SEEN TAYLOR?

A large photo accompanied the query, the same one that Maeve had seen in the newspaper and that was now the official photo of the missing-person case. There wasn't one lawn, or so it seemed, that didn't have a sign, not unlike the kind you would see during village elections, when red signs appeared on some lawns, blue on others.

Maeve was still reeling from Chris's revelation earlier that day about Judy Wilkerson. Maeve hadn't had much to do with the school nurse over the years, but she hadn't thought she was a liar, or someone who would go to great lengths to maneuver the truth into a space that would cast her in a better—more blameless—light. Rebecca was one of those perfect-attendance kids and was loath to miss a school day, or even come home sick in the middle of the day if she had a sore throat or felt nauseous. Heather, despite being a pain in Maeve's ass, had a pretty good attendance record as well, so Maeve's contact with Judy throughout her girls' high school years had been minimal.

She left Jo to close the store. She parked in the one tiny spot she could find, sandwiched between a sleek convertible and a big SUV. While she waited for the students with cars to drive away and the buses to transport other kids had left the parking lot, she thought about her conversation with the detective. She'd been flabbergasted when Chris told her what Judy said, shocked that the school nurse would tell a lie so blatant to cover her own ass. And even if Maeve had done what Judy said, had said to send Trish home, why did Judy listen to Maeve? That was some faulty logic there that even Chris couldn't make work. He'd looked perplexed, but when he heard what Maeve had to say, that it hadn't been her idea, he had believed her. She thought. Before he left, there was no hug, no kiss, no promise of a late-night drop-in to see her once more before the day ended. It was just him, a trace of incredulity still on his handsome face, professing to believe Maeve. He didn't know, and he never would, that she did keep some secrets from him, but this wasn't one of them. What this was was one school nurse trying to keep her job after making what turned out to be a tragic error in judgment, despite her following protocol. And the law. Let's not forget that, Maeve thought as she watched kids stream out of the school.

When it was clear that the school was down to just the regular staff and a few student stragglers, Maeve got out of her car and walked through the back doors and up to the second floor. The smell of the place brought her right back to her own high school days; the smell of teenage funk and old lunch meat was the odor of every high school in America, or so it seemed.

Judy Wilkerson was sitting behind her desk doing paperwork when Maeve knocked. “Maeve, hi,” she said, her eyebrows rising at Maeve's appearance in her doorway. “What can I do for you? Terrible thing about Taylor, right?”

Maeve closed the door behind her. The office itself was incredibly small, adjacent to the room that held the cots for sick kids and the area for the ones who awaited a pickup by a parent. Maeve poked her head into the room and determined that it was all clear before sitting down in front of Judy. She had thought about how this would go: if she would ask after family first; if she would make small talk, a little chitchat, before getting into the reason for her visit. When she saw Judy's face staring across at her, both of those ideas went out the window. “What you can do for me,” Maeve said, “is tell me why you lied about our conversation to Chris Larsson.”

Maeve could almost see the wheels turning in the other woman's head, the smoke that her thought process was producing under a copse of dyed-blond tresses, a spiky pixie cut on a woman far too old to be sporting one. Clearly she fancied herself “the cool nurse,” one who would be down for a rap session with her high school students. “What do you mean?”

There were a few things Maeve hated. Obtuseness was one of them. She leaned forward and put one hand on Judy's desk. “Let's not play games, Judy. Our conversation was short and sweet. I asked you if it was okay to send Taylor home, and you said that it was fine.”

“That was before she disappeared.”

“So the conversation changes based on the outcome? If she had arrived home and her mother had raised a fuss, would you have still thrown me under the bus, so to speak? Or would you have handled it like an adult, telling the truth?” Maeve watched Judy's face for any sign that she understood just how angry she was, how angry she could really get. There was none. “You need to tell Chris Larsson that I questioned you before telling you it was okay, that I wondered if it was standard procedure to let the girl go home by herself.”

“But that's not what happened, Maeve,” Judy said. “That's not what you said.”

Maeve felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience. She remembered the conversation word for word. “So which is it, Judy? That you lied after you found out that Taylor disappeared or that you remember an entirely different conversation, one that, if you indeed heard it that way, speaks to an inability on your part to do your job?” Maeve said, losing her breath midsentence. “Because if that's what you heard, then you are either deaf or have dementia.” She leaned back in her chair, afraid of what she might do to this school nurse, someone for whom pushing paper around on her desk came so naturally, it seemed to be her calling.

Judy stared at her for so long that Maeve feared she had gone into a trance. Her blue eyes, unblinking, held Maeve's gaze, the silence in the room finally broken by the principal's voice coming over the PA system, asking that Judy come to his office as soon as possible. Judy stood. “I know what I heard, Maeve.”

Maeve stood in front of the door. “Well, you heard wrong.”

“What? You're going to trap me in my office?”

Maeve realized that as much as she wanted to trap Judy Wilkerson in her office, keep her there until she admitted that she lied, it was a faulty gambit and one that would only result in Maeve finding herself in the local paper's police blotter. That was the last thing she needed, particularly if she was now not getting the Emergency Contact of the Year award for “refusing,” as Judy had told Chris, to pick Taylor up. “If I hear anyone repeat what Chris Larsson told me yesterday or see it reflected in any news account of Taylor's disappearance, Judy, I will—” Maeve stopped herself, straightening when she saw the look on Judy's face. Great. Now she was Maeve Conlon, Crazy Baker. It would be all over the school, then the village, and reported to the police if she didn't back down, let this go. “Thank you for your time, Judy,” she said, the buzzing in her head alerting her to the fact that at any moment, she was prone to losing it completely. She smoothed her hair back and squared her shoulders, righting her emotional compass.

She backed away from the door and let Judy through. After counting to ten and getting her breathing back to normal, she left the office and walked down the hall, her clogs making a squeaking noise in her wake, sounding like
it's your fault, it's your fault, it's your fault,
following her all the way to the asphalt of the parking lot.

Maeve drove through town, up and down village streets, not sure what she was looking for, not sure what she was hoping to find. She drove past Cal's, where she saw an unfamiliar car parked out front, no sign of Gabriela's little red sports car, a completely impractical Audi TT that fit Gabriela, her giant purse, and nothing else. It was a weekday; she was at work. Cal was alone during the week, sometimes until late into the evening when Gabriela had a photo shoot to oversee or a magazine layout to finalize before she went home. As Cal often said, “That damned magazine doesn't print itself.”

No, but it kept them in that gorgeous Tudor and him as a stay-at-home dad with far too much time on his hands. Maeve noticed that he, too, had a sign on his front lawn beseeching someone, anyone, to call the police with a tip regarding Taylor's whereabouts, where she had last been seen. She pulled over to the curb a few feet down from his house and kept an eye on the front door in the side-view mirror, wondering just who Cal Callahan was entertaining at a little after three in the afternoon. The car wasn't a minivan, and a quick glance as she had driven by indicated that there was no car seat in the back of the beat-up Honda Accord, so her curiosity was piqued.

She would put nothing past him, but prayed, nonetheless, that whoever was in the house was giving him an estimate on new tile for the front foyer or fixing a wonky toilet, one that had been running at all hours of the night, disturbing the beauty sleep of Mrs. Callahan #2, a woman far more likely than she had ever been to take him to task for falling down on the job of crossing off chores on the honey-do list.

Maeve scrolled through her phone, looking for something besides an online order to occupy her time. A sexy text from Chris. A funny joke from Jo. But there was nothing except Donna Fitzpatrick's plea for an extra dozen cupcakes, same color frosting, please, and an e-mail from Maeve's heating company informing her that this winter, her oil bill was going to go up considerably.

She put her phone away and watched Cal's front door for movement. Finally, after fifteen minutes, a quarter hour in which Maeve wasn't sure if she had fallen asleep or not, the door opened and a woman came out.

Maeve wondered what business Trish Dvorak might have with Cal.

 

CHAPTER 10

“I couldn't stay away,” he said, as they lay together on the sofa in her living room. Maeve had made sure that Heather was at the library before allowing things to go as far as they had.

“I missed you.” She wriggled out from under him, grabbing her wine glass from the coffee table. “I have to be honest: I don't really like Detective Chris Larsson.”

“Sometimes, I don't like him either,” he said. “He's kind of serious.”

“And sort of scary.”

“Really? Scary?” He seemed proud of that. “How so?”

She wasn't kidding. “Do you really want to go there?” They were having a nice time; did he really want to hear that she was disappointed in the way he had handled Judy's lie, even if he didn't immediately know that it wasn't the truth? Did he want to know that what she expected in a partner was complete trust in what she said, a lone sexual encounter with her ex-husband notwithstanding?

He touched his lips to hers. “I'm sorry. I sometimes forget that not everyone has deep, dark secrets.”

She tried to hold his gaze, but she closed her eyes and kissed him instead so that she didn't have to see herself reflected in his irises, telling herself that she was a liar, plain and simple, and he was the nicest guy any woman could ask for or even dream up.

Outside, a car drove past, slowing and then stopping in front of her house. She didn't need a crystal ball to tell her that it was Cal, checking up on her, letting her know that he was there but smart enough to know he would be unwelcome. She had her own part-time stalker, someone not industrious enough to put a lot of work into the task, using his baby's bedtime as an excuse to get the little lad to sleep while finding out if his ex-wife was being visited by her boyfriend. She was sure she'd hear about that the next time they saw each other, which would be their meeting with Heather's guidance counselor about college applications.