Lies That Bind (12 page)

“I think we should talk.”

“Did you know I had a sister?”

“
Have
a sister. You have a sister,” Margie said. Maeve didn’t understand why the tense was important or why Margie sounded so sure. For all she knew, her sister was gone, but she hoped that wasn’t the case. “Yes. She was discussed in my house, your sister. My mother prayed for her. Every day.” She stared off at a spot somewhere over Maeve’s head. “We were sworn to secrecy. We weren’t supposed to tell.”

Knowing that didn’t thaw the ice Maeve had in her heart toward the late Fidelma Haggerty.

“She prayed for me, too,” Margie said, “but didn’t get what she hoped for.”

Maeve looked confused.

“A nun. Remember? She wanted me to be a nun.”

“Right,” Maeve said. She looked up at the clock on the wall. She needed information, not a walk down the Haggerty memory lane, a jaunt filled with emotional broken glass and uneven pavement.

Margie looked at her, tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I should have said something sooner.”

“This seems like just the kind of information Dolores would have loved to have given me when we were kids,” Maeve said. “She’s special like that. So, why didn’t she?”

Margie stared off into the distance without saying a word, taking in the sights of the kitchen: the piping bags, the cookie sheets, the appliances that needed updating. She never answered.

“And why didn’t Sean tell me?” Maeve asked, as if Margie would know why her abusive cousin would have kept something like that from her. It seemed like something that he would have loved to have held over Maeve, like he had held her mother’s death over her. She thought about it. “See what happens when you tell?” he would have said. “You get sent away. And then you die.” There’s no way he could have known and not told her; that kind of information was too good for him to hold in, to keep to himself.

“Maybe he didn’t know.”

“Then why did you know? How? Your family?” Maeve asked. The Haggertys were neighbors, acquaintances. Maeve wouldn’t go so far as to call them “friends” to either herself or Jack.

Margie didn’t answer that question. “Listen,” Margie said, tapping her finger on the bar, seeming to be mounting a defense of her defenseless sister, “my sister…”

“I know,” Maeve said, holding up a hand to stop her, her other hand holding on to the counter for support, “she’s been through a lot. Spare me.” She started toward Margie, making the woman back up toward the door, looking for escape. “Tell me. Is she dead? Evelyn?”

Margie shrugged. “That, I don’t know. But I can help you maybe.”

Maeve didn’t respond, couldn’t bring herself to ask for the help from Margie. Stubbornness, pride really, wasn’t Maeve’s most attractive character trait but the one that helped keep her going, helped her achieve what she had. She wondered if she should relent in this case. She made one last attempt for any information, trying to keep the ball in her court. “Any idea where she went?”

Margie’s answer surprised Maeve and broke her heart just a little bit. “Mansfield,” she said.

Maeve wished she had said anything but that. After that, she would have preferred hearing that her sister had died.

CHAPTER 19

Maeve had few memories of growing up that weren’t related to Sean Donovan or one of the Haggerty girls exacting their brand of justice on an innocent kid with no mother. One other memory was the day her mother left for the store, never to return, and another was the day she saw her father cry the first time.

She had just made her first multilayered cake from scratch; she was eleven. As she put the last bit of icing on the top, careful to make the edges neat and tidy, she heard her father, in the living room, let out a gasp and then a sob. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what he was watching, why he was crying, but she peeked around the corner anyway. He was standing in front of the large Zenith console, his beloved “color TV,” his arms crossed tightly across his chest. He swayed a bit, the color draining from his face.

“Those poor souls,” was all he said. “God help them.”

On the television was a story about the Mansfield Institution, a place that, judging from the news story, was as close to hell on earth as a place could get. Maeve had a few memories of the moving images from the story: bars on the windows of brick buildings, a few haunted souls walking the grounds, overgrown shrubs and weeds growing in front of the main structure. Back then, she knew, people with a variety of issues were sent to places like Mansfield, those with mental illnesses and those who were developmentally challenged. Things that were now understood, treated and addressed in a particular way with medication or therapy, were less understood then. She shuddered at the thought of her sister, her flesh and blood, in a place like Mansfield.

After Margie left the store, Maeve stayed in the kitchen, focusing her attention on piping cannoli cream into the shells that she had left cooling on a rack, while Jo worked in the front of the store. Behind her, the door to the back parking lot opened and Chris Larsson came in, his smile doing nothing to alleviate the physical pain that had settled around her heart. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and she leaned into his chest, willing herself not to let all of the sordid details come spilling out. He was a much more welcome guest than Margie Haggerty, a man who hadn’t kept the truth from her, someone who seemed to be as open and transparent as any one person could be. She wasn’t sure how she knew that about him, but she felt it.

He turned her around and looked down at her, their height differential not preventing him from giving her a long kiss. The door to the kitchen swung open—its squeaky hinges alerting Maeve to Jo’s presence—but just as quickly, it slammed shut and Jo returned to the front of the store. Chris smoothed the hair that had come loose from her ponytail off her forehead. “You look upset,” he said. “Is it kissing at work or something else?”

She hadn’t told Jo a lot about her talk with Margie because she couldn’t go down the emotional road that Jo would take her on. Chris was used to hearing unsavory things and not reacting; it was part of his job. She thought about it for a few seconds and told him the rest of the story. He listened intently, and just as she had hoped and had wanted, didn’t react with anything other than concern.

“Mansfield?” he said. “The place upstate, right?”

Maeve nodded. “I remember the news stories,” she said, picking up her piping bag and worrying the top, twisting it until the filling oozed from the tip. “I remember some senator talking about the people there. That there were hundreds too many for the space. That the conditions were deplorable.” Her hands started to shake so she put the piping bag down and wiped her fingers on her apron.

At the time the news about Mansfield broke, Maeve lived in a nice row house with a nice father and although she endured other horrors, living incapacitated in filth and despair was something she didn’t know. It seemed to upset Jack to a far greater extent than it should have, now that she thought about it. It was disturbing and vile but it was far away from them and their lives. Now she understood why he had reacted the way he had.

Chris leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t remember it on television, but for some reason, I do remember hearing about the place.”

“I remember my father’s words to this day. ‘Those poor souls. God help them.’” She didn’t remember anything beyond that—no searches, no conversations, no desperate phone calls—just sadness, tears, and a little bit of brokenness that entered his body and stayed for a while.

“What happened to the place?” Chris asked. “The actual location?”

“It’s a SUNY,” Maeve said, because she had looked it up right after Margie left. “Specializes in the arts. Dance. Music.” She had also learned something else while digging around on her computer, the orders that she needed to fill having to wait. “Some people went missing when it closed.”

Recognition dawned on Chris’s face. “The Mansfield Missing. I remember hearing about them.”

A dozen young adults, or maybe more; the twelve had been identified by their families as having never come home once the place closed, but according to reports, there could have been more who disappeared. No one knew. Which left Maeve wondering if her sister was among those who had vanished in the wind once the doors had slammed shut. The record-keeping had been shoddy, the administration mostly uncaring, the workers scattering far and wide to avoid questioning and maybe prosecution. Some thought a fire in one of the outbuildings was responsible for the missing persons, but others thought a more sinister plot was at work. It all added up to finding a needle in a haystack, years later.

Maeve answered the questions before he asked. “I don’t know if she was one of them. I also don’t know why my parents would have sent her there.” Lacking anything else to say or do, she handed Chris a cannoli. “Try this for me.”

He took a bite. “Only if I have to,” he said, closing his eyes at the taste of the luscious cream, the crispy shell. “Amazing.”

“I’ve got to find her, Chris. I remember my father’s reaction that day and I don’t remember much,” she said, lying about her memories. “He was crying. I wonder if she went missing.”

“I’ll help in any way I can,” he said.

Maeve could tell by the way he said it that he thought she needed protecting. She didn’t have the heart to tell him, standing there with a hint of ricotta cream on his lips, that now that she was grown, she could take very good care of herself. And she didn’t need protecting.

“Did you find Billy Brantley?” she asked, changing from one sordid subject to another. It was worth a try.

His face clouded over a little bit but he tried not to give anything else away. “Um, yes.”

“Spill it, Larsson,” she said.

“Nothing to spill,” he said. “Tommy Brantley’s brother. A little pot in the house. Crazy parents.” He finished off his cannoli. “Last I heard, he was trying to go straight after a few high school dust-ups. Get his GED.”

“He never graduated?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. So did he have an alibi for the afternoon of the break-in?” she asked.

“I’m almost embarrassed to tell you,” he said. “He was at a meeting, too. Again, confidential.”

She started laughing, but there was no merriment in it. “Am I the only person in town who isn’t in a twelve-step program?”

“Maybe?” he said. “I’m not either, by the way.” He paused. “And in case you were wondering,” he said, “we’ve got nothing on the finger yet.”

“What does one do with a severed finger?” Maeve asked.

“The only thing a small-town detective could do,” he said. “I turned it over to the county crime lab.” He stood, ready to go. “Well, that and look at every pair of hands in town for the one that has only nine fingers. You’d be amazed at how many people are missing a finger or part of a finger.”

“Really?” she asked.

“No,” he said, laughing out loud, the sound of it breaking the tense mood that had stayed after Margie’s departure.

She wondered about his self-deprecation, if it masked a really sharp investigative mind. Only time would tell, she thought. She wasn’t sure which answer she wanted when it came to him. His ignorance of her—of what she had done, of what she was capable of doing—was bliss. He just didn’t know it.

She had worn a mask most of her life—loving daughter, devoted wife—the one that let the world believe she didn’t have any scars. She could never let him see who she really was, and wondered if he had the ability to find out on his own.

CHAPTER 20

Chris went back to work, two cannolis in a bag for later, and Maeve went to her desk to review the orders that she’d need to fill before the holidays began in earnest. But her discussion with Margie was still on her mind, her quest for more information like a hunger she couldn’t sate, so she pushed the stack of orders aside and went to her computer, Jo still in the front of the store to deal with the light foot traffic that the midmorning usually brought.

The Mansfield Missing. She went back to them. A dozen young adults, different ages, sexes, and ethnic backgrounds, were never located once the facility was closed. Was the fire to blame? Did they wander off before it closed? Or had something more sinister happened? The institution’s administration were at a loss to explain what had happened. One of them had even gone to jail, dying there years before.

There was a lot more information in various places but Maeve didn’t have time to search them all. Some people had shared the names of their missing loved ones, but others, citing privacy, did not, leaving Maeve to wonder if Aibhlinn “Evelyn” Conlon was on the list.

She thought back to her conversation with Margie. Could Maeve trust her? Was Margie as altruistic, as helpful, as she seemed to be? Wanted to be? Maeve couldn’t be sure. She typed her name into the search engine and waited to see what she would get in response. Maybe the information that turned up would give Maeve the answer she was looking for.

“Disgraced cop.”

“Mishandled evidence.”

“Discharged from duty.”

It wasn’t a huge story; it couldn’t have been, because Maeve didn’t remember reading about it. It had happened over a decade ago but even then, if she had read about it, Margie’s name would have rung a bell in Maeve’s overtaxed mind. The story was simple: after searching an apartment and confiscating drugs, Margie having been on a drug task force at the time, she took a detour and had a drink with a colleague, one Ramona Ortiz, at a bar in Washington Heights. She got drunk. She hit a telephone pole. And when her colleagues were called to get her out of the jam she had gotten herself in, it became clear that the chain of custody had been broken and any work that had been done on the case thus far—with the help of the FBI and DEA—had gone to crap, leaving her holding the bag, as it were. Or not.

And now? With the law degree that she had gotten after she had been discharged of her duties, according to a later article, she had opened up a little office, specializing in workman’s comp cases, but that information didn’t shine any light on Maeve’s real questions about her former neighbor. Was she good? Was she bad? Or was it a combination of the two, like it was for so many people, Maeve included?