Once Upon a Lie (27 page)

“So what’s going on?” he asked. “Heather been behaving?”

“Oddly enough, yes,” Maeve said, choosing to ignore the question about what was happening. What wasn’t happening? “Seems she’s flying right, at least for the time being.”

“How’s Jack?”

“I’d joke and say, ‘Out on bail,’ but there’s a ring of truth to that.”

He stood straighter, looking at her to see if she was joking.

“He was questioned again.”

“Again? Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, because if she had learned anything during their marriage, it was all about him, all the time, which was what made his new marriage so confounding.

“Didn’t need to,” she said, walking over to the oven and taking out a tray of banana-nut muffins, the tops golden brown, the insides, she knew from years of experience, moist and bursting with cinnamon. She pulled one gingerly out of the muffin tin and handed it to Cal. “It’s hot. Be careful,” she said, thinking that was advice she should have given him before he had walked down the aisle again. He was waiting for her to explain. “They’re not serious about him, Cal. We knew that.”

She went out to the front of the store and grabbed two cups, filling them with the coffee that wasn’t quite ready but would have to do in a pinch. She left them black, bringing them back into the kitchen and handing them to him. “They’re on the house.”

“What makes you so sure?” he asked, returning to their original conversation. He hadn’t moved an inch since he had come into the kitchen, the muffin still in front of him in its wrapper, steam rising from the top. “Did someone say something to you?”

“I had a conversation with Detective Poole.”

He blanched. “Bad idea.” Spoken like a true lawyer. Even one who specialized in mergers and acquisitions.

She busied herself making more muffin batter, steeling herself for the inevitable lecture, which, when it came, was lengthy, filled with all sorts of legalese and insinuations that what she said could and would be used against her in a court of law. “You done?” she asked.

He sputtered for a few seconds, not sure what to do with an ex-wife who wasn’t remotely similar to the woman he had married years before. “You seem to be the only person not concerned with what happened to your cousin.”

“That’s because I know what happened to my cousin,” she said, licking the batter from the spatula before throwing it into the sink. The noise startled Cal, who clearly couldn’t function at that hour of the morning without a jolt of caffeine. “He called a hooker or went on Craigslist or found someone on the street. She—or he—killed him. I don’t know if it was over money or one or the other’s performance or if things just turned violent for another reason. And he’s dead.”

Delivered in a matter-of-fact tone, it seemed very cut and dried and perfectly logical to her, but to Cal, it was different. He looked as if he had seen a ghost when she was done.

“Guy was scum, Cal. There’s no reason to be upset unless my father continues to be involved. He’s the only one I care about right now.” She opened the oven, the blast of hot air putting a flush in her cheeks. “But he’s not involved anymore. It’s over. Trust me.”

“He had kids,” Cal whispered, as if that were a reason to mourn the loss of Sean Donovan. “A wife.”

“They’re better off without him.” She pulled another tin off the shelf. “You always fancied yourself the sensitive one, Cal. Maybe you were right.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet.

“I told you. On the house,” she said.

He riffled through the wallet and pulled out a card; he left it beside his uneaten muffin. After he left, planting a brief, soft kiss on her cheek, something that was completely at odds with his earlier hug, she picked it up.

She should have taken his money, because the last thing she needed was a therapist.

CHAPTER 37

Maeve and Jo went forty-eight hours speaking only about baked goods, work schedules, and the weather. By Wednesday, Maeve had had enough and put the
BE BACK SOON!
sign, the one with a cupcake serving as the dot of the exclamation point, on the door, then dragged Jo back into the kitchen for a talk.

“This can’t go on,” she said, noting that Jo was looking anywhere but directly at her. She grabbed her friend’s face and pulled it toward her, not caring how rough she was being.

“Hey!” Jo protested, trying to release herself from Maeve’s grip. “Stop it.”

“You’re mad at me. I know that. But there’s nothing I can do to change what happened.” She let go of Jo’s face, noticing the red fingerprints that had bloomed under her cheekbones. “For what it’s worth, I think Doug is crazy about you. Cop or not. And I had no idea that he wasn’t who he said he was.”

Jo crossed her arms over her chest, blinking back tears.

“You’ve got to admit, nobody’s got a meet-cute like yours.” Maeve pulled herself up onto the counter. “And if it hadn’t been for this case, he never would have been speed dating. You never would have met him.”

Jo’s expression told her that was small consolation. “Was the murderer there maybe?” she asked. “Was that it?”

Maeve shrugged and made one last attempt to smooth things over, leaving the sarcasm aside. “I’m sorry, Jo. I never would have thought that you would have gotten dragged into this. It’s my fault, and while I can’t do anything to change that, I want you to know how sorry I am.”

Jo found her voice. “You’ve changed. Since Sean died. You’re different.”

“Happier?” Maeve asked.

“No. Not happier,” Jo said, the tears rolling down her cheeks. “Why weren’t you sad? Why didn’t you ever cry?” she asked. It was clear that Doug’s questions about Maeve had infiltrated her subconscious, making her suspicious of her best friend.

“I did,” Maeve lied. “When I was home.”

“I don’t think you did,” Jo said.

Maeve tried to be honest. “You know we weren’t that close.”

Jo considered that. No one, at this point in Maeve’s life, knew her better than her co-worker and friend. “It doesn’t really matter to me how you felt about him. But I want to know why it changed you.”

The
BE BACK SOON
! sign was rapidly becoming false advertising; the conversation they were about to have would take far longer than either would have predicted. Maeve looked at Jo and wondered what would be the point of revisiting the past. It was gone, and so was Sean, and although it might make her feel better for a while, it would be a burden to Jo, one that she didn’t need.

“There’s more to this story,” Jo said.

Maeve closed her eyes and nodded. “There is. But I’m not sure you want to know.” She opened her eyes but turned her head away so that Jo couldn’t look directly at her. “I don’t know if I can even say it.”

“Tell me everything.”

Maeve was anxious to get it out and then go back to work, but she knew it wouldn’t be that easy. She started with the first day, two days after her sixth birthday, the day that he had knocked her off the curb and she had skinned her knee on the edge of the sewer grate; it was her earliest memory. She told about her cracked tooth and her broken arm and how he would pinch her hard where nobody would see or whisper things in her ear that she wasn’t supposed to tell and how it was one day when she realized that the hurt that she thought was only on the outside was now becoming a piece of her heart, the thing that made up her soul. “And when he stopped beating me, or hurting me in that way that he had that made it look like I was just clumsy, he started molesting me.” She rubbed her arm. “I was ten.”

Jo’s mouth hung open, a gasp trapped in her throat.

“He was my babysitter. He was saving money for a new record player,” Maeve said, laughing a little. “Remember record players?” she asked.

Jo nodded, silent.

“Well, that’s what he wanted. So Jack paid him a dollar an hour to take care of me. He took me to the Bronx Zoo and he took me to Arthur Avenue and he even took me to the Botanical Gardens. My big, handsome cousin. The one the girls all liked. And it was times like those when I wasn’t sure if what had happened was actually true or if I had made it up in my own mind.” She wrapped her arms tight around her body, her one hand caressing the spot where her arm had broken. “I hadn’t, though. I hadn’t made it up. It was all true,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

“Why didn’t anyone help you?” Jo asked, her sadness turning to anger, her tears coming fast and furious. “Why didn’t you tell?”

As Jo cried, Maeve told her how she’d wanted to tell but didn’t and why. Jo looked sick when Maeve got to the part about Claire. “He killed my mother, Jo. And he would have killed Jack.” Her mind went to her sweet, lovely father, the man who had tried so hard to give his girl the best life she could have but had failed. “And I couldn’t lose him. Not after I had lost my mother.”

“Jack failed you, Maeve,” Jo said, and while there was truth in that statement, it was nothing Maeve ever wanted to pin on the man she loved the most.

“I can think that, but you can never say it,” Maeve said. He had failed her, but he just didn’t know that he had. Working day tours, night tours, overtime and then some, he worked as hard as he could to give her the best life he had imagined for her. The private school in New York City, the tuition at the CIA ready and available when she was accepted, he thought he had done all the right things. Sure, she had been a latchkey kid far earlier than the term had even been coined, but she was the best little girl in the world, as he always said, and would never get into any trouble. But what he didn’t know was that when he needed help, he had left her in the care of a sadist, someone who wore the costume of a big, strong, loving cousin; someone who would never let anything happen to Jack’s perfect daughter, the daughter who would never tell.

She was almost a hundred percent sure that he never knew what had happened, and even if he had learned something along the way, he had long forgotten it by now. Still, every once in a while she caught him looking at her, and in those looks was a sadness that said, “I know something about you; I just don’t know what it is.”

Jo was looking at her differently, and Maeve wasn’t sure she liked what she saw. “Is this going to change us?” Maeve asked.

Jo was distraught, and in the center of that swirl of emotion, Maeve saw fear. “So either one of you could have done it. No one would blame you.”

Maeve touched Jo’s shoulder. “But we didn’t. It was disgusting and salacious and all those things that the tabloids love about a murder. He was meeting a hooker, Jo. And he died.”

She could see Jo trying to work that out in her head. It was something that anyone would have a hard time believing, but she hoped her friend knew her well enough to believe her. To believe the truth about Jack.

Now that she was done, she was less upset than Jo and less upset than she’d thought she would be. The telling wasn’t as she’d always imagined it would be—emotional and fraught with myriad emotions—but delivered in a flat, almost detached style that belied just how terrible it had been. The years had made the story almost foreign to her, as if it had happened to someone else in a very different time. The horror that crossed Jo’s face, her tears something that Maeve envied because they showed that she could feel, indicated that even with the most level and dispassionate recitation of the heinous acts that had been perpetrated against her, her childhood self, it was still the worst thing that anyone could hear. Her tears that morning had come from being overwhelmed, not sad. There was a difference.

Jo started toward her, her arms outstretched. “Don’t,” Maeve said, holding out her hand. She clasped an empty muffin tin to her chest for protection. “Just … don’t.”

Jo’s hands returned to her sides, limp, her fingers playing with stray threads on the sides of her overalls.

“You can never tell,” Maeve said, uttering the words that Sean once said to her.

Jo raised an eyebrow; she didn’t understand.

“Doug. You can’t tell him.” The last thing she needed was for Doug to know. Yes, she had told Rodney. But for some reason, she knew he understood in a way that Doug never would.

“So he’ll rot in hell,” Jo finally said, thinking about Sean Donovan.

“If there’s a God,” Maeve said.

“There’s a God,” Jo said, “and she’s a woman. And she hates ugly.” Jo’s anger turned on Maeve. “You should have—”

Maeve stopped her. “Told? Tell that to my six-year-old self, my eight-year-old self, Jo. Tell a scared little girl that the cruel teenager who threatens her every day with violence to her or the people she loves should be told on. I couldn’t do it.” She could feel heat rising in her chest. “Don’t tell me what you think I should have done. If you want to go there,” she said, giving Jo a pointed look, “we’ll go there. I have a lot to say on the subject of Eric and what you should have done.”

Jo was ready to unleash a defense but thought better of it, closing her mouth, her lips set in a grim line that let Maeve know she had hit a nerve.

“One thing,” Jo said.

Maeve put down the muffin tin.

“Did you kill him?” Jo asked. “Because nobody would blame you if you did.”

“Jo,” Maeve said, “I already told you. Really? You have to ask me again? You know me better than that.”

Jo continued to study her. Her voice was barely a whisper when she finally spoke. “Because you’re different.”

After a few seconds of tense silence, Maeve asked, “Can we go back to work?” She thought after everything she had told Jo that she would feel exhausted, depleted. But she felt lighter than air.

“I don’t know if I have the energy,” Jo said. “How do you go on each day?”

Maeve didn’t know. “With one foot in front of the other?”

“Is it better now?”

“Now that he’s dead?” Maeve asked.

Jo gave the slightest of nods.

“A little, I guess.”

“It makes me want to kill him all over again,” Jo said.

Maeve flashed on Michael Lorenzo’s face, a seemingly incongruent thought at an odd time. “Me too.” Be back soon, she thought.

CHAPTER 38

A storm was coming, and it wasn’t just the usual fall nor’easter that usually beset the Hudson Valley. Rather, it was being billed as a late hurricane with the possibility of a tornado thrown in for good measure. Jack flipped through the local paper while sitting at Maeve’s kitchen table, a glass of Coke in front of him, waiting for his dinner. Even though it was blowing up pretty good down by the river, she had taken Jack on a walk, one that seemed to clear his head and invigorate him even though it left her with a wicked case of windburn.