Once Upon a Lie (29 page)

I’m better than this, she thought. I must be.

Julie drove off after a longer encounter than Maeve expected, longer than any of the other rendezvous on which she had spied. She waited until Julie was out of sight, her sports car making its way past the dam and up to the main road at the end of the drive, and then walked toward the minivan, where she found Michael Lorenzo on his cell phone, yelling at someone on the other end. With one hand, she tapped lightly on the driver’s-side mirror; with the other, shoved into the depths of the cheap purse, she touched the handle of the gun, making sure that the fingers grazing it would be able to wrap around it if needed.

Lorenzo turned off the phone and looked at her, the expression on his face a mixture of exasperation and boredom. His hand locked on the gearshift of the minivan, his motivation clear. He was going to drive away. Maeve took the gun from her purse and pressed it to the glass, letting him know that what he wanted to do would have to wait until she’d had a chance to make one final pitch for a little girl’s safety.

“Get out,” she said.

He stared at the gun and then at her, not sure what it meant that a woman he had known only as a nuisance was now a menace. She stepped back and let him out. He stood next to the back door, his eyes trained on the gun only now, a thin sheen of sweat forming on his forehead despite the cold and the wind.

“Do you know what happens to little kids—little girls—who are abused?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she continued. “They become damaged. They become detached. They become dead inside. Is that what you want?” she asked.

He shook his head. “What are you doing?”

“Teaching you a lesson,” she said. She brought the gun closer to his head. “I’ve asked you nicely. I’ve asked you firmly. And now I’m asking you one last time to stop hurting that child.”

“What makes you think you know what’s going on?” he asked. “You have no idea what goes on in my house.”

“I think I do. If the dead look in your wife’s eyes is any indication, I know exactly what’s going on. If the fact that one four-year-old child hurts herself as much as your four-year-old child does is any indication, I know. You’re hurting her. You’re hurting your wife.” She pressed the gun against his head. “You’re an animal.”

“And what are you?” he asked, his head leaning toward the gun. “You’re holding a gun to a stranger’s head. What does that make you?”

Beyond the usual descriptors, the things that defined her—wife, mother, baker, friend—she didn’t know what she was. An avenger? A vigilante? She tried to think of the word and waited until it came to her, loud and clear. “I’m a survivor,” she said. Inside her purse, her phone trilled, ringing six or seven times until it finally went to voice mail. “And I want Tiffany to be one, too. And your wife and the baby. All of them.”

“So what are you going to do?” he asked, trying to be tough but weakening with every passing moment that she didn’t get in her car and drive away. “Are you going to kill me?” he asked.

“No,” she said, throwing her head back in the direction of the dam. “You’re going to do it yourself.”

Inside her bag, the phone trilled again in agreement. He was going to do it himself. All she was going to do was watch.

CHAPTER 40

When all was said and done and she watched from atop the dam as his body rolled toward the banks of the Farringville River and eventually into the raging water, she smiled. Maybe once spring came and the thaw along with it, an auspicious diver would find him. But by that time, how much would be left? A femur? Two tibia? It was hard to say. Maybe they’d find him immediately, right after someone alerted the police he was missing. All she knew was that there would be no more Michael Lorenzo inflicting pain on a little girl and a sad woman. What became of his remains was really not her concern.

He had gone willingly to the top of the dam; maybe he had wanted to die. Maybe his pain, the pain that made him the monster that he was, made him want to go into the depths of the river so that it wouldn’t be passed on to anyone else.

Or maybe it was just the gun pressed to his temple.

She had given him two choices: a bullet to the brain or a swan dive into the dam. Either way he would die, but the choice was his, giving him a modicum of control over his last moments. He had tried to fight her, but it was no use. She had clubbed him once with the butt end of the gun, effectively making it known that she wasn’t to be trifled with, that she would shoot him and dispose of his body, never to be caught, never to be suspected. Who would suspect her? She was a pillar of the community, a woman scraping by, one scone at a time. She donated cakes to the elementary school’s bake sale year after year. She let the French exchange students in the high school use the back of her store to make French onion soup for their annual fund-raiser. She was Maeve, the cupcake lady.

And no one in town had anything to connect her to Michael Lorenzo besides his daughter’s birthday party. Nobody knew that they knew each other, except for Jo, who saw the Lorenzos as customers and nothing more. She would open the bakery in the morning and nobody would be the wiser. Nobody would know that the woman who cheerfully put muffins in a jauntily decorated brown paper bag had blood on her hands.

He begged. He pleaded. He promised, but the promises rang false. She had given him several chances and he hadn’t taken any of them. “I warned you,” she had said, not feeling an ounce of compassion for someone breathing his last breaths. “I gave you chances.” This was the only way out for everyone involved, and she was the only one who knew that, her belief in her righteousness honed over the years of watching Sean Donovan build his financial empire, buy his various homes, and entertain the family as if he ruled it. In her mind were full-color memories of being kicked and hit and tortured, of hanging from a tree until her arm nearly came out of its socket, of being touched in a way that no child should ever be touched. Of crying herself to sleep every night, the sound of Soupy Sales’s voice in the background as her mother said over and over in the same reel of her life, “Be back soon.”

“If you shoot me,” he had said, “they’ll find you. There will be a bullet.”

“Wrong,” she said. “This gun has never been fired. There will be no way to trace it.” He had no way of knowing that that was a lie.

In the end, he had chosen to jump, just as she’d suspected he would. At the end, or any time, for that matter, who didn’t want to control his own destiny? He went over backward, his eyes boring into hers as he made what seemed like an inordinately slow descent toward the banks of the river, a look she would never forget. He thought he’d survive; she was sure of it. She waited a long time to make sure that he didn’t move, his body a shadow down below. There was no way he could have survived the fall, she thought as she walked away, hoping that her instinct was correct. It had to be. She had no time to wait. The bruise that would inevitably be on his head, if he was found right away, would be attributed to the fall.

It was a long way back to the car, still in the parking lot in a darkened corner. Yes, Dad, I’m angry, she thought, listening to the trill of her phone ring for the fifth or sixth time in as many minutes in her purse, ignoring it. Whoever it was could wait. She had things to do at home.

She left the park and went out to the main road, deciding as she had the last time she had gone to the dam that she would go home the back way, avoiding the main road and the traffic that traveled its windy path between her town and the larger one to the east. It hadn’t started raining, but it was still windy; and when the storm finally hit, it was clear it was going to be one of the worst they had seen in a long time. She wound her way over the small mountain that framed the town, coming to the main intersection at the very top, hanging a left, and meandering down the other side toward the center of town.

Her thoughts were focused in a way that surprised her. Not “What did I do?” but “Why didn’t I do it sooner?” floated through her brain, the thought of a little girl, now fatherless but safe, tucked into her bed, pink wallpaper adorning the room, stuffed animals plush and numerous and arranged around her sleeping frame. And then, out of nowhere, a thought about a special cupcake she would make with bright Tiffany-blue-colored frosting, a little gold leaf to decorate the center. It would be her cupcake, the one Maeve would give her every time she came into the shop and the one that would remind her that once there was someone who cared enough to save her from her own life.

She came around the corner toward the house where Jo used to live. Eric’s house was on the sharp bend that always indicated to Maeve to slow down so she could pull into the driveway without overshooting it. There was many a time when she visited Jo that she had missed the driveway and had had to turn around on a street about a quarter mile away. The house was hidden behind a tall stockade fence and a couple of tall trees, making it invisible to the street that it sat right on, dangerously close to traffic. As she got closer, Maeve made out a shape standing by the fence and slowed even more, the outline of the shape becoming clearer and, eventually, in focus.

Jo.

Maeve was going too fast to stop, and given where she had been and what she had done, she didn’t want to. In her friend’s hand was the can of spray paint that Maeve had spied in the bag by Jo’s things on the shelf in the kitchen, and she was writing, fast and furious, the wind proving to be a worthy adversary for her penmanship, a word on the fence that described Eric in a way that was not flattering but completely accurate.

Douche bag.

Maeve was pretty sure it was one word, but now was not the time for a spelling lesson. Anyway, Jo knew better than that; she had gone to Vassar, one of Rebecca’s top school picks. She hit the gas and sped past Jo, their eyes locking for a fleeting couple of seconds as she continued down the hill. In her bag, the phone rang again, but she kept driving, slowing her pace and her heart as she got closer to home. She pulled onto her street, most of the houses gone dark, her Prius making its way to the Colonial that she called home, the rain just beginning.

The flashing red lights turned slowly and methodically, cutting through the dark. Several sets, they illuminated her house and the onlookers who had gathered on the street.

It’s over, she thought. That didn’t take long. She pulled into the driveway and got out of the car, noting that none of the cops rushed her or drew their guns. Rather, they kept a respectful distance as she traversed the front lawn, eyeing her not warily but sympathetically. They were saddened by something, and it wasn’t Michael Lorenzo’s passing.

“My father?” she asked. And when no one said anything to the contrary, she knew that it was.

CHAPTER 41

Moriarty was taking it harder than anyone else, and after several hours of hearing him bemoan the fact that he could have prevented Jack’s latest walkabout, Maeve gently asked if he wouldn’t like to go back to Buena del Sol and get a good night’s sleep. It had been a long day and an even longer night, and nobody knew how long it would take for Jack either to wake up or to die. It was one or the other, and either scenario came with a lengthy wait, according to the doctor who was attending the day after Jack had been admitted.

Moriarty finally left the hospital, leaving Maeve alone with her father. He was hers alone to care for, and she didn’t call Cal or Jo or anyone in the extended family. He lay in the bed, unmoving, his chest going up and down in a slow but rhythmic motion. He was in good shape, she told herself, but even she knew that the most hale and most hearty person alive would have a hard time withstanding getting hit by an SUV, even if it was going as slowly as the driver claimed it was.

They had been trying to reach her all night, but she hadn’t answered her phone, first Charlene Harrison to tell her that he was gone and then the police to tell her that he had been found. While she was dealing with the problem that was Michael Lorenzo, Jack was on his way down the main drag—tons of energy surging through his veins, thanks to a dinner of roast chicken and pecan pie for dessert—to the river, making a wrong turn and ending up on the main route through town, in the dark, the wind whipping around and probably making him more disconcerted and disoriented than he normally was.

She leaned over and touched the leathery skin of his hand, careful not to disturb the tubes and needles that had been placed in and around his body. “Oh, Dad,” she said, resting her head on his arm, still warm, a pulse still beating through the skin and muscle. “What did you do?”

She knew that if he were conscious, he would have an excuse, one that would alternately exasperate and amuse her. She took solace in listening to him breathe, wondering if he could keep going after what would have been a mortal trauma for most. But he was Jack. He was, as he proclaimed to her many times over the years, the strongest man in the world. Nothing could keep him down at sixty, or seventy, or even eighty. Although he had let her down, she had to trust that he knew what he was made of.

And if he died? Well, she would have to deal with that. She wasn’t ready—she never would be—but if he did go, he would have gone on his own terms, wandering about, free as a bird, his own man. A grown man, as he liked to say, out for a nocturnal jaunt down by the river, not a care in the world because he couldn’t remember what his cares were or had been.

A nurse came in and checked his vitals; Maeve didn’t lift her head. She wasn’t interested in hearing whether or not anyone thought he would live or wonder what he was doing walking around at night or why she hadn’t made sure that he was safe at all times. All she cared about was him and what his life would be like if he awoke.

He didn’t wake up the next day or the day after that. The Comfort Zone opened up under the guidance of Jo, with the help of Cal and the girls—and presumably baby Devon—and Maeve went home to shower only once, changing out of the clothes that she had worn when she had watched Michael Lorenzo jump to his death. She bagged them up and threw them in a Dumpster outside the hospital’s cafeteria before going back up to sit with her father, who didn’t seem to be dying but who certainly wasn’t fully living, either. When the girls weren’t working or going to school, Cal brought them to the hospital to visit, but it was clear that the sight of their once hale grandfather was causing them great pain, a normal reaction to seeing him so broken. The second night that Jack was in the hospital, the girls came, and while they had been stoic the first night, maybe they were expecting some kind of progress that wasn’t evident in his status. The two of them went to pieces when they saw their grandfather still in the same position as the night before but now looking weaker and closer to death than he had right after the accident.