Lies That Bind (31 page)

Maeve knew a thing or two about sociopaths. “I thought you hadn’t seen her since you were little?”

“When Dolores told you about your sister, I tried to blackmail her into helping you. I wanted to make things right again.” Margie held her hands out. “I’m not like those people. The people in my family.”

“That is hard for me to believe, Margie.” Maeve relaxed a little, taking in Margie’s terrified face, her shaking hands. “You should have turned her in.”

Margie looked surprised. “You don’t turn against family.”

And there it was, the root of all of the problems with the Haggertys. They didn’t turn on family even when they knew that certain members were up to no good, making the lives of others a living hell. Before all of this had happened, Maeve had seen Margie, who had spoken ill of her own sister, something Maeve reminded her of now. “Why the family devotion all of a sudden? Especially to Dolores?”

“She’s my sister. We’ve gotten closer since she became a widow.”

“That’s beautiful, Margie,” Maeve said. She looked around the office. “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Margie fingered a stack of papers on her desk, avoiding Maeve’s gaze. “I never meant to hurt you, for this to happen.”

A sudden realization dawned on Maeve. “You are just really, really stupid,” she said. What other explanation could there be for the woman sitting in front of her to hatch a plan like this? Maeve counted off the transgressions on the hand not holding the gun. “You withheld from me that I had a sister. You sent me to see your aunt, who you didn’t tell me was a relative, to get information she was never going to give me.” Maeve stood and walked around the office, the little space she could navigate, and gathered her thoughts. “You knew that she was awful. A ‘sociopath.’ This whole situation defies comprehension.” She bit her lip, thinking. “I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to do with you, Margie.”

In the front of the office, Maeve heard shoes crunching on the broken glass. Rodney Poole appeared around the partition, taking in Margie’s terrified expression and Maeve’s wild-eyed visage, the gun. “We need to leave, Maeve Conlon,” he said, taking the gun from her hand. He looked at Margie. “This never happened,” he said, waving a hand around the room. “She was never here.”

Margie tried on a look of defiance that really didn’t suit her; she was incapable, it seemed, of really having a backbone. “Or what?” she asked.

Poole studied her face. “Do we really need to get into that, Haggerty?” He put Maeve’s gun in his pocket. “Let’s put it this way: still a lot of cops on the force, around these parts, who would rather see you dead than help you one iota. That’s just the way it is.”

“Are you sure about that?” she asked, giving her stoic resolve one last try.

“I’m positive,” he said. He mentioned a name that wasn’t familiar to Maeve but which Margie seemed to know. “Just ask Ramona Ortiz. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. She’s dead.”

Margie’s face turned in on itself, like an ice sculpture that was melting and then collapsed into a pool of water on the floor. “That wasn’t my fault.”

“I guess it wasn’t,” Rodney said, but the damage was done. “You ruined her life, she took her own. Seems to run in your family, that kind of behavior. Life has a funny way of coming full circle, though, doesn’t it?” He took Maeve’s hand and led her to the front of the office.

Out on the street, he reached into his pocket, and without anyone passing by being the wiser, he slid the gun from his coat pocket into hers. “This been discharged?” he asked.

“It’s clean,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “Keep it that way. Unless you have no other choice.”

CHAPTER 53

Maeve opened the store the following Wednesday, happy to be back in the routine of making scones, quiches, and cakes, channeling her sadness into creating beautiful things that people loved to eat. Jo’s stream-of-consciousness monologues helped the days pass and she was grateful to hear more than she ever wanted to know about how one birthed a baby in the twenty-first century, her children having been born in the old twentieth century when epidurals and pain meds were still thought to be acceptable accompaniments to the painful process of delivering a child.

Jo was going to go “all natural,” she said, adding “until it gets really painful.”

Maeve had news for her: there was no area between “painful” and “really painful” when it came to childbirth. It all hurt, a lot, and all the time. Even after the baby was out, if her own daughters were any indication.

Jo was still determined to try every culinary item from the “Best of Westchester” issue of the local magazine, naming for Maeve all of the places they hadn’t been. Maeve was exhausted just thinking about it.

Chris Larsson occupied the nights between her last trip to Rhineview and the opening of the store, his uncomplicated brand of wooing her just the salve she needed to heal her wounds, make her forget the pain she had been witness to. She told him only what he needed to know: that she had confronted Mrs. Hartwell, that the woman had responded by blowing up her house. That she had found Winston. That she knew now what happened to some of the Mansfield Missing.

“And your sister?” he asked one afternoon when they were in his bed, soft sunlight coming in through the window, his long arms wrapped around her body, his face in her hair.

“I don’t know,” she said. She still didn’t know if anyone else had been in the house, if other bones had been found, but she couldn’t admit any of that to him. It was too good, what they had. She wanted it to last, if only for a little while.

She tried to hold on to the fact that Margie didn’t think Evelyn had ever lived there, but even if that was the case, the idea that she had been responsible for an innocent person’s death stayed with her.

Maeve scanned the papers and the Internet every day for the stories related to what had happened up in Rhineview, her name mysteriously missing from any mention of the investigation or the missing man. She had asked Detective Fahnestock if that would be possible, and apparently the woman had bent to Maeve’s wishes, a call from Chris probably helping secure her identity as “unidentified woman from downstate.” She was grateful for the courtesies cops showed each other, showed her as a cop’s daughter.

A few days after she had seen what Regina Hartwell was capable of, saw her blow up her own house, Maeve was icing a cake when Detective Fahnestock showed up at the bakery unannounced, a small bag in her hand. Jo let her in, holding open the swinging door to the kitchen and staying just long enough to hear that the detective wanted a DNA sample from Maeve.

“I need a DNA sample from you, Miss Conlon.”

Maeve put down the piping bag that she had been using to dot florets around a chocolate cake, a beautiful, multi-layered concoction that would fetch close to thirty dollars. “What is it?”

The detective cut to the chase and didn’t give Maeve a chance to steel herself for the news that was going to shake her to her core. “There were two sets of bones found in the rubble,” she said. “The medical examiner is looking at them now to determine who they might belong to, if the person was even alive when the house blew up.”

“Female?”

“Hard to tell at this point,” she said, pausing, “but most likely.”

The next morning, she could still feel the scrape of the cotton swab on the inside of her cheek, a reminder of her visit from the female detective. Of the news she brought. Maeve hadn’t eaten a bite since that moment, drinking only when she felt a dire thirst, her parched throat reminding her that she was getting dehydrated.

Was there anyone else in the house? The detective’s words rang in her ears, every one an indictment of Maeve’s impulsiveness, her drive to make Regina Hartwell tell the truth.

That afternoon, after Maeve had sent Jo to the store to buy butter, she asked both girls to come to the bakery and sat them down in the kitchen area. They had been helping out that morning, though Maeve hadn’t uttered a word to either one of them. Finally, she found her voice again and peppered them with questions. She had solved one mystery; time to solve another. She left off the nice preamble, going straight to the one question that she needed an answer to: “Who was in my bedroom and why did a check for three grand go missing?”

They were liars, both of them, and it was written all over their faces. In the front of the store, the bell over the door rang and Maeve went through to wait on the new customer.

“Get your story straight. I want the truth when I come back,” she said before she left.

When she came back into the kitchen, they were still sitting there, looking as if they hadn’t moved or spoken the whole time. “So?” she asked.

Rebecca was the mouthpiece. “We don’t know, Mom.”

“Where’s the money from your accounts?” Maeve asked Rebecca. “And don’t tell me you put it toward your tuition because I’ve already been on the account on the Web site and we’re all paid up.”

Rebecca wasn’t a liar; she hadn’t inherited the finely honed art of deception from her mother. “Fine,” Rebecca said. “I spent it. I spent every last dime. I didn’t eat in the dining hall, I partied, I treated my friends to dinner. We went to New York City. I rented a hotel room.”

Heather looked at her, stunned. She was not used to seeing her sibling in the role of the less-than-perfect older sister.

“And shoes?” Maeve asked.

“Not too many, but yes, I bought some shoes,” Rebecca said.

Maeve studied both of them, sitting quietly on the high stools that framed the butcher-block counter in the middle of the kitchen. Heather’s hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail that she kept grabbing and smoothing with trembling hands.

Maeve looked down at her hands and saw the pulse in her wrist jumping out of her skin. After a few minutes, she looked at her daughters and gave Rebecca, her face pale and her own hands shaking, a hard look. But Maeve was honest; she was a bit out of her league on this one. “I don’t know quite what to do right now, Rebecca, but I would like you to leave my sight, immediately.”

The girls shared a look that Maeve couldn’t decipher.

“Please go home.”

Rebecca opened her mouth to speak.

Maeve held up a hand. “Please. Before I say or do something that I will regret.”

Right at that moment Jo walked in the back door and put the butter in the refrigerator, chatting aimlessly about the store, who she saw, what a bitch the cashier had been to her, why she hated going on these runs for Maeve. She closed the refrigerator door and turned around, finally taking in the stunned faces of the Callahan girls and Maeve’s own florid one. “What happened here?” she asked. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing,” Maeve said. “Rebecca was just leaving.”

Heather asked if she could go, too.

Maeve waved a hand in her direction. “Certainly. Go.” As the door to the kitchen slammed behind them, Maeve called out, “Clean your rooms! Go to church! Feed some orphans! Stay out of trouble!”

Jo looked at her for an explanation.

“You don’t want to know.”

It was only minutes before closing when the bell over the door jingled for what would be the last time that day. She and Jo were deep into their closing routine, Maeve wiping the counters with a focused ferocity. When she was done, they gleamed. With the girls out of the store and wandering the streets of Farringville proclaiming the evilness that was their mother, most likely, she was happy to have an outlet for her stress.

“A little help, please?” the woman at the counter said.

Maeve turned at the sound of her voice, her words slurring and blurring together into one barely intelligible sentence. Maeve hoped she hadn’t driven here herself.

“Hello, Dolores,” she said, asking Jo to go into the kitchen. “What brings you here?”

“Where’s my sister?” she said. Today, her auburn hair was freshly coiffed, her makeup artfully applied. It was only the crooked line of lipstick on her bottom lip that indicated that she was a little tipsy.

“Your sister?” Maeve asked. “Is she missing?”

Jo walked out briefly and tossed a bundle on the counter before returning to the kitchen. “Mail’s here.”

“Yes,” Dolores said, leaning in. Maeve caught a whiff of something medicinal, vodka maybe, covered over by a strong breath mint. Oldest trick in the book, she thought.

“I don’t know,” Maeve said.

“Wasn’t she helping you find your sister?” Dolores asked. Behind her, the clock clicked to four, and Maeve came out from behind the counter to turn the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
. No reason why her regular customers, the nice people who shopped here, needed to see this.

“‘Help,’ Dolores, is a very loose term,” Maeve said. “Listen, I’m closing. What do you want?”

Dolores surprised her by softening just enough to let a few tears spill from her eyes, the tears taking rivulets of black mascara along for the ride. “I miss her. I need my sister.”

“That’s rich, Dolores,” Maeve said. “You want me to pity you for losing a sister.” Maybe Margie, like Michael Donner, was in the wind, never to be seen again. “Forgive me, Dolores, if I don’t feel a whit of sympathy for you,” Maeve said, but deep down, if she had to admit it, she did feel a twinge of sadness for two lives that seemed to have seen hardly a moment of happiness. Those girls had never stood a chance in that household. Dolores had been right all along: Maeve had always thought she was better than them, what with her doting father and her cupcake making. She was never hit—at least by Jack—and he told her often that she was perfect. That he loved her. And that counted for a lot, made some of the hurt go away. She found herself welling up, thinking of what it must have been like to hear how fat and dumb, how useless, you were every single day of your life. It was almost worse than physical abuse.

Almost.

“I don’t know what happened to Margie,” Maeve said, softening her tone. “I’m sorry, Dolores. I hope you find her.”

Seemed that Margie had been smart enough to hit the road. The jig was up, as Jack used to say, and the handwriting was on the wall. If she stayed around, she might be arrested and sent to jail for knowing what she knew and keeping it to herself. Her life, as she knew it, would be over and even though she hadn’t been sent to jail for her role in the chain-of-custody case, or responsible for the other woman’s suicide—someone she had brought down with her—this time, she’d be done for.