Once Upon a Lie (10 page)

Maeve reached over and flicked the cheese away. “It was Sean, Dad. Remember? We went to the wake?”

Jack looked up into the cloudless sky and pondered that. “Yes!” he said as the light bulb in his brain went off. “That’s right. That miserable wench Dolores had me in a headlock for most of the time we were there, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And Margie’s now a gay.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“She told me she got married to another woman. Have you ever heard of such a thing?” he asked.

“Yes, Dad. Civil unions are legal in New York now.”

“What did he die of?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Sean,” he said, exasperated, as if she were the one having a hard time keeping up.

“Dutch elm disease,” she said. He looked confused, so she prodded him gently. “Do you remember what happened to Sean?”

He thought for a moment. “Don’t care. Hated the kid.”

That wasn’t exactly news, but the way he said it was more direct than Maeve had ever heard him verbalize.

“I seem to remember a cruel streak. Am I wrong there?”

Her silence served as tacit agreement.

“No wonder he worked down on Wall Street. Probably among his kind there.” He shook his head. “Pass that cheese.”

Maeve pulled her chair closer to his, thinking that the proximity would allow him to understand what she was going to say. She had five minutes or so before the girls came home, and she needed both to tell him about the circumstances of Sean’s death and his possible questioning by the police and leave herself enough time to deal with his reaction. “Dad, listen. A policeman was by the bakery. He said they are questioning family members.”

He looked puzzled. “That’s strange. Now why would they be doing that?”

She looked at him, raising her shoulders slightly in question. “Sean didn’t really die of Dutch elm disease,” she said.

“You don’t say,” Jack said, revealing that he was in on the joke.

“He was murdered.”

“I know. Buena gets the papers delivered daily.”

“Does anyone know he was your nephew?” she asked.

“Just Moriarty,” he said, referencing his best friend, another retired cop, though his problems were different from Jack’s. Although he had bounced back nicely from his last stroke, he still bore the evidence of what it had done to him, mainly slurred speech that made him sound as if he’d had a few belts with his turkey chili and rice pudding. Otherwise, he was totally fine. Hale, even. Maeve made a mental note to find out if he still drove.

“They can’t think that one of us did it, can they?” Jack repeated. Maeve hadn’t heard him the first time, deep in thought about Jimmy Moriarty and his ability to drive. She didn’t want to tell him that the “us” he was referring to—her and him—was really only “him.” They thought he did it.

“They might, Dad.”

She continued to look at him, watching the synapses firing for the first time in a long time.

“Fools.”

Not really. Both Jack and Maeve had plenty of motive—and a little opportunity—to kill Sean. “Where were you on the night Sean died, Dad?” she asked.

He didn’t hesitate. “I went to a Knights of Columbus meeting at the church. That idiot Maloney wants to make the communion breakfast a monthly event. Moron. We can’t even get people to come once a year.”

Jack hadn’t been a member of the K of C since 2002.

“Then, I went to the Steak House for a pint.”

The Steak House was around the corner from their old house. Maeve felt an electric charge of anxiety run through her veins. This wasn’t going to be easy. She knew it was useless to ask him these questions, but she’d figured she would give it a try.

“Oh, well,” he said. “Poor bastards are just doing their jobs.” He tinkled the ice in his empty glass. “Just let me know when I have to talk to them. I have a pretty busy schedule,” he said. “Book club this month is going to be a humdinger and I don’t want to miss it.”

“Why’s that, Dad?”

“We’re reading
Fear of Flying
. I thought it was about nervous airline passengers.” He gazed off into the distance. “I’m so happy I was wrong.”

CHAPTER 12

“God, what do you have in here? Your bag weighs a ton,” Jo said, moving Maeve’s purse from the counter to the table next to the back door.

Maeve grabbed her bag and stowed it on the top shelf of the standing metal rack next to the five-pound bag of sugar and the ten-pound bag of flour that she kept in the event of an emergency. Jo was responsible for placing the dry goods order, but her lack of punctuality was matched only by her incredible forgetfulness when it came to ordering. Maeve had thought that giving Jo more responsibility was a good thing because it took things off her own plate, but it was still an evolving process.

To wit: They were out of butter.

She was headed to the grocery store, leaving Jo in charge of making another batch of cupcakes. The two dozen that they had made that morning were already gone. She grabbed her bag from its place next to the sugar and the flour and hefted it over her shoulder. It was heavy. Too heavy. She had to do something about that. She added that task to the list she was keeping in her head, the one that was blank every morning when she got up because she’d forgotten everything while sleeping.

“I’ll be right back,” she said to Jo.

“And I’ll be right here,” Jo said, pulling a chair up to the stainless-steel counter, positioned so she could see customers coming into the shop, and opened the textbook she was now bringing to work so she could keep up with her schoolwork. Baking, apparently, was going to take a backseat to social work.

At the store, Maeve resisted the urge to do her regular grocery shopping, knowing that she would spend way too much and not have enough time to unload before going back to the shop. A few things caught her eye that she couldn’t resist, though—the cheap shampoo her kids hated but that was half price, another box of Band-Aids for the shop, discounted pasta—and she filled up her cart more than she had originally intended.

In the checkout line, Maeve felt a tap on her shoulder.

“Excuse me?”

This was her second pass through the checkout. Butter was on sale and wouldn’t be this cheap again for a long time, so she bought as much as the store would allow at one time and made multiple trips through the checkout line to pay. She hoped the bags that she garnered in her first go-round didn’t mark her as a scofflaw. She turned around.

A young mother, a baby in the front part of the cart, a toddler in the cart itself, was pointing at the floor. “Your purse. I think you have a hole in your bag.”

Maeve looked down, spying money on the ground along with a tampon whose wrapper had seen better days, along with the pen she had lent Rodney Poole. And trying to make its way through the ever-widening hole in the fake leather was the barrel of the gun that she had kept close to her ever since she had removed it from her father’s house. She had deemed her original hiding place, a shoebox on the shelf in her closet, unsafe, and she still hadn’t gotten to the bank to rent a safe-deposit box. So she was left to carry it around, its heft reminding her that she needed to find a good way to dispose of it and fast. She quickly pulled the purse to her chest, pushing things back through the hole in the bottom and throwing the butter onto the counter as the person in front of her finally figured out how to use the keypad on the credit machine.

“Bonus card?” the checkout guy asked her. “You know it’s only eight to a customer, right?” he asked, pointing to the butter.

She dug through her bag and pulled out her card, which he swiped and handed back. She positioned herself so that the bags already in her cart wouldn’t be so obvious. “I know,” she said. She didn’t tell him about the other pounds of butter that she had already put in her trunk, probably melting into the environmentally conscious bags that she had remembered to bring into the store. “How long is the sale on?” she said, her hands shaking at the thought of how close she had come to exposing the gun in her bag.

“Over at the end of the week. Eight to a customer.”

“Got it,” she said, throwing butter into another bag as quickly as she could. She’d be back the next day and purchase another gross. Seriously. What were they going to do? Throw her in coupon jail?

In the parking lot, she took deep breaths, trying to calm down. As she passed the two handicapped spots nearest the store, she spotted Tina Lorenzo struggling to disengage a jammed cart from a long line of other carts sitting under a canopy. In her arms was a toddler who was squirming to get away and holding her free hand was Tiffany, the little girl from the birthday party, who still wore the same placid look that she had that day in the store, her blond curls billowing around her head like bleached cotton candy. Like that day in the store, she was singing a song to herself when she thought no one was watching.

Maeve put the thoughts of the gun out of her head and rushed over to help the woman free a cart from the massive chain of immovable metal. After Maeve stowed her cart, she put her purse into the bag with the butter, figuring the gun had less of a chance of falling out if it was secured in yet another bag. “Here. Let me help you,” she said as she wrestled with the last cart in the line.

It was the little girl who recognized her first. “You’re the cupcake lady.”

She guessed that was one way to identify her. “Yes. I’m the cupcake lady.”

Tina Lorenzo wasn’t wearing her sunglasses today, and Maeve could see that the troubled look she suspected lived behind them was in full evidence in the harsh sunlight of the fall day. “Thank you. Tiffany had a great time at the party.”

“I’m so glad.”

Tina put the baby in the cart and hoisted Tiffany up and over the side and into the back. She turned so that her back was to her children. “I’m sorry about my husband.”

Maeve waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry.”

Tina reached into her own bag and pulled out her wallet; she took four twenties and pressed them into Maeve’s hand. “Here. I haven’t been able to get to the store to pay you directly, but I hope this makes us even.” She zipped her bag shut. “Keep the change.”

Maeve clutched the money in her hand and looked at Tina Lorenzo. Something hung in the air between them. Maeve wanted to tell her that there was a way out of her situation, but she didn’t know this woman from a hole in the wall. And when she thought about it, was she the right person to be doling out advice? A woman who had an unflattering running commentary in her head every time her ex-husband was around? A woman who wanted to kill Jo’s husband and had even crafted a plan for doing so and getting away with it? A woman who wasn’t a wee bit sad that her cousin had been found with a bullet in his head in the middle of a dark and deserted park? All Tina had to do was ask Cal, and she’d know that Maeve didn’t handle conflict with anything approaching reason. With nothing left to say on the subject of leaving, she thanked Tina and walked away.

“It’s complicated,” Tina called to her back.

Maeve paused. She supposed it was.

CHAPTER 13

Jo had no idea that when Doug from speed dating had called her, he already knew that she was Jewish and single and made a mean pot roast. She was so excited to share the news of their first date that she was actually blushing. And Jo did not blush. She was way too jaded for that.

“Do you remember him from speed dating?” she asked Maeve. “You must have met him.”

“Tall, light hair, nice eyes?” Maeve asked, doing her best to look as if she were searching her overcrowded memory.

“Dockers, though? With pleats?” Jo said. “If we’re going to get serious, the first thing we’re going to do is go clothes shopping.”

“Remember, Jo,” Maeve said, pulling a loaf of bread out of the oven, careful to keep her hands away from the heat, “you can change a man’s wardrobe, but you can’t change his taste.”

Jo found a broken cookie amid a pile of perfectly round ones and shoved it in her mouth. “Yeah, but the Dockers will have to go.”

“Give the guy a chance,” Maeve said. “If he’s the guy I remember, he seemed nice.”

“Yeah, but he was speed dating,” she said derisively.

“And so were you.”

“I know, but that’s different.”

Maeve didn’t have time to get into why that might be; the corkboard over the sink held orders that had piled up and needed to be filled if she was going to stay in business. “Before you go, can you give me a hand?” she asked. “Like do your job?”

Jo’s mind was still on the date and stayed that way while she attempted to start a batch of brownies. “Will you drive me to the train station later? We’re meeting at Grand Central.”

They closed at four, and Maeve spent the next hour mopping the front of the store while Jo transformed herself from shopgirl into femme fatale. As Maeve was putting the mop away, a little song played on her cell phone, letting her know that she had a text. It was from Cal. He had let her know that morning that he was taking Jack to the Bronx to be questioned. As a result, she had been a nervous wreck the entire day, waiting to hear from him.

His text was short: “Met with Detective Poole. Talk soon.”

She wrote Cal back to thank him for letting her know. An image popped into her head: her father wearing a sport jacket and two different shoes, being coached by Cal, wearing the baby like the plastique worn by a suicide bomber, arriving at the precinct.

Jo emerged from the bathroom and Maeve was astounded at the transformation. Her friend now wore a pair of tight black jeans, a white shirt, and high-heeled black boots.

“Yowza,” Maeve said. “Who needs speed dating when you look like that?”

“I did,” Jo said. “In the worst way. It was either that or move out of this town. There’s not a decent man who’s not already married, divorced with issues, or not aware that he’s really gay.”

Girl had a point. Maeve put on the alarm and locked the back door.

“Doug does seem nice,” Jo said, hope creeping into her voice. “You know what he said?”

“What?”

“That pot roast is his favorite meal,” she said. “My signature dish. If that’s not serendipity, I don’t know what is.”