Once Upon a Lie (15 page)

Gabriela finally answered the door. “You’re going to wake the baby,” she said. She was dressed in a silk robe and, for some strange reason, high heels. Maeve had now been awake for seventeen hours and the stretch in her jeans was starting to let her down, the ass sagging, the hems drooping over the tops of the clogs she wore to the store to support her feet.

“Is Cal awake?” she asked.

Cal appeared behind his wife, his Bermuda shorts and polo shirt rumpled, his hair standing on end. Asleep on the couch. Maeve had seen this look many times and knew where he had been. Why his wife was dressed in a peignoir set with a come-hither look on her face didn’t make any sense to Maeve, but she had other things on her mind and didn’t want to waste her brainpower on figuring out why Gabriela did the things she did. As Gabriela stomped away in a pair of shoes that would have paid Maeve’s electric bill for the month, Maeve took great delight in noticing the bald spot again.

Cal held up a hand to stop her from speaking. “It was the midnight run. That’s why I let her out,” he said.

“She didn’t go to the midnight run packing meeting, Cal,” Maeve said.

“I called the church and the youth minister said her name was on the list.”

“Of course it was,” Maeve said. “Because she’s smart.” Unlike you, she held back. “She was at the party I told you she couldn’t go to.”

Cal stepped outside and closed the door behind him, leaving Gabriela to steam in her leopard silk robe in the massive foyer, the one that was bigger than Maeve’s bedroom. “I checked this out before I let her go.”

“Was I wrong, Cal? Do you want to be their friend? The good guy?” she asked. “I hate being the bad guy all the time. I hate being the one who has to monitor their every move.”

“Then stop,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Stop,” he said. “Stop monitoring their every move. So she was at a party. So she lied. You think she’s the first fifteen-year-old to tell a lie or three?”

Maeve stared up at him, incredulous.

“This is something we’re never going to agree on,” he said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his wrinkled Bermuda shorts. How he had gotten through law school and managed a successful career was starting to become a wonder to her. “I’ll keep her home until you come back to get her,” he said, turning to go into the house. He stopped before he got to the grand front door. With his back turned, he said, “To answer your question, no, I don’t want to be their friend. But I do want to have an open enough relationship where they will talk to me without being afraid. I don’t want them to be afraid. Plain and simple.”

“I—I don’t want them to be afraid,” she said, but she stammered, giving him the impression that there wasn’t a lot of confidence behind the statement.

“You do,” he said before he went inside. “You’d like nothing more.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant, but surely it was an indictment of her, a criticism of her parenting skills or, worse yet, her very being. Yes, she wanted to make them afraid. Bad things lurked out there and sometimes in innocuous, pleasant-looking packages. Sometimes those bad things—those bad people—told you things that you wanted to hear. She wanted them on their guard at all times so that they didn’t get hurt. She wanted to protect them. That’s all.

Nothing good happens at two
A.M.
, Jack used to say, but there were other times, times when the sun shone bright, when bad things happened, too.

She stared at the door for a long time after Cal went back into the house. If he was stupid enough to be outsmarted by a fifteen-year-old who could lie like someone with a serious pathology, she had no idea how he was going to keep Jack out of jail.

CHAPTER 19

Getting Jack an alibi was proving to be harder than getting Jo to fall in love with Doug of the Dockers, as Maeve had come to think of him. Although Doug had shown tremendous care and concern for Jo after her accident with the pocketbook, as Maeve had come to think of it, Jo didn’t seem very interested, so Maeve took every opportunity to remark upon how nice Doug seemed, how caring, how completely perfect for Jo.

Jo wasn’t buying it.

She was feeling better just a few days after her collision with Maeve’s purse and had not brought up the issue of the gun again, but she did ask for advice from her good friend about what to do about Doug. For once, Maeve thanked God for the self-absorption that took Jo away from the firearm in her purse and to the subject of her relationship.

“It’s like he wants to take care of me,” she said, disdain evident in her voice.

Maeve was cleaning the front counter, getting ready to close for the day. “And that’s a bad thing?”

“Well, no,” she started, clearly running out of gas with the thought. “I’m tired. Let’s talk later. Doug is bringing me chicken soup.”

“That’s nice!” Maeve said, trying to fake-cheer her way into Jo’s brain to let her know that the guy was a keeper. She wasn’t feeling cheerful, and she couldn’t understand why Jo couldn’t see what she could: the guy was the real deal.

“Chicken soup is for a cold, not a head wound,” she complained. In the background, Maeve could hear the television blaring. Obviously, Jo’s headache had subsided, but that didn’t mean Maeve could expect her back at work anytime soon. That conversation hadn’t been broached yet, and Maeve suspected it would be awhile before she saw her friend again in a Comfort Zone apron.

Maeve couldn’t argue with that, so she took another route. “Just accept it graciously. And stop overthinking things. The guy is nuts about you. What more could you want?”

“Passion. Chemistry. Lust.”

“Oh, just those? Give it time,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

The parking lot out front of the store was empty as the clock crawled toward five. She went back to the shop so she could bake and keep up on things with Jo still recovering from her head wound. Maeve knew the plan she had concocted had a few flaws, but she was willing to give it a try. She hadn’t talked to Jack in a few days, but she suspected that even if she did, and they revisited the conversation about where he had been several Saturdays past, he still wouldn’t know, coming up with something about going to a dance class at Arthur Murray or going to his usual Saturday-night poker game with some of the boys from the precinct, two things that he hadn’t been involved in in more than thirty years. Maeve turned the
CLOSED
sign over on the front door and headed out the back, leaving her apron next to the sink and taking her purse—which still held the gun—down from the reconstructed metal shelving unit that sat next to the kitchen door.

If the information she had gotten from Mr. Moriarty was correct, this would have been about the time that he had dropped Jack off at the train station on the night that Sean was killed. Who knew if the same ticket agent would even be at the window tonight? Did the schedules for the agents change at all? Was there a separate set of agents for weekends? She didn’t know, but she figured it was worth a try to see if the agent was the same and if he remembered Jack from that night. Or others. When it came right down to it, Maeve wasn’t sure of the exact number of times Jack had gotten loose and where he had gone. He might have ridden the train a half-dozen times for all she knew.

She had a picture of Jack on her phone, and when it was her turn to approach the ticket window, after listening to the sad story of a woman who had gotten on the wrong train and now couldn’t figure out how to get back to Tarrytown, she held up her phone and asked the agent if he had seen this man in the not-too-distant past. The agent, a middle-aged guy with an impressive paunch straining behind the striped shirt and blue buttons of his uniform shirt, gave the picture a much longer gander than Maeve would have thought necessary.

“No.”

“Were you here a little over three weeks ago? On a Saturday?” she asked.

“Lady, I’m here every Saturday. Every Monday, too. Come to think of it, I’m here practically every damn day, so if I saw this guy, I would remember.”

“But that doesn’t mean he didn’t take the train,” she said, more as a question to herself than to the agent.

He threw his head toward a bank of machines at the far side of the station. “He could have used the ticket machines over there. I never would have noticed,” he said, looking over her head pointedly at the line of people forming behind her. “Now, if you don’t mind?”

She walked away, going over to check out the bank of ticket machines. They seemed easy enough to use, very intuitive, but would Jack have been able to figure them out? She had given him a small laptop computer so that he could e-mail with the girls, but even that had seemed beyond his abilities technologically. She poked at the screen dejectedly, wondering if Mr. Moriarty had remembered correctly or if he was as confused as her father, “misremembering” things and making up facts to suit the situation.

“I was wondering the same thing,” a deep voice to her left said.

She knew to whom the voice belonged, not needing to turn and look at the speaker. “Detective Poole.”

“Ms. Conlon.”

She finally turned and looked at him, ending her mindless poking at the ticket machine screen. “Just picking up a schedule,” she said.

“Or figuring out how your father could have gotten to the Bronx on his own pins,” he said. He was sitting on one of the metal benches along the same wall that held the ticket machines, his legs crossed, a folded
New York Times
on his lap. He looked like a regular commuter waiting for the train to take him to Grand Central, just an ordinary guy killing some time by catching up on the news. At this time of day, there were a fair number of people in the station, and he didn’t look out of place, his rumpled corduroy pants and tweed blazer a credible uniform for a guy on his way to work, even in the late afternoon.

“So you’re following me now?” she asked, frozen in the spot at the ticket machine.

“Not exactly,” he said. “You probably won’t believe me when I tell you this, but I came by the store to buy more cupcakes.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t believe you.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, getting up. “The ticket agent doesn’t remember seeing your father.” He smiled sadly. “But as he told you, and he told me, that doesn’t mean he didn’t take the train.”

“There’s no way my father could have figured out how to use this machine,” she said, poking angrily at the screen welcoming her to Metro-North. “You don’t know him like I do,” she said.

“That’s true, Ms. Conlon,” he said, the formality coming back into their relationship. “But maybe he’s a little more technologically savvy than you think?”

She waited. Maybe he had some news to impart, something that he was holding back for maximum dramatic effect. She clutched her bag closer to her chest, trying not to clutch it so tight as to give away the outline of the gun resting in its dark, messy depths. But there was nothing. Just conjecture. Was Jack was better at the computer than she had thought? Was Poole’s silence suggesting that?

She looked out over the tracks below to the river beyond them. “And even if he had gotten to the Bronx,” she said, spinning her defense as she stood there, “how would he have gotten from the station to the park?”

Poole was not impressed with her reasoning. “Cab?” he said. He smiled that sad smile he had. “I also understand that your father does quite a lot of walking, too. He’s in good shape for an old guy.”

Maeve couldn’t let it go. “Then how did he get Sean to meet him?”

Poole was cryptic. “Maybe you should ask him that.”

“When are you talking to him again?” she asked.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

She watched as a group of kids, all clad in Rangers’ hockey jerseys, headed down the stairs toward the platform to wait for the next train to the city, their voices melding together into one rich sound, the sound of pure excitement. “He didn’t do it,” she said quietly. She wasn’t sure how many times she’d feel obliged to say that but would just keep repeating it until someone understood and left him alone.

“Where are your father’s guns, Ms. Conlon? The ones from his days on the PD?”

It should have been a question that she expected, but she was caught off guard. One had been sold years ago, while the other was still in the bottom of her purse. Regardless, she wasn’t giving a direct answer to the question. “I’m not exactly sure, Detective. Did you ask my father?”

“Of course,” he said, his attention diverted by the sound of an Amtrak train steaming into the station. “As you might expect, he can’t remember.” He studied her face. “A lot of ex-cops at Buena del Sol.”

“A lot of ex-cops in the area,” she said.

“A lot of them probably keep their guns.” He smiled. “I know I would.”

“Really?”

“Yep, tough habit to break, I imagine,” he said. “Once you’ve been armed. In control.”

She knew what he was insinuating—Jack had access to firearms even if he didn’t still have his own guns—but she played dumb, figuring that was the best course of action, given the circumstances.

Poole stayed silent, too, waiting for the response that wouldn’t come.

They waited until the commuters who had come in on the train from Penn Station had streamed by, the cacophony of their voices dying out after a few long minutes.

“Off the record, Detective?” Maeve asked.

He considered that for a moment. “Off the record.”

“Focus your attention elsewhere. On other cases. On other people whose killers deserve to be caught,” she said, relaxing her grip on the bag, the Doppler effect of the kids’ voices fading into the background. “Because Sean Donovan? He wasn’t a very nice person.”

He walked away; it was clear he didn’t know the proper response to that statement. She had said too much and nothing at all.

But that didn’t change the fact that she knew that Jack was slowly moving from person of interest to prime suspect, and there was likely nothing she could do about it.

CHAPTER 20

With no one to cover for her during the morning rush and Jack probably having forgotten that he was meeting with detectives again today, she called Cal. They hadn’t spoken since Saturday and their argument on his front steps, and she hoped that he had cooled off enough to have a calm conversation with her about Jack’s interrogation.