Once Upon a Lie (17 page)

He pulled out a small pad and a pen from his jacket pocket. “Give me her schedule for the next few weeks.”

“There is no schedule,” Maeve said. She thought that was obvious. “When she’s with me, she stays home. When she’s with you, she stays home. It’s as simple as that.”

She wasn’t sure what he wrote down, but he jotted something on the pad. For a supposedly smart guy, he was pretty dense sometimes.

She thought about their conversation as she drove away from Jo’s, now three joints lighter but still troubled by Jack’s repeated questioning by the police. She headed straight for Buena del Sol, where she hoped she could catch Jack before he went to dinner, if only to check what he was wearing.

Doreen was manning the front desk again and had her faithful companion, Caesar, in tow. She gave Maeve a big smile, one that Maeve tried to return but was so forced, it made her cheeks hurt. “Jack Conlon?” she asked.

“Is he expecting you?” Doreen asked.

“No. I’m his daughter. I’m just dropping in.” Hadn’t they been through this before? Maeve looked around the lobby of the facility and noted that a lot of residents had guests this afternoon. It was when the lobby and the surrounding grounds were empty that she felt Jack was in the wrong place, thinking that this was where family members stuck their elderly relatives to die. But today it was full of life and everyone seemed happy, even those who were being pushed in wheelchairs or getting around with the help of walkers. Still, she felt impatient and nervous and had to get to Jack’s room to execute her plan.

Doreen looked at her sadly. “Mr. Conlon isn’t answering the phone in his apartment, nor the page I sent out,” she said after a few minutes. She looked at Maeve expectantly.

Maeve felt that old flutter of fear, the one that started in her throat and slowly worked its way down to her stomach. “He’s not?”

“Nope,” she said, checking her log. “And it appears that he didn’t sign out on any of the excursion buses.”

So, no trip to the grocery store, no outing to Woodbury Common with the rest of the more ambulatory residents, no excursion to Mohegan Sun. Jack was on a walkabout. Maeve beat it back to her car without saying good-bye to Doreen or her stuffed simian companion and headed back the way she came, this time sticking to the roads closest to the river so she could spot him easily.

The road along the river, however, was empty of pedestrians, a fact that relieved Maeve in one way—the road was not suitable for walkers—but concerned her overall. Where was he? She took a chance that he had gotten to his favorite destination before she had arrived at the facility, so she headed to the walking path along the water, hoping that she could spot him easily. This late in the day on a weekday found the river walk almost empty, a few people taking dogs out for a pre-dinner walk, one or two kids riding bikes under the watchful eyes of parents, one woman pushing a jogging stroller. She scanned the thin crowd for a sign of her father, jogging along the path in a pair of clogs wholly unsuitable for running, and had reached a bend in a path before she spotted him.

He was sitting on a bench that was positioned above a cluster of rocks at the water’s edge, gentle waves lapping at the outcropping. His eyes were closed, his face turned up to the last rays of the sun, seemingly oblivious to anyone around him. It wasn’t until Maeve touched his arm—momentarily afraid that she had found him too late, postcoronary—that he jerked awake, his vision clearing after a few seconds, a smile lighting his face as he realized who was sitting on the bench next to him. Rather than look at him, she turned and faced the water.

“Went a-wanderin’ again, Dad?”

“Figured I was owed a wandering after the morning that I had,” he said.

“And what kind of morning was that?” she asked.

He folded his arms across his chest. “Now there’s a question you don’t need to ask.”

Which was his way of telling her either that he couldn’t remember or that he remembered every last detail of his questioning and didn’t want to talk about it.

“The thing I don’t understand is why they care so much that that little puke was killed. He had it coming,” Jack said, remembering enough about Sean—she wasn’t sure what—that his anger toward him came bubbling back up to the surface, something Maeve hadn’t seen in a long time. “I always told you that anyone who hurt my little girl would come to no good,” he said cryptically. She didn’t know what he thought he knew or what he remembered.

She felt another shiver go up her spine. She was shivering a lot lately. “What does that mean, Dad?”

“It means nothing. It means I don’t remember. Something bad happened.…” He closed his eyes again. “It means I don’t know why they’re looking at an eighty-year-old man with a bad memory for a murder. How in God’s name would I have gotten myself to the Bronx?”

His frustration seemed to be clearing his mind, his take on the situation more on point than at any other time. She thought about the ticket stub in her pocket, wondering how she was going to get it into his wallet or his apartment at the facility.

“You didn’t hurt Sean, Dad,” she said, even though she didn’t think he was unsure of that point.

“I hope I didn’t,” he said. “But frankly, I don’t care if I did or if they ever catch who did. He was bad.” After a few seconds, he looked at her worriedly. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

She laughed. “Now why would you think that, Dad?”

He shook his head and stared out at the mountains on the other side of the river. “I don’t think that. I think any one of us in the family had motive. Kid stole money from my brother Brian, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Wrecked his mother’s car, too.” He closed his eyes as if to stop the memories that at other times he reached for. “You don’t think they’re going to put me in jail, do you, Maeve?”

She tried not to let her heartbreak show on her face. “No, Dad, I don’t.”

He tried to laugh it off, but she could hear genuine concern there, right below the glimmer of bravado. “Because I don’t think I would make it. I mean, I’m still built like a guy half my age…,” he started.

“Yes, well, if you keep up these daily three-mile walks, you’ll be built like a guy a third of your age,” she said. “Dad, you’ve got to stay put at Buena del Sol.”

He snorted dismissively. “It’s landlocked. You know how I hate that.”

“So, I’ll come get you and we can walk the river after I close the shop. How about that?”

“Sounds fine. Won’t happen, but it sounds fine,” he said. “You’ll get too busy with the girls or you’ll stay open late to do a cooking class, and the next thing you know, it will be winter and I won’t have seen the outside of Buena del Sol in four months.” When he saw that she was getting upset, though not necessarily disputing his prediction, he patted her knee. “Forget it. I don’t want to make you feel bad. But you already do enough to make sure I’ve got it good. I’ll try not to mess up.”

She pointed toward the end of the walk, the spot where the path ended and a mosaic-tile oval made people turn around and start back toward the parking lot. “Race you to the end?” she asked.

He looked at her shoes. “With you in clogs? You’re on,” he said, bolting up from the bench and starting a slow trot toward the end of the walk. For an old guy, he was surprisingly fast, and Maeve had to hoof it to keep up. When she reached him she was out of breath, but he wasn’t so he slowed down. They jogged the rest of the way and part of the way back, Maeve begging him to stop halfway; they walked to the car slowly, allowing her to catch her breath.

As they reached the parking lot, Jack had a question for her. “Who do you think killed Sean, Maeve?” he asked.

“Like you, Dad, I don’t care,” she said. She punched the keypad and opened the doors. “Hop in.”

Back at Buena del Sol, he escorted her in past Doreen—today, “dumber than a box of rocks,” according to Jack—to his apartment on the second level of the facility. It had been a few weeks since Maeve had been in the apartment, and she was happy to see that it was clean and that Jack had enough of the food items that he liked—cheese, some diet soda, and a couple of cartons of yogurt—so that she didn’t have to make a trip to the grocery store. When he excused himself to use the bathroom that was attached to his bedroom, she looked around the apartment to see the best place to stick the ticket stub so that it would be alternately noticed and unnoticed. She decided to stick it under a magnet that held an image of Rebecca on the soccer field, one of the “extras” that Maeve had purchased when team pictures had been ordered. She stuck it under the powerful magnet and stepped back, admiring her handiwork. It was now right there, proof that Jack had been at the Yankees game and not in Van Cortlandt Park the night that Sean had been killed.

When Jack came out, she gave him a kiss. “You look tired. No more marathon walks for a while, okay?”

He gave her his usual snappy salute. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m not kidding, Dad,” she said.

“I’m not either,” he said. “I am kind of tired,” he admitted. She was nearly out the door when he called her name. “What am I going to do if the police call me again?”

“I have a feeling they’re done with you, Dad,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

He looked around the apartment as if he were memorizing every knickknack, the placement of all the furniture. “Because I’m not really sure I didn’t murder him,” he said. “It’s not like I didn’t think about it once or twice.”

“Why did you think about it, Dad?”

He looked at her, but he had already forgotten. “About what, honey?”

“About Sean. Hurting him.”

“Bad seed, that kid. Didn’t you think so?” He shook his head. “I feel like I wanted to hurt him.”

She rubbed her arm instinctively, the one that had been shattered and which had required that she be taken by one of Jack’s cronies to the emergency room, Jack not wanting to waste the time waiting for an ambulance. “I think we all thought about it, Dad.” She rubbed the arm until the skin was hot. “At least once or twice.”

Maybe more.

CHAPTER 22

Jo’s doctor was thrilled with the progress she had made and impressed with his handiwork. Jo was not quite as enamored with the way her head looked and let him know.

“Is my hair going to grow back? Will I have a scar? Should I stay home from work longer? Are you single?” she asked, the last question slipping out amid the other, more salient concerns that she had regarding her accident and the overall well-being of her head.

The guy was game, answering each question in the order it had been asked. “Yes. Probably. Soon. Yes.”

A smile spread across Jo’s face as she realized that she had gotten the answers she wanted, the scar notwithstanding; the hair would probably cover that. “Okay!” she said, brighter and lighter than she had been in a week.

“And you can return to work,” he added.

At that news, she didn’t look quite so thrilled, but she went with it. “But no heavy lifting, right?”

DR. NEWMAN
—Maeve finally got a look at the name tag that had been hidden under his lab coat—smiled. “You can do all the heavy lifting you want.”

“But I shouldn’t work quite so many hours as I usually do, right?” she asked.

“That depends,” he said, writing a few notes down on his chart. “How many hours do you normally work in a week?”

“Fifty,” she said at the same time that Maeve said:

“Twenty-five.”

He looked confused. “You can work anywhere between twenty-five and fifty hours a week. You’re fine, Ms. Weinstein. Go about your daily life and put this little bump in the road behind you. Okay?”

Jo looked disappointed, clearly not ready or willing to resume her role as Maeve’s halfhearted helpmate in the store. According to Dr. Newman, she was definitely able. “Okay,” she finally said, relenting. She pointed to Maeve. “She’s my boss, so what she says goes, anyway.”

Maeve resisted the urge to laugh. That was never the case, and she had the extra logged hours to prove it.

“Take care, Ms. Weinstein,” Dr. Newman said, sending them on their way. When Maeve turned around, he was holding his clipboard at his side, a smile spreading across his face.

They walked down the hall toward the front door, passing the nurses’ station, where a man in a baseball hat, his back turned, was filling out paperwork while a nurse helped him find the proper spaces to fill out his personal information. Next to the nurses’ station was another section of the emergency room, and from inside one of the bays came the sound of a child crying, a woman’s voice uttering soothing words. As Maeve passed the man, almost in slow motion, he turned and looked at her, the look on his face causing her to suppress a gasp and force herself to keep walking.

“Mr. Lorenzo?” the nurse at the station said. “We need your insurance card. We need an X-ray of your daughter’s arm.”

But he was fixated on Maeve, and as she watched the color creep up from the collar of his T-shirt and onto his stubbly jowls, she grabbed hold of Jo’s arm and moved her forward quickly. Jo was too busy taking inventory of every sick person in every slot of the ER, noting who had someone accompanying them and who was alone, chattering away to Maeve about the state of health care in the United States and why she was voting for some fringe candidate in the next presidential election.

“Mr. Lorenzo?” the nurse called, trying to get his attention.

Maeve dragged her eyes away and fixated on the tiled floor in front of them. In the slot where the child had been crying was Tina Lorenzo, begging her daughter to be quiet so as not to disturb the other patients. The little girl was in too much pain, though, and Maeve could hear it in her voice as a low, moaning sob that was replaced by a high-pitched cry that even got Jo’s attention.

“Poor kid,” Jo said. “Wonder what happened to her.”

He finally broke her arm, Maeve thought. That’s what happened to her.

CHAPTER 23

When things had gotten bad, just before the end had come, Maeve had told Cal that they needed to remember why they had once loved each other. All he had done was stare back at her blankly; it was then that she knew he had already forgotten and would never remember.