Once Upon a Lie (23 page)

Jack was sitting on a bench beside Tina Lorenzo. The baby was on her lap, sucking enthusiastically from a bottle of juice while Tiffany dallied on the jungle gym, the arm in the sling holding her back from playing with reckless abandon. They were the only family in the playground, and Tina was talking animatedly to Jack, who was listening eagerly. It looked as though they were old friends.

Maeve approached cautiously; she wasn’t sure why. As she got closer, she heard Jack bellow, “And there she is now!”

Tina looked at her and smiled tentatively. Tiffany jumped off the jungle gym and ran toward her.

“Do you have any cupcakes?” she asked.

“Dad, I was worried,” she said after saying hello to Tina and telling Tiffany that no, she didn’t have any cupcakes. “I thought you were going to come right back.”

“Right back where?” he asked, the smile on his face masking his uncertainty.

She waved it off. “It doesn’t matter. The soccer game is almost over,” she said.

“I was walking along and I saw this little girl. Doesn’t she look just like you did when you were little, Maeve?” he asked, beaming at the little girl, her face bringing back some memory from Maeve’s childhood that made him happy. “When I saw her, I thought to myself, Why, it’s my little Mavy! But then I remembered that you’re old now.” He slapped his knee and let out a big guffaw. “I mean, not old like me, but older than this little beauty.” He gave Tina Lorenzo a winning grin, and she was charmed. “I’m seventy-three years old,” he said, flexing his bicep. “I bet you find that hard to believe.”

Tina smiled genuinely, not the look of someone who was humoring an old man. Jack’s openness had that effect on people.

Tiffany pulled at the hem of Maeve’s shirt. “This is where I’m going to go to school next year,” she said.

“Kindergarten?” Maeve asked.

She smiled and Maeve could see two teeth missing from her bottom row.

“Kindergarten was the best year of my life,” Maeve said, and it was the truth. She still had her mother, and the torture hadn’t started yet.

“You look just like my Maeve,” Jack said again. “The spitting image.” He got that faraway look in his eyes, the one that told Maeve he was thinking about the past. It was the look of someone grasping for the string at the end of a kite, just out of reach. He looked at his daughter and smiled. “Just like you.”

CHAPTER 31

New day, new recipe.

Take a dash of nosiness, a sprinkle of annoyance, a cup of concern, and a layer of consternation, and bake for an hour. When you’re done, you’ve got a woman who should mind her own business instead of sticking her nose where others would not dare to tread.

Maeve had missed the dam. Seems that she and Michael Lorenzo both had Saturdays free, but for different reasons. That was the night her daughters went to their father’s house and one of the nights that Lorenzo exited the giant house in the new part of town to meet Julie Morelli, she of the big and apparently talented mouth, in the vacant parking lot adjacent to one of the county’s man-made wonders. Maeve wondered why it was Saturday and wondered if Julie had divorced the Mute or vice versa. It seemed too serendipitous to think that Maeve could continue her stealth missions on one of the only nights that she ever had free, but there you had it. Sometimes life hands you the lemonade first instead of the lemons.

She didn’t know why, but her mother was on her mind more and more. She’d thought that once Sean was dead she would have some peace; that she would stop thinking about her all the time. But the opposite was true. The red car, the contents of the purse strewn across the avenue, the lifeless body sprawled on the double yellow line … the thoughts stayed in her head, fighting for prominence in the little space she had left to think and feel. She had compiled the images from bits and pieces of conversations overheard throughout the years, snippets she had read in newspapers that had been left around, which had created what she was sure were imperfect memories of what had happened and what other people had seen. She slid down in her seat and closed her eyes, hoping to get rid of the tattered remnants of the thoughts of her mother, a person who, in Maeve’s mind, was rapidly becoming both larger than life and a distant memory all at the same time.

What was she accomplishing by sitting in the dark, a light rain falling once again, watching a man she had little knowledge of beyond what she had witnessed at the birthday party and the two nights she had confronted him? She wasn’t sure. Was it to let him know that someone was watching, even though she tried to stay as hidden as possible? Or was it to make sure that he was evil, as she suspected? A lot of men cheated on their wives, but his adultery just added to the specter of his menace and increased the sleazy factor tenfold. She went farther down in her seat and ruminated on the practical logistics of this tryst. Was Julie Morelli so hard up for a roll in the hay that she was content doing it in a minivan with an incredibly disgusting guy? Maeve shuddered to think that she would ever get to that point, happy that although it wasn’t necessarily her choice, she was now a practiced celibate who hadn’t really had a sexual thought in close to three years.

Except for the night of the speed-dating event.

Like the memory of her mother, which was faulty and skewed, her lingering impression of Detective Poole was not what it should have been, based on his occupation and the frumpiness that he since had exhibited in the execution of his job. That night, the night in which she had tried to steer romance in the direction of her lovelorn friend, he was someone different, someone who had a heartbeat underneath his pilled sweater and rumpled sport coat.

She wondered why he had let that—the heartbeat—show itself to her. Maybe the save-your-marriage baby hadn’t been as successful as he had hoped.

As the rain fell, Maeve watched the minivan from the safety of her Prius, which she realized was starting to smell like Rebecca’s soccer togs, the ones she left in the backseat after Maeve drove her home from the game yesterday and that wouldn’t be removed until Maeve had had enough of the odor of pungent teenage girl. Julie did what she did every other night when her interlude with Lorenzo was done. She got out of the minivan, climbed back in her sports car, and began talking on her phone, the time it took to execute whatever sexual task she had been charged with using up precious minutes when she could have been talking. Maeve waited until Julie drove past before starting the Prius, deciding that this was not the night to be confronting Michael Lorenzo.

Lorenzo, however, had other ideas.

Although she was at the far end of the parking lot and as hidden as one could be in the open air of a village park, he had spotted her. She wasn’t sure when or how, but he knew she was there; maybe his conscience had alerted him to the fact that what he was doing was wrong. Now someone besides Julie Morelli—a woman whose moral compass could be considered faulty at best—knew what he was doing with his spare time. Maeve saw him striding across the lot, his destination clear, so she began to accelerate, slowly at first and then flooring it when it became apparent that Michael Lorenzo was going to chase her on foot and that he had a baseball bat.

He was screaming at her, but she could discern only the curse words, of which there were many. She drove in toward him, hoping to scare him as he charged her like an angry bull, veering to the right at the last second to avoid the baseball bat coming down on her windshield and shattering it. As she drove past, he caught her right taillight with the bat and smashed it, the pieces scattering around the parking lot. She hit a large pothole and winced as the Prius listed to one side, half of it seemingly being swallowed up by the hole. She looked in her rearview window and saw him bent over at the waist, the exertion of chasing her sensible hybrid catching up with him. The bat was resting across his knees.

She angled out of the parking lot and up the ramp toward the main road, the only thing stopping her hands from shaking being her grip on the steering wheel. She decided, for safety’s sake, to take a detour through the back roads of the village just in case Lorenzo had gotten his wits about him and had plans to follow her home. She took a right and headed toward another town, making a quick left just before she got to the edge of the village proper and wended her way through the windy road that anchored her little burg on one side. When she realized she was hyperventilating, she pulled off onto a small dirt road where only two houses were set, turned off the car, and rested her head on the steering wheel.

For perhaps the hundredth time that month, she asked herself what she was doing, but she still didn’t have an answer. Tonight’s escapade underscored that she was way out of her league and things were getting to a point where she could get hurt if she kept it up. She needed to mind her own business. She needed to stay home and attend to her own affairs, the ones of a noncarnal nature. It was time to hang up her avenging angel persona and go back to the business of being a mother and a daughter.

But still. Something inside her had snapped, she felt, and she was using these nocturnal recon missions to fuel something inside of her, although she wasn’t attuned enough to her feelings to know what it was. Sean had seen to it that she’d never really be able to figure out what she thought, what was true, and what was a lie. She hadn’t been able to trust her feelings—her gut—for as long as she could remember.

Until now.

Her gut was telling her that what she was doing was not only right but necessary. Crucial. Important. She was making sure, in her own small way, that someone who was preying on the weak would be taught a lesson. She wasn’t sure what that lesson was, but she would figure it out in time.

She had rubbed the skin on her arm raw without realizing it, her sleeve pushed up over her elbow and the scar where the bone had poked out all those years before. These days, an arm broken like hers would have been set and then subjected to weeks of painful physical therapy, but back then the plaster cast was fitted, worn, and then sawn off a few weeks later. She pulled the sleeve down and lifted her head off the steering wheel. In front of her car was the mother of one of Heather’s classmates, a nice woman she had served pizza with at a basketball game two seasons ago and who rarely frequented the shop. She was holding a garbage bag and was ready to throw it into the shed at the foot of her driveway, the heft of it making the muscles in her bony arm stand out in a kind of strange, fleshy bas-relief. Instead of throwing the bag away and going back into the house, she stared at Maeve through the rain-slicked windshield of the Prius. Maeve saw her mouth her name.

She left the bag by the shed and started toward the car, her first name escaping Maeve’s memory even as she racked her brain to try to summon it. Maeve rolled down the window of the car. “Hi!” she said cheerfully to cover her overall panic at what had transpired at the dam and her inability to come up with the woman’s name.

“Maeve?” the woman asked.

Jane.

Joanna.

Jessica.

Jolene? That wasn’t it. “Hi,” Maeve repeated. “I was just going. I realized I had forgotten something and was going to turn around.”

“You’ve been here for a while,” the woman said. “I noticed you about fifteen minutes ago. Is everything all right?” The rain, now heavier than earlier, was soaking her blond bob, and Maeve felt bad at seeing it go from perfectly coiffed to sodden and droopy.

“I’m fine,” Maeve said. “Just forgot something.”

The woman put a hand over her head as if that would protect her head from the pelting rain. “It’s funny seeing you, because you know what I forgot?” she said, laughing. “I forgot to place an order for a cake next weekend.”

Maeve waited. She knew what was coming. The woman would give her an elaborate set of directions for what she wanted and never follow up with a phone call. She’d end up with a Batman cake instead of a bat mitzvah cake, or something equally ludicrous, and whisper all around town that Maeve was losing her edge. Instead of telling her to call her in the store, because she knew she wouldn’t, Maeve rustled around in her purse for a pen and a piece of paper, her fingers grazing the cool metal of the gun, the one that clearly wasn’t safe being stashed in a cheap knockoff with ripped lining but which inexplicably stayed in her possession at all times. “Shoot.” No pun intended, she thought.

The order was elaborate, and the woman—Judy?—didn’t seem to mind that the rain was soaking her through to the bone. She was relieved that Maeve had happened upon her driveway to do her mental inventory and seemed to forget that it was a little unusual and a lot strange that a local businessperson and mother was sitting alone on a back road at nearly ten at night, her car running, her windshield wipers slapping at a driving rain.

“And make sure the ganache doesn’t drip onto the cake round,” she said.

Maeve wrote that down, as if that would ever happen. “Okay…” Janelle? “Saturday? What time?”

“Three.”

“You got it,” she said, and put the paper back into her purse.

The woman didn’t back away from the car. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Maeve appreciated her concern and was even a little touched. Jody! It was Jody. Now she could call her by name. “Thank you, Jody, but I’m fine. Jody.”

“Because if you aren’t feeling well, I can order the cake from someone else,” she said.

I just got chased by a bat-wielding adulterer and now I’m taking cake orders in the rain, she thought. “I’m fine,” she said. “No chocolate ganache on the cake round. Got it.”

“And I really don’t want to spend more than fifty dollars.”

The cake she wanted cost sixty-five and she let Jody know, but the woman wasn’t budging. She remembered that Jody was a dental hygienist in a local office. Maeve wondered if she could bargain down her next cleaning. Maeve let out a little laugh; it was the price of doing business in a small town and she let it go, telling Jody the cake would be fifty dollars.

What a kick in the pants. In the span of a half hour she had gone from defending her life to defending her prices.