Once Upon a Lie (24 page)

Jody wandered off, her garbage now stowed in its cedar shed, her cake ordered for the weekend. Maeve put the car in drive and headed home, still sticking to the back roads. She had never been so anxious to get back to an empty house.

CHAPTER 32

Julie Morelli came into the store right before yoga the next day and the sound of her voice made Maeve freeze, the coffee that she was dispensing into a mug for herself sloshing over the top and onto the counter. She grabbed a dish towel and wiped up what she could; the stream that was running onto the floor would have to wait.

She hadn’t seen Julie socially in a while. The visits to the dam had been her only sightings of the leggy yoga devotee, and in Maeve’s mind, those didn’t really count. She was glad she had stopped going to yoga because she had decided that she hated it. All of that relaxing and meditating was just another opportunity for her to be alone with her thoughts, and if there was one thing she had figured out, it was that that was no place to be. She felt a little guilty because that hour in yoga had constituted the only exercise she got for the week, especially after having promised Jack that she would take him for walks at the river. But she realized he was right and that they would never go. That promise had already been broken, and it didn’t look as though she’d be able to follow through anytime soon.

Julie’s yoga pants were giving her camel toe, and Maeve used every ounce of energy she had to draw her eyes to Julie’s face. Julie perused the items in the case while Maeve continued to clean up the mess she’d made. Lorenzo was well aware of Maeve’s presence at the dam, but she didn’t know if he had let Julie in on the fact that she was spying on them. Julie seemed to be her usual self-involved self, mussing her hair after looking at her reflection in the bakery case and talking to herself, because besides Maeve, there wasn’t anyone else to talk to and Maeve was otherwise occupied. She finally stood and threw the dish towel into the sink on the counter and asked Julie if she could help her. Jo was nowhere to be found.

“What’s fresher, the scones or the muffins?” Julie asked, pursing her lips.

Maeve had an unsettling image of Julie and Lorenzo in a carnal clinch in his minivan. Her stomach did a little lurch. “Made them both at the same time this morning.”

She smiled at Maeve. “I’ll take one of each.” She leaned over the counter, much more comfortable in Maeve’s presence than Maeve was in hers. “So, Maeve, I haven’t seen you at yoga.”

Maeve got a paper bag and picked out a scone and a muffin for Julie. “I found that it stresses me out.”

Julie let out a loud laugh. “Seriously? You are so funny, Maeve.”

She wasn’t sure why that was funny, but she let out a dutiful laugh as she handed Julie the bag. “How are the kids, Julie? Your husband?”

“Great!” she said. “Everyone’s great. Especially Frank. He’s great.”

Methinks she doth protest too much, Maeve thought. “Really.”

“Yes, really,” Julie said. “Doing great at work, loving life, spending time on the golf course. What could be better?”

Maybe not being married to you? “Nothing,” Maeve said. “Nothing could be better. That’ll be four dollars, please.”

Julie handed her a five and winked. “Keep the change,” she said.

My silence costs more than a dollar, Maeve thought as she shoved the bill into the cash register, her back turned to the counter. She wanted to ask Julie if she knew she was sleeping with a man who smacked his wife around and broke his little girl’s arm, but the jingling bell over the door signaled that she had left the store. Her departure coincided with Jo’s arrival from the kitchen.

“Is she gone?” Jo asked, a little breathless. Gossip. She had some, obviously. She had assumed her gossip voice (a barely audible whisper) and gossip face (complete incredulity). She watched as Julie navigated her sports car out of the parking lot before she spilled the beans. “I heard she’s having an affair.”

Maeve slammed the register shut. “Really?”

“Yes.” Jo came closer to Maeve, the better to spread whatever details she had heard. Maeve had to give her credit: although she was single and didn’t have children in the school system—two prerequisites to getting good information in the village—she really had her finger on the pulse of what went on in Farringville. “I ran into—”

Maeve held up a hand. “Stop. I don’t care.” She handed Jo an empty basket, the one where the muffins had been until Julie had bought the last one. “What Julie Morelli does with her spare time is not my concern.” She sounded so convincing, she almost believed herself.

Jo looked disappointed. “Fine. Want to read the blotter aloud?” she asked, going around the counter to pluck the village newspaper from the rack by the door.

She didn’t. She headed out the back door and into the parking lot. If she smoked, this would be the time she would light up, but that was one habit she had never gotten, sticking to garden-variety oral fixations such as eating and nail biting. There was a bench next to the door, and she sat down, staring up at a gray sky that threatened more rain and did nothing to alleviate her foul mood. Jo’s bike, parked next to her Prius, was listing to one side, the basket on the front starting to rust a little, giving her the idea that she should buy Jo a new basket and have semihandy Cal put it on, just a little something to continue to assuage the guilt she felt for the head wound.

The broken taillight on her Prius would need to get repaired. Add that to the list of things that needed to get done but would be pushed aside in favor of other things. Most of the cops in town were customers, so if she got pulled over, she would be sure to turn on the charm to get out of a summons. She wasn’t averse to a little bribery in the form of scones and coffee, either.

Jo was calling to her from inside the store, her voice insistent and a little shrill. Something was wrong. She jumped up and went inside, expecting Jo to be attempting to tackle an order she couldn’t handle or dealing with an unhappy customer, memories of the Batman cake flooding her consciousness. When she got inside, Jo was holding the cordless phone at arm’s length, the look on her face a mixture of distress and panic.

“It’s Jack,” she said.

The acid in Maeve’s stomach heated up so that it felt like hot lava roiling around inside of her; her palms went slick with sweat. She took the phone from Jo. “Dad?”

“Oh, Mavy, I did it this time.” The din in the background was muddled, as if he were holding the phone too close to his head.

“Did what, Dad?”

“I got myself arrested.”

She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.

“You heard me. Arrested.”

She didn’t want him to say too much over the phone and told him so. “So you’re at the Farringville police station?” she asked. She could be there in less than five minutes even if she hit the one light in the center of town.

“No. The Fiftieth.” She heard a catch in his voice. “It’s murder, Maeve. They think I murdered Sean.”

CHAPTER 33

Maeve racked her brain on the drive down, trying to recall who she knew in town who was a lawyer, and a sharklike one at that. It was Farringville, though; everyone was either in publishing or an architect. She didn’t need a book edited, and she wasn’t in a position to build onto her house. She also knew that Cal wasn’t up to the challenge of defending her father, his corporate legal instincts having served them not so well thus far. She had asked Jo to call him to get a recommendation; maybe he knew someone better up to the task. And if he gave Jo any guff, he’d get an earful. Cal got on the girl’s last nerve, and she wasn’t afraid to tell him.

In the meantime, she sped down the highway, hoping to get to her father before he got a twenty-five-year-old legal aid lawyer and ended up “in the system,” somewhere that was no place for an eighty-year-old who was completely innocent.

She had been to this precinct once, right after her twelfth birthday, though she’d never been inside. Rather, she had stood on the sidewalk in front of the putty-colored building, staring at the front door, wondering where the courage she had mustered earlier had gone. She was finally going to tell someone what she had endured for so many years in front of so many eyes, hoping that someone would finally see the truth and set her free. But the thought of her mother—the image of her mother—sprawled across the avenue, her belongings lost to the wind, stayed in her mind. If she told, who knew what would happen? Who knew what he would do next? So she stood until the shift change and Jack had emerged, thinking that his little girl had come to meet him after his workday to beg him to take her to dinner at her favorite pub or to ask for money. She did neither and he did both, walking her down to the pub on the corner, pressing a ten in her hand because of her excellent report card, telling her that it didn’t matter that he hadn’t had time to change, because when you had a girl as perfect as Maeve, you took her out and spoiled her.

To him, she was that perfect. But in reality, she was damaged goods.

She double-parked on the block next to the precinct, not caring if the Prius got towed. It was more likely she would get a summons for the broken taillight, but she would deal with that if it happened. Maybe after she gave Rodney Poole a piece of her mind, giving him hell for arresting an eighty-year-old man with encroaching Alzheimer’s, he would fix the ticket. In the event the car got towed, they’d take the train home or to somewhere Jack wasn’t suspected of murder.

Inside, the precinct was a beehive of activity, if a beehive comprised a cadre of cranky cops shuttling a group of unruly prisoners to and fro in front of a large desk that held a sergeant and a few assistant types who were answering phones and working on computers. She asked the desk sergeant where she could find Detective Rodney Poole or Jack Conlon.

“The old guy?” the man asked, and Maeve wasn’t sure if he meant Poole or Jack, so she nodded. He threw his head to the right. “Up the stairs. Detective squad.”

She raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, dodging a guy in handcuffs who apparently had decided to engage in a sit-down strike on the second landing, giving grief to the female uniformed cop imploring him to get up. She didn’t look much older than Rebecca or much more street savvy. She was practically crying at the effort of getting this guy either up or down. Maeve reached the top of the stairs and raced through the first opening. She saw Jack at the far end of the room, Poole at a desk beside him, staring wearily at him while Jack spun a tale, the details of which reached Maeve, a good twenty feet away.

“And that’s how we did it back then,” Jack said, concluding a lengthy and long-winded story, if Poole’s expression was any indication. Jack looked up, and for a fleeting instant, Maeve was convinced he didn’t know who she was. After a few long seconds, he broke into a grin. “This is my daughter, Detective. Maeve Conlon.”

Maeve clutched her purse to her chest and regarded Poole; keeping the gun in her purse was a boneheaded misstep. “I understand you’ve arrested my father?”

“He hasn’t been arrested, Ms. Conlon.” Poole stood. “We had a few remaining questions to ask your father.”

“Oh, good!” Jack said. “I really don’t look my best today. A mug shot would look like hell.”

“Does he need a lawyer?” she asked, not entirely sure how this worked.

“Do you think he needs a lawyer?” Poole responded.

Jack watched the exchange with interest. “I do not need a lawyer. What I need is a ham sandwich and a beer.”

Maeve put her hand on his shoulder. She’d get him the sandwich, but not the beer; by the time they got to lunch, he would have forgotten and would probably want Chinese takeout and a cream soda. “In a minute, Dad.”

“We just had a few inconsistencies in his story that we wanted to check out,” Poole said cryptically.

Maeve arched an eyebrow. Inconsistencies. That was rich. He was interrogating a guy with progressive mental degeneration and he was surprised by inconsistencies. He was screwing with her and she knew it. “Detective Poole, my father and I are happy to answer any questions you may have regarding Sean’s untimely passing, but this is getting ridiculous. He’s been dead over a month, you’ve questioned my father a number of times, and frankly, neither of us have time for this anymore.”

“We don’t?” Jack asked.

“I get the sense that you really don’t care if Mr. Donovan’s murderer is ever caught,” Poole said.

The din in the background faded, and it felt as if everyone were waiting for her answer. Poole already knew the answer to that question, so she didn’t feel compelled to prove him right. She kept her mouth shut, her purse clutched to her chest as if she were an old lady guarding her Social Security check and coupons, and stared at Poole. “Can we go?” she finally asked.

He waved a hand toward the door. “Yes. You can go.”

Jack jumped up from the chair. “You don’t have to ask me twice.” As he passed his daughter, his back turned to Poole, he gave her a little wink.

“Did you even give him a chance to call a lawyer?” she asked after Jack made his way across the open expanse of the squad room.

“We did. But,” Poole said, flipping through his notebook, “your father said, and I’m quoting, ‘I’d rather take my chances with a new law school graduate than that idiot ex-husband of my daughter’s.’” He flipped the notebook shut. “We took that as a ‘no.’”

That sounded just like something Jack would say. Maeve stood, rooted to the ground. “This is ridiculous, Detective. He’s an old man. How in God’s name could he have killed a man who was twice his size and half his age?”

“Very easily, Ms. Conlon. He could have shot him and walked away. It was a dark park, at night, with no one around. From what I gather from Mrs. Harrison at Buena del Sol, your father has a bit of a wandering jones. She told us that when we picked him up.”

Maeve resisted the urge to smile at the expression she had used many times herself.

“And as I have mentioned before, the person who did this knew enough to make the crime scene virtually unreadable.”

“Anyone with cable TV and a remote could do that, Detective.”