Once Upon a Lie (7 page)

“Turn around slowly,” she said, watching his eyes as he did as he was told. That was a plus in his favor: he could follow directions. “Do you see the fantastic-looking brunette over there? The one who looks like a taller Natalie Portman?”

He turned back around, keeping one eye on Jo. “Uh-huh.”

“She’s thirty-eight, Jewish, a former gymnast, divorced, no kids.”

“Keep going.”

“She likes the Knicks. And she makes the best pot roast you’ll ever have. Bar none.”

“My mother makes good pot roast,” he said.

Great. A mama’s boy. “Play along, Doug,” Maeve said.

“Okay,” he said. “What else?”

“What else is there?” she asked.

“Does she want to get married again?” he asked.

Maeve considered this, not sure what the right answer was. But Doug made it easy for her. “Because I’m looking to settle down,” he added.

“Definitely,” she said, as if that had been her answer all along. She wanted to advise Doug not to show his hand so easily; that always led to trouble. “She’s dying to get married again.” Of that she was fairly certain.

His eyes narrowed. “What’s in it for you? How do I know that you’re not just trying to get rid of me? What if I wanted to date you?”

“You’re a Jew. I’m a Muslim. It would never work,” she said just as the air horn sounded. Doug looked at her quizzically, then jotted something down quickly on his date sheet before sauntering off. Maeve watched Doug’s Dockers-clad backside sidle away, his attention still on Jo. Mission accomplished.

Maeve leaned back in her chair, her work for the evening complete. Another candidate slid into the chair across from her, talking while she continued to focus on Doug, wondering if he was good enough for her friend or if her usually correct instincts had let her down.

The new bachelor rapped his knuckles on the table. “Hello?”

Maeve dragged her eyes away from Doug, calculating that the air horn needed to sound three more times before the round robin brought him to Jo’s table. “Um, hi?” she said, focusing on the man in front of her. The face that stared back at her was mid-forties, black, brown-eyed, and handsome in a way that suggested this wasn’t his first rodeo. But he looked tired. Really tired. As tired as she felt.

“Your name?” he asked, looking down at his date sheet. “Or are we just going to use numbers?”

“What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

“Not sure. I wasn’t really paying attention during the instruction portion of the evening,” he admitted, but he held out his hand anyway. “I’m Rodney.”

“Maeve,” she said, taking his hand.

“What kind of name is Maeve?” he asked.

“Gaelic.”

“What does it mean?”

She had been hoping he wouldn’t ask, but now that he had, she had to tell him. “‘Intoxicating,’” she said, blushing. “The original Maeve was a warrior queen in first-century Ireland. She wielded a pretty hefty sword, according to Irish lore.”

“And you?”

“Just a spatula,” she said.

“So what brings you here, Maeve?” he asked, folding his arms on the table.

“Speed dating,” she said as convincingly as she could muster. Something about him made her want to tell him the true story, but she held back. The people here were taking this whole exercise much more seriously than she was, and she couldn’t recommend that every man she met date Jo.

“You don’t sound very convincing,” he said.

She shrugged. “Giving it my best shot.”

“Me too,” he said. “What do you do?”

“I own a gourmet shop in Farringville. The Comfort Zone?” she asked, but she could tell by his face that he either had never been to Farringville, despite its relative proximity to the speed-dating location, or he didn’t eat gourmet or comfort food. “What do you do?” she asked.

“This and that. Import/export.”

She didn’t know why, but she liked his deliberate vagueness. Maybe it allowed her to create an identity for him that suited what she wanted to think. “Well, if your ‘this and that’ takes you to Farringville, make sure you come in and visit,” she said, sounding far more confident than she felt. “It’s only about a half hour from here in Westchester.”

He studied her for a minute. “I just might do that,” he said. “So what are you doing here?” he asked in a rephrase of his earlier question.

“Speed dating,” she repeated.

He continued to look at her. “I don’t think you are.”

“Well, you’d be wrong.” She decided that turning the tables was the only way to go. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking to find a good woman to date.”

“I don’t think you are.” She paused a minute, the truth hitting her so hard that she was surprised she hadn’t figured it out earlier. “You’re a cop.”

His calm façade cracked slightly, but not enough so that Maeve could tell if she was right. A slight shrug was all she got in return. He tried to tell her she was wrong, but he couldn’t; the word
no
stuck in his throat.

“You’ve got cop written all over you.”

“Really?”

“My father was a cop. I can spot you guys a mile away.”

He regarded her coolly.

She sensed she wasn’t going to get the truth, so she tried another tack. “Okay, Officer. We’ve got work to do here. What would a date entail?” she asked after a few seconds of silence.

A smile played on his lips as he looked off into the expanse of the ballroom. Finally, he brought his attention back on her. “A bottle of Côtes du Rhône. A meal we cooked together. Dessert? Definitely.” He leaned in and whispered conspiratorially. “And I ain’t talking chocolate mousse here.”

She wondered why the hair at the nape of her neck was damp, but she didn’t have time to really process it; the air horn sounded and Rodney moved on to the next table, his seat being taken by a bald guy wearing a loud paisley shirt more colorful than should have been legally allowed. She followed Rodney with her eyes, wondering what a cop would be doing at a speed-dating event and why, in spite of knowing that, she was intrigued. Maeve had tamped down any thoughts related to love and lust long ago and was surprised, sitting there, to find out that they still held a little place in her brain.

The guy at the table wanted to know her “sign.” She made up a story about being on the cusp with Aries rising, which got him talking about her tendencies and why they were a perfect match.

Sometimes, she was her own worst enemy.

Her attention previously trained on Doug, Maeve now watched Rodney move fluidly through the room, wondering what he was really doing there. Because that was a man who, in a five-minute interlude, had managed to pique her curiosity, something no one had been able to do in a very long time.

Maybe ever.

CHAPTER 8

Kids’ birthday parties were the worst.

Maeve had to remind herself several times during a party why she had started this part of the business. Oh, that’s right—seventy-five dollars a head with a minimum of ten kids. Throwing just two parties a month paid her rent and kept her going. Otherwise, it was muffin by muffin, scone by scone, as Cal so wisely pointed out, and even with the free help her two teenage daughters occasionally provided, it was tough going. She had her one paid employee, but Jo preferred to work the “front of the house,” as she liked to call it, passing up the opportunity to spend an afternoon with icing-covered kids.

After she’d hosted just a few, word had gotten out that a birthday party at The Comfort Zone was worth every penny, and soon Maeve was booking back-to-back parties every weekend.

Too bad she hated kids, her own notwithstanding, although even they made her question her devotion to them from time to time.

Before the party, she had visited her father again at Buena del Sol. She reminded him that he couldn’t leave the premises without her, even if it was just to go across the street to the deli to get a six-pack.

He responded by reminding her that he was sixty-eight years of age and that he didn’t have to listen to anyone. He was a grown man.

Once again, she didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was really eighty and that he did have to listen to her. And while he was a grown man, he was one whose brain didn’t fire on all cylinders. That conversation was like a broken record, and it didn’t matter how many times she told him; it only made her feel better for a short time and made him more determined to grab hold of his freedom. She had enough on her plate without tracking down another facility that wouldn’t just sedate him, strap him in a wheelchair, and wait for him to die. She kept all that to herself, though, extracting a promise from him—probably already forgotten—that he would stay put.

Once, he had been a detective from whom other detectives sought advice; he had spent thirty years on the police force, working far longer than he had to to collect a significant pension. It was the work that he loved and that kept him at it. Some days, he would regale her with stories that she had never heard, and she was still surprised to find that she was fascinated; she thought she had heard them all. His gift had been his gab, as he liked to say, Jack Conlon being the guy who was called when all else failed, when even the right series of questions in an interrogation didn’t elicit the right answer in a given situation. He could find common ground with anyone, and that made him trustworthy to even the crustiest of criminals.

He wasn’t a shadow of his former self; there were still flashes of that great sense of humor, and physically the old guy could probably take out men half his age. She wondered, though, how long it would be until he forgot her completely, looking at her as if she were the greatest mystery he had yet to solve.

Going from her visit with Jack straight to the party had been a bad idea. It was hard to be festive for a bunch of little kids when all she could think of was the next time he was found on the side of the road by a passerby or a cop, a newspaper tucked under his arm, a six-pack swinging back and forth as he made his way to a destination he wasn’t entirely sure of. Home? If asked, he would have no idea where that was.

She had a hard time getting her daughters to work the parties anymore, so today she was on her own; the girls had their limits, apparently. There were only nine girls for this party and they were fairly well behaved, the birthday girl’s parents’ bickering not an indication of the kids’ demeanors. One of the invited children hadn’t shown up, and it was clear that the father of the birthday girl—one Michael Lorenzo—was angling for a discount, one that Maeve was not prepared to give. The final count had come in the day before, as she requested, her policy set forth in the original contract that Cal had drawn up and that the parents had signed. Any no-shows on the day of the party were to be paid for in full, no exceptions. At the time, she’d wondered why Cal had worded the contract to make it sound as though any deviation from the final number would land the signer in the guillotine, but now she was glad for his legalese. It was right there in black and white, but that didn’t mean the fat guy in the Ed Hardy T-shirt wasn’t going to give her a hard time.

Mrs. Lorenzo had seemed like an agreeable woman when she had come in to book the party and then again to sign the ironclad contract. Maeve hadn’t been able to put her finger on it, but she found the right word when she compared the wet dish towel in her hand to the woman sitting on a chair by the kitchen door. “Sodden.” That’s all that Maeve could come up with. Today Tina Lorenzo wore a tight-fitting top that despite its fit seemed to be trying to pull away from the woman’s skin. Although she was fairly fit, Maeve wanted to tell Tina Lorenzo that a shirt that tight was off limits after your thirty-fifth birthday. Maeve didn’t need to see her eyes, always hidden behind dark sunglasses, to know that they spoke of pain and of sadness. Her body told a tale that no one but Maeve—or someone like her—would be able to guess. Whatever “it” was, it was there and on this woman; there was no hiding it. The woman pushed a lank lock of hair behind her ear, taking in the party from her perch on a stool that Maeve used when icing her cupcakes. She didn’t seem overjoyed at what seemed like her little girl’s dream party. She didn’t seem happy with the half-eaten cupcake in her lap on a crumpled paper plate.

As a matter of fact, to Maeve she didn’t even seem alive.

Maeve poured another round of juice into the girls’ cups, brushing past the birthday girl’s mother and feeling an electric jolt of depression as her back touched the woman’s knees. That was everyone’s mistake: they thought depression meant that you were dead inside, that there was no spark. There was a spark all right, Maeve thought; it was just a spark that deadened you from within with each passing day, taking energy from its source.

The father was yammering into his cell phone, presumably talking to one of the parents of the missing child, threatening them with an invoice if they didn’t show up at the shop within the next thirty minutes to pay for the party their kid was missing. By the way he was talking, though, Maeve determined that there was no one on the other end of the conversation and that what he was doing was just for show.

She shot him a look, thinking, So that’s how you want to play it?

“The Comfort Zone?” he asked the imaginary person on the other end of the conversation. “More like the Suck-Ass Zone.”

Classy.

One spilled juice and nine overly decorated cupcakes later, it was time for the cake. As Maeve passed by the mother again, her arms laden with a heavy three-layered cake just as Tiffany, the birthday girl, wanted, she noticed a bruise peeking out from the side of the sunglasses, a mark that the woman had taken great pains to hide behind a thick layer of gloppy makeup. Inexpertly applied, it only brought more attention to what Maeve could see was a fresh injury and one that would take a few days to show its true colors.

She put the cake on the stainless-steel table, around which sat the perfectly behaved children, and picked up her cake knife, the one with the serrated edge that made the cleanest cut. She smiled at the group. “Girls? I just need to run outside for one quick minute to get some candles I left in my car,” she said, fingering the box of candles that sat in the front pocket of her apron. “I’ll be right back.”