Once Upon a Lie (8 page)

Lorenzo looked at his watch and tapped the face, letting her know who was in charge.

You think so, huh? she thought as she exited through the screen door. Let’s see.

Outside, it was easy to pick out the minivan that had transported the dysfunctional family to the party, the family with the child who was afraid to get icing on her hands, the mother who either endured abuse or had had a run-in with the old standby—the doorknob—and the father whose silly fashion sense betrayed a sinister side that Maeve could almost smell on him. The minivan—with a Mad River Glen bumper sticker on the back—was the only other car in the back parking lot, parked beside and almost on top of her sensible but aging Prius in which she found the candles. She wedged herself between the two cars, and she indulged in a fantasy in which she ran the knife down the side of the van until she got to the end; it was far enough down on the body of the car that it wouldn’t be noticed immediately. In her mind, the final flourish came when she carved “F U” right above the fender.

But she didn’t do any of that. She’d had every intention of doing it when she had left the store but knew what would happen if the car was found with a scratch on it. First, Mr. Lorenzo would take her to task for allowing people to drive erratically in the lot, as if she had any control over that. With her luck, he’d blame it on Jo and then Maeve would really have to kill him. Then, he’d take out whatever pent-up rage was left on his wife and possibly his kids. He had no self-control, while she had it in spades, and that’s what separated her from him. With a satisfied smile on her face, she walked back into the store, the candles held tightly in her hand.

“Now who wants a piece of chocolate cake?”

CHAPTER 9

Maeve wanted to remind Julie Morelli that when they were in yoga class, and corpse pose in particular, there was no talking.

She would have liked to put Julie in corpse pose for good, but that wasn’t polite. Even Jack, who had met her in the store once, couldn’t stand her, and he didn’t remember anyone long enough to form an opinion. Julie was different, though. “Could talk a dog off a meat wagon,” he liked to remark in her presence, but she was too stupid to realize he wasn’t talking about canines and hamburgers in general. Maeve always thought that no jury in the land would convict Julie’s husband—also known as “the Mute” to Maeve and her friends—if he smothered her while she slept, the only time her mouth wouldn’t be working overtime. Maeve turned her head to the right and smiled at Julie, when in her heart she wanted to tell her to shut the hell up.

Julie took Maeve’s smile to mean that talking was now appropriate. “So sorry about your cousin,” she said. News traveled fast. Maeve had told only one person besides Cal—Jo—that Sean Donovan, the guy whose murder had been all over the papers, was her first cousin. Maeve had been counting on the fact that there would be nothing to connect her to him and on the fact that over two weeks later, the media attention would start to wane. Apparently, she had been wrong. “Were you close?”

Maeve looked back up at the ceiling, her legs stretched out, her arms held tightly at her sides. That was the funny thing about yoga: although Maeve had taken it up for the relaxation it supposedly provided—and to replace the meditation on Sunday that going to church used to provide—she was more tense than ever when she left, and Julie Morelli had nothing to do with that. Maeve wondered if she was just wired to be continually wound-up. While everyone else in the room was close to a comatose state, she and the woman on the next mat with the mouth that wouldn’t quit were wide-awake and not focused on their deep breathing.

Julie was still talking. “Kids? Wife? Did you see him on holidays? Did you grow up together? How was the wake? The funeral?” The questions kept flying, so fast that Maeve had a hard time keeping up.

Maeve could dig a hole.

“Is his wife set financially?”

And push Julie in.

“And the kids? Will they be able to go to college?”

And then shoot her in the head.

“Did anyone see who did it?”

Nobody would be the wiser.

She was enjoying the fantasy so much that she didn’t hear the soft voice of Tamara, the yoga instructor, bid everyone “namaste.” Namaste, my ass, Maeve thought. Get me the hell out of here. How did you translate that into Hindi?

Maeve rolled up her mat and stood. Julie grabbed her in an embrace and pulled her close.

“I don’t think there is anything worse than losing someone you love so violently,” she whispered into Maeve’s ear, Maeve’s diminutive frame looking as if it were being swallowed whole by the almost six-footer.

Yes, there is, Maeve thought, but she remained silent. And she had never said she loved him.

“Such a violent, violent death,” Julie cooed. If Maeve didn’t know better, she would think that Julie was actually getting turned on.

As she got into her car, the unseasonable October heat enveloping her like a wet blanket, she thought about the new one she was going to rip Jo. It’s not that her relationship to Sean Donovan was a secret, but Julie Morelli? Not telling her was a given. She thought Jo understood that the fastest way to keep the gossip moving in town was to tell Julie. Maeve had certainly kept her mouth shut during Jo’s very public, and very painful, divorce from Eric, but everyone had found out the gory details regardless. How? Maeve had given Jo one guess when her friend had come to her in tears. Julie Morelli knew it all and had told everyone.

Cal knew. So did Gabriela. Maeve was sure, though, that neither would say a word. Cal was discreet and Gabriela couldn’t give a damn about anybody but herself. She had probably already forgotten that Sean had been Maeve’s cousin; she was like that.

She pulled in behind the store. Once inside, she peeked through the porthole in the kitchen door, seeing that Jo was perched on a stool, reading the local paper. Maeve knocked on the glass and beckoned Jo back into the kitchen area.

The paper tucked under her arm, Jo greeted her warmly. “How was yoga?”

“How was yoga?” Maeve asked, pulling a knife from the magnetic strip above the sink. “Julie Morelli couldn’t wait to ask me everything there was to know about Sean’s death.”

Jo tried to hide the fact that she knew where Maeve was going with the conversation. “Really?” she asked, playing it cool.

“Really,” she said, opening the refrigerator, taking out a carton of eggs, and slamming them down on the counter. When she opened the container, three were broken.

Jo flinched. “I’m sorry.”

“It may be hard for you to understand this, but I really don’t want to be associated with the man who was murdered, with his pants down, in Van Cortlandt Park. What don’t you understand about that?” she asked, feeling a momentary flicker of remorse when she saw tears well up in Jo’s eyes. If she had learned anything about herself over the years, it was that it took a while for her anger to dissipate, and until it did, she had to let it out, one way or another.

“His pants were down?” Jo asked, her eyes wide.

Maeve shot her a look that let her know they weren’t going down that path.

“I made a mistake,” Jo said. “That’s all I can say.”

Maeve put down the knife and gripped the sides of the counter. She breathed in the scent of the cupcakes that Jo had baking in the oven, a scent that brought her back to the first kitchen she had ever baked in in the semidetached house on Independence Avenue, right off the main drag and around the corner from the park. She thought about Jack tasting her first homemade cupcake and bragging about it and her to his brother in the living room. She remembered being in the kitchen and Sean taking one, pretending he was going to eat it, but pressing it into her mouth instead, acting as though it were all great fun until she started crying, loud, gasping sobs, her bottom tooth, the first adult tooth that she had, chipping in half. He told her father she had fallen. She had been eight years old. After a few seconds, in which she erased the memory of her cruel cousin and replaced it with those of her father, she raised her head. “It’s okay,” she said. Jo was crying openly now. “It’s okay,” she repeated.

“I would never do anything to hurt you,” Jo said, making her way around the counter.

Maeve held up a hand to stop her. If Jo hugged her now, she would crack into a million pieces. “I’m sorry. I just want to distance myself as far as I can from this. It would be bad for business…,” she started, looking at Jo. “It will be bad for business,” she amended. Because the cat was already out of the bag, and in due time, everyone would know.

CHAPTER 10

Maeve was wrong: it was great for business.

She never could have anticipated what the murder of her cousin would bring her in terms of profits, but it seemed as though everyone wanted to pay their condolences to her and, while doing so, place an order.

“I’ll have two dozen of the mini chocolate cupcakes,” Sarah Teitelbaum said.

“Four dozen of the large gingersnaps, please,” Carolyn Bain said when she called.

“Can you make one of your chocolate cream cakes? Enough to serve thirty people?” Barbara Worthen asked.

Sure. I can do all of that and then some, she thought. Even the distributor had contacted her again, out of the blue, and asked if her operation had grown at all since the last time they spoke. She didn’t honestly believe that he had called because of the murder, but maybe her luck was changing. That first day after it seemed like everyone knew, she posted record sales and was able to put half of the next month’s rent in an envelope under the register drawer. Might as well pretend it wasn’t there; if she kept it in her possession, it would be gone before the month was over.

She had smoothed things over with Jo, too. Nothing like making change for a fifty-dollar bill, or even a hundred, to make her forget that one slip of the tongue had revealed something she had wanted to keep to herself forever. She even gave her friend and only employee that afternoon off to study for the upcoming test she would be taking; a master’s in social work was something Jo had always wanted but never had time for when she was married. Now on her own, she had decided to pursue her dream. The Comfort Zone was Maeve’s dream come true, but not Jo’s. Hers was to help the less fortunate, those in need of assistance. Maeve’s was to keep everyone well fed; she guessed that she could also make the world safer, just in a different way.

Maeve had underestimated just how nosy people were and how they loved a good tragedy. A sordid one? Even better.

Two nights before, Cal had asked her if she had found a hobby yet.

“Still working on it,” she had said, turning away from her computer to stare at the stack of bills she needed to pay and, for once, would be able to.

“Well, keep thinking about it,” he had said. “I’m sure you’ll find something.” And then he had kissed the top of her head in that annoying way he had and taken the girls out to dinner at a new pasta place they were dying to try. She wondered how he would fork pasta into his mouth with young Devon strapped to his chest, but if she knew Cal, he would find a way.

That kid was never going to learn to crawl if Cal didn’t unstrap him soon.

“Try the red velvet. You won’t be disappointed.”

Maeve’s head snapped up from behind the glass case. She’d been so engrossed in rearranging the refrigerated display that she hadn’t realized she wasn’t alone. Marcy Gerson was doing what she always did when she came to Maeve’s store: hard selling other customers who couldn’t make up their own minds because of her incessant chatter.

“And have you ever had her brownies? Scrumptious!” she said, her face taking on the look of someone in the rapture.

Maeve pulled a box of cupcakes out of the case and pushed them across the counter to Marcy; the order she had called in was ready and waiting for her. “Fourteen fifty, Marcy.”

Marcy was still doing her best to convince the handsome African American man that the red velvet cupcakes were the way to go. Don’t bother, Maeve thought. He’s not here for the cupcakes.

Marcy turned back to the counter. “How much do I owe you?”

“Fourteen fifty,” Maeve repeated.

Marcy pressed fifteen dollars into Maeve’s outstretched hand. “Keep the change,” she said, winking. She left the store, giving the man a last glance as she sashayed past, leaving a cloud of musky perfume in her wake.

The man looked at her. “A whole fifty cents. Whatever will you do with such largesse?”

“I could buy you a half a cup of coffee, Detective,” Maeve said, putting the money in the register and dropping fifty cents into the tip jar that she left out for Jo.

The man did his best to look impassive, but Maeve could tell that he wasn’t used to being “made” so quickly even this second time.

“Daughter of a cop, Detective. You guys don’t exactly blend. Know what I mean?”

“Is there somewhere we could talk?” he asked, gesturing toward the kitchen. There was the cop thing, but he also had a college professor thing going on, what with the tweedy sport coat, pressed slacks, and loafers. The thinking man’s detective. She should have been wary, but his posture—a little slumped, slightly morose—didn’t engender that feeling in her.

Maeve didn’t think that it would do any good to protest, so she put a sign in the door that indicated she would be back in fifteen minutes, locked it, and led the detective around the counter and into the kitchen. Once behind the swinging doors, he pulled his badge out of his pocket.

“Detective Poole. NYPD Homicide.” He smiled slightly. “But you already knew that.”

Maeve’s face gave nothing away; it was as if a visit from a detective were an everyday occurrence in the bakery. She’d known he was a cop almost as soon as she had seen him at the speed-dating event. She saw him studying her expression before deciding to reveal the reason he was there. “Why were you speed dating?” she asked, cutting to the chase.

“Believe it or not, it’s germane to the case,” he said.

She appreciated his honesty, even though there wasn’t a lot of detail there. “How so?”

He smiled in a way that told her she wasn’t going to get an answer.