Read Online Lies That Bind by Maggie Barbieri - Free Book Online Page B

of gardeners.
    Nah, the perfection that Dolores was trying to convey just masked the darkness that permeated her life.
    A sneak attack was best; Maeve didn’t want Dolores to know she was coming so she could prepare her story, be ready with her lies. Although she could have started with Margie she decided to go with Dolores, the original messenger; she seemed so sure of what she had said that Maeve wanted to get her information first. Maeve wasn’t sure if Margie would tell her the truth, whereas Dolores would only be delighted to spill it, particularly if the story cast Jack or Maeve in a bad light. Why she had it out for Maeve’s family was beyond her. All Maeve could figure was that they were poison, all of them.
    When Dolores answered the door, after looking through the peephole, Maeve could tell that cocktail hour had started at lunchtime, a few hours earlier. Or maybe at breakfast. Dolores seemed to be feeling no pain, as Jack used to like to say. Three sheets to the wind. Boxed.
    “Maeve,” Dolores said, holding open the door. “You’re the last person I expected to see.”
    And you’re the last person I want to see, Maeve held in, but there you have it. Deaths and funeral revelations make strange bedfellows. Dolores brought Maeve into the kitchen, outfitted with appliances that Maeve could only dream of owning. Instead of her ubiquitous blue suit, Dolores was in a tight velour tracksuit, her short auburn hair uncombed. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m just back from the gym,” she said.
    If by “gym” you mean “bar,” then I believe you, Maeve thought. “Thanks for letting me in, Dolores.” She took a seat at the oak table in a sunny alcove in the kitchen. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said last week. At my father’s funeral?” she added when it was clear that Dolores had no recollection of what she had said or what the effect might be. “My sister?” The words sounded odd on Maeve’s tongue.
    “Oh, that,” she said, waving a hand. “So, you didn’t know?”
    Apparently, they were cutting straight to the chase. “Of course I didn’t know, Dolores,” Maeve said. “Would I be here otherwise? Would you have told me with such obvious relish?”
    Dolores swigged from a water bottle that Maeve was pretty sure didn’t hold water. She leaned against the counter and regarded Maeve coolly. “Need to rehydrate first.”
    The silence was more than uncomfortable; it was unbearable. Maeve looked down at the burnished wood and, using the Lamaze breathing that she now remembered how to do thanks to Jo’s class, she waited.
    “Retarded,” Dolores finally said, slurring. Maeve checked her watch. It was two o’clock on the nose.
    “Who?”
    “Your sister,” Dolores said, drinking some more.
    Like father, like daughter, Maeve thought, their language, their words spoken without any art or compassion. “We don’t use that word anymore, Dolores. Did she have Down’s syndrome? Something else?”
    She shrugged, and even that gesture looked off-kilter, blurry. “How should I know?”
    “When’s the last time you saw her?”
    Dolores looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I was little. I don’t know what year it was.”
    “Please. Try to remember.” Maeve didn’t know why it mattered so much but she needed to know, needed the details so she could put the pieces of this puzzle together into one coherent whole.
    “I don’t know, Maeve,” Dolores said, as if Maeve’s questions were an incredible inconvenience. “She went away. She never came back.” She finished the “water” in the bottle. “I don’t know where she went. For all I know, she’s dead.”
    Maeve did her best to remain impassive. In her bag was the gun she had bought, the one that her old friend Rodney Poole had helped her get so that she could feel safe again. In control. In a display of bad judgment, she had retrieved it from its rightful place under the driver’s seat in the Prius and put it in her