Read Online Once Upon a Lie by Maggie Barbieri - Free Book Online Page B

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