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

somewhere else, somewhere where no one could find it, making sure that she was the only person who ever handled it.
    The birth instructor came into the hallway and beckoned the pregnant women and their birth coaches back inside. As they walked the length of the hallway, Maeve looked up at Jo. “Was anyone so mean to you when you were young that you would kill them if you saw them again?”
    “Yeah,” Jo said without hesitation. “Stacy Morgenthal.”
    “What did she do?”
    “She stole my bat mitzvah date.” Jo stopped by the opening to the classroom door. “Mine was supposed to be on my actual birthday, which was a really big deal when I was a kid, and she knew that but she swooped in with her horrible mother and booked the date. My temple only did one bat mitzvah at a time.” Jo rolled her eyes. “Stacy and her mother booked it. Three years in advance.”
    Stacy Morgenthal wasn’t exactly in a league with Margie and Dolores Haggerty, but Maeve kept that to herself. “You’d kill her for that?”
    “You bet,” Jo said, taking her place on her yoga mat, lowering herself to the floor with Maeve’s help. “My temple was liberal with scheduling, so I had my bat mitzvah on the next available date, which turned out to be one of those ‘storms of the centuries.’ You know, when you get so much snow that everything is closed down? Well, not Seasons, the catering hall. They were open and wouldn’t refund my parents’ money. It was me, Rabbi Decker, Cantor Bernard, and my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Milton from Massapequa. They never missed anything.” She shook her head. “Good times.”
    “DJ?”
    “Nope. He never showed. We were eating challah out of the freezer for weeks.”
    Everyone had their breaking point, Maeve thought. Jo’s seemed to require little more than an excess of challah and a thinly attended bat mitzvah, and she thanked the universe for that as she counted Jo’s breaths. Not everyone could harbor the sometimes murderous thoughts that ran through her mind.
    She dropped Jo off a little after nine, spying Doug’s car in the driveway as she rounded the corner. As she drove away, she wondered why he was home and why Maeve was at the birth class for his child. She needed another task to complete, another responsibility, like she needed another hole in her head.
    The store was her main responsibility, the girls notwithstanding. She drove by The Comfort Zone just to make sure that everything looked as it should. There was one car in the front parking lot and when she pulled up, the driver drove away. The windows were tinted so she couldn’t see inside, couldn’t tell how many people were in there. More to the point, she wondered what they were doing there at this time of night, in an empty parking lot in front of a bank of empty stores. She pulled into the back parking lot to make sure that the store was safe, as she left it.
    It was, with the exception of one light, the one over the kitchen sink, casting a glow over the back parking lot. She pulled into her usual spot and got out her keys, walking toward the back door.
    It was locked.
    And when she opened the door and went to the alarm keypad, it was set. She had been preoccupied the last few days; she had left a light on. She couldn’t remember doing that. She did remember, though, that the large thumbprint, pressed into a little spray of flour on the butcher-block counter, had not been there earlier. Why hadn’t she noticed the make of the car that had been in the front of the store? An approximate year? She was distracted, she knew that. She hoped she wasn’t losing her edge.
    She riffled through a stack of papers on her desk, finding Sebastian DuClos’s card on top of a pile of invoices. Instinctively, she touched the bump at the back of her head. He answered on the first ring, not happy to hear from his tenant. “I’m sorry, Mr. DuClos, but I was wondering if you had been in the store tonight?” she asked. “Or any other