Lie in Plain Sight by Maggie Barbieri Page A

time ago, and I really don’t remember.”
    Maeve dug around in her pocketbook for a business card from The Comfort Zone. She held it out, but the other woman didn’t take it. Maeve dropped it on the coffee table. “If you happen to remember anything, will you call me?” When Mrs. McSweeney didn’t respond, Maeve pleaded with her. “Please? I have to know.”
    Finally, the woman spoke, staring at the card. “Yes. If I remember anything, I’ll let you know.”
    Maeve let herself out, pausing briefly at the large photo of Jamie McSweeney. She knows loss, Maeve thought. Maybe that will push her to tell me everything she knows.
    Because I’m betting she knows a lot.

 
    CHAPTER 14
    Maeve took Rodney’s advice, starting at the beginning the next day, thinking about those days, not so long ago, when she spent time at the soccer field. Taylor played soccer. That was all she knew about her, beyond the fact that her mother was encouraging her to go to a state university in the hope that she could afford it. That made Maeve wonder: If they were as destitute as Trish claimed, surely financial aid would be of assistance? Cal had navigated that entire process for Rebecca, and Maeve knew that they hadn’t qualified for one penny of assistance, but Trish’s situation was different. Maeve wondered about the delinquent father that Trish referred to and how well off, or not, he was.
    After the store closed, she drove over to the high school. She remembered that when Rebecca was on the team, the team practiced constantly when they weren’t playing games. So, a Sunday practice was not out of the realm of possibility. She parked in the same spot in which she had parked when she had visited Judy Wilkerson.
    The girls’ soccer team exited through the back door a few minutes after she arrived, ready to take the short walk over to the soccer field to start practice. Rebecca had been off the team for two years, so Maeve didn’t recognize a lot of the girls. If they had been freshmen when Rebecca had been a senior, then they had changed into young women Maeve wouldn’t know. Gone would be the knobby knees and angles of ninth grade, and in their place would be more weight, a bit more heft, and a change in their features. Every one of them, or so it seemed, was long and lithe, jogging effortlessly from the back of the school building and down the hill to the soccer field, a place where Maeve had spent many an afternoon, watching Rebecca run up and down the length without losing her breath or really breaking a sweat. Maeve marveled at her older daughter’s athletic ability. Sure, Maeve had played CYO basketball and youth softball, but she was small and not wiry and really, when she thought about it, not all that coordinated. Her body, like the bodies of her female ancestors, was more suited to long hours in a field, low to the ground, nimbly picking the day’s harvest. The Irish peasant body, she called it. Rebecca’s prowess must have been inherited from the Callahan side of the family, but Maeve had never considered Cal that much of an athlete either, something with which he probably would take issue. The way he saw himself was often at odds with the way the world viewed him, which as of now was middle-aged, trying to be hip, too old to be the father of a toddler.
    She got out of the car and followed the team down the hill, walking past the playground where the girls used to play and where now, younger siblings of varsity soccer players spent hours while their sisters were on the field. There was the porta-potty that she had used more than she cared to admit, her bladder control having taken a hit after she gave birth to Heather and never recovering, that little bit of wetness every time she sneezed reminding her that as hard as she tried not to think it, Heather provided challenges both great and small as a daughter.
    She took a seat on the hill overlooking the