Fool Me Once

Eileen came over and wrapped her arms around Maya. Maya hugged her back. Eileen wasn’t a quasi-stranger paying her respects. Maya ended up going to Vassar a year after Claire. The three women had lived together in those halcyon days before Maya had started Army Aviation School at Fort Rucker in Alabama. Eileen was still, along with Shane, her closest friend.

“I love you, you know.”

Maya nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“You sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“You have your own family to take care of.”

“It’s okay,” Eileen said, pointing at the digital frame with her thumb. “I’m still watching.”

“Funny.”

“Not really. But I know you need downtime. Call if you need anything. Oh, and don’t worry about dinner. I already ordered you Chinese from Look See. It’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

“I love you, you know.”

“Yeah,” Eileen said, heading to the door. “I know.” She stopped. “Whoa.”

“What is it?”

“You have company.”

Chapter 2

The company was in the short, hirsute form of NYPD homicide detective Roger Kierce. Kierce entered the house with his best attempt at swagger, glancing all around the way cops do and saying, “Nice place.”

Maya frowned, not bothering to hide her annoyance.

Kierce had something of a caveman thing going on. He was stocky and broad, and his arms seemed too short for his body. He had the kind of face that looked unshaven even immediately after a shave. His bushy eyebrows resembled a late stage of caterpillar metamorphosis, and the hair on the back of his hands could have been the work of a curling iron.

“Hope it’s okay I stopped by.”

“Why wouldn’t it be okay?” Maya said. “Oh, right, that whole just-buried-my-husband thing.”

Kierce feigned contrite. “I realize my timing could be better.”

“You think?”

“But tomorrow you go back to work and, really, when is a good time?”

“Great point. What can I do for you, Detective?”

“Do you mind if I sit?”

Maya gestured toward the couch in the den. A spooky thought came to her: This encounter-in fact, every encounter in this room-would now be recorded by the hidden nanny cam. What an odd thing to think about. She could, of course, manually turn it on and off, but who would remember or want to go through that hassle every day? She wondered whether the camera recorded sound too. She would have to ask Eileen, or she could wait and see when she checked its content.

“Nice place,” Kierce said.

“Yeah, you said that on the way in.”

“What year was it built?”

“Sometime in the nineteen twenties.”

“Your late husband’s family. They own the house, right?”

“Yes.”

Kierce sat. She stayed standing.

“So what can I do for you, Detective?”

“Just some follow-up, that kind of thing.”

“Follow-up?”

“Bear with me, okay?” Kierce gave her what he must imagine was a disarming smile. Maya wasn’t buying it. “Where is it…?” He dug into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a frayed notepad. “Do you mind if we go through it one more time?”

Maya wasn’t sure what to make of him, which was probably what Kierce wanted. “What would you like to know?”

“Let’s start at the beginning, okay?”

She sat and spread her hands as if to say, Go ahead.

“Why did you and Joe meet up in Central Park?”

“He asked me to.”

“On the phone, right?”

“Yes.”

“Was this normal?”

“We had met up there before, yes.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. A bunch of times. I told you. It’s a nice area of the park. We used to spread out a blanket and then we’d have lunch at the Boathouse…” She caught herself, stopped, swallowed. “It was just a nice place, that’s all.”

“During the day, yes. But it’s a little secluded at night, don’t you think?”

“We always felt safe there.”

He smiled at her. “I bet you feel safe most places.”

“Meaning?”

“When you’ve been where you’ve been, I mean, in terms of dangerous places, I guess a park must rank pretty low.” Kierce coughed into his fist. “Anyway, so your husband called you and said, ‘Let’s meet there,’ and so you did.”

“That’s right.”

“Except”-Kierce checked his notepad, licked his fingers, started paging through it-“he didn’t call you.”

He looked up at her.

“Excuse me?”

“You said Joe called you and said to meet you there.”

“No, you said that. I said he suggested we meet there on the phone.”

“But then I followed up with ‘He called you’ and you said, ‘That’s right.’”

“You’re playing semantics with me, Detective. You have the phone records for that night, am I correct?”

“I do, yes.”

“And it shows a phone call between my husband and me?”

“It does.”

“I don’t remember if I called him or he called me. But he suggested that we meet at our favorite spot in the park. I could have suggested it-I don’t see the relevance-and in fact, I might have, had he not suggested it first.”

“Can anyone verify that you and Joe used to meet up there?”

“I don’t think so, but I don’t see the relevance.”

Kierce gave her an insincere smile. “Neither do I, so let’s move on, shall we?”

She crossed her legs and waited.

“You describe two men approaching you from the west. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“They wore ski masks?”

She had been through this dozens of times already. “Yes.”

“Black ski masks, am I right?”