The Last to Know (28 page)

There’s music blasting upstairs. Loud, teenage music with a throbbing beat. One of the kids must have left the stereo on again. Or else . . .

“Jeremiah?” Fletch calls, taking the steps two at a time.

The music is definitely coming from his nephew’s room.

Fletch strides down the hall and knocks on the door.

The music turns off abruptly on the other side.

“Who is it?” a voice calls.

A female voice.

Fletch opens the door to find Lily and Daisy sprawled on their brother’s bed. Lily has the stereo remote control in her hand, and Daisy is clutching a bunch of CDs.

“Hi, Uncle Fletch.” Lily gives a little wave.

“We just wanted to see how our CDs sounded on Jeremiah’s stereo,” Daisy tells him.

“We only want to hear one more,” Lily says. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Where’s your aunt?”

“She went someplace.”

“And left you here alone?” Fletch frowns. That’s not like Sharon. “Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” Lily tells him. “She just stuck her head in and told us she had to go out for a little while and she’d be back later.”

Out.

Resentment swoops through Fletch as he stands there, still gripping the doorknob. He called Sharon less than an hour ago to see if there had been any word of his nephew or a call from his brother. Nothing yet. She told him she would be waiting by the phone, just as she had been all day, and then, sounding irritated, she asked him where he was.

“At the gym.”

“Well, when will you be home?”

“Soon,” he promised, before hanging up.

Well, she didn’t wait for him. Apparently, his wife had suddenly found something more interesting to do on a Saturday night Something more important—to her—than waiting for information about her missing nephew, or a call from his father overseas.

And Fletch has a good idea what that something is.

“Has anybody called?” he asks his nieces.

They shake their heads.

“How long have you had the stereo on full volume?”

They look at each other.

“A while,” Lily says, indicating the stack of CDs in her sister’s hand. “We’ve played all of those.”

They wouldn’t have heard the phone if it rang. Nor would they have overheard any call Sharon might have placed before leaving.

Well, it doesn’t matter.

Fletch doesn’t need evidence to have his suspicions confirmed. He can do that himself.

“I’m going out for a little while, too,” he tells his nieces abruptly. “Do me a favor. Keep the stereo volume down so that you can hear the phone if it rings.”

“In case it’s Jeremiah?” Daisy asks.

He nods. “Or your stepfather. Aidan’s got to get the message and get back to me sooner or later. If he does, don’t tell him Jeremiah’s missing. I’ll do that. Just tell him to stay where he is so I can call him when I get back.”

“Where are you going, Uncle Fletch?”

“To find your aunt,” he says grimly.

B
ack upstairs in her room, Margaret breathlessly strips off Jane’s clothing, blindly tossing the gown, the robe, the shoes into a heap on the floor beside the bed.

She eyes the long, high-collared plain blue flannel nightgown hanging on the hook beside the door. She’s worn nightgowns like that all her life. Now it looks like she always will.

Standing naked but for the string of pearls still clasped around her neck, she closes her eyes, shutting out the nightgown, attempting to shut out what just happened with Owen in his study.

But she can’t.

The horrible scene replays against the screen of her eyelids.

Owen staring at her in shocked silence as she blurted the truth—the whole truth. About Jane. About herself. About her feelings for him.

Her eyes still squeezed closed so tightly they ache, Margaret half-turns, grasps for something—the bedpost—needing support as the cruel irony rams into her all over again.

Despite Jane’s death—even more painful, despite Jane’s bitter betrayal—Margaret will never have the man she loves.

He made it clear that even in death, Jane lays claim to what will be denied Margaret for the rest of her life.

At which point did Owen start to sob? At which point did he vomit into the wastebasket beside his desk? At which point did his grief and disbelief turn to wrath? At which point did he order her to get out?

Mercifully, it’s a blur now.

Dazed, Margaret opens her eyes.

She finds herself facing the window across from the bed. The window that looks down on the front yard and Harding Place beyond, where the press and curious onlookers are still encamped. The numbers have dwindled a bit these past few days as the Leiberman murder took center stage, only to explode with tonight’s development. Cameras trained on the house, floodlights, police officers, the private security firm Owen hired to keep everyone back, beyond the barricades . . .

Margaret stares down upon the garish circus from her window, feeling momentarily like a doomed tower prisoner.

But it dawns on her, as it has before, that she isn’t imprisoned in this house. Not really.

She swiftly begins to dress again, pulling on the stiff denim jeans again, and heavy socks, and a dark turtleneck over the strand of pearls. She needs the pearls. Daddy’s pearls. They’ll give her the strength to do what has to come next.

Fully clothed, wearing shoes and a warm coat, she kneels beside the bed and slides out the suitcase she has stowed beneath it. She unpacked the contents into the bureau and closet when she arrived earlier in the week—all but two items.

She unlocks the suitcase and removes those items now, carefully stashing them in the deep pockets of her hooded down parka.

Then she takes a flashlight from the drawer of the night table.

She’s ready.

Taking one last look around the room, Margaret tells herself that she has no choice. It has to be this way. She failed miserably in her final effort to avoid the inevitable, forever sealing her fate in those moments in Owen’s study.

As she descends through the silent house, she becomes acutely aware of certain sounds. The massive grandfather clock ticking in the foyer. The hum of the oversize refrigerator in the kitchen. The distant hubbub of the crowd at the gate. And her own accelerated respiration that seems to grow more audible with every intake of breath.

She closes the basement door behind her, then, training the flashlight beam on the steep stairway, continues her journey into the depths of the old house.

It’s cold down here. Damp. Cobwebs brush against her face as she makes her way through one cavernous room after another. The wine cellar. The root cellar. The coal bin.

At last reaching the back wall of the stone foundation that was dug well over a century ago, Margaret opens the rough-hewn door to a moldering storage closet. Her beam illuminates a few rusted old tools that hang on the walls. Otherwise, the closet is empty.

Not quite. Margaret shudders, hearing a sudden scurrying somewhere at her feet as she steps inside.

Holding the flashlight steady with one hand, training it on the back wall of the closet, she reaches out, feeling for the concealed latch Jane showed her that day so long ago.

One tug, and the back wall of the closet transforms into a door.

A door that leads to an underground tunnel that will take her away from the house and into the woods, far beyond the glare of the lights and cameras.

Margaret steps over the threshold and pulls the door safely shut after her, one hand clutching the flashlight, the other feeling in her pocket to make sure they’re still there.

The photograph.

And the butcher knife.

W
rapped in her flannel bathrobe, Tasha scuffs downstairs in her big fuzzy slippers, wondering where Joel can possibly be.

He left over an hour ago to pick up the food and the video.

In the front hall, she peers out into the night. The wind is gusting and it’s raining now. Just a light rain that patters against the windows, but Tasha knows that a nor’easter is predicted at some point this weekend.

Maybe Joel won’t be able to go to Chicago tomorrow, she thinks hopefully.

Or maybe she should just come right out and ask him not to go.

Before his sudden shift in mood earlier tonight, she wouldn’t have dared. But the way he treated her earlier, before he left . . . well, he might have realized how much she needs him. He might be willing to tell his boss that he can’t make the trip.

Tasha decides to ask him about it when he gets home.

Where is he?

How long can it possibly take to get Chinese food and a video? Okay, he did have to order the food and wait for it to be prepared. And he did have to browse in the video store. Plus, the strip with Panda Palace and Blockbuster is a few miles from here, outside of town.

Even considering all of those things, he should be back by now.

What if something has happened? Like a fender bender?

Then he would have called, she tells herself.

Worried, Tasha paces into the kitchen.

Her gaze falls on the telephone receiver lying face-up on the counter, and a wave of relief washes over her.

Of course. Joel said he was taking the phone off the hook because of reporters. If he tried to call her to say he would be delayed, he wouldn’t get through.

Tasha hangs up the phone, hoping he’ll call—or better yet, walk in the door—soon.

Y
ou should have known better than to come here, Sharon. You should have trusted your senses. But your curiosity got the best of you, didn’t it.

Look at her, picking her way through the marshy ground overgrown with grass, looking over her shoulder every few seconds, almost as though she suspects she’s being watched. But she doesn’t think to look ahead of her, over toward the shed. Not that she would see anything if she did. A perfect hiding place, here in the shadows behind the overgrown lilacs alongside the shed.

Ah, Sharon.

Even glimpsed from a distance, through the murky darkness and driving rain, she’s beautiful, with that stunning figure and that blond hair of hers.

Does she sense that these are her last moments of life? Does she realize she’s about to draw her last breath? Does she know now that she’s no better, no different, than the others?

A few more steps, and she’ll be in position.

One . . .

Two . . .

Three . . .

She gasps, looking up. “My God,” she says in the split second before she realizes. “You just scared the hell out of me. What are you doing here?”

And then she knows, in an instant, her surprised expression giving way to horror and then a twisted mask of agony as her hair is yanked back and the blade swiftly slices her throat.

A
t last Jeremiah arrives at his destination, shivering, soaked from the rain that, thankfully, didn’t begin falling until a short time ago. As he picks his way through the last few yards of mist-draped woods over finally familiar terrain toward the clearing just ahead, he can think only of food. And sleep.

He hasn’t eaten all day today, either. He couldn’t bring himself to even consider ingesting anything he could possibly find in the forest. Certainly not raw game, or worms, or grubs. He sipped water from a cold, clear stream. It had a faintly metallic flavor, but his throat was so parched it didn’t matter.

Now maybe he can find something to eat in the remains of the vegetable garden he and the twins planted last spring. The deer have probably taken any tomatoes and beans that survived the light frosts they’ve had until now, but you never know. And there are pumpkins, not all of them the size of the enormous prize one that he was supposed to help his sisters lug to the harvest festival. Maybe he can cut into some of the smaller sugar pumpkins using his father’s axe, as long as it’s still in the shed.

Shivering, Jeremiah remembers that there used to be a couple of old blankets in the shed, too. They used them for a long-ago day at the Jersey Shore, and Melissa refused to allow them back into the house to be washed, saying she didn’t want her washing machine full of sand. Jeremiah’s dad stashed them on a shelf with citronella candles and potting soil and rose spray, and they were still there the last time Jeremiah looked.

In fact, everything beyond the charred ruins of the house—the shed, the garden, the girls’ wooden swing set—is just as it was left the night of the fire. Jeremiah knows his father intends to sell the property when he comes back home from the Middle East.

And then what? He’s pretty sure his father doesn’t intend for him and his stepsisters to five with Uncle Fletch and Aunt Sharon forever.

But now, with everything that’s happened, Jeremiah has no idea what his future holds. For all he knows, he could spend the rest of his life in prison for murder.

Swallowing hard, his throat sore from two days hiking in the cold, damp air, he steps into the overgrown yard. The rain is coming down harder now, and the ground is marshy beneath his feet.

He’ll check out the vegetable garden first, then the shed.

Then, coming into view of the garden, he stops short.

No . . .

It can’t be.

Needing to believe that the scene before him is distorted by the rain and mist, Jeremiah takes a step forward. Then another.

Then a scream escapes him as he finally understands that the gruesome sight is no illusion.

P
aula hurries toward Officer Brian Mulvaney as he stands in front of her car parked in the fire lane in front of the town hall. His ticket pad is in his hand and he’s shaking his head.

“Brian, I’m so sorry,” she calls to him.

He looks up in surprise, spotting her amid the swarm of people coming from the press conference. “Paula, hi.”

“That’s my car,” she says apologetically, jingling the keys. “I couldn’t find a spot for the press conference—every spot in front of my apartment two blocks away is taken, and even the commuter parking lot is full.”

“I know. I’m headed over there next,” he tells her, gesturing around them at the throng of chattering reporters. “I can’t believe these out-of-town idiots don’t even give a second glance at the signs that say you need a permit to park in that lot or you get towed.”