The Last to Know (8 page)

She studies his expression. His faded blue eyes are concerned—does that mean he knows? Or is he just wondering why Dad hasn’t been coming around these past few years?

“He has his good days and his bad days,” she answers. If Mr. Mieske doesn’t know, she’s not in the mood to tell him.

“Don’t we all.” He nods and gestures at the big house beyond the fence. “That’s really something, isn’t it?”

“Jane Kendall’s disappearance?”

He waves his hand at her. “She’s dead. No question about it. The only question is, did she kill herself, or did somebody kill her?”

“What’s
your
guess?” She watches the old man’s face.

“My guess is that somebody killed her. A woman like that, she has everything to live for. Why would she do herself in?”

Paula nods slowly.

Jane Kendall certainly had everything to live for.

And what about you, Paula?
she asks herself thoughtfully, forgetting all about Mr. Mieske.
What do you have?

She glances at her father’s old friend. He’s turned his attention toward a nearby network news reporter who’s interviewing a police officer.

Your time is coming, Paula. You’ve always known that, haven’t you? You’ve always believed in yourself. You’ve been patient. You’ve paid your dues.

Just wait. Just hang on, Paula. You’ll see. Someday everything will be going your way.

“H
i, Stacey. Is Joel around?”

“Oh, hi, Tasha.” There’s a pause.

Tasha clutches the telephone receiver against her ear, picturing her husband’s secretary on the other end of the line.

Stacey McCall is a pretty twenty-two-year-old brunette he hired right out of college last spring. Tasha has met her only once, when she stopped by Joel’s office with the kids one afternoon in June on the way down to the Central Park Zoo. Stacey fell all over Joel’s “little angels,” as she kept calling them, and was polite enough to Tasha.

Unwilling to allow herself to be one of those wives who feels threatened by her husband’s young, attractive secretary, Tasha did her best not to notice Stacey’s sun-kissed, unblemished skin, her thick, dark hair that was cut in a flattering layered look, or her willowy figure clad in a pale yellow Talbots summer suit without a blouse underneath, the jacket lapels cut so as not to reveal more than a hint of cleavage.

Tasha, feeling considerably older than her thirty-five years, her shoulders perpetually wet from the baby’s drool, and everything in her wardrobe a throwback to seasons long past, told herself that even if Joel were ripe for an affair and did find Stacey attractive—okay, who wouldn’t?—Stacey would have nothing to gain by getting involved with her middle-aged, married boss.

Joel has told Tasha that Stacey comes from a wealthy, Waspy Connecticut family; that she has moved into her parents’ Sutton Place pied-à-terre and has a wallet full of their credit cards; that her entry-level salary is essentially spending money. Although she assured him during the interview that her goal is to work her way up the totem pole and become an account executive with the agency, it has since become obvious that she’s merely killing time until her boyfriend gets his MBA from Harvard Business School and they get engaged.

And yet Joel found it necessary to point out to Tasha that Stacey certainly isn’t stupid. In fact, he claims, she has a photographic memory. She knows his schedule, day in and day out, without having to glance at his calendar more than once.

“Actually, Tasha,” Stacey says, after clearing her throat, “he’s in a meeting with a client and he asked not to be disturbed.”

Tasha feels a surge of anger—perhaps irrational anger, aimed not just at Joel but at this perfect young woman planted squarely in the path of access to her husband.

“When do you expect him out of the meeting?” Tasha asks, trying not to allow a chill to creep into her voice.

Max whimpers suddenly in his Exersaucer nearby. Tasha glances sharply at Victoria, who is clutching a wooden block and looking guilty.

“It’s hard to tell when the meeting will be over with. Can I have him call you back? I wrote down your other messages for him, and I know he picked them up when he broke for lunch a while ago.”

Tasha’s grip tightens on the receiver. She forgets to wonder whether Victoria has clocked Max with a block. “My other messages?”

“The ones you left on his voice mail,” Stacey explains. “He has me check it for him lately, because he’s been so busy. That way I can let him know if anyone important has called.”

Apparently, his wife doesn’t qualify as anybody important, Tasha thinks, knowing that if she allows herself to voice that realization to Stacey, she won’t stop there. She’s not exactly thrilled to learn that her husband allows his secretary to screen his voice mail. Her messages aren’t intended for anybody’s ears but Joel’s. But she has no intention of embarrassing herself—or Joel—by launching into a tirade.

She glances at the clock on the microwave, then at Victoria, who is now moodily stacking blocks within reach of Max’s flailing arms.

“Tell my husband when he gets out of his meeting to please call home,” Tasha says succinctly.

“Is it an emergency, Tasha? Because I can—”

“Just have him call. I have to go pick up my son from school now, but I’ll be right home afterward.”

She hangs up, grabs the kids’ jackets from the hooks by the back door, and walks toward them just in time to see Max’s chubby fist topple Victoria’s block tower.

“Look what you did!” Victoria shrieks, and turns on him swiftly. She slams a wooden block into his forehead.

Max erupts into a wail.

“Victoria!” Tasha yells, and, before she knows it, her hand has lashed out at her daughter, smacking her in the arm.

Now Victoria is crying as loudly as Max is.

Tasha pulls the baby from his Exersaucer and cradles him in her arms, kissing the splotch on his forehead that is already bright red.

“You hit me!” Victoria screams, her accusing blue eyes filled with tears. “You hit me!”

“I’m sorry, Victoria,” Tasha says, her head throbbing. She rubs her temples with one hand, patting Max’s back with the other. “I didn’t mean to hit you. But I was angry—”

“You hit me!”

“You hit your brother!” Tasha shoots back, her patience completely dissolving. “He’s just a baby. You hurt him!”

“You hurt me!”

“I didn’t mean to,” Tasha says again.

And she
didn’t
mean to. She and Joel had agreed, when Hunter was born, that they would never hit their children in anger, though both of them had been spanked by their own parents. But that generation simply hadn’t known any better. They hadn’t read countless reports about children and violence and abuse. . . .

Never, until now, has Tasha ever come close to hitting one of her children.

Now her little girl is gazing at her with an expression of stark betrayal, and all she can think is that she needs to get away. She needs help; she needs a break; she needs to get out of this house and away from these children before she snaps.

But there is no escape.

This is her responsibility, her life.

There is nobody she can ask for help.

She certainly can’t turn to Joel’s parents. Her own widowed mother is five hundred miles away and working full time as a nurse. Her friends are busy with families of their own; she’s long been out of touch with her former colleagues.

As for her husband, well, she might as well be a single mother for all the emotional support he provides these days.

Tasha takes a deep breath, counts to ten, and makes room in her arms for Victoria.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says as she strokes her daughter’s hair. “Mommy will never hit you again. I don’t know what got into me.”

Chapter 4

M
itch’s sneakered feet plod along the walk as he leaves the red brick school and heads toward the row of yellow buses parked at the curb.

His hands are jammed into the pockets of his worn jeans and his eyes are fastened on a worn spot in the toe of one of his sneakers. It figures these crummy shoes would wear out so fast. He’s tried explaining to his mother that he needs good ones, like the kind with the soles you inflate with a built-in pump, but she says they’re way too expensive.

She also said, “Don’t you dare ask your father to buy you sneakers.” Which was strange, because Mitch knew his father would be happy to buy them for him. Plus, he thought, back when Mom first told him he was going to meet his dad, that she wanted his dad to help them buy stuff they couldn’t afford. But then that changed last spring for some reason, and lately his mother has been asking him not to go telling his dad that there’s specific stuff he needs or wants that she can’t afford—like the pump sneakers.

Instead she bought him these generic white shoes with some stupid bright blue stitching that he hates. All the other kids make fun of these shoes—especially Robbie Sussman. Which is why one of Mitch’s cheap, ugly shoes found its way in front of one of Robbie’s top-of-the-line Nikes as he was running the relay in gym class this morning.

Seeing the look of shock on Robbie’s big, dumb oval face as he went flying forward was almost worth having to stay after class.

Almost.

Mitch’s gut is killing him now from doing two hundred sit-ups for Mr. Atkins, the gym teacher.

“Why’d you trip Sussman, Bailey?” Mr. Atkins asked.

Then, when Mitch fumbled for answers, Mr. Atkins said the ones he gave—“
I don’t know,”
and “ ’
cause I felt like it
”—weren’t good enough. He wanted a real reason before he would let Mitch go.

Finally, Mitch told Mr. Atkins the truth—well, part of it.

“I did it because he deserves it.”

“Why does he deserve it?”

Because he has everything. Everything. And I have nothing. And he doesn’t let me forget it. That’s why.

But Mitch didn’t say that. He would never say anything like that to a teacher—not that most teachers seem to give a you-know-what about anything Mitch has to say.

Mr. Atkins is okay, but Mrs. Chandler, who teaches art and music, hates him. So do the lunchroom monitors, but then, they’re these grouchy old ladies who pretty much seem to hate everybody.

Then there’s Miss Bright. Half the time she acts like she’s mad at him, the other half like she feels sorry for him. Mitch doesn’t know which is worse.

In his bookbag are a note she wrote to his mother—it’s in a sealed envelope—and a fractions worksheet. He tucked that into the front zippered pocket beside the duplicate worksheet he brought home a few nights ago—the worksheet he was supposed to work on with Mom.

But as usual she didn’t get home till after he fell asleep on the couch watching a World Wrestling Federation match, and when she woke him up and sent him to bed, he went. No way was he going to tell her about some dumb worksheet then.

Miss Bright gave him an F because it wasn’t done.

Big deal. Big deal if he fails some stuff. Big deal if he flunks out of school. Then he can just stay home and play Super Nintendo instead.

Hey, maybe if he’s not stuck going to Townsend Heights Elementary every day, his mother will let him spend more time out at his father’s place.

Yeah, right.

And maybe Mom will be waiting for me at home today with fresh-baked cookies.

His mother hates his father more than . . .

Well, he can’t even think of anything to compare it to. He just knows that anytime his father shows up to get Mitch—or even if Mitch just mentions his father’s name—she gets this awful look on her face. Her mouth looks all sucked in and her eyes turn into little slits, and she either says something nasty about Dad or she changes the subject.

“Hey, Mitch!”

He doesn’t even look up at the sound of his name. Whoever it is, he figures, is probably yelling to Mitch Schmidt, a kid who shares his first name—though not much else.

Mitch S., who lives in one of those big old houses in the best part of town, has two parents who are still married, a bunch of brothers and sisters, and about a zillion friends. Everyone loves him, including the art teacher and the lunch room monitors.

“Mitchell!”

There’s something familiar about the voice, though—something that makes Mitch look up.

“Dad!” He breaks into a run when he spots his father at the curb, waving.

“Hey, buddy.” His dad claps him on the shoulder.

“Hi.” Mitch claps him back.

Sometimes he wishes his father would just hug him, but he never does. Not since the first time Mitch ever saw him, when his dad put his arms around him and squeezed, but only for, like, a second.

Maybe he’s just not the hugging type.

“What are you doing here?” he asks his father, seeing that he’s wearing jeans and a sweatshirt instead of a suit and tie. A Mets cap sits on top of his dark, curly hair, and there’s a dark shadow on his face, like he didn’t shave today.

He should be at work out on Long Island at this time on a weekday, Mitch thinks. So what’s up?

“I had the day off,” his father tells him.

“Yeah? How come?”

“How come?” He shrugs. “Because I felt like taking it. You can do that when you’re the boss, you know that, Mitch?”

His father says it like he wants Mitch to be a boss someday. Like that would make him really proud.

He’s always talking about giving Mitch a job in his business. Ferrante and Son, he wants to call it. Mitch figures that by the time he’s old enough to go into the business, he’ll know what his father actually does. Right now all he knows is that it has something to do with computers. Something boring. His father has tried to explain it a couple of times, but Mitch had trouble paying attention.

“Hey, Mitch, instead of riding the bus home today, why don’t you come with me and we’ll go get some pizza. Or ice cream. Would you like that? A banana split?”

“Well, I don’t really like banana splits,” Mitch says slowly as he thinks about what his mother would say about him going out for ice cream with his father. Then he wonders about the fact that his father’s here on a weekday when he’s not supposed to be.

Suddenly a terrible thought pops into his head. A thought so scary he gets a really bad pain in his chest, near his heart.

“Why are you really here, Dad? Did something happen to my mother?”

His father’s black eyes get that even blacker look that always pops up when Mitch mentions something about his mom. It’s pretty clear he can’t stand her.

But if something happened to her, somebody like the police, or the school would probably call him to come and get Mitch, right? Is that the real reason he’s here?

“Your mother is fine, as far as I know,” his father says. “She’s probably working, as usual. Right?”

Mitch lets out a big blast of breath, knowing Mom is okay. “Yeah, she’s working. I mean, she works every day.”

His father looks like he’s about to say something other than what he does end up saying, which is, “Well, I thought that I’d take you out for ice cream and then drop you off at home. That way, you won’t have to spend forty-five minutes riding around town on the bus. You’ll get home at the same time you always do.”

Mitch shrugs. “Okay, but . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t have to have a banana split, right?”

His dad smiles. “No, you can have whatever you want. Just . . . Mitch . . . do me a favor.”

Uh-oh.

“What?”

“Don’t tell your mother I was here. Okay? We’ll just keep it between us.”

“Whatever.”

Now it’s his dad’s turn to look relieved.

Mitch hopes he’ll remember not to slip to Mom. There’s a lot of stuff Mitch doesn’t tell her these days.

So what’s one more little secret?

M
argaret rounds the corner from the shadowy back hall to the high-ceilinged kitchen and crashes into someone.

Owen’s mother.

Louisa Kendall gasps and jumps back as Margaret reaches out, only intending to steady her. She’s holding a cup and saucer, the contents now spreading in a dark stain across the front of her white silk blouse.

“Oh, Mrs. Kendall, I’m so sorry,” Margaret says.

The woman says nothing, just puts the china aside with a clatter and grabs a dishtowel from the hook by the stainless-steel restaurant-type range. She starts blotting at her blouse, making sputtering noises of disgust.

“Was it coffee?” Margaret asks, running water over a wad of paper towels.

“Tea,” she says curtly. She ignores the paper towels Margaret offers.

After a moment, Margaret tosses them into the garbage can. Looking around the spacious room, bent on avoiding eye contact with Owen’s mother, her gaze falls on a large object in the far corner by the mudroom entrance.

“Is that Schuyler’s stroller?”

“Yes.”

“Where did it come from? I thought it was being held as evidence.”

“The police have released it and somebody brought it back here.” She continues to dab at her blouse.

Clenching her fists to keep her hands from trembling, Margaret crosses the room and peers into the carriage. It’s a top-of-the-line model, a blue Peg Perego—not that Margaret ordinarily knows anything about such things. However, she happens to be the one who bought the carriage for Jane, presenting it to her sister at a baby shower shortly before her niece was born.

There’s a large pouch underneath the stroller. In it Margaret sees several items.

“I’ll empty this for Owen,” she murmurs, not turning to look at his mother, now blotting her blouse by the sink, where she’s running the water.

There is no reply.

She reaches into the carriage and takes out a purple Playtex sippy cup. Unscrewing the lid, she sees less than an inch of some yellowish liquid. Sniffing, she realizes it’s apple juice. She sets it on the counter.

Next she pulls out a pink-and-white monogrammed wool carriage robe, and a small, stuffed fleece bunny. Beneath those items are a silver rattle from Tiffany’s and a wooden Humpty Dumpty puzzle. At the very bottom of the pouch is a small bag containing a package of disposable wipes and a single Huggies diaper.

Her heart pounding, Margaret lines up everything on the counter and looks it over again.

“What are you doing?” Owen’s mother asks sharply.

Margaret looks up to find Louisa Kendall’s dark gaze probing her, as though . . .
as though she’s suspicious of me,
Margaret realizes, and a sudden tide of panic washes over her.

“I told you,” she says, keeping her voice steady, “I thought I’d empty the carriage so that Owen won’t have to deal with it.”

“What makes you think he won’t want to deal with anything involving his own daughter?”

“I’m trying to help, Mrs. Kendall.”

Margaret half-expects a perfunctory
Call me Louisa
. When it doesn’t come, she realizes that of course it never will.

To Owen’s mother, she is a nobody, because she is still—and most likely always will be—an Armstrong. Though Jane and Margaret share a gene pool, an upbringing, and yes, a life-altering tragedy, the Kendalls see Jane differently, simply by virtue of their son having saved her from a life in the shadow cast by their father’s suicide.

None of them—not Mother nor Margaret nor Jane—ever suspected that Daddy, in the years leading up to his death, had lost a vast chunk of the Armstrong fortune through a series of poor investments. Faced with selling the enormous stone manor house that had been in his family for a century, and thus relinquishing the Armstrongs’ long-held position amid Westchester’s most elite families, he had chosen the only alternative.

Margaret will wonder for the rest of her life whether, in his muddled last days, he was aware that he had let the larger of his two life insurance policies lapse. Had he realized that his death would leave his wife and daughters not just grief-stricken and ostracized, but also hopelessly in debt? Or did he kill himself so that they could cash in on insurance he thought he still had?

Margaret chooses to believe the latter: that her father was an unselfish soul making the supreme sacrifice for his family. She rarely allows herself to consider the alternative, to think that he simply didn’t care what became of any of them in the certain turmoil after his death.

He was buried in the vast network of cemeteries in northern Westchester County, in a grave ironically only about a mile from Townsend Heights, where Jane settled with Owen so many years later.

Mother sold the house, the horses, the cars, and paid off the debts. Far from penniless, but no longer as wealthy as they had been all their lives, the three Armstrong women moved into a much smaller home in a respectable neighborhood. Soon after, Mother wed Teddy, whose wealth eclipsed even that of the Kendalls, and moved to his family’s castlelike estate outside London. And of course, Jane married Owen.

Margaret continues to live in the two-story stucco house she has never liked; it has always felt cold and empty to her, even during the brief time she shared it with her mother and sister.

Lucky Jane, to have this sprawling, elegant yet comfortable home—and Owen to share it with.

“Where is Schuyler?” Louisa Kendall’s voice intrudes on Margaret’s thoughts, startling her.

“She’s upstairs, with Minerva.”

“Who’s Minerva?”

“The housekeeper. She picked up Schuyler when she woke up from her nap.”

“You left her with the housekeeper?”

“Schuyler sees her every day. She seemed comfortable with her,” Margaret replies.

More comfortable than she is with me,
she adds silently. Her niece, who had woken crying, buried her head in the other woman’s shoulder when Margaret offered to take her.

“A housekeeper isn’t a nanny,” Louisa points out.

“Jane didn’t ever want to hire a nanny,” Margaret replies, though she has no idea what that has to do with anything. “She wanted to take care of Schuyler on her own, without help.”