The Last to Know Read online

  “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Paula Bailey turns to see a familiar face grinning at her from beneath the brim of a Yankees cap.

  “Oh, hi, George.” Her gaze flits back to the three-story red-brick Victorian mansion beyond the iron gate.

  “Covering the crime beat these days?”

  “What’d you think, that I’m just doing golden anniversary write-ups and reporting Brownie troop news?” Paula fights to keep her tone light.

  It isn’t easy. Not for someone like her. Not with someone like him.

  Lord, I need a cigarette.

  She’s known George DeFand since they were both freshmen in community college, where she took every communications course the meager department offered, and so did he. Of course, after two years, he went on to Columbia while she dropped out of the academic scene for good, knocked up by her boyfriend.

  Now George is living down in Rye, married to a soap opera actress and reporting for the New York Post, and Paula is a single mom living in a one-bedroom apartment here in town and writing for the weekly Townsend Gazette.

  Well, she thinks defensively, the Post is just a crummy tabloid—it’s not like he’s working at the New York Times. Still, she can’t help noting George’s khaki barn jacket that must have cost two hundred bucks. At least.

  Well, she’s wearing a designer suit. She bought it at a consignment shop down in Mount Kisco, but the boxy tweed jacket and matching slim skirt look practically new. The leather pumps are new, and appear far more expensive than they really were. Her reddish hair is pulled back in a businesslike but not unflattering ponytail, and she’s fully made-up. She knows that she looks like a modern-day Lois Lane—far more professional than the other reporters milling around in their jeans, as George is.

  She’s run into him a few times these past few years. He never fails to remind her that he made a name for himself as an investigative reporter covering that fatal cop shooting in the Bronx a few years back—and the subsequent scandal that erupted when he broke the story that the cop’s partner, and not the drug pusher they were chasing, had fired the fatal shots—deliberately.

  She’s not in the mood to hear about it again. Maybe she won’t have to. An impossibly small, ringing digital Motorola cell phone materializes from his expensive jacket. He flips it open and says importantly, “DeFand here.”

  Paula gladly leaves him to his conversation and makes her way through the crowd of media people and law-enforcement officials congregated along the black iron fence surrounding the Kendall home.

  The sprawling red-brick house sits on a corner lot that’s entirely fenced in, allowing outsiders a view of the rear of the house and the sloping back yard that gives way to woods at the back of the property. Jane told Paula that the house was once part of a country estate built by Henry DeGolier, a millionaire merchant before the turn of the century. The rest of the land has long since been sold off in segments, and the crumbling, distant outbuildings have been swallowed up by woods or demolished to make room for other homes on the street.

  Paula’s been here since the husband filed a missing person report last night. She dropped Mitch at his friend Blake’s house and rushed over here, hoping for an exclusive interview with one of the family members, attorneys, or household staff members who have been coming and going for the past twelve hours.

  The other members of the press trickled in as the news spread, and by dawn the place was a circus: camera crews, satellite news vans, television reporters doing live feeds. The cops are doing their best to keep things under control. So far there’s been no sign of Owen Kendall, who is apparently holed up inside with his infant daughter.

  Being from Townsend Heights, and familiar with the faces of the locals, Paula has a definite edge over the other reporters. She alone recognized Minerva Fuentes, the Kendalls’ longtime housekeeper, crossing the street and walking toward the gates an hour earlier. Naturally, she dashed right over to intercept the woman, whom she had encountered briefly when she interviewed Jane Kendall about the charity ball last year. Jane was head of the committee.

  Unfortunately, Minerva either didn’t recognize her or didn’t care that Paula had met her once before. She was clearly distraught by the crowd scene and waved Paula away just before a police officer intervened, abruptly escorting the weeping housekeeper inside as the rest of the media bellowed questions after her.

  Shortly afterward, a sleek black limousine arrived and was promptly admitted through the gates, obviously expected and reportedly containing Owen Kendall’s parents, Henry and Louisa.

  Now Paula glances around, scanning the crowd and the street beyond again for familiar faces, hoping for an exclusive.

  She sees a few people she recognizes—just locals who have come to gawk, though, none of whom appear to be the Kendalls’ neighbors. You won’t catch the other well-heeled residents of Harding Place out here with the commoners. No, but they’re probably glued to their television sets inside the dozen or so stately multimillion-dollar mansions that line the short street, perhaps even occasionally allowing themselves furtive glimpses at the bedlam outside.

  Paula sneaks a peek at her watch.

  It’s almost ten. She can’t stay here much longer. She’s not in a rush to file a story on a daily deadline like a lot of the press here; her paper’s a weekly. But she’s supposed to meet Mitch’s fourth-grade teacher over at the elementary school at ten-thirty.

  Since the academic year began last month she’s had a couple of telephone conversations with Miss Bright about his behavior. Now, apparently, her son has been acting up in class again, and his grades are slipping. Miss Bright has decided a face-to-face meeting can’t wait until parent-teacher conferences next week.

  I warned Mitch the last time this happened, she thinks, feeling a flash of renewed anger at her son.

  Didn’t she tell him that his obnoxious behavior reflects poorly on her parenting skills? If the other kids in his class, with their two-parent, well-off families, are behaving and pulling passing grades, and Mitch isn’t, the school officials are likely to place the blame on the fact that his mother is too busy working to support the two of them.

  And that he misses his father.

  Paula knows her son talks about Frank every chance he gets, to anyone who will listen. Mitch, oblivious to his father’s true slimeball status, thinks the man is God.

  Damn Frank Ferrante!

  Paula never should have tracked him down last year for child support payments.

  You were desperate, she reminds herself. They had shut off the phone, and the electricity was next. You couldn’t possibly live under those circumstances. You had no choice but to find Frank.

  Frank.

  The man who swept her off her feet with his dark good looks and smooth talk, knowing just what buttons to push with her.

  The man who had shattered her dreams by knocking her up, then won her trust by marrying her.

  The man who had abandoned her, first in the emotional sense when she miscarried the pregnancy; then in the literal sense, leaving her pregnant again, with a pile of bills and an overdrawn bank account. He just walked out one day and that was it.

  She let him go, of course. She wasn’t in love with him then, if she ever truly had been.

  But she never had been one to forgive and forget. A typical Scorpio, her father used to call her—although he said it in admiration. Daddy admired pretty much everything about Paula.

  Anyway, so what? Maybe her reasons for finding Frank and making him pay were more than purely monetary.

  She hardly expected him to obey the court order to send her back child support for the years he had missed since he ran off with another woman, let alone keep up with the monthly payments from that point on. And she certainly hadn’t anticipated his request for visitation with his son, who by then had stopped asking why he didn’t have a daddy.

  A
s it turns out Frank—who when Paula knew him was an aimless dreamer and schemer—has managed to turn one of his countless half-baked ideas into a business. A really successful business. Money is no longer an issue with him, so he’s made the payments. And he arranged for weekend visits with Mitch, time that seems to be spent mostly at the custom-built Long Island house where Frank lives with his wife, Shawna. A blonde, of course. Frank always was crazy about blondes.

  Never in her wildest dreams did Paula ever imagine that Frank would not only win Mitch’s affection and admiration, but would threaten her with a custody battle.

  “It would be a lot easier on everyone involved if you’d just let the kid come live with me, Paula,” he had the nerve to say when he first broached the subject with her six months ago.

  “Not on everyone involved. Easier on you, Frank. Just you.”

  “And Mitch. It wouldn’t be fair to him if we drag this out in court. And easier on you, too, Paula. Do you think I don’t know how much you wanted a real career as a real reporter instead of settling for some small-town flunkie paper? If you hadn’t gotten pregnant and married me, you would have gone to Syracuse to study journalism. You would have hit the big time by now. You were the most determined person I had ever met. Hell, maybe some of that ambition even rubbed off on me,” he added—knowing, she was sure, full well how it would rankle.

  She wanted to leap on him, to scream and scratch. She wanted to obliterate him, just as he was trying to obliterate her dreams.

  But she kept her composure, saying only, “I don’t regret dropping out of college and I don’t regret having Mitch, Frank. All I regret is that I married you. But Mitch is the most important thing in my life, and there’s no reason why I can’t have him and my career.”

  “Yeah, well, at this rate, you’re not going to turn into Woodward or Bernstein anytime soon, babe,” he said with a smirk.

  She doesn’t know what got to her more: the reference to her once-idolized famed Watergate reporters, or the way he called her “babe.” It was his pet name for her back in the days when she didn’t know an imitation leather bomber jacket from the real thing, or cheap aftershave from designer cologne.

  The irony is, now that she finally knows the difference, he’s graduated to the good stuff.

  Money can’t change him, though. It might have given him a big house and a beautiful blond wife, but he has no class. No integrity. And no Mitch.

  As far as she’s concerned, that’s how it will stay.

  She doesn’t give a damn that Frank can afford a lifestyle she’s never even come close to providing for Mitch. And she sure as hell isn’t swayed by Frank’s sob story about how he and Shawna tried to conceive for a few years before finding out that even with fertility intervention she most likely will never be able to bear children of their own. That means Mitch is Frank’s only child and always will be—at least, if he stays married to Shawna, which Paula figures isn’t necessarily a given, considering his track record.

  “He’s my only child, too, Frank, and I’m going to raise him,” Paula had said before throwing Frank out of her apartment that afternoon.

  Now he’s going ahead with the custody suit. And the thing that terrifies Paula most is that if the judge allows Mitch to choose which parent he wants to live with—as this judge has been rumored to do—Mitch might choose Frank.

  Even if Mitch doesn’t have a say, how will Paula stack up against her ex in court? She’s a single parent, struggling to make ends meet. Mitch sleeps on a lumpy fold-out couch in their cramped one-bedroom apartment—one of Townsend Heights’s few rentals, located a block from the business district. She’s never home. And he’s getting into trouble in school, having to stay after class and bringing home notes from the teacher.

  With Frank, Mitch would have his own room in a beautiful home in an exclusive neighborhood, private schools, a father who runs a thriving business, and a full-time stepmother who doesn’t work.

  But I’m his mother, Paula tells herself stoically. Nothing is more important than that.

  Reluctantly she turns away from the Kendall house, knowing she’d better leave now if she’s going to make it to the school for that meeting—and have time to smoke an entire cigarette in the car on the way over.

  That’s about the only place a smoker can indulge her habit in Westchester County these days. In a car or at home. Anyplace else and you risk the wrath of non-smokers.

  Someday I’ll quit, Paula thinks—not for the first time—as she hurries away.

  She rounds the corner onto Grafton Avenue, where she parked her car the night before. She’s almost reached the banged-up blue two-door Honda at the curb when she sees a taxi pass by and stop behind her at the corner of Harding.

  Instinctively, she turns around.

  A woman gets out of the cab.

  In the fleeting moment her pale, plain face is turned in her direction, Paula realizes that she looks vaguely familiar.

  But who is she?

  The woman scurries around the corner onto Harding Place as the cab drives off in the opposite direction.

  Paula slowly unlocks her car door and gets in, certain that she’s seen her before.

  But where?

  Chapter 2

  Balancing the baby on her hip and holding a cup of apple juice with one hand while clinging to a squirming Victoria’s hand with the other, Tasha makes her way to the round corner table Rachel has staked out in the crowded Starbucks.

  “There you are at last!” Rachel says, bouncing her thirteen-month-old, Noah, on her lap. He’s holding his omnipresent blue plastic sippy cup. Rachel is in the process of weaning him from the bottle and complains that he refuses to take milk in anything other than this cup.

  Tasha has told her to stop complaining. Sure, Hunter gave up his bottle, no questions asked, the week of his first birthday. But it was nearly impossible to wean Victoria, who had rejected all cups until she was nearly two.

  Rachel looks great as usual. Her sleek, expertly dyed blond hair is cut stylishly short, and she’s wearing makeup, earrings, and a crisply ironed ivory linen shirt tucked into jeans that hug her narrow hips. She used to work for Saks as a stylist, and looks like she still does.

  The whole Leiberman family has that upscale, attractive thing going on, Tasha thinks wistfully. Aside from his darker coloring, Rachel’s husband, Ben, is a masculine image of his wife: tall and attractive with a well-toned body. He’s always impeccably dressed. So are the kids.

  Tasha notices that Noah is wearing a plushy cotton tan-and-ivory-patterned romper that was recently in the window of Goody Gumdrops, the exclusive children’s clothing boutique on Townsend Avenue. She thought when she first spotted it in the store that it would be great for Max—until she saw the label and price tag. Imported from France, and almost a hundred dollars.

  “Look, Noah,” Rachel says. “Your buddy Max is here!”

  “Uh-oh, where’s Mara?” Tasha asks, glancing down at Victoria and anticipating a tantrum when her daughter realizes Rachel’s other child is nowhere in sight. Victoria adores Mara, who is four. “Don’t tell me you left her home with the nanny again.”

  “I wish. There’s no nanny today. Mrs. Tuccelli canceled again. This time it’s her gallstones, or so she says. You wouldn’t happen to know a reliable sitter, would you?”

  “If I did, would I be dragging these two virtually everywhere I go?” Tasha asks, plopping into a chair at the table and reaching around Max to unbutton Victoria’s pink rain slicker.

  “I really need to find someone else. I’m going nuts.” Rachel hands Noah a piece of bagel to chew on.

  Tasha resists the urge to roll her eyes at the urgent tone in Rachel’s voice. Her neighbor has become her closest friend in the past few years. But she can’t help thinking sometimes that Rachel is more than a little spoiled. She’s never had to work; the fashion stylist thing was mostly for kick
s, since her parents paid the rent on her East Side apartment. She quit when she married Ben, who has a thriving pediatric practice in town. The Leibermans have a housekeeper and a full-time nanny, and Rachel spends most days shopping, golfing, lunching, and socializing without her kids.

  Still, when she called from her car an hour ago and asked Tasha to meet her at Starbucks for coffee, she actually had both Mara and Noah with her.

  “So where’s Mara?” Tasha asks again, seeing Mara’s favorite Barbie doll on the table. Rachel’s always complaining that Mara never goes anywhere without the doll, whom she’s cryptically named Clemmy, and who even Tasha admits is hideous-looking, with a dirty face, chewed-off feet, and most of her nylon hair missing.

  “She’s in the ladies’ room with Karen. She offered to take her in—thank God—since I’ve got Noah. I swear, it was so much easier when she wasn’t potty-trained.”

  “You can’t convince me of that,” Tasha says, hoisting a protesting Victoria into the chair beside hers, then running a hand through her rain-damp hair. She must look about as appealing as Clemmy does. Nothing new there, she thinks wryly.

  “Well, did Victoria go when you put her on the potty yesterday?” Rachel asks.

  “Nope,” Tasha says with a sigh, not wanting to go there. Victoria’s potty-training trials have been a bone of contention for months. Instead, she says, “So Karen’s here too? I didn’t know she was coming.”

  “We just bumped into her down the street at the dry cleaner’s. She left the baby with Tom. He’s working at home today. I figured that out when I saw his car there on my way into town.”

  Karen Wu lives at the opposite end of Orchard Way with her accountant husband and their nine-month-old daughter, Taylor. The petite Chinese-American woman is on an extended maternity leave from her job teaching social studies at a public high school in lower Westchester. Sometimes she joins Tasha and Rachel at Gymboree.