The Last to Know Page 5

  “Did you tell her about Jane Kendall?” Tasha asks Rachel.

  “Are you kidding me? She already knew. It’s all anyone’s talking about today. I don’t think there’s anyone who hasn’t heard.”

  Yes, there is.

  Joel.

  Tasha tried calling him at the office a couple of times this morning but reached his voice mail every time. She left messages: “Joel, it’s me. Call me, I have to tell you something.”

  She didn’t bother to try his cell phone. He doesn’t keep it turned on while he’s in the office. In fact, he usually forgets to turn it on even when he’s not.

  She left deliberately vague messages, figuring he’ll call her back more quickly. She knows he checks his voice mail constantly, even when he’s out of the office, in case a client calls.

  Of course, Joel always calls her back . . . eventually. But sometimes it takes a few hours.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, Tash, but I’m busy when I’m at work.” That’s his explanation whenever she gets on his case about not returning her calls promptly.

  She resents his implication that she’s bothering him while he tends to more important things. All right, so maybe there are times when she does call him just to check in and say hello. He used to do that, too, back before he reached this lofty rung on the corporate ladder.

  When Hunter was a newborn and she was still on maternity leave, the phone would ring all day long, with Joel wanting to know how the baby was.

  And okay, there were times back then when Tasha let the machine get it, or would even take it off the hook just so she could have some uninterrupted moments while the baby was napping.

  But most of the time, she was happy to talk to her husband.

  And these days, when she calls Joel at work it’s for a reason. Maybe just to check and see if he wants her to drop his overcoat at the cleaners, or to find out where he put the checkbook, but those are reasons. It’s frustrating to wait for hours to hear from him.

  Besides, how does he know, when she leaves a message on his voice mail, that it isn’t urgent?

  “If it’s an emergency, or if something is up with one of the kids, call my secretary directly and have her find me, Tash. And if it’s not urgent, don’t make me think that it is, okay? Just tell me what it is that you need, and I’ll call back as soon as I can.”

  Today, she didn’t want to tell him what it was that she needed from him, because she isn’t really sure what it is. Just to tell him about Jane Kendall’s disappearance, but more than that, maybe—to connect with him, to hear his voice reassure her, to feel safe. To know that she and Jane Kendall have less in common than it seems on the surface.

  So she left the vague message, hoping he’d be curious enough to get back to her right away.

  Apparently he wasn’t, because he hasn’t.

  “Did he just say ‘venti skim caramel machiato’?” Tasha zaps back to the present and peers at the kid behind the coffee bar, who has just set a foamy, steaming cup on the counter and called out something unintelligible.

  Rachel shrugs. “I have no idea. I can never hear what they’re saying in here. Go ahead and see if it’s yours; I’ll keep an eye on Victoria.”

  “Where’s Mara?” Victoria is asking Rachel as Tasha walks up to the counter, carrying Max. She smiles to herself. Thank goodness Mara will be here as promised. It’s the only way she got Victoria away from her Teletubbies video and into her car seat without a struggle.

  “Is that a venti skim caramel machiato?” she asks the kid behind the coffee bar, who has a ponytail and a goatee and is now busily foaming milk in a whirring machine.

  “It’s a venti caramel machiato,” he informs her above the noise.

  “Not skim?”

  “Nope.”

  “I ordered skim. Maybe that’s for someone else.”

  He shrugs. “It’s the only machiato order I’ve gotten. You want skim instead?” he offers reluctantly.

  “Never mind.” Tasha grabs the cup, fat-saturated milk and all, and carries it back to the table. She’ll worry about her too-tight jeans another day. Today it seems frivolous, in light of the Jane Kendall thing.

  It’s all she’s thought about all morning. In fact, she couldn’t even bring herself to go to the park with the kids after all. No, not once she knew that Jane vanished from there only hours earlier.

  Instead, she went to the supermarket to pick up a few things. She found herself pausing over the stacks of newspapers at the front of the store, disappointed that the tabloids, the New York Post and Daily News, had no coverage of the Kendall story. Coverage in the Journal News had been sketchy, and the local paper, the Townsend Gazette, isn’t out yet; it’s only a weekly.

  She moved on when the baby started fussing because she was standing motionless with the cart for too long, and she shifted her thoughts to selecting a new brand of cereal for a clamoring Victoria, and diapers for Max, who’s on the brink of the next size.

  But in the dairy aisle she overheard two women talking about the Kendall disappearance, and when she reached the register, the cashier—a chatty type Tasha knows by sight—actually brought it up.

  “Did you hear about that lady who disappeared from the park?” she wanted to know as she bagged the purchases. When Tasha mentioned that she had actually been acquainted with her, the woman held up the line asking questions about Jane Kendall. Questions Tasha couldn’t answer, because when you came right down to it, she hadn’t known the missing woman well at all, despite the few times they sat together in the Gymboree group and at Starbucks.

  Jane Kendall is the kind of person who can seem to be a part of things, yet maintain a distance, deliberate or not. Must come with money and breeding.

  Tasha makes her way back over to the table with her brimming coffee drink.

  “So did you hear anything new?” she asks Rachel when she is seated again and has settled Victoria with her apple juice and propped a bottle into Max’s mouth as he leans against her.

  Rachel doesn’t have to ask what she’s talking about. “No, but I heard that the police are investigating it as a possible suicide.”

  “A suicide?”

  Somehow, she just can’t connect that image to the perfectly nice, perfectly beautiful, perfectly . . . well, perfect woman from Gymboree. “Why would she kill herself?”

  “Her father killed himself.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Ben told me when he called home this morning. One of his patients is a cop’s kid.”

  “The kid told Ben Jane Kendall’s father committed suicide?” Tasha asks doubtfully.

  “I think the mother told him what her husband told her. I guess they think she might have jumped.”

  Tasha winces at the very idea of someone hurling herself over the rock-walled edge of the cliff that rises high above the Hudson River and forms the western boundary of High Ridge Park. It happens every once in a while, sure. Someone takes the deadly plunge. But usually you hear about a lovesick teenager doing it, or a distraught middle-aged man—not a suburban mom who has every reason to live, and who, by jumping, would be leaving her baby defenseless and alone in the park.

  “Do you think she jumped?” Tasha asks Rachel.

  “I don’t think she did,” Karen Wu says, materializing at the table with Mara.

  Naturally, Victoria lights up at the sight of her toddler idol. Tasha allows her to pull up a chair next to the one Mara vacated earlier, and the two girls share a box of animal crackers Tasha pulls from her bag.

  She turns her attention back to what Karen said. “So why don’t you think she killed herself? I think I read someplace that children of parents who commit suicide are far more likely to kill themselves than the average person would be.”

  “That’s true. But I just don’t believe Jane Kendall did it.”


  “Why not?” Rachel persists.

  Karen shakes her head. Her straight, shiny black hair swings back and forth at her shoulders, falling neatly back into place. “It’s just a feeling I have. I barely knew the woman, after all. I’m not qualified to offer a professional opinion.”

  “I can’t believe anyone would jump from that wall into the river,” Tasha comments, and sips her coffee, savoring the dribble of caramel in the rich foam. She watches Noah drop the crust of bagel he was chewing.

  “People do it all the time,” Rachel points out, handing her son another piece of bagel without bothering to bend and pick up the chunk he dropped.

  She’s like that, Tasha has noticed. She tends to expect other people to clean up after her and her kids—probably because someone always has.

  “People like Jane Kendall don’t jump into the river all the time. Maybe she ran away,” Tasha suggests, doubting it.

  “Maybe. My housekeeper’s cousin knows the Kendalls’ housekeeper,” Rachel says. “I can probably get some dirt out of her. You’d be surprised at what housekeepers know about the people they work for,” Rachel says, and turns to Karen. “Speaking of household help, I need a stand-in sitter until I can get a new nanny. I think I’m going to have to let Mrs. Tuccelli go. Didn’t you tell me last week that you might know of someone?”

  Karen nods. “Sharon and Fletch Gallagher’s nephew. He’s living with them now.”

  Fletch Gallagher.

  The name causes a startled little jump in Tasha’s stomach. She busies herself plucking the bottle from Max’s still-sucking mouth, putting him up on her shoulder to burp him even though it’s no longer necessary at his age.

  Rachel is hesitant, frowning. “A male sitter? I don’t know . . .”

  “He’s a good kid from what I can tell, Rachel,” says Karen, who lives next door to the Gallaghers and should know. “He seems like a real studious type—”

  “I know who he is,” Rachel cuts in. “His mother died in that awful house fire in July.”

  “August, actually, and that was his stepmother, Melissa Gallagher.”

  “No wonder,” Rachel says.

  “No wonder what?” Karen asks.

  “No wonder the kid is so homely. Melissa Gallagher was an attractive woman. A blonde with a great figure, remember? No way could she produce a kid who looks like that.”

  Tasha rolls her eyes. “Rach, that’s cruel. He’s just a kid.”

  “I know, but . . . never mind. Go on, Karen.”

  “Anyway,” Karen says, getting back to the point, “Sharon and Fletch have taken in Jeremiah and his two stepsisters until his father gets back to town. He’s overseas on a military assignment.”

  Tasha toys with her coffee cup while Rachel and Karen discuss the Gallaghers’ nephew. She’s grateful when Victoria spills her apple juice all over herself, effectively curtailing the conversation.

  Fletch Gallagher isn’t someone she feels comfortable discussing, even now.

  Even if not another living soul knows what happened.

  “I’ve got to get her home and change her into dry clothes,” Tasha tells Rachel and Karen, wiping the juice spatters from her daughter’s pink overalls with napkins.

  “She’s not that wet,” Rachel points out. “It’ll dry fast.”

  “I know, but . . . I’ve got a lot to do at home,” Tasha tells her, standing. “I was about to tackle a mountain of laundry when you called.”

  “Oh, laundry,” Rachel says, wrinkling her nose. “Wouldn’t you rather stay here and gossip with us?”

  Not about Fletch Gallagher, Tasha thinks grimly as she reaches for her jacket.

  Margaret Armstrong sets a steaming cup of tea on the desk in front of her brother-in-law, taking care to make sure the saucer is carefully positioned on the blotter so as not to mar the antique cherry finish.

  Owen barely looks up at her and doesn’t even glance at the tea, mumbling only, “Thanks.”

  His head rests heavily in his hand; his gaze is fixed bleakly on a framed photograph on the desk.

  Margaret can see only its easel back but she knows the picture must be of Jane. Owen’s large study is filled with photos of her sister, some formal studio shots, others candid snapshots, and a few of her with Schuyler.

  On the wall over the fireplace behind the desk is an oil painting in an ornate gilt frame: Jane and Owen together on their wedding day. Jane, elegantly simple in Mother’s silk gown that has faded to a mellow ivory. Owen, dashing in his morning coat, beaming at his bride. She’s looking up at him, too, but, Margaret notices for the first time, she doesn’t radiate bliss the way her new husband does.

  That’s Jane, she thinks to herself with a familiar flicker of anger, averting her eyes from the painting. Oblivious to the fact that she’s landed one of the most eligible men on the East Coast—and that he’s wildly in love with her.

  Her sister has always taken Owen’s devotion for granted, from the moment she first met him at the country club pool on that long ago Fourth of July weekend.

  Jane was only thirteen then. Margaret, at eighteen, had been assigned to keep an eye on her younger sister while Mother was on the golf course and Daddy was in the bar.

  Keeping an eye on Jane meant watching her frolic in a skimpy turquoise bikini that she filled out so remarkably that every teenaged boy—and most of the men—at the pool that day were in awe of her.

  While her sister flirted—shyly at first, and then with maddening aplomb—Margaret sat in the shade at a poolside umbrella table, her own modest black one-piece concealed under a terry cover-up that hid her pale skin and knobby, angular figure. She pretended to be engrossed in the novel she’d brought along: Dostoevsky.

  But she was mostly watching Jane, wondering how it was that her kid sister was able to attain so effortlessly everything that had always eluded Margaret’s grasp.

  Then, as if to punctuate Margaret’s covetous thoughts, he showed up, a gloriously masculine, broad-shouldered young blond man silhouetted against the bright blue summer sky as he bounced lightly on the edge of the high board.

  Margaret found herself staring up at him, wondering why he was lingering, why it was taking him so long to leap over the edge. Was he leery? She didn’t sense apprehension in his sanguine bouncing. No, she realized . . . he was waiting for something. He was gazing pointedly down into the water below, where Jane, surrounded by a crowd of male admirers, was treading water, her wet golden hair streaming back to reveal that flawless sun-kissed face.

  He was waiting for Jane.

  Finally, as though sensing the eyes intently focused on her from above, she glanced up at the man on the diving board.

  And he, realizing he had her attention, executed a perfect somersault dive into the water below.

  When he surfaced, he swam directly over to Jane.

  Margaret watched as he chatted with her sister, who seemed coyly uninterested yet didn’t seem to mind when her other admirers drifted away gradually, leaving her alone with him. Finally the two of them climbed out of the pool and headed over to the snack bar, passing Margaret on the way. Her sister waved casually, and the boy with her glanced in her direction. It was then that Margaret recognized him.

  It was Owen Kendall, the eighteen-year-old heir to a vast Westchester fortune. Like her, he had graduated from high school weeks earlier. He had gone to Somerset Prep while she had attended its all-girls sister school, Dover Academy. All the Dover girls knew about handsome, affable, gentlemanly Owen Kendall, the consummate great catch.

  It figured that he would land in Jane’s lap before she even began her freshman year at Dover. Owen was patient, dating her the whole time he was away at Yale, proposing marriage on her eighteenth birthday.

  Jane never had to work for anything in her life. She didn’t know what it was like to yearn. To envy . . .

  No, Margaret chast
ises herself. Not now. Don’t hate Jane now. Not when you should be focusing your energy on Owen. He needs you.

  That’s why she’s here, having so willingly left behind her life in Scarsdale—the idle days she struggles to fill with gardening, reading, television.

  She has nothing to rush back to. She can stay here with Owen and Schuyler as long as she is needed.

  And she is needed. Or so she has been struggling to convince herself.

  She clears her throat.

  He looks up. His light blue eyes are tormented.

  “Do you . . . need anything?” Margaret asks, feeling herself flush under his gaze.

  She is suddenly aware of the overwhelming silence in the study, broken only by the rhythmic ticking of the clock on the mantel.

  He seems to ponder the question too long before shaking his head. “Nothing you can give me,” he says with quiet bitterness.

  Margaret knows he means no animosity toward her. That he can’t possibly sense the secret, forbidden urges that torment her. Yet she can’t help feeling a prickle of trepidation at his words.

  Is he angry with her?

  Is there the slightest chance that he somehow knows?

  She forces her voice to remain level as she tells him, “I checked on Schuyler. She’s asleep in the nursery.”

  “Are my parents still here?”

  “Your mother is lying down upstairs. She has a headache. Your father is still on the phone in the library.”

  “With our lawyers, no doubt,” Owen says dully.

  Margaret doesn’t have an answer for him. The Kendalls have pretty much ignored her since she arrived. Though they adore Jane—who doesn’t?—they have never had much use for her family.

  The Armstrongs were never quite as socially esteemed as the Kendalls, but they were certainly on par with the majority of Westchester’s country club set—until Daddy blew his brains out one midnight on the golf course, later that same summer when Margaret was eighteen and Owen was following Jane around at the pool.

  In the wake of that tragedy, the Armstrongs were tainted. But not Jane. Never Jane. She survived the scandal with her dignity intact, traded the tarnished Armstrong name for one that was pure gold. Jane became a Kendall, welcomed into their ranks and thus protected from further unpleasant fallout from her father’s scandalous suicide.