The Last to Know Read online

  “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?

  Margaret 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.”

  “Well, Jane isn’t here,” Owen’s mother says. “And Schuyler needs comfort from someone other than a maid. I’ll go to her.”

  Margaret knows little about the relationship between Owen’s mother and Schuyler; Jane has never discussed it. Margaret doubts that Louisa Kendall is a hands-on grandmother, the type whose mere presence would bring comfort to a child missing its mother. She says nothing, though, just watches the woman leave the kitchen, heading down the hallway to the stairs.

  After a moment, alone in the kitchen, Margaret turns her attention back to the things she has removed from Schuyler’s carriage. After a moment, she picks up the baby’s soft pink blanket, holds it to her cheek, and absently strokes it.

  Karen Wu stands at her kitchen sink dumping a few ounces of unused soy formula from Taylor’s bottle. She wrinkles her nose as the familiar smell of the stuff wafts up. No wonder Taylor made a face and pushed it away just now.

  Then again, she usually gulps down the soy formula hungrily—as opposed to how she reacted when Karen tried nursing her during the first few weeks of her life. Armed with statistics showing that a mother’s milk is far better than formula for newborns, Karen was determined to breast-feed her daughter at least through the first year. But when the baby grew increasingly fussy and constantly spit up, Ben Leiberman switched her to a soy formula despite Karen’s reluctance.

  Sure enough, that did the trick. Taylor’s been on soy ever since, and she’s thriving.

  Today, however, she has had little appetite. When Karen returned from Starbucks this morning, Tom told her the baby wasn’t interested in her bottle. She must be coming down with something.

  Karen’s nieces were sick with some sort of stomach bug late last week, and they dropped by on Sunday. Karen’s younger sister, Lisa, mentioned their illness in passing. It would never occur to her to keep the girls home for fear of spreading germs to Taylor. Carefree Lisa never has been very responsible.

  Unlike Karen, who seems to spend her days worrying. There are just so many dangers in the world—so many reasons to protect her tiny daughter. . . .

  A door slams outside. Karen, running water into the empty bottle, looks up at the sound and notices a teenage boy emerge from the house next door. It’s Jeremiah, Fletch Gallagher’s nephew. He’s a gangly sort of kid, she thinks, watching him make his way across the yard. At that awkward age, although even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t have his uncle’s lady-killer looks.

  She wonders if Rachel will call him to babysit. After she made the recommendation this morning, she thought better of it. For one thing, she doesn’t know the boy very well—has only met him a few times in passing. Not that Rachel is fussy about things like that. She’s the total opposite of Karen, never seeming to fret about things like references even when it comes to her kids.

  Karen watches Jeremiah Gallagher open the door to a wooden storage shed among the trees near the back of the property line next door. The boy disappears inside, closing the door behind him.

  That seems odd. What can he possibly be doing in there? The space has to be only a few feet square, and probably houses a lawnmower, yard tools, that sort of thing. At least, that’s what Tom keeps in their shed, Karen muses. But maybe the Gallaghers—

  “Karen! Hey, Karen!” Tom shouts urgently from the next room.

  “What’s wrong?” She turns off the tap and tosses the bottle into the sink.

  “Taylor just threw up all over me. Bring something to clean it up!”

  Karen grabs a dish towel and hurries into the family room, silently cursing her sister. Taylor’s sick. I just knew it.

  “Mommy, can we have pizza for dinner?” Hunter asks, adding his lunchbox to the clutter on the kitchen counter and unzipping his jacket.

  “We’ll see.” Tasha closes the door behind them, then locks it. There are days when she doesn’t bother, but after the whole thing with Jane Kendall . . .

  She had the car radio tuned to a local station on the way to the elementary school. The latest reports haven’t revealed anything new. The woman is still missing, and her family is expected to give a statement later today. Anyone with any information about the case is asked to call a special toll-free hotline set up by the Townsend Heights police.

  Tasha sets the baby on the worn blue-and-white-pinstriped family-room couch and takes off his little blue fleece coat. The fabric is pilling a bit—it’s a hand-me-down from Hunter, like pretty much everything else in Max’s wardrobe. He really deserves some new clothes, Tasha decides. Maybe she can go down to the mall in White Plains one of these days.

  The thought of shopping brightens her spirits . . . but only a little. She’ll have to lug Victoria and Max along with her in the double stroller, and they’ll last maybe an hour, tops.

  “Mommy, help me,” Victoria says in a whiny voice, struggling with the buttons on her coat.

  Tasha carefully counts to three before saying evenly, “Victoria, don’t whine.”

  “But it’s stuck,” Victoria whines, and stomps her foot. “I can’t do it!”

  Patience, Tasha reminds herself as she puts Max on the floor. He crawls across the blue carpet toward a basket of foam blocks, and Tasha kneels to help her daughter take off her pink coat.

  “Thank you, Mommy,” Victoria says, throwing her arms around Tasha as thoug
h she’s just been promised unlimited candy for dinner.

  “You’re welcome.” Tasha smiles. All Victoria wants is attention. This time. Oh, who knows? Maybe all the time.

  Maybe, Tasha thinks, as an oldest child with two younger brothers, she has a hard time relating to the needs of a middle child. She can’t remember ever feeling like she needed more than her own parents could give.

  In fact, Mom and Dad did a great job with Tasha and her brothers. The boys are both well-adjusted, successful adults with thriving careers. Gregg is a financial analyst in Cleveland with a bubbly, sweet blond wife, and their first child on the way around Christmas. Andrew, a tax accountant, is engaged to marry a hometown girl and lives a few blocks from their mother. He has looked out for her ever since Dad died almost two years ago from the lung cancer that ravaged him long before he drew his last breath.

  Since then, Tasha hasn’t gone home. She and Joel used to make the trip every Christmas. She used to tease him—back in the teasing days of their marriage—that she only married him because he was Jewish and they would never have to argue over where they would spend Christmas, the way so many of their friends seemed to do. They would simply celebrate Hanukkah whenever it fell in December and always go to Ohio at the end of the month.

  Joel loved spending the holidays back in Centerbrook with her family. Her parents’ sprawling Victorian would be decked out in garlands and lights, and it always seems to be snowing there. Tasha still remembers the first time she brought him home for Christmas, the year they got engaged. They drove that year, renting a car in Manhattan and playing corny carols on the tape deck the whole nine-hour trip. Every house on the block had a tree glowing in the front window, and her parents’ porch roof was lined in colored lights, the old-fashioned kind with the big flame-shaped bulbs.

  “It looks like something out of It’s a Wonderful Life, Tash,” Joel said, gazing at it in wonder.

  She still remembers how she felt in that moment. As though she were going to spill over into laughter or tears from sheer joy.

  How long has it been since she felt that way?