“Cursing PBS,” Tasha replies, going into the kitchen.
“Oh, I know. They’re doing that fund-raising thing again. Mara’s all pissed off that The Big Comfy Couch isn’t on yet.”
“So is Victoria.” Tasha wedges the receiver between her shoulder and ear and pours herself a cup of coffee from the pot Joel made. It splashes on her sleeve.
That reminds her. The washing machine. She needs to do something about it today.
“Did you see the paper?”
“No, why?”
“Jane Kendall’s still missing.”
Tasha bites her lip. Jane Kendall. Somehow, she’d almost forgotten.
“Do the police have any idea what could have happened to her?” she asks Rachel.
“Nothing new. But I got all creeped out when I was outside getting the paper this morning. I felt like whoever got Jane Kendall was hiding in the bushes, watching me.”
“Yeah, or maybe it was just Mr. Martin again,” Tasha says, rolling her eyes. She knows Rachel’s convinced that the kindly old retiree is some sort of pervert. That’s the thing about Rachel—she’s a typical New Yorker, skeptical of everything and everyone.
“If it was, then he was lurking in the junipers this time, because I didn’t see any sign of him.”
The image of Mr. Martin as a Peeping Tom is just too ludicrous. Tasha laughs.
“What’s so funny?” Rachel asks.
“Never mind. So what are you doing today?”
“I was supposed to have a facial and manicure, but now I don’t have anyone to watch the kids while I go. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on them for about an hour this afternoon.”
Vaguely irked by Rachel’s life of leisure, Tasha hesitates, then decides she might as well say yes. Mara can keep Victoria company, and Max always loves to see Noah. If she can get them all busy with toys in the family room, maybe she can even wash the kitchen floor. “What time do you want to drop them off?” she asks Rachel.
“Actually, I thought maybe you could come over here. I have to be there at one, which is Noah’s nap time. You’d only have to watch Mara, really. Noah will sleep through.”
“All right,” Tasha says reluctantly. There goes her clean kitchen floor. She glances down and sees dried spatters of spilled milk on the linoleum where she’s standing. She’s definitely got to wash the floor before her in-laws come on Saturday.
“Great,” Rachel says. “You’re such a great friend, Tasha. Anytime I can return the favor, just ask.”
“I definitely will,” Tasha tells her. She really could use an hour or two to herself sometime. Like . . . now.
“Ouch—Mommy!” Victoria screams suddenly from the next room.
“Hey, cut it out! . . . Mommy! She’s hitting me!” Hunter yells.
“Uh-oh, gotta run,” Tasha wearily tells Rachel. “I’ll see you this afternoon.”
“Karen?”
“Ben!” Karen says, relieved to hear his voice on the other end of the line. “Thanks for calling back.”
“No problem. What’s wrong with Taylor?”
“Vomiting and diarrhea.”
Ben asks her a series of questions about how much formula the baby’s had since last night, whether her diapers are wet, and how she’s been acting.
“She’s sleeping right now,” Karen tells him. “She’s exhausted. She was up all night.”
“Which means you were, too,” Ben says sympathetically.
“Right.” He’s such a sweet guy. Not for the first time, Karen wonders what ever drew him to Rachel. Beyond her looks, that is.
The more she thinks about her friend today, the more irritated she becomes with the way Rachel thinks the world revolves around herself and her problems.
“Listen, Karen, keep her hydrated with Pedialyte and don’t force her to eat. If she’s not better by the end of the day, bring her in and I’ll take a look at her.”
“How late are you there?”
“Late. I have office hours tonight, and I’m meeting with expectant parents after that. So call if you need me. I’ll be here.”
“Thanks, Ben,” Karen hangs up and goes back to the living room, where Taylor is asleep in her playpen. The television drones in the background. Karen had turned on Sesame Street for her daughter. Taylor always smiles when she sees Elmo. She didn’t today.
Karen turns off the television, abruptly curtailing the announcer’s cheerful description of gifts that can be yours if you pledge a donation to PBS.
She stands by the playpen, staring down at her tiny daughter, noticing that she looks pale. Worried, she pulls a white knit blanket up around the baby’s shoulders.
“Was that the doctor?”
Karen looks up to see Tom standing in the doorway behind her. He’s wearing his work-at-home uniform: faded jeans and a big Rutgers sweatshirt.
That was where they met, in college. He was a sophomore and she was a senior. She had surprisingly much in common with him from the start, despite the two-year age gap and the fact that he was a mild-mannered WASP from Connecticut. They were engaged two years later, while she was in the midst of getting her master’s in education, and married two years after that.
They waited to start a family, though, until both their careers were well established. To her dismay, when they finally decided they were ready, it took longer for her to conceive than she had expected. So long that she was about to consult a fertility expert when she finally found herself pregnant.
“What did he say?” Tom asks, coming to stand beside her and staring down at their daughter.
Karen recaps the conversation with Ben.
“Pedialyte? Do we have that in the house?”
Karen shakes her head. This is the first time Taylor has been really sick, aside from her trouble with breast milk months ago.
“Want me to go to the store?” Tom asks, eyeing her flannel pajamas.
She can tell he’s reluctant to break away from his work for that long. He told her earlier he’s buried in paperwork today.
“No, it’s okay,” she tells him. “I’ll go later, after I’ve taken a shower and gotten dressed.”
“What if she wakes up in the meantime? Shouldn’t we have some of that stuff on hand to give her as soon as she does?”
“I’ll call Tasha,” Karen decides, crossing to the phone. With three kids, Tasha is often her source of borrowed baby items. “She probably has some. Maybe she can drop it off when she drives Hunter to school. She should be leaving any minute.”
“Let’s go that way,” Lily says, pausing on the corner of Townsend Avenue and North Street. With her enormous navy book bag seeming to weigh down her slender shoulders, her stylishly oversize jeans brushing the sidewalk at her heels, and her short red hair fashionably rumpled, she looks even younger than she is.
“Again?” Jeremiah asks reluctantly, knowing he’ll give in. “I thought we were going to start taking the short way again.”
“Not yet,” Daisy tells him, glancing from her twin to her older stepbrother. “We don’t want to do that yet, Jer’.”
“Besides,” Lily says, “we need to check our pumpkin. The contest is on Saturday.”
He sighs. They begin walking up North Street. The girls’ school is a block and a half in the other direction, but the girls like to walk by the house—or rather, what’s left of it.
He promised Uncle Fletch before they left home that he would walk them all the way to the door of the middle school this time, instead of just leaving them at the corner. Uncle Fletch had said that he should be extra careful because of that lady disappearing and nobody knowing what happened to her.
Jeremiah shoves his hands in the pockets of his jean jacket as they walk down the street, their shoes making scuffling noises in the piles of leaves that litter the sidewalk.
It’s a
nice neighborhood. He likes it better than the one where they live now. Here, the houses are older—maybe more than a hundred years old, he would guess, judging by their old-fashioned front porches with gingerbread trim, scallop-type shingles, and gabled roof lines. Enormous trees in the front yards cast the sidewalk and most of the houses in dappled shadows. A tangle of woods borders the backyards of the properties.
Most of the homes on the block are decorated for Halloween. Thick skeins of cotton, meant to look like cobwebs, are strewn across bushes. Miniature white ghosts dangle from trees. Curbs are dotted with leaf-filled plastic garbage bags meant to look like fat orange pumpkins. One house even has a make-believe cemetery on the front lawn, with realistic-looking headstones of papier-mâché. Last year while trick-or-treating, Jeremiah tapped one and figured it out.
He thinks back over the months to that strange holiday, remembering how reluctant he had been to go trick-or-treating with the twins, yet just as reluctant to give it up quite yet. There’s a certain thrill in taking on somebody else’s identity, in hiding behind a mask or makeup and clothing that doesn’t belong to you. It’s sort of an escape.
An escape from being Jeremiah Gallagher.
He remembers that night last year: how he dressed in a costume he designed himself after being struck by inspiration one day walking past an antique shop in town. It was the Victorian dress on a mannequin in the window that had triggered the idea.
It was a perfect costume. Perfect, except that nobody recognized who he was trying to impersonate.
“Who are you supposed to be?” he heard time and again, from his sisters, passersby, and puzzled neighbors poised on doorsteps with baskets full of miniature candy bars.
How could they not know? The dress, with its Gay Nineties–style high collar and puffy sleeves, was just right. So was the wig, a woman’s prim bun in a reddish hue. He smuggled both out of the drama club’s storage room at school; they had been used in a production of Our Town years ago, and nobody missed them.
What made the costume, of course, had been the axe. He borrowed it from the woodpile behind the shed. With his father away so much, nobody noticed that missing, either. Melissa never went out into the yard unless she was on her way to the car.
He smeared the blade with fake blood, cutting his hand in the process, tainting the ketchup-corn syrup mixture with the real thing.
“Who are you supposed to be?”
How could they not have figured it out?
Lizzie Borden was only the most notorious female murderer who had ever lived—if you believed she was guilty.
“She killed her father and mother, didn’t she?” Melissa asked him when he explained his costume, more irritated with her than with the others who asked. Everything she did got on his nerves. Everything.
“Stepmother,” he’d corrected her icily, pleased to see her squirm and look away.
He remembered that now. Remembered the twins’ shrieks of disgust when they saw the fake blood. Remembered how reluctantly they wore the costumes that Melissa had made them.
“You’re adorable,” she exclaimed as they glowered in their outfits. One was a salt shaker. One was a pepper shaker. Melissa came up with that idea herself and thought it was brilliant.
Jeremiah thought it was ridiculous. So did Uncle Fletch, who stopped by right before he left to take his sisters trick-or-treating. He came over a lot those days. Almost every day. Said he was checking on everyone, making sure they were all okay with Jeremiah’s father overseas.
“Salt and pepper shakers?” he asked when he saw the twins, shaking his head and turning to his brother’s wife. “Mel, don’t they ever get to dress as individuals?”
She shushed him, of course, but good-naturedly. She was never moody when Uncle Fletch was around.
He didn’t get the Lizzie Borden thing, either.
Jeremiah and the twins trekked around the neighborhood that windy, moonless night, ringing doorbells and collecting candy in their plastic pumpkins. The girls admired the decorations on house after house and chattered about what they would do if their mother let them decorate their own house next year.
Well, now their house is by far the eeriest place on the block, Jeremiah realizes as it comes into view between the tall trees shielding it from the sidewalk.
The three of them stop and stare in silence at what little there is to see within the grim perimeter of yellow police tape encircling the property.
It’ll be gone soon, he knows, staring at the pile of charred rubble punctuated by a brick chimney and a few standing beams. His stepmother’s body was found in there someplace, burned beyond recognition.
Beyond the house, the shed stands unscathed, its contents untouched. He’ll have to go in there to get the wagon on Saturday morning.
“Do you want to go check your pumpkin?” Jeremiah asks the twins, glancing at the garden just in front of the shed, well beyond the wreck where the house used to be. Even from here he can see the plump orange pumpkins amid the low foliage, with the biggest—the one the girls are entering in the contest this weekend—rising above the rest like a mountain.
“Will you come with us?” Lily asks quietly.
But he doesn’t want to go any closer. Not now. He shakes his head. “Just leave it for today,” he tells them. “It’s fine. I can see it from here.”
“Okay,” Daisy agrees. “We’ll come back and get it Saturday morning, right?”
He nods.
They stand there for a long moment. Then Jeremiah puts one hand on each stepsister’s shoulder and wordlessly ushers them away.
Tasha pulls up at the curb in front of Karen’s house, parking beside the curbside mailbox marked Wu/Simmons. She’s struck, as always, by the blatant reminder that Karen has kept her maiden name.
When she married Joel, Tasha toyed with the idea of keeping her maiden name. She might have, if she had liked it. But Tasha Banks sounds so much better than Tasha Shaughnessy, which she always thought had one too many sha sounds. Besides, it’s easier to spell.
She puts the car into park and grabs the plastic grocery bag containing the Pedialyte from the seat beside her.
“What are you doing, Mommy?” Hunter asks from the back seat, where he’s strapped in between Victoria’s booster and Max’s car seat.
“I’m just dropping this off for Taylor’s mommy,” Tasha tells him, getting out of the car. She grabs her keys from the ignition as an afterthought. You never know when a car-jacker might be lurking, although the prospect seems laughable in this neighborhood, at this hour of the day.
A sudden bang shatters the stillness, making her jump.
Just a car door slamming nearby, she realizes, her heart racing.
Glancing up, she sees Fletch Gallagher behind the wheel of his Mercedes in the driveway of the house next door to Karen’s.
Tasha freezes.
Has he seen her?
He waves at her through the windshield.
She waves back. Clutching the shopping bag, she starts toward Karen’s front door.
Drive away, Fletch, she bids silently. Just go.
He’s getting out of the car.
“How’s it going, Tasha?” he asks, walking toward her. His keychain jangles casually in his hand.
She forces herself to stop, to face him, when what she really wants to do is take off running. “I’m fine,” she says stiffly. Defensively, almost. As if daring him to speculate that she might not be coping well after—
“Haven’t seen you around lately.”
That’s because I avoid this end of the street. When I have to pass your house I put my head down and step on the accelerator just in case you’re around. . . .
But he rarely is.
At least, he wasn’t until lately. Not with baseball season in full swing and a busy travel schedule.
Now, the Mets are out of the p
layoffs and he’s out of a job until next spring.
“Why aren’t you in Florida?” she hears herself ask.
He smiles faintly. “How’d you know I go to Florida in October?”
She shrugs, trying not to squirm. The last thing she wants to do is admit she remembers anything he ever told her. But then, the fact that he likes to winter in Florida is mild compared to the other things that still echo through her head.
“Visiting Karen?” he asks.
She nods.
“Leaving the kids in the car?” He peers over her shoulder, at the small heads bobbing in the back seat of the Expedition.
“I’m just dropping something off, actually.”
“Did you lock them in?” he asks, motioning at the car.
She shakes her head.
“I wouldn’t take any chances,” Fletch tells her. “Did you hear about Jane Kendall?”
“That she disappeared?”
He nods.
In his clouded golden-hazel eyes, she glimpses an unexpected expression, something other than casual concern. It’s gone before she can read it. She pushes away a flicker of suspicion, relieved when he says abruptly with a shrug, “Well, just make sure you’re careful, Tasha. And I’d keep a close eye on my kids if I were you.”
“I always keep a close eye on my kids, Fletch.”
He smiles. “I know you do. Well, I’ll see you later, Tasha.”
A chill skids through her as he walks back to his car, jangling his keys. She can’t help but wonder whether it’s just her imagination or if there’s something forced about his nonchalance.
Paula drives up in front of the train station just as the northbound eight twenty-two pulls into the station. The train is coming from Manhattan, having made stops in Harlem and the Bronx as well as lower Westchester.
The vast majority of disembarking passengers are nannies and maids and day laborers, all of them heading off to another day’s work for the wealthy local families. They chatter cheerfully to each other as they move toward the steps leading up from the tracks, some speaking in accented English, others in different languages.
Those already waiting on the platform for the eight thirty-three southbound to Manhattan—the well-heeled residents of Townsend Heights—are quiet by contrast. Some are jean-clad, headphone-wearing private school or college students with knapsacks, but most are business commuters in suits and trench coats, clutching briefcases, newspapers, and steaming paper cups of coffee from the small bakery café opposite the train parking lot.
The Last to Know Page 15