“We haven’t heard anything yet—”
“I’m just beside myself,” her mother wails as the uniformed car service driver deposits her bags just inside the door, tips his hat, and walks off into the night. “And all those people out by the gate—”
“They’re still there?” Margaret looks out the open door. In the yellow glow of the streetlight, she can see shadowy figures still congregated beyond the fence.
“They’re vultures.” She embraces Margaret in a hug that is little more than perfunctory, then wipes tears from her eyes.
“Schuyler, oh, my poor, dear grandchild.” Sobbing, Bess holds out her arms toward the baby. “Come to Mere.”
Mere. The French word for Mother. Bess announced, shortly after Schuyler’s birth, that it was what she would like to be called by her grandchildren. “ ‘Grandmother’ just sounds elderly,” she told Jane, who agreed, of course. Jane has always been willing to please Mother.
“Come to Mere, Schuyler,” Bess urges again.
Margaret half-expects her to cling to Margaret, the way she did to Minerva. But Schuyler, still sniffling and whimpering, goes to the grandmother she’s only seen a handful of times in her life.
“What is this?” Bess asks, as the baby settles into her arms, clutching her hand to her mouth. “What is she chewing on?”
“It’s a piece of one of her puzzles,” Margaret tells her.
“Where did she get it?” Bess seizes the baby’s tight fist and pries it open. “Surely you didn’t give it to her?”
Margaret falters. “She picked it up. I let her have it. It’s hers.”
“It can’t be. Look at the size of it.”
Margaret looks at the puzzle piece, and then, blankly, at her mother. Her heart is pounding and it’s all she can do not to flee. She can’t deal with this. She can’t. Not now.
“What was I thinking? Of course you wouldn’t know. You’ve never had children.” Her mother smiles faintly, as though her words are meant to exonerate Margaret, but Margaret hears the accusation in her tone.
You’ve never had children.
Never been married.
Never done most of the things that Jane has done, the things that have made their mother so proud.
“What wouldn’t I know, Mother?” Margaret manages to keep her voice even, watching her mother struggle to remove the puzzle piece from the baby’s clenched fingers despite Schuyler’s angry shouts of protest.
“You wouldn’t know that she can’t have a puzzle with pieces this size,” she says above the baby’s howls. “See? It’s much too small. A choking hazard. The puzzle belongs to an older child.”
“It was hers,” Margaret says succinctly. “It was with her things. Otherwise I wouldn’t have given it to her.” She raises her voice almost to a shout on the last part, partly in anger, and partly to be heard above Schuyler’s renewed screams over having been deprived of her prize.
“Please take this, Margaret,” her mother says, pressing the saliva-soaked wooden piece into her hand. “I’ll calm the poor baby. Where is Owen?”
“He’s with the police. Holding a press conference.”
“Oh, my God.” Her mother chokes up again. “If anything has happened to Jane, I’ll . . .” She trails off.
“You’ll what, Mother?” Margaret asks icily, somehow unable to help herself.
You’ll kill yourself, like Daddy did? she wants to ask but can’t quite bring herself to utter the harsh phrase.
She doesn’t have to. Unrestrained resentment mingles with the suffering in the flooded blue gaze her mother levels at Margaret. She says nothing, only walks away down the hall, cooing to Jane’s sobbing baby.
Seated in the living room in front of the television, Tasha nearly bolts from the couch when she hears a noise outside. She grabs the remote control and mutes the volume on the television, then cocks her head, listening.
It must be Joel, she tells herself, glancing at the clock on the mantel. About a quarter after nine. It has to be him. She heard a train whistle a short time ago and wondered if he was on it. He sure as hell wasn’t on the six-forty-four. Or the seven twenty-one. Nor has he called to tell her he’ll be late, as he promised to do.
Meanwhile, here she is, jumping at every little sound, glancing constantly out the window at the empty, silent street, wondering if whatever happened to Jane Kendall could possibly happen to somebody else. Somebody like Tasha, alone in the house at night.
Well, not alone. The kids are here. She put them to bed early, giving Max some Tylenol to make sure he would sleep well, poor baby. That tooth is giving him such a hard time. . . .
There’s another thump outside.
Tasha puts the remote on the coffee table and walks toward the back door. It swings open just as she reaches it.
She screams.
“What the hell?” Joel sticks his head in. “Tash, it’s me.”
“Oh, my God.” She clutches her collar. “You scared me!”
“Obviously. But who else would it possibly be?” He locks the door behind him and shrugs out of his black Burberry trench coat. Darkly handsome in his charcoal Paul Stuart suit and tie—another post-promotion splurge—a still crisply starched white shirt, and polished black wing tips, he looks as though he belongs someplace else. To someone else. Not in this sticky, crumb-laden suburban kitchen that smells of dried-out chicken casserole, with a wife who’s wearing decade-old men’s flannel pajamas and hasn’t combed her hair since this morning.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says, depositing his briefcase on the kitchen table next to Hunter’s finished homework and packed vinyl lunch bag for tomorrow morning.
Tasha doesn’t want to be living a horrible cliche. She desperately doesn’t want to be the wife stuck at home in the suburbs, clock-watching and wondering about her husband and his pretty secretary.
The wife is always the last to know.
Or so the saying goes. But it doesn’t apply to her. Not her. Not Joel.
“Tash?”
“Mmm?”
“I said I’m sorry I’m late.”
“It’s okay,” she says, biting back, I thought you were going to call if you didn’t make the early train.
“I tried to call and let you know,” he says, as if he’s reading her mind. “But my phone battery is dead.” As if to punctuate the remark, he pulls his cell phone out of his suit coat pocket and fishes in the utensil drawer for the charger he insists on keeping there, adding to the clutter. He plugs one end into the phone and the other into the wall next to the toaster oven.
Tasha watches him, wanting to ask why he didn’t just do the old-fashioned thing and call her from a pay phone in Grand Central, the way he used to before he was promoted to account supervisor and got the cell phone. But maybe she doesn’t want to know the answer.
He brushes by her, taking off his jacket and loosening his tie. “I smell chicken.”
She sniffs the air. “Really? I smell cologne.” An irritating voice in her head wants to know why he would come home smelling of cologne at this hour, after a long day at work.
“Yeah, me too. And the chicken smells better. This stuff is giving me a headache, to tell you the truth. But I had to wear it. It’s one of the products for the new account, and I had to go over to the client for that meeting. . . .” He sits on a chair and bends over to untie his shoes.
Cologne. One of the products on the new packaged-goods account he helped to win. That’s right. He did mention something like that a while back. Relieved, Tasha turns away before he can glimpse her face and realize what she was thinking.
She doesn’t have to worry. She can see in the reflection of the oven door that he isn’t even looking at her. Now that his shoes are off, he’s rubbing his temples, his eyes closed, as though he’s had an exhausting day.
She turns back to him. “Did you hear ab
out Jane Kendall?”
“Jane Kendall?” He frowns. “Who’s Jane Kendall?”
“That woman I told you about? From Gymboree?”
He looks vacant, and she realizes that she might not have ever mentioned Jane Kendall to him after all. For some reason, though, she’s still irritated when he shakes his head and says, “Never heard of her.”
“I definitely told you about her, Joel.”
Her insinuation hangs in the air between them. He never listens anymore when she talks to him. He doesn’t think anything she has to say is important.
“Maybe you did,” he says with a shrug. “What about her?”
“Where are you going?”
“Upstairs to change, as soon as you tell me about this Jane Kendall person.”
“You’re going to leave your shoes there in the middle of the kitchen floor?”
“No, I’m going to take them with me,” he snaps, grabbing them. He heads for the doorway to the hall.
“Joel!”
“What?”
“What are you doing?”
“Taking my shoes with me, like you said.”
Seething, she says, “You don’t even care what I was about to tell you.”
His back to her, he just stands there. Like he’s waiting. Or maybe counting to ten before he speaks.
But he doesn’t speak.
She strides over to him and grabs his arm. “Joel, I’m trying to tell you that this woman, this friend of mine, just vanished into thin air today from High Ridge Park!”
He looks down at her with an expression she can’t read. “What do you mean, she vanished? What happened?”
“Nobody knows. People are saying she might have jumped. Or maybe she was kidnapped. She’s from a wealthy family—the Armstrongs—and her husband is one of the Kendalls. The vacuum cleaner family. Rachel told me they’re like the Rockefellers or something.”
“Rachel would say that.”
Joel doesn’t like Rachel much. He thinks she’s spoiled and a gossip. Which she is, for the most part, but Tasha isn’t about to let him deride her friend now. Not when he’s behaving in such a frustratingly cold way, as though he couldn’t care less that one of his wife’s friends has disappeared.
Maybe Jane Kendall isn’t exactly a friend, Tasha concedes, but that doesn’t mean this hasn’t totally upset her. She knows the woman, for Christ’s sake. Sees her every week. Watches her playing with her daughter. And now she’s—
“Is this why you kept calling me at work today?” Joel asks.
“Kept calling you? I didn’t keep calling you! Is that what Stacey told you?”
“She said you called a few times, yes.”
“I needed to talk to you. You could have called back.”
“I did.”
“At three-thirty this afternoon.”
“That was the first chance I had. I was in meetings—”
“You’re always in meetings, Joel. Whatever.” She waves her hand in dismissal and stalks over to the oven, yanking the door open.
“You have no idea what kind of day I’ve had, Tasha,” he says angrily. “You have no idea what kind of pressure I’m under.”
“You have no idea what kind of day I’ve had, either,” she shoots back. “You want to know about pressure?”
“What else happened?”
“You mean aside from Jane Kendall vanishing from the park? Isn’t that enough?”
He pauses. “Look, I’m sorry about your friend. I know you’re upset. But—”
“The washing machine is broken, Joel.” She turns away from the open oven to glare at him.
He stares back at her, almost . . . incredulous.
“I know, it’s not even a year old,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it either.”
“What I can’t believe is that you’re bringing up a broken washing machine as evidence of how stressful your day is. Try managing a thirty-million-dollar advertising account for a bunch of stuffy guys in designer suits.”
“Gladly!” Tasha shot back. “And you try staying here for a day, keeping the kids and the laundry and everything else under control without losing it.”
Joel just looks at her, then shakes his head and continues into the hall with his shoes dangling from his hand.
Tasha bangs the oven door shut and starts to follow him, then thinks better of it. She’s furious, yes, but utterly and completely drained. Too drained to get into an argument with him now.
She stands in the kitchen staring at her clenched fists, hearing his footsteps go steadily up the stairs.
The phone rings just as Karen takes the last tiny pink Onesie out of the drier. She tosses it into the laundry basket with the rest of the clothes Taylor wore—and vomited on—earlier today. Balancing the basket on her hip, she hurries into the kitchen to answer it.
“It’s me,” Rachel’s voice says.
“Hi, Rach.” She sets the laundry on the table and reaches for something to fold. “What’s up?”
“I called your neighbor to babysit. He’s coming tomorrow night. I just wanted to say thanks. I never thought of him before.”
Karen remembers how Jeremiah Gallagher disappeared into the storage shed this afternoon. Should she mention it to Rachel? Nah. After all, he wasn’t doing anything wrong as far as she knows. It’s just a feeling she had.
And maybe Tom is right. He just told her, over a late dinner of takeout sandwiches, that she worries too much.
No, she isn’t overly anxious. Just conscientious, she thinks stubbornly. There’s a big difference.
She tells Rachel, “I hope it works out,” as she matches a pair of tiny socks.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Rachel says breezily. “I need someone full time, though. I just fired Mrs. Tuccelli. I don’t supposed you’ve run into anyone Mary Poppinsish and unemployed since I saw you this morning?”
“No, but if I do, you’ll be the first person I call,” Karen says, examining the collar of the pink turtleneck Taylor has been wearing. It’s faintly stained, but not too bad. She folds it.
“Okay, thanks. Well, see you.”
Karen hangs up and returns to the laundry. Rachel didn’t even ask what’s going on with Karen. That’s typical, though. Karen used to think Rachel was merely self-absorbed, but lately she wonders if her friend is bordering on a case of narcissistic personality disorder. Karen had a troubled student a few years back who was diagnosed by the school psychologist as having NPD. She shared certain personality traits with Rachel, Karen has noticed lately. Her friend isn’t the most empathetic person in the world, and she takes advantage of her household help—and yes, sometimes her friends. Most of the time, she’s wrapped up in her own self-importance. And she certainly doesn’t react well to criticism.
Karen remembers an incident a while back in Starbucks, when Rachel had spread honey on a piece of bagel she was going to give to Noah. She told Rachel that honey could be toxic to small children, and Rachel snapped at her, saying she knew far more about what to feed children than Karen did. At the time, Taylor was only a few weeks old, as Rachel pointed out. And besides, Rachel was married to a pediatrician.
“You’re right about that, Rachel, and you probably know more than I do about a lot of parenting issues, but it could be dangerous to give Noah honey,” Karen insisted.
At that, Rachel stormed out in a huff, leaving Karen and Tasha to look at each other and shrug.
“She’ll get over it,” Tasha said. “She doesn’t like to be criticized.”
Tasha was right. Rachel got over it. And Karen has never seen her give Noah honey again. She’d be willing to bet that Rachel checked with Ben and discovered Karen was right—not that Rachel would ever be likely to admit it.
In any case, she still considers Rachel a friend. She has her good points, and besides, she lives right do
wn the street. These days, Karen’s social calender centers on convenience and on her daughter’s schedule. The women she spends time with now tend to be other moms from the neighborhood, which is fine most of the time. But on occasion, Karen longs for the people she has left behind. Since moving to Orchard Lane almost two years ago, Karen has drifted from her circle of city friends, many of whom juggle marriage and babies and careers as she does.
Did, she corrects herself. She’s been on maternity leave since last Christmas. She had intended to go back to work two months ago when school started again, but she realized she couldn’t leave Taylor behind. Not yet.
Luckily, she’s been teaching there long enough for her job to remain secure during the unpaid leave for at least a while longer. And Tom’s CPA business has been doing phenomenally well here in the suburbs, so they haven’t missed her income. Well enough, he keeps saying, that Karen might not have to go back to work if she doesn’t want to.
Does she want to?
Maybe. But not yet.
She folds the last tiny undershirt and picks up the basket, heading up the stairs, suddenly missing her daughter.
The door to Tom’s office—a spare bedroom, really—is closed. She can hear his calculator whirring on the other side and knows he won’t be coming to bed anytime soon.
She tiptoes down the hall and peeks into the baby’s room. Taylor is in her crib asleep. She’s lying on her side.
Karen strokes the soft, black fuzz covering her head. “Are you feeling better now, sweetheart?” she whispers. “Is your tummy settling down? Don’t you worry. You’ll be fine. And Mommy’s here to make sure of that. I’ll always be here, baby.”
A press conference, Mitchell learns, is even more boring than listening to Miss Bright drone on and on about some stupid dead president.
All that happens at a press conference is that a bunch of sad-looking people and some cops and guys in suits stand in front of a microphone in a big room, and they talk, and then they answer questions. Everyone’s talking about some lady who’s missing from the park, and her husband, the good-looking guy standing with the cops, keeps wiping tears from his eyes. Mitch wonders if he’s embarrassed to be crying in front of everyone this way. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to cry—especially men. Mom never even does.
The Last to Know Page 12
