“It doesn’t look like it, does it, then?” Paula agrees, even as she silently tells Brian Mulvaney, Don’t be so sure about that. Don’t be so sure about anything.
Fletch is staring miserably at his reflection in the rain-spattered bay window when the telephone rings behind him.
With his body facing the room, head twisted toward the window, he doesn’t even bother to turn around at the sound.
It’s been ringing all afternoon. One of the police officers answers it every time.
Now, as a stormy twilight descends outside, he notices that the lights have come on in the house around him. That’s why he can see his reflection.
He looks like his father.
The unavoidable truth is right there in front of him. He looks just like the bastard who ruined his mother’s life and then Fletch’s. Aidan’s, too, although his brother would never admit it. Aidan likes to pretend that everything is fine. Even after losing first one wife, and then another. Even now, with his son missing and suspected of murder—along with his brother.
And what the hell is Fletch supposed to do about that? There’s nothing he can do. This time there’s no escape. When they start digging into his past, they’re going to find out—
“Fletch?”
He sees someone come up behind him in the window as he registers the voice. It’s Detective Summers.
Fletch doesn’t reply.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Fletch.”
This is it.
They know.
Fletch braces himself, his hands clutching the edges of the window seat beside his thighs.
“Sharon has been found, Fletch. I’m sorry. She’s dead.”
After tucking the kids into bed, Tasha goes to the phone in the kitchen and tries Joel’s cell phone again. She’s been calling it every so often, with no response. Not this time, either. Not surprising. She knows he uses it mainly for outgoing calls and rarely keeps it turned on. She doubts he even checks his voice mail for that phone, so she doesn’t bother leaving a message.
Instead, she dials information.
“The Hyatt Hotel, Chicago, Illinois,” she says succinctly into the receiver when an automated voice asks for the listing.
Moments later, a female voice comes on the line. “Which Hyatt Hotel, ma’am? There are several in Chicago.”
Of course there are. Tasha pauses. What did Joel say? She thinks back to this afternoon, when he tossed the name over his shoulder. Belatedly, she realizes that it was something more specific than just the Hyatt, but she has no idea what it was.
Reluctantly she takes down the numbers for all of the Hyatt hotels in metropolitan Chicago. It isn’t a short list.
Does she really need to call all of them looking for Joel?
No, she realizes. She doesn’t. It’s a long shot but she can try to reach his secretary at home. She’ll probably know where he’s staying. After all, Joel says she has a photographic memory.
As always, Tasha feels a stab of jealousy at the thought of Stacey McCall being privy to every detail of her husband’s professional life when she herself is in the dark about most of them. But this time, she reminds herself, she should be glad the secretary keeps such close track of his schedule.
She dials information to get the phone number, figuring it’ll probably be unlisted—or, with any luck, she’ll be given a list of S. McCalls to try. If that happens, she’ll have to weigh the list against the list of Hyatts, and decide which will be less time-consuming.
To her surprise, though, there’s only one S. McCall on Sutton Place. Better yet she recognizes the voice that answers.
“Stacey, hi. This is Joel’s wife.”
A pause, as though it takes a moment for that to register, and then an incredulous-sounding, “Tasha?”
“I’m so sorry to call you at home on a Sunday night.” She paces nervously across the kitchen floor. “Joel left on his business trip this afternoon and I can’t seem to find the phone number of his hotel. I was wondering if you knew which Hyatt he’s at.”
“Business trip?” Stacey echoes.
Tasha frowns. So Miss Photographic Memory isn’t as brilliant as Joel thought.
“He’s not on a business trip, Tasha.”
“Yes, he is. He just left this afternoon.” Even as the slightly smug words spill out of Tasha’s mouth, she realizes, with a sudden, sick feeling, what’s coming.
“All I know is that he’s off tomorrow,” Stacey tells her. “He told me he was taking a personal day. It’s been on his calendar for two weeks now.”
“Are . . . are you sure?” It’s all Tasha can do to force her voice from her throat.
“Positive.”
“I guess . . . I guess I forgot,” she says in a futile, feeble attempt to appear in control. To appear as anything other than what she is: a wife whose husband has lied to her.
It’s no comfort that he’s obviously not with Stacey McCall . . . or is he? Is she covering for him? Is he there, in her apartment with her? Are they now, after Tasha has hung up, making fun of how blind she is not to have guessed?
You can’t think that way, she tells herself, wrapping her arms around herself, trying to calm the swarm of butterflies in her gut. You don’t really believe that Joel would lie to you, do you? Even though Stacey said . . .
There has to be some explanation for this.
There has to.
He said he was going to be at the Hyatt in Chicago, and she’s going to prove that he is.
She sits at the kitchen table to place the first call.
By the third, she’s standing.
By the fifth, she’s pacing.
After the last she tosses the receiver on the table, the pizza she has eaten churning in her stomach.
Outside, the storm rages.
Inside, the house is silent except for her own quickened breathing.
She hears the dial tone, then a clearly audible announcement in a robotic masculine voice. If you’d like to make a call please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and dial your operator. Then a loud, fast-paced beeping.
Tasha ignores it.
It’ll stop soon.
The phone can be off the hook all night, for all she cares.
She knows that the one person who matters won’t be calling her.
There is no Joel Banks registered at any of the Hyatt Hotels in Chicago.
Jeremiah’s father rushes into the interrogation room just as he’s telling the detectives, once again, that he didn’t kill his aunt. That he didn’t kill anybody.
“Dad!” he cries out, looking up to see the familiar figure, arms outstretched.
His father strides over and embraces him tightly. “It’s going to be all right, Jeremiah,” he says, his voice sounding choked up, the way it was before Melissa’s funeral.
“Dad, I didn’t kill Rachel. And I didn’t kill Aunt Sharon. I swear it.”
His father pats his head, then sits beside him. Jeremiah sees a big smudge of dirt along the front of his dark uniform and realizes it’s from him. He’s filthy.
“I’ve called a lawyer,” Aidan tells the three stern-looking detectives. “Jeremiah won’t answer any more questions until he gets here.”
“But I want to talk to them, Dad,” Jeremiah protests. “I want to tell them everything, because I’m innocent I swear I am.”
“If you’re innocent Jeremiah,” one of the detectives says, leaning across the table, “then why did somebody see you sneaking around the shed behind your Uncle Fletch’s house? What was in the bundle you took out of the shed, Jeremiah? And why did you carry it into the woods with you when you left?”
A soft knock on Mitch’s door awakens him. Confused, he looks around the darkened room, locating the glowing digital clock on his shelf. It’s past ten. He’s been asleep
for more than an hour. Why would somebody be knocking on his door?
“Come in,” he calls, his voice croaking a little the way it does when he’s been sleeping. He rubs his eyes and props himself on his elbows as the door opens and a shaft of light from the hall spills into the room.
Shawna is in the doorway.
“Mitch, I have something to tell you,” she says, crossing the room.
Something about her tone makes his stomach instantly queasy.
“What is it?” he asks, swallowing hard.
“There’s no easy way to say this, Mitch. I wish I didn’t have to be the one to tell you.”
Mitch braces himself for whatever is to come, his hands clutching the edges of the nautical quilt, trembling.
Please, don’t let it be Mom. Please, don’t let it be Mom.
“All right,” Jeremiah finally says, his voice breaking as he looks at the detectives, at the lawyer, at his father. “All right, I’ll tell you. But only because then you’ll know the whole truth. And I didn’t kill those women. I swear I didn’t.”
“But you’re hiding something, Jeremiah,” one of the detectives tells him. “You’ve admitted to that. It’s time to tell us what it is. What was in that bundle you carried off into the woods? And where is it now?”
Jeremiah looks down at his hands, clenched tightly before him on the wooden table. His fingers are filthy, caked with dirt and scratches and smears of dried blood, the nails blackened with grime.
“Jeremiah,” one of the detectives prods.
He takes a deep breath.
Then, haltingly, he begins to talk. He stares at his hands as the words pour from him, as he spills his darkest secret, not wanting to meet his father’s gaze—or the bitter disappointment and shame he knows he’ll find in it.
“I’m worried about Tasha,” Karen tells Tom as he turns off the television set across from their bed, plunging the room into dark silence.
“Why are you worried?”
“Her phone has been busy all day. I just tried it again when I went down to get a bottle for Taylor, and it still is.”
“You said she probably took it off the hook again because of the reporters. We can relate to that.”
He’s right. Their phone number might be unlisted, but there’s nothing to stop the reporters from ringing their bell. They’ve done it all day and night—even once or twice after Tom and Karen turned off all the lights and came upstairs to watch television in their bedroom with Taylor tucked cozily between them.
Now the baby is in her crib down the hall. But tonight, for the first time, Karen has left her door wide open, and theirs, too. That way, she can lie awake and listen for any unusual sound that might disturb the quiet household.
“I’m sure Tasha’s fine,” Tom tells her.
“Joel’s away. She’s alone with the kids. Maybe one of us should go down and check on her.”
Tom is silent for a minute. “You’re not going out alone in this weather, Karen.”
She listens to the pouring rain, to the wind creaking the tree branches high above their house.
“You want me to go?” he finally asks reluctantly.
She considers it. Then she would be alone in the house with the baby.
And Tom would be alone out in the stormy darkness.
“No,” she says decisively. “Not now. But first thing in the morning, one of us will go over there.”
“Okay. Good night.” He rolls over.
She murmurs a reply.
Long after Tom’s breathing has grown rhythmic, Karen lies awake, unable to get past a growing feeling of uneasiness as she listens to the howling storm.
Alone in the house after the last detective has left, Fletch goes into his den. He pulls out the leather chair behind his desk and sinks heavily into it.
The phone calls to Randi and Derek were the hardest. He promised to fly down and get Randi in the morning and bring her home from college, and in the meantime he has made sure that her friends and the RA are going to stay with her all night. She was hysterical after he told her.
Derek took the news surprisingly well, or else he was stoned when Fletch finally tracked him down at one of his buddies’ homes. Maybe so. In any case, he said he would be home tomorrow. He didn’t even ask how Fletch is holding up.
Neither Randi nor Derek seemed surprised to hear that Jeremiah has been arrested for their mother’s murder.
Not that the kid has admitted anything to the police. At least, not murder. Not to ordering those puzzles using Fletch’s credit card, either.
What he has admitted to, however, is being a pervert.
No surprise there.
Look at his grandfather.
Fletch hasn’t spoken to Aidan since he went down to the station after Jeremiah turned himself in. He doesn’t blame his brother. He wouldn’t want to face anyone with that kind of story, either. It was Detective Summers who told Fletch about his nephew.
Fletch wonders if Sharon ever suspected the kid of sneaking into her lingerie drawers, of stealing her panties, her bras—of trying them on, even.
Apparently, he did the same thing at Rachel’s house the night he babysat.
Sure enough, his prints showed up all over her room.
And after the detectives badgered him long enough, the kid reportedly directed them to the spot in the woods where he had buried the bundle containing not just Sharon’s and Rachel’s undergarments, but Melissa’s, too.
Jeremiah broke down and admitted to keeping the stuff stashed in the woodshed behind the house, saying that he figured nobody would find it there. That nobody would stumble across him prancing around in women’s underwear.
Fucking fairy.
Fletch slams his hand down on the desk, shaking his head in disgust.
He should be grateful that he knows.
There isn’t enough evidence to convict Jeremiah of murder—not yet—but there’s more than enough for the police to hold him for a while.
And there’s more than enough evidence for them to shift their investigation away from Fletch, thank God. They’ve finally left him alone, the new widower, to grieve in peace.
By now, they have begun checking out his alibis. Making sure that he really was where he said he was yesterday, at the Station House Inn—which Jimmy backed up—and then at the gym. Apparently, he had hidden his intoxication well, or else Michael, his trainer, didn’t mention it to the police. If he had, that bastard Summers would definitely have brought it up.
Fueled by liquor and pent-up fury, Fletch had had a hell of a workout.
Liquor.
He could use a stiff drink right now. But not a workout. Just a drink—or two—and then bed.
He spins in his chair, reaching into a low cupboard behind the desk. As he takes out a bottle of single-malt scotch, an unexpected sound pierces the silence.
The telephone is ringing.
Tasha awakens to a loud pounding.
Startled, she sits up in bed, trying to gather her thoughts.
Did she take Tylenol PM again before bed? She must have. The last thing she remembers is watching the news. The television is still on, she notes vaguely, seeing the bluish glow in the room.
Her head feels fuzzy, and she’s having trouble waking up. . . .
That pounding sound again. What is it?
Facts come tumbling back at her. Joel is gone. . . .
She’s alone in the house with the kids. . . .
There’s a storm. . . .
Rachel.
Jane.
Sharon.
The ten o’clock newscast . . .
“Sharon Gallagher’s body has been found at an undisclosed location . . .”
More pounding.
Dazed, she realizes somebody’s knocking on the door. It’s directly below her windo
w.
That means the side door facing the driveway, not the front door.
She gets out of bed.
Goes into the hall.
Something nags at her subconscious as she hurries down the steps. . . .
Something she should be noticing.
Remembering.
Filled with inexplicable apprehension, she can’t grasp whatever it is; her mind is too fuzzy, her head still too heavy with sleep.
This must be Joel knocking, she tells herself in the kitchen, trying to calm her fears as she reaches for the doorknob. Nobody ever uses the side entrance but the two of them. You can’t even see it from the street. Surely one of those reporters wouldn’t be so brazen as to prowl around the house and knock on the side door at this hour. . . .
Which hour?
Glancing at the illuminated dial of the clock on the stove, she sees that it’s past one in the morning.
The dead of night she thinks, not liking the phrase even as it settles into her muddled brain.
Well, of course it must be Joel. That’s why he wasn’t at any of the hotels.
An entire scenario flits into her mind. Stacey got it wrong about the personal day. Maybe the perfect secretary isn’t so perfect. Maybe Joel flew to Chicago, then realized he couldn’t stay. He was too worried about her. He tried to call, but the phone was off the hook. So he flew back home. Along the way, he lost his keys.
Yeah, right, she tells herself, poised in front of the door. She can see a silhouette outlined against the frosted glass, and it’s not tall enough to be Joel’s.
She flicks the light switch beside the door to illuminate the step, but nothing happens. It must have burned out again, she thinks vaguely.
“Who is it?” she calls, her hand poised on the doorknob.
“It’s me. Paula Bailey,” a familiar voice calls back.
Relieved—and perplexed—Tasha opens the door.
As she does, she realizes that the deadbolt hasn’t been locked. Only the one on the knob, the one that, if it’s turned, locks automatically when you close the door.
The Last to Know Page 33
