Paula’s breath catches audibly in her throat.
But that—and the rhythm of the windshield wipers—isn’t the only sound in the car.
Paula’s ears pick up a faint rustling sound.
And it’s coming from inside the Expedition.
Fletch glances in the rear-view mirror.
Bright headlights are bearing down on the Mercedes. It’s a Mack truck, roaring along the dark, rainy mountain highway as though it’s high noon on a dry straightaway.
“Back off, you asshole,” he growls at the driver behind him, accelerating.
The truck keeps coming, obviously wanting to pass him. They’re always so cocky, truckers. Think they rule the road. Well, not this one.
Pissed, Fletch presses the gas pedal. He can outrun a freaking semi. He knows this road better than any trucker.
He’s been coming up here to the Catskills for years now. Day and night, in rain, in snow and ice. The route is familiar.
He just didn’t expect to be driving it tonight. All he wanted was a glass of scotch and a warm bed all to himself.
Then the phone rang.
And now, here he is.
Careering into the mountains in a storm.
Hating that he’s doing it, yet knowing only that he has no choice. She was right, of course. It’s the only way to save himself.
Paula’s slight gasp tells Tasha she’s guessed correctly. Paula, too, has been involved with Fletch Gallagher. Christ, is there a woman in Townsend Heights he hasn’t put the moves on?
I’ll kill him, Tasha thinks, clenching her fists in her lap. And as pure rage courses through her tense body, she knows she’s capable of it. He’s taken her babies. If he’s hurt her babies . . .
She hears herself cry out, sobbing, as a new wave of despair sweeps over her. Agony. This is agony. She has to save her children. If only they’re not too late . . .
“Can you drive any faster?” she asks, glancing at Paula.
“I’m trying,” Paula says, her expression suddenly anxious. “I’m going as fast as I—there it is! That’s the turnoff!”
She hits the brakes.
The Expedition skids on the slick highway.
For a moment, Tasha is panicked, certain that Paula has lost control.
As they careen sideways, headed for a massive tree, all Tasha can think is that she’s going to die before she can get to her children.
No.
That can’t happen.
They need her.
She isn’t going to die, damn it. Not now. Not before she helps them.
Then she feels the vehicle turning, realizes Paula has regained the steering.
“Sorry,” Paula tells her, looking shaken. She shifts into reverse, backs up a few feet, then turns up a narrow road leading away from the highway. “It’s not far now. Hang in there. We’re going to make it.”
Tasha nods, not sure whether Paula is reassuring Tasha or herself.
The road is steep and winds through trees, climbing all the way.
Another turnoff.
Another steep road. This one isn’t paved.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” Tasha asks.
“I’ve been here before,” Paula says simply.
Finally they turn into a curving tree-lined dirt lane that Tasha belatedly realizes is a driveway. There’s a cabin up ahead, around the last bend, perched at the very top of the incline, surrounded by a fringe of trees that hint at a steep drop-off just beyond.
The lights are on inside.
And Fletch Gallagher’s silver Mercedes is parked at the door.
Inside the cabin, seeing the arc of approaching headlights through the window, Fletch stiffens. He lifts his glass to his lips again, sipping the amber liquid he poured moments before.
He needs it.
To calm him.
To prepare him.
Because now, in addition to facing his screwed-up past—his own mistakes and his father’s sins—he has to face her.
Still seated in a big leather chair by the massive stone fireplace, he raises the glass to his lips again and drains the scotch.
It burns all the way down.
Then, fortified for what lies ahead, he stands and walks to the door.
“Where are they?” Tasha screams, leaping from the car while it’s still moving, hurtling out the moment she sees Fletch Gallagher framed in the doorway of the cabin, his silhouette outlined in the light behind him.
She rushes toward him, through the rain, vaguely conscious that there are no other cars in the driveway, that the police—or the FBI—haven’t made it here before them.
No matter.
She’ll handle this herself.
She’ll do whatever she has to do.
In a flash of lightning, she can see his face.
He looks . . .
Baffled.
Did he think she wouldn’t find him here? That she wouldn’t track him down? That she wouldn’t confront him, risk her life to save her precious children?
Then, almost simultaneously with the lightning’s illumination comes the deafening boom of thunder.
No . . .
Not thunder.
It was different.
Just one loud report.
A gunshot.
Karen awakens with a gasp to a ringing telephone. In the first instant before she opens her eyes, she assumes it must be morning. Then she sees that the room is pitch black, and that the glowing bedside clock says that it’s almost three A.M. That’s when she becomes nauseated with apprehension.
“Oh, God,” she says as Tom sits up beside her, feeling blindly for his glasses on the table.
Karen reaches past him and snatches up the phone.
“Karen? It’s Joel Banks.”
“Joel!” And in that moment she knows.
Something horrible has happened to Tasha.
She’s dead, like the others. Jane. Rachel. Sharon.
And I knew it was coming, Karen realizes. Her friend has been on her mind all day. Why didn’t she insist on going over to check? Why didn’t she send Tom down there tonight even if it was raining?
“Karen, I’m sorry to call in the middle of the night but do you know where Tasha and the kids are? I just got home and they’re not here. I thought they might have gone to my parents’ after all, but I called and they’re not there. Please say they’re with you, Karen.”
He’s distraught. “Oh, Joel, they’re not here.”
“Oh, God. Where are they?” he asks.
Beside her, Tom is asking her what’s wrong.
She whispers to him that Tasha and the children are missing as Joel goes on, “I should never have left. I had such a sick feeling about this. All day. On the way to the airport. And then, when the flight was delayed . . . I should have left then. I knew it after I boarded. And while we were sitting on the runway for hours, I kept worrying. . . . But by then it was too late. I was on my way to Chicago.”
Karen’s mind is reeling. Confused, she asks, “Chicago? But I thought you just said you were—”
“I am home, now. When I landed I turned around and came right back on the next flight. It was delayed, too, because of the weather. I kept trying to call her, but the phone was busy—”
“She had it off the hook, because of the reporters.”
“I figured. I’ve got to call the police. Unless—do you have any idea where she could have gone, Karen?”
“No, but Joel—”
“Tell him they’ve made an arrest,” Tom urges, beside her.
He’s right. She almost forgot that herself. “Joel, they’ve got someone in custody for the Leiberman and Gallagher murders—”
“Gallagher?”
“You don’t know? Sharon Gallagher
. She vanished last night and they found her body today. Her nephew did it.”
“The one who’s staying with them?”
“Jeremiah. I saw him acting strangely, Joel. I talked to the police about him. Believe me, he did it.”
“Jane Kendall, too?”
She tells him quickly about Margaret Armstrong. About the police theory that she killed her sister because she was in love with Jane’s husband. That it was simply a coincidence in terms of timing.
“So you see, Joel, you don’t have to worry,” she tells him, though she doesn’t believe that herself. Her perception of Tasha in danger was too palpable for her to put herself at ease.
Still, she tells him, “There’s no killer roaming the streets. Tasha and the kids are probably safe.”
The word probably hovers between them.
“Then why aren’t they here? Their beds have been slept in. All of them. Tasha always makes the beds in the morning, Karen. They’re all rumpled. It looks like they fled in the middle of the night. Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” she says, breaking down in tears at last.
The first bullet slams into Fletch’s arm.
Staggering backward, he looks down in astonishment at the red stain that quickly spreads on the sleeve of the thick gray cotton jersey he’s wearing. The pain hits a split second after the shock does. He gasps as much at the intensity of it as he does at the realization that he’s been shot.
“What the hell . . . ?” Dazed, dizzy from the searing ache in his arm, he looks out into the night, but all he can see is blinding headlights and the figure of a woman. She was rushing toward him, but now she’s motionless, arms hanging limply at her sides, no sign of a gun in her hands.
Who is she? He can’t see her face.
And who the hell shot him?
Bewildered, his good arm clutching the wounded one, he backs away from the doorway. He has to close the door. Lock it. Call for help . . .
That’s when he hears the second shot fired.
Agony explodes inside him.
As Fletch Gallagher writhes on the floor, one word whirls through his consciousness before everything goes black.
Why?
Panting, arms outstretched before her, Paula tightly clutches the gun—the one that belonged to Pop, one of his few possessions she kept after giving almost everything else away. That was shortly after the terrible fall that landed him in a nursing home with permanent brain damage.
“It could have killed him,” the emergency room physician told her that day when she burst in, looking for Pop.
It was Mrs. Ambrosini who called the police. Apparently, she wasn’t too deaf to hear an old man’s screams as he fell headfirst down the steep flight of steps and landed with a thud not far from her door.
The police tried to track Paula down at the newspaper, and Tim reached her on her cell phone. She’ll never forget her boss’s somber words. Paula, I’m afraid your father’s had a terrible accident. He’s in bad shape. You’d better get to the hospital as soon as you can . . .
“My God, what have you done?! My God, my God . . .”
The shrieks are coming from Tasha, standing a few feet away, in the beam of the headlights.
Paula, balanced with one foot on the running board of the Expedition and the other on the dirt driveway, forces her attention back to the present. The SUVs engine is running, the driver’s side door open beside her serving as a shield, she realizes, had Fletch Gallagher been prepared for her and shot back at her in defense.
But of course, he wasn’t prepared.
She caught him off-guard.
Just as he had caught her off-guard the day he so callously told her it was over between them.
Tasha cries out, “My kids,” and takes off, running for the cabin.
Paula watches her step hurriedly over Fletch’s crumpled form in the doorway and disappear inside.
She climbs back into the driver’s seat and cocks her head, listening.
Not a sound from the back now. Maybe it was her imagination. She’s been so damned uptight . . .
But it won’t be much longer now.
She turns the Expedition, then backs it carefully, yard by yard, then foot by foot, inch by inch, until it’s aligned with the drop-off at the end of the drive just beyond the cabin.
The car still in reverse, her foot on the brake, she rolls down the window just in time to hear Tasha’s anguished scream from inside the house, “They’re not here! Paula! They’re not here!”
Hastily dressed, her hair uncombed and her face unwashed, Karen dashes out through the rain to the curb the moment Joel pulls up in front of the house.
As she climbs into the car beside him, she gives him a quick hug. “It’ll be okay,” she tells him with a confidence she doesn’t feel.
“Thank you for coming with me,” he says simply.
She nods, fastening her seatbelt
“If anything happened to them . . . I’ll never forgive myself for leaving.”
“You couldn’t have known, Joel.”
“But I felt it. I kept telling myself to ignore my gut feeling, because I needed to go.”
“Pressing business?”
“Not exactly.” He’s silent
She waits. Then, when he says nothing, she comes right out and asks. She’s thinking of what Tasha said the other night About how she was growing suspicious of Joel. Were her fears founded?
“It was an interview, Karen,” he says heavily. “I had been interviewing for a job with a smaller agency. I thought that would make Tasha happy.”
“You didn’t tell her what you were doing?” she asks, relieved that at least Joel Banks is faithful to his wife. Her instincts hadn’t been wrong.
He shakes his head. “You have to know what it’s been like, Karen. With her. At home. We’re both stressed. Her, because of the kids. Me, because of work. The pressure is unbelievable. The clients are demanding. I know she’s pissed off that I’m never home. She doesn’t understand that I took the promotion for us. So that we’d be able to afford this lifestyle. So that she wouldn’t have to work. When I went after this new job, I figured I wouldn’t tell her.”
“Why not?”
“Jobs like these are rare. More money, less hours, less stress. I figured there wasn’t much chance I’d get it. And if Tasha knew I was willing to switch, she’d be on me constantly to find something else. She doesn’t know how hard it is to find an opportunity like this one.”
“And now you let the opportunity slip by because you flew home.”
He nods. “I had already gotten the green light from the agency people. They want to hire me. But before they can, I was supposed to meet with the CEO and product managers at their biggest client first thing in the morning. If everyone there liked me, the job would have been mine.”
“And now it won’t be.”
“I don’t even care, Karen. As long as Tasha and the kids are all right. Nothing else matters.”
They ride in silence the rest of the way to the Townsend Heights police station.
On the verge of the hysteria that already consumed her once tonight—when she realized her children were truly gone—Tasha storms through the small, obviously empty cabin, back to the door and Fletch Gallagher.
It barely registers now that Paula shot him with no apparent confrontation. She’ll find out why later.
What matters now is that he tell her what he’s done with her children.
She looks down at him. He’s bleeding from his upper arm and his side. His eyes are closed. She can see his chest rising and falling, can hear his labored gasps. He’s still alive. But for how long?
She crouches beside him. “I need to know, you bastard. Where are they?”
No response.
“You took my children!” She hears her voice rising
in panic, fights to keep it at bay. Not yet. She can’t lose it yet. Not until she knows for sure. “Where are they?”
His eyes open halfway. He opens his mouth to speak. All that comes out is a guttural rasp of air before his lids flutter closed again.
What do I do? What do I do? Stay calm.
Tasha races frantically back outside into the rain.
Paula is still behind the wheel of the Expedition. She’ll know what to do. Maybe there’s a barn, or a shed. . . .
Yet even as the idea crosses Tasha’s mind, she realizes it’s a futile one. She can plainly see that there is no other structure in this small clearing. The cabin sits at the very edge of a cliff, surrounded by only a few pine trees.
Tasha runs over to the driver’s side of the SUV. The window is rolled down. Paula looks at her, wearing a strange expression.
She must be in shock, Tasha realizes. She shot a man. Probably killed him. She glances down at the gun in Paula’s hand. She hadn’t even realized Paula was carrying it with her.
“Take it,” Paula says, thrusting it toward her.
Only when her hand closes automatically around the weapon does Tasha realize that Paula is wearing gloves.
As Tasha holds the gun, trembling, Paula nods at her.
“Good,” she says. “I won’t need it anymore. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“I . . . I don’t know.” Tasha’s voice is quavering. Poor thing. She’s been through so much.
Well, it’ll be over soon. For everyone.
It’s been such a long, hard road. Such a struggle. From the days in the Bronx to New Rochelle to her marriage to Frank to being a single mother to dealing with Pop . . .
“Why did you shoot him, Paula?”
“Why?” she echoes, attempting to focus on Tasha’s plaintive question.
. . . to Fletch Gallagher coming along and making her fall in love with him. She’ll never forget that first night she met him, at Jimmy’s, where she had stopped for a glass of wine after a particularly grueling day. Just one glass. She isn’t a drinker. She can’t afford to be. Wine doesn’t come cheaply at the Station House Inn.
When the bartender placed a second glass in front of her, she thought it was a mistake. And much as she wanted it, she couldn’t keep it. She had a dollar left in her wallet, and her credit cards were maxed out. As she opened her mouth to tell him to take the glass back, he said the words that changed her life. “Compliments of the gentleman over there.”
The Last to Know Page 35
