The Last to Know (36 page)

“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.

T
he 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?

P
anting, 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!”

H
astily 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.

O
n 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.

A
s 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 gentleman over there, of course, was Fletch Gallagher. Paula knew who he was. She had even seen him around town.

But she and Fletch traveled in different circles.

She doesn’t remember everything about that night they first met. Maybe it was the wine. Or maybe she doesn’t want to remember. Because it was all a lie. Everything that night, and everything that came after.

He told her that he would take care of her.

Or did he?

Maybe it was just what she wanted so badly to hear. Maybe she twisted his words, desperately needing to believe that he was her Prince Charming, that he would rescue her and Mitch from their miserable little life.

Now she knows that she doesn’t need to be rescued. She’s taken matters into her own hands. She’ll rescue herself.

But she believed, back then, that
he
would do it.

She believed him when he said he was planning to leave his wife just as soon as their children were out of the house. He said,
Sharon and I have an understanding
.

Turns out that part was true.

Well, anyway, the point is, he never left his wife.

Not for Paula.

Not for anyone else, either.

Her Prince Charming failed her. He moved on to a princess.

Jane Kendall . . .

And from Jane to Melissa . . .

From Melissa to Rachel . . .

Somewhere in there, to Tasha, too. That bit of news caught Paula off guard.

Just as Margaret Armstrong’s suicide was pure coincidence, she showed up that day on the Bankses’ doorstep that day purely by chance. She intended only to interview Tasha about Rachel’s murder, so that she could quote her in the article. Cover all her bases.

She’s done it all along.

Made a big show of investigating. Taking notes. Intending to interview every possible witness so that if there is ever a shadow of suspicion, they will vouch for her. All of them, from Minerva to Tasha to Brian Mulvaney.

Lest anyone later suspect that she hasn’t been doing her job all along.

Lest anyone guess that Fletch Gallagher isn’t the serial killer after all.

Paula looks at Tasha.

“You have everything, don’t you?” she asks. “Just like they did.”

Tasha is silent. Then the bewilderment drains from her expression, replaced by knowing dread.

“Well, now it’s my turn to have everything,” Paula tells her.

Her mind whirls back over her life. It’s about time she got a break. She’s always taken care of everybody else. Frank. Mitch. Pop . . .

Again, she thinks of that day. The day everything changed. The day Pop fell down the stairs.

What did Tim say?

“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 . . .”