The click of the receiver as he hung up was almost drowned out by the ringing of the front doorbell.

For the next two hours, Molly felt as though life was almost normal again. Jenna had brought not only dinner but a bottle of Cal ’s best Montrachet. They sipped wine in the family room, then ate their meal at the coffee table there. Jenna dominated the conversation as she mapped out the plans she had made for her friend. Molly was to come in to New York, spend a few days in the apartment, go shopping and to the hot new salon Jenna had discovered, where she could have a complete one-stop makeover. “Hair, face, nails, the bod, the works,” Jenna said triumphantly. “I’ve already planned to take time off to be with you.” She grinned at Molly. “Tell the truth. I look pretty good, don’t you think?”

“You’re a walking ad for whatever regimen you’re on,” Molly agreed. “At some point I’ll take you up on that. But for now, no.”

She put down her demitasse cup. “Jen, Fran Simmons was here today. You probably remember her. She went to Cranden with us.”

“Her father shot himself, right? He was the guy who embezzled all that money from the library.”

“That’s right. She’s an investigative reporter now, for NAF-TV. She’s going to do a show about Gary ’s death for the network’s True Crime program.”

Jenna Whitehall did not attempt to hide her dismay: “Molly, no!”

Molly shrugged. “I didn’t expect even you to understand, so I know you won’t understand this next thing either. Jenna, I need to see Annamarie Scalli. Do you know where she is?”

“Molly, you’re crazy! Why in God’s name would you want to see that woman? When you think…” Jenna’s voice trailed off.

“When you think that if she hadn’t fooled around with my husband, he might still be alive today? That’s what you mean-right? I agree, but I simply must see her. Does she still live in town?”

“I haven’t a clue where she is. From what I understand, she accepted that settlement from Gary, got out of town, and hasn’t been heard from since. She would have been called as a witness at the trial, but that wasn’t necessary after the plea bargain.”

“Jen, I want you to ask Cal to get his people onto finding her. We all know Cal can do anything, or at least get someone to do it for him.”

Cal ’s “can do” attitude had been a kind of running joke between them for years. Jenna, however, didn’t laugh.

“I’d rather not,” she said, her voice suddenly strained.

Molly thought she understood the reason for Jenna’s reluctance. “Jenna, you’ve got to understand something. I’ve paid the price for Gary ’s death, whether I was responsible for it or not. I believe that at this point I have earned the right to know what really happened that night and why. I need to try to understand my own actions and reactions. Maybe after that I’ll be able to go on. I have to try to put together for myself something that will resemble a normal life.”

Molly got up, went into the kitchen, and returned with the morning paper. “Maybe you’ve seen this. It’s the kind of thing that will follow me throughout my life.”

“I’ve seen it.” Jenna pushed the paper aside and took Molly’s hands. “Molly, a hospital, like a person, can lose its reputation because of a scandal. All the stories about Gary ’s death, including disclosure of his affair with a young nurse, followed by your trial, hurt Lasch Hospital badly. It’s doing a good job for the community, and Remington Health Management is flourishing at a time when a lot of other HMOs are in deep trouble. Please, for your sake, for the sake of the hospital, call off Fran Simmons and forget about finding Annamarie Scalli.”

Molly shook her head.

“Just consider it, Molly,” Jenna urged. “Look, you know I’ll back you up no matter what, but please at least consider Plan A.”

“We go in to the city, and I get a makeover. Right?”

Jenna smiled. “You bet.” She stood. “Okay, I’d better be on my way. Cal will be looking for me.”

Arm in arm they walked to the front door. With her hand on the knob, Jenna hesitated, then said, “Sometimes I wish we could go back to Cranden and start all over, Moll. Life was a lot easier then. Cal is different from you and me. He doesn’t play by the same rules. Anything or anyone that causes him to lose money becomes the enemy.”

“Including me?” Molly asked.

“I’m afraid so.” Jenna opened the door. “Love you, Molly. Be sure to lock up and turn the security system on.”

14

Tim Mason, the thirty-six-year-old sports announcer for NAF-TV, had been on vacation when Fran first started at the network. Raised in Greenwich, he had lived there briefly after college, while he worked for a year as a cub reporter for the Greenwich Time. It was at that point that he realized that the sports pages were where he wanted to be, and so he switched to a sports-reporter job at a newspaper in upstate New York.

Broadcasting for the local station there followed a year later, and over the next dozen years, a progression of stepping-stone jobs brought him to his big break, the sports desk at NAF. In the tristate area, its hour-long evening news program was already making impressive dents in the ratings of the three major networks, and Tim Mason soon became known as the best of the best of the new generation of sports commentators.

Rangy and with uneven features that gave him a boyish appeal, affable and easygoing by nature, Tim turned into a type-A personality when observing or discussing a sports event, which created a bond with ardent sports fans everywhere.

When he dropped into Gus Brandt’s office the afternoon he came back from vacation, he met Fran Simmons for the first time. She still had her coat on and was filling Gus in on her visit that morning with Molly Lasch.

I know her, Tim thought, but from where?

His prodigious memory bank instantly furnished the facts he was seeking. He had started working at the Time in Greenwich the same summer that Fran Simmons’s father, Frank Simmons, faced with the disclosure that he had embezzled library funds, shot himself. The gossip in Greenwich was that he’d been a social-climbing bootlicker who used the money trying to make a killing in the market. The scandal died down quickly, however, once Simmons’s wife and daughter moved out of Greenwich almost immediately thereafter.

Looking at the attractive woman she had become, Tim was sure Fran wouldn’t know him from a hole in the ground, as his grandmother used to put it, but he found himself curious as to what kind of person she’d turned out to be. Working as investigative reporter on the Molly Lasch case in Greenwich wasn’t exactly a job he would have chosen if he had been in her shoes. But of course he wasn’t, and he had no idea how Fran Simmons felt about her father’s suicide.

That louse left his wife and teenage daughter to face the music, Tim thought. Simmons took the coward’s way out. Tim was confident it was not something he would have done. If he had been in that situation, he’d have gotten his wife and daughter out of town, then faced the consequences of his actions himself.

He’d covered the funeral for the Time, and he remembered seeing Fran and her mother coming out of the church after the Mass. She’d been a kid then, with downcast eyes and long hair that fell over her face. Now Fran Simmons was extremely attractive, and he found that she had a direct handshake, a warm smile, and a way of looking straight into his eyes. He knew she couldn’t read his thoughts, couldn’t know that he’d been mentally rehashing the scandal surrounding her father, but for the brief moment of the handshake, Tim felt guilty and awkward.

He apologized for bursting in on them. “Usually Gus is by himself at this hour, trying to decide what will go wrong with the newscast.” He turned to go, but Fran stopped him.