We'll Meet Again

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.

“Gus told me that your family lived in Greenwich and that you grew up there,” she said. “Did you know the Lasches?”

In other words, Tim thought, she’s saying I know you know who I am and all about my father, so let’s skip that. “Dr. Lasch, I mean Gary ’s father, was our family doctor,” he said. “A nice man and a good physician.”

“How about Gary?” Fran asked swiftly.

Tim’s eyes hardened. “A dedicated doctor,” he said flatly. “He took wonderful care of my grandmother before she died at Lasch Hospital. That was only weeks before his own death.”

Tim did not add that when his grandmother had been ill, the special-duty nurse who frequently attended her was Annamarie Scalli.

Annamarie, a pretty young woman, had been a terrific nurse and a nice, if rather unsophisticated, kid, he remembered. Gran had been crazy about her. In fact, Annamarie had been in the room with his grandmother when she died. By the time I got there, Tim thought, Gran was gone, and Annamarie was sitting by her bed, crying. How many nurses would react like that? he wondered.

“I’ve got to see what’s going on at my desk,” he announced. “Talk to you later, Gus. Nice to meet you, Fran.” With a wave he left the office and headed down the corridor. He did not think it fair to tell Fran how totally his opinion of Gary Lasch had changed after he heard about his involvement with Annamarie Scalli.

She’d been only a kid, Tim thought angrily, and in a way she was not unlike Fran Simmons, the victim of someone else’s selfishness. She’d been forced to give up her job and move out of town. The murder trial brought national attention, and for a time she was in every gossip column.

He wondered where Annamarie was now and worried briefly if Fran Simmons’s investigation would hurt the new life she might have built for herself.