“I need your name.”
“It’s Jeremy.”
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SCARED TO DEATH,
the next suspenseful page-turner
from New York Times bestselling author
Wendy Corsi Staub
Coming Soon
From Avon Books
Dallas, Texas
September
Mind if I turn on the TV?”
Hell, yes, Jeremy minds.
Minds the disruption of television and minds suddenly having a roommate.
Until an hour ago, when an orderly pushed a wheelchair through the doorway, Jeremy had the double hospital room all to himself. He should have known that was too good to be true.
Most good things are.
An image flashes into his head, and he winces.
Funny how, even after all these years, that same face—a beautiful, female face—pops in and out of his consciousness. He doesn’t know whose face it is, or whether she even exists.
“Hey, are you in pain?” the stranger in the next bed asks, interrupting Jeremy’s speculation about the face: Is she a figment of my imagination—or an actual memory?
He almost welcomes the question whose answer is readily at hand.
Am I in pain?
Hell, yes. He feels as though every bone in his face has been broken—and that’s pretty damned near the truth.
“I can ring the nurse for you,” the man offers, waving his good hand. The other hand—like Jeremy’s face—is swathed in gauze. Some kind of finger surgery, he mentioned when he first rolled into the room, as if Jeremy might care.
Reaching for the bedrail buzzer, he adds, in his lazy twang, “That Demerol’s good stuff, ain’t it?”
Yeah, and I wish you’d take some and knock yourself out.
Aloud, Jeremy only says, “No, thanks,” and shakes his head.
Bad idea. The slightest movement above the neck rockets pain through his skull. He fights the instinct to scream; that would be even more torturous.
“You sure you’re okay, pal? You looked like you were hurting for a minute there. Before. I saw you wince.”
Jeremy’s jaw tightens—more agony. Dammit. Why won’t this fool leave him alone? Doesn’t he realize it’s a bad idea to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong?
“You don’t have to be a hero, you know. If you’re in pain, all you need to do is—”
“I’m fine,” Jeremy manages to interrupt, in an almost civil tone. “Really. Just—go ahead, turn on the TV.”
“You sure? Because if it’ll bother you I don’t want to—”
“I’m positive. Watch TV.”
“Yeah? Thanks.” Working the remote with his unbandaged hand, his roommate channel surfs.
Face throbbing, Jeremy gazes absently at the barrage of images on the changing screen, half-hearing the snippets of sound from the speaker above his bed. Audience applause, country music, gunfire, a sitcom laugh track, meaningless words.
“…ladies and gentlemen, please welcome…”
“…be mostly sunny with a high of…”
“…and the Emmy-nominated drama will return on…”
His roommate pauses to ask, “Anything in particular you feel like watching?”
“Nope.”
“You a sports fan?”
“Sometimes.”
“Rangers?”
“Sure,” Jeremy lies.
“News should be on. Let’s see if we can get us some scores.”
More channel surfing.
More fleeting images.
More meaningless sound, then…
“…in Manhattan today indicted Congressman Garvey Quinn for…”
“Here’s the news.” The clicking stops. “I’ll leave it. Sports should be coming up soon.”
“Great.” As if Jeremy gives a damn about sports, or the news, or—unlike the rest of the world, it seems—television in general.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” someone—Lisa?—once said to him.
She was right. And when you grow up deprived of something, you can’t miss it.
Or can you?
“…kidnapping the seven-year-old son of Elsa and Brett Cavalon. In an incredible twist, the child…”
A close-up flashes on the screen: a photograph of a striking couple. The woman…
Jeremy gasps, his body involuntarily jerking to sit up.
“What?” Glancing over, his roommate immediately mutes the volume. “What’s wrong? It’s the pain, right? I knew it!”
Jeremy can’t speak, can’t move, can only stare at the face on TV. It’s as if the pain exploding inside Jeremy’s head has catapulted a fragment of his imagination onto the screen. Of course, that’s impossible.
But so is this, unless…
As suddenly as she appeared on the screen, she’s gone, and the camera shifts back to the anchorman.
Unless…
Unless she’s real.
She was there. On TV.
She does exist. She has a name—one he’s heard before in another place, another time…
Now, the name—her name—echoes back at him from the darkest recesses of his mind.
Elsa.
Groton, Connecticut
June
“Mommy…”
Elsa Cavalon stirs in her sleep.
Jeremy.
Jeremy is calling me.
“Mommy!”
No. Jeremy is gone, remember?
There was a time when that renewed awareness would have jarred her fully awake. But it’s been fifteen years since her son disappeared, and almost a year since Elsa learned that he’d been murdered shortly afterward.
The terrible truth came as no surprise. Throughout the dark era of worrying and wondering, she’d struggled to keep hope alive, while knowing in her heart that Jeremy was never coming home again. All those years she’d longed for closure.
When it came last August, she had braced herself, expecting her already fragile emotions to hit bottom.
Instead, somehow, she found peace.
“It’s because you’ve already done your grieving,” her therapist, Joan, told her. “You’re in the final stage now. Acceptance.”
Yes. She accepts that Jeremy is no longer alive, accepts that she is, and—
“Mommy!”
Jeremy isn’t calling you. It’s just a dream. Go back to sleep…
“What’s wrong?” Brett’s voice, not imagined, plucks Elsa from the drowsy descent toward slumber. Her eyelids pop open.
The light is dim; her husband is stirring beside her in bed, calling out to a child who isn’t Jeremy, “What is it? Are you okay?”
“I need Mommy.”
“She’s sleeping. What’s wrong?”
“No, Brett, I’m awake,” she murmurs, sitting up, and calls, “Renny, I’m awake.”
“Mommy, I need you!”
Elsa gets up and feels her way across the room as Brett mumbles something and settles back into the pillows. With a prickle of envy-tinged resentment, she hears him snoring again by the time she reaches the hallway.
It was always this way, back when Jeremy was here to disrupt their wee-hour rest—and when his palpable, tragic absence disrupted it even more. All those sleepless nights…
Brett would make some halfhearted attempt to respond to whatever was going on, then fall immediately back to sleep, leaving Elsa wide awake to cope alone with the matter at hand: a needy child, parental doubt, haunting memories, her own demons.
“Mommy!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Shivering, she makes her way down the hall toward Renny’s bedroom.
The house is chilly. Before bed, Elsa had gone from room to room closing windows that had been open all day, with eighty-degree sunshine falling through the screens. Late spring in coastal New England can be so unpredictable.
And yet Elsa wouldn’t trade it for the more temperate climates where Brett’s work as a nautical engineer tr
ansported them in recent years. It’s good to be settled back in the northeast. This is home.
Especially now that we have Renny.
Her bedroom door is ajar, as always. Plagued by claustrophobia, she can’t sleep unless it’s open. That’s understandable, considering what she’s been through.
Whenever Elsa allows herself to think of Renny’s past, she feels as though a tremendous fist has clenched her gut. It’s the same sickening dread that used to seize her whenever she imagined what Jeremy had endured—both before he came into their lives, and after he was kidnapped.
But Renny isn’t Jeremy. Everything about her, other than the route she traveled through the foster system and into Elsa’s life, is different.
Well—almost everything. With her black hair and eyes, Renny resembles Elsa as much as Jeremy did. No one would ever doubt a biological connection between mother and child based on looks alone. But their bond goes much deeper than that. From the moment she saw the little girl, Elsa felt a connection.
And yet…had she felt the same thing when she first met Jeremy? There was a time, not so long ago, when her memory of her son was more vivid than the landscape beyond the window. Now it’s as if the glass has warped, distorting the view.
Now.
Now…what?
Now that I know Jeremy is dead?
Now that there’s Renny?
Elsa pushes aside a twinge of guilt.
Her daughter’s arrival didn’t erase the memories of her son. Of course not. She’ll never forget Jeremy. But it’s time to move on. Everyone says so: her husband, her therapist, even Mike Fantoni, the private eye who had finally brought the truth to light by identifying Jeremy’s birth mother.
“Why would you want to meet her now?” he’d asked Elsa the last time they’d seen each other over the winter.
“I didn’t say I want to…I said I feel like I should.”
“Has she been in touch with you?”
“No.”
“Then let it go,” Mike advised, and for the most part Elsa has.
She finds Renny sitting up in bed, knees to chest, her worried face illuminated by the Tinkerbell nightlight plugged into the baseboard outlet.
“What’s wrong, honey? Are you feeling sick?” Elsa is well aware that her daughter had eaten an entire box of Sno-caps at the new Disney princess movie Brett had taken her to see after dinner.
“Why would you let her have all that candy?” Elsa asked in dismay when he filled her in on the father-daughter evening.
“Because it’s fun to spoil her.”
“I know, Brett…but she’s going to have an awful stomachache. She’ll never get to sleep now.”
Renny proved her wrong, drifting off within five minutes of hitting the pillow. And right now, she doesn’t look sick at all…
She looks terrified. Her black eyes are enormous and her wiry little body quivers beneath the quilt clutched to her chin.
“I’m not sick, Mommy.”
“Did you have a nightmare?” Elsa asks. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“No. It was real.”
“Well, sometimes nightmares feel real.”
And sometimes, they are real. Renny knows that as well as she does. But things are different now. She’s safe here with Elsa and Brett and nothing will ever hurt her again.
Elsa sits beside her daughter and folds her into an embrace. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was real,” Renny insists, trembling. “A monster was here, in my room…I woke up and I saw him standing over my bed.”
“It was just a bad dream, honey. There’s no monster.”
“Yes, there is. And when I saw him, he went out the window.”
Elsa turns to follow her daughter’s gaze, saying, “No, Renny, see? The window isn’t even—”
Open.
But Elsa’s throat constricts around the word as she stares in numb horror.
The window she’d closed and locked earlier is now, indeed, wide open—and so is the screen, creating a gaping portal to the inky night beyond.
Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse…
What nursery rhyme was that?
Not that it matters.
Really, right now, the only thing that matters is getting away from the Cavalon house without being spotted. Good thing the streets are deserted at this hour; there’s no one around to glimpse the dark figure stealing through the shadows.
Not a creature is stirring…
Damn, it’s frustrating when you can’t remember something that seems to be right there, teasing your brain.
Not a creature was stirring…
Leaning on the terrace railing, gazing at the smattering of lit windows on the Queens skyline across the East River, Marin Hartwell Quinn finds herself wishing the sun would never come up.
When it does, she’ll be launched headlong into another exhausting, lonely day of single motherhood, a role she never imagined for herself.
At this time last year, the storybook Quinn family was all over the press: Marin, Garvey, and their two beautiful daughters destined to live happily-ever-after on the Upper East Side—and then, if the expected nomination came through and the election turned out predictably, in the governor’s mansion…and someday, the White House.
But in a flash—a flash, yes, like those from the ever-present paparazzi cameras—Garvey was transported from Park Avenue to Park Row, the lower Manhattan street that houses the notorious Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Naturally, the photographers who had dogged Congressman Quinn along the campaign trail were there to capture the moment he was hauled away in handcuffs on a public street. And when the detectives had driven off with their prisoner, sirens wailing, the press turned their cameras on Marin, still sitting, stunned, in the back seat of the limousine.
Later, she forced herself to look at the photos, to read the captions. One referred to her as “the humiliated would-be first lady,” another as “a blond, blue-eyed Jackie Kennedy, shell-shocked at witnessing her husband’s sudden demise on a city street.”
That wasn’t the first time the press had drawn a Kennedy-Quinn comparison. But while the slain JFK had remained a hero and his wife lauded as a heart-broken, dignified widow, the fallen Garvey Quinn had been exposed as a coldhearted villain—and his wife drew nothing but scorn from his disillusioned constituents.
No one seemed to grasp—or care—that Marin herself had been blindsided, that the man she loved had betrayed her—and their children—with his unspeakable crime.
She has to force herself to get up every morning—if she manages to stay in bed that long—and face the wreckage of her life.
Public contempt is nothing compared to the rest of it: grieving her firstborn; helping her surviving children cope with the realization that their father is a criminal; looking Garvey in the eye through protective prison visitor’s room glass and telling him that she’ll never forgive him.
With a sigh, Marin turns away from the railing. Still no hint of sunrise on the eastern horizon, but it will appear any moment now, and the day will be underway.
In the master bedroom she once shared with Garvey, Marin smooths the coverlet on her side, arranges the European throw pillows, strips out of her nightgown, and hangs it on a hook in her walk-in closet.
Beside it, Garvey’s closet door remains closed, as it has been for months now. His expensive suits and shirts, shrouded in dry cleaners plastic, are presumably still inside, along with dozens of pairs of Italian leather shoes and French silk ties.
What is she supposed to do with any of it? Burn it? Give it away? Save it? For what? For whom?
She has no idea, and so his clothes hang on in a dark limbo.
Sort of like I do.
In the bathroom, Marin showers, brushes her teeth, and blow-dries her hair.
Same routine every morning, and yet, today will be different. Still a living hell, but June has arrived. Finals are over, as are the latest round
of lessons and extracurricular activities that consumed the weekends. The school year that began in the immediate aftermath of Garvey’s downfall has come to an end.
This morning, instead of heading over to their private school off Fifth Avenue, Caroline and Annie will be here at home with Marin.
That means she’ll have to hold herself together from dawn until long after dark. No crying. No ranting. No swallowing a couple of prescription pills and crawling into bed in the middle of the day to capture the sleep that evades her in the night.
Maybe it’s better that way.
When she sleeps, she dreams.
Dreams of a little boy with big black eyes, and he’s calling for her.
“Mommy…Mommy, please help me…”
Not dreams—nightmares. Because she can never help him. Nobody can.
It’s too late to save Jeremy.
And maybe, Marin thinks, staring at her haggard reflection in the bathroom mirror, too late to save herself as well.
Brett yawns audibly, promptly evoking a dark glance from his wife. He belatedly covers his mouth and resumes a riveted expression. Too late.
“You’re not even listening to me.” Elsa’s tone is more weary than irritated, and she reaches for her mug of coffee.
“I’m listening. I’m just tired. It’s five in the morning, and we didn’t even have to be up for another—”
“There’s no way I can sleep now.”
Maybe not, but he certainly could. In fact, after he’d dutifully gone through the entire house clutching a baseball bat, checking closets and under the beds for prowlers, he’d had every intention of climbing right back under the covers. He saw no reason to lose another moment’s sleep. Even Renny had gone from frantic to drowsy, allowing Brett to tuck her back in with reassurances that there were no monsters.
Not in this house, anyway.
And the man—the monster—responsible for Jeremy’s death is behind bars.
“It was just a nightmare,” Brett had told Renny—and he tells Elsa the same thing now.
“But the window was open.”
“Maybe you just thought you’d closed it.”
She gives him a look. One that says, I’m not crazy.
He knows that, though there was a time when he’d thought…
No, he’d never thought Elsa was actually crazy.
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