Scared to Death

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  What Tanya had done just didn’t happen in his own little world. Not to him.

  And yet, in this business, he’d trained himself to consider every possibility…and sometimes, the impossibilities, as well. Because you just never know.

  Hell, no. You never know.

  Determined to ignore the bitter memory of Tanya and the rumbling in his stomach, Mike closes the fridge, thinking about the Cavalons.

  He’d chalk up their situation to mere mischief, break-in and all, if it weren’t for Spider-Man.

  That’s not a coincidence. No way. If his years in this business have taught him anything—other than that anything is possible—it’s that there are no coincidences.

  Yeah. Coincidences. They’re impossible.

  Mike’s head is spinning. Too much to think about.

  He resumes pacing.

  So far, he knows only that someone out there is up to something.

  Someone who knew about Jeremy and Spider-Man.

  Who knew?

  Elsa and Brett.

  A handful of cops on the case.

  Garvey Quinn and his pawns.

  Jeremy himself.

  Not a whole lot of suspects to choose from, particularly since a couple of them happen to be dead.

  Okay, so go to the motive. What motive would anyone have for hurting the Cavalons? Revenge?

  Among that handful of people who knew about Spider-Man, who would possibly have a reason to bear a grudge after all these years? Certainly not the parents, and not the cops. Garvey Quinn—but he’s in jail, his mistress is dead, the hit men won’t care, and—

  Mike stops in his tracks.

  But that’s impossible…isn’t it?

  The nightmare is familiar. Jeremy’s been having it for years.

  Now, though, he knows it’s not a nightmare at all. It’s a memory, yet another one that’s been let loose to drift through his brain and torment him.

  “All you have to do is triple up on his pain meds tonight…” the man is saying, and the woman’s strange, gold-colored eyes are filled with misgiving.

  They don’t know Jeremy is watching them, listening to every word, as he plays with his Spider-Man superhero on the floor of the hotel room. They don’t know that he understands exactly what they’re talking about: that he’s going to die tonight. They don’t see that his hands are shaking in terror, or that tears are streaming down his cheeks. They don’t even look at him.

  “You’re stronger than you think. I believe in you…You do what has to be done, and then you wash your hands and you move on. Right?”

  The woman nods in agreement. The man kisses her, then swings his pretty little dark-haired daughter onto his hip and leaves without a backward glance.

  Jeremy looks up, and the woman is staring at the closed door after them, shaking her head.

  Somehow, in that moment, he grasps that there might be hope, and he swiftly wipes his tears on his sleeve.

  She turns, sees him watching her. “Come on,” she says abruptly. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  The foreign city is unbearably crowded. He still doesn’t know where they are; only that they flew for a long time to get here, and no one speaks English.

  Few people on the street make eye contact with him, but whenever anyone does, he begs for help. “Please, can you help me get home to my mother? I want my mother!”

  Sometimes, he even cries. But it’s useless. Even when he sees a flash of sympathy in a stranger’s glance, he can’t communicate that he’s been kidnapped, that he’s in danger.

  There are so many other troubled children on the teeming streets: orphans sleeping in filthy gutters, starving beggars dressed in rags. Children who look just like him, with glossy black hair and enormous, frightened black eyes.

  With one hand, he clutches his Spider-Man action figure; with the other, he tries to hold on to the woman, but she keeps slipping out of her grasp. Always, he finds her again, clings to her…until an elephant plods slowly past, and a memory stirs within. A memory of home, and being with his mother at the zoo…

  “Oh look, Jeremy…” Mommy is laughing, pointing, “look at the elephant!”

  Mommy! Why did you let them take me away? Why aren’t you coming to find me?

  His eyes blur with tears, and when he brushes them away and reaches for the hand of the woman with the yellow eyes, it’s gone. She’s gone, and he’s alone now, and he knows that he’s never going home again…

  No, it’s not a nightmare. It’s a memory.

  A grown man, alone in the dark in a strange bed once again, Jeremy cries for his mother.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Watching his wife cringe as she steps out of the grungy shower onto the Kleenex-thin bathmat, Brett shakes his head. Room 103 is even more depressing in the first morning light—especially on a rainy summer day.

  As Elsa attempts to wrap herself in a flimsy bath towel that’s more the size of a hand towel, he sighs. “I can’t believe it’s come to this. Hiding out in a cheap motel—”

  “Shh…” She reaches past him and pulls the bathroom door shut. Renny is still sound asleep in the next room, and they’re not planning to wake her until they’re ready to get out of here.

  “She’s still out cold, Elsa. She’ll never hear us.”

  “I know, but still…” Elsa watches him pick up the travel-sized tube of Crest. “Do you think we jumped to conclusions yesterday?”

  Holding it poised over his new toothbrush, he looks at her in surprise, wondering if she’s suddenly come to her senses. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was kind of alarmist, going to see Mike. Maybe the whole thing was a huge coincidence…”

  “Spider-Man?”

  “And the branch, and the footprint…” She frowns. “Wait—what am I talking about? Why am I trying to convince myself it was nothing?”

  Because somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re aware that you imagined it in the first place.

  No. He can’t say that. He can never let her know he doubts her stability.

  “You’re trying,” he says instead, “because you don’t want to believe it. I don’t, either.”

  “But you do, don’t you?”

  Brett hesitates, then admits, “I don’t know.”

  He waits for her to lash out and accuse him of not taking her seriously, but she doesn’t. Wearing a contemplative expression, she says only, “Mike seemed to believe it.”

  “I know.”

  “He said we shouldn’t go home.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” Brett squeezes the toothpaste, and turns on the water to dampen his toothbrush. He raises his voice above the groan of old pipes. “Your mother’s apartment is sitting empty in New York.”

  “I thought of that, too.”

  “Maybe you and Renny should go stay there for a few days. Through the weekend, at least.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. What about you?”

  “I’ve got a job to go to, Elsa.”

  “It’s Friday. You can just—”

  “Lew needs me on the project. You know that.”

  “I can’t understand how at a time like this you can be thinking about—”

  “If I don’t go to work, I lose my job, and we lose Renny. What don’t you understand about that?”

  For a moment, she just looks at him with those big eyes of hers; eyes that now seem enormous, thanks to her smudged makeup.

  Paulette Almeida—Renny’s mentally ill birth mother—always had smudged eye makeup, Brett remembers—and hates himself for it.

  Elsa says—as if it’s just that simple—“Take some personal days.”

  “I’ve used them all up.”

  “You have some vacation days coming.”

  “I’m taking a week off for Disney. I can’t just decide to use those days now, at the last minute.”

  “Not even in an emergency?”

  “You want me to tell Lew that I can’t be there because I’m running scared?”


  “Why do you have to tell him anything?”

  Exasperated, Brett doesn’t bother to respond. She just doesn’t get that he’s accountable to someone other than his family.

  He brushes his teeth vigorously and rinses using his hand as a cup, rather than even touch the smudged motel drinking glass beside the sink.

  “The drain is clogged,” he observes, turning off the water.

  “This place is disgusting.”

  “Let’s get out of here. We’ll go home first to pack up some things for you and Renny, and then I’ll drive you to the city.”

  “I’ll drive us. You should go to work if you have to,” she adds pointedly. “But…”

  “What?”

  “We’re not supposed to cross state lines with Renny without getting permission.”

  She’s right. Brett forgot all about that rule. “We already have,” he points out. “We’re in Massachusetts, remember?”

  “I know. I didn’t even think of it yesterday. But—”

  “Look, no one from the agency is ever going to find out she’s here or in New York without permission. It’s not like she’s got on some kind of homing device that goes off if she crosses a border.”

  “I know.”

  “Anyway, they’re so short staffed over there, they do things in a half-assed way themselves half the time.”

  “But that wouldn’t stop them from taking her away from us, and you know it.”

  “I do—but out of all the risks involved in this situation, not getting permission to take Renny to New York is the least threatening, don’t you think?”

  She nods. “What about you, though?”

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  “But you can’t stay in the house alone. What if whoever it is comes back?”

  “Then I’ll be there. And this will be over.”

  “What if something happens to you?”

  “It won’t. I promise.”

  Oh, but it might. Something terrible might happen to you, Brett Cavalon. Or to your precious family. You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.

  Silence seems to have fallen on the other side of the bathroom wall, but it’s probably a good idea to wait a few minutes, just to be sure the Cavalons don’t inadvertently share any other interesting tidbits.

  One would think the two of them would be more careful about what they say, and where they say it.

  Although to be fair, they have no way of knowing they’ve been tracked to this dumpy motel. Gotta love modern technology. Homing device, indeed.

  Then again, there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned surveillance tool, either.

  The water glass, so filmy that no one in his right mind would dare drink from it, has done its job well. Back onto the grubby sink shelf it goes, its fluted sanitary—ha!—paper cap once more in place.

  Twenty minutes later, the Cavalons exit their room, blissfully unaware that they’re being watched through a crack in the cheap curtains of the room next door to theirs, which was conveniently vacant last night at check-in time.

  Conveniently vacant?

  The place is just about empty.

  Lucky for me. And so, so unlucky for the Cavalons.

  The night manager didn’t bat an eye last night at the walk-in request for a specific room number. If he had, the explanation was ready: “I was born at 1:04 on October 4, so 104 is my lucky number.”

  Almost a shame not to get to use the clever cover story. But it’s probably best to have as little contact as possible with people who might—should anything go wrong—be questioned later.

  Incredible. Even against this dingy backdrop, with yesterday’s smudged makeup around her eyes and her hair pulled back from her face, Elsa Cavalon looks beautiful. She and Renny head toward their car in the parking lot as Brett goes into the office to check out. She keeps a protective hand on her daughter’s shoulder as they walk, and she does seem to glance from side to side, as if making sure the coast is clear.

  But she never looks behind her, back at the motel.

  She and Renny get into the car. Before long, Brett joins them, and they drive away. A moment later, the GPS tracker vibrates, indicating that they’ve left the vicinity.

  As if I didn’t know.

  But it was a good idea to set the device last night, just in case they left unexpectedly in the wee hours.

  Now, the onscreen locator indicates that they’re heading toward the southbound entrance to I–95.

  Too bad I have to go in the opposite direction.

  But we’ll meet again before you know it…and next time, believe me, you will know it.

  This time, the sleeping pill only worked until about three A.M. Marin has been up for hours, listening to the rain, worrying about the rat in Caroline’s purse and the anonymous texts to her phone, waiting for a decent hour to call the one person who can possibly understand what it’s like to fear for your kids’ safety in the wake of a public ordeal.

  That last text was so ominous. And how did someone get her private number?

  Come on—these days, you can get hold of anyone’s personal information, if you really want to.

  After all, she herself managed to track down both a home and a cell phone number for Elsa Cavalon a while back, when she was thinking she might want to contact her.

  Ever since, she’s been toying with the idea of reaching out to Jeremy’s adoptive mother, though she isn’t sure why.

  Does she want to grieve with her?

  To express gratitude?

  To satisfy her own curiosity?

  Thinking of the woman to whom she’d given that precious gift—her firstborn—Marin swallows the bitter irony that they’d both lost him, in the end.

  She rubs her burning eyes and looks at the bedside clock.

  It’s past six. Too late to take another sleeping pill, and too early to call anyone.

  Nothing to do but brood.

  Story of my life.

  After surveying the pile of folded T-shirts on the bed, Mike removes two. Then he adds three pairs of boxer shorts, removes one, puts it back, and adds another.

  Four pairs of underwear? Is that enough? Is it overkill?

  He sucks at packing.

  At a lot of things, really.

  At times like this, he desperately misses Byron Gregson.

  Not just because Byron was full of great tips—like “always keep a packed suitcase handy by the door”—but because, as an investigative journalist, his old friend had contacts all over the world. With just a few well-placed overseas calls, he probably would have been able to tell Mike that he’s way off base with his suspicion—or that he might be on to something huge.

  But Byron did one too many favors for Mike when he agreed to look into Jeremy Cavalon’s birth parentage. He stumbled upon the link to Garvey Quinn, then made the mistake of trying to blackmail him—and now he’s gone forever.

  And that’s something I have to live with for the rest of my life.

  Without Byron here to guide him toward the right track, he has nothing to go on with this Cavalon case but a hunch. Yeah, terrific. A hunch—coming from a guy who’s so intuitive it only took him a year to figure out that his wife was sleeping around with—no, not his best friend. Hers.

  Married to a closeted lesbian, and he never had a clue. Intuitive? Mike Fantoni? What a joke.

  But this hunch…it actually makes sense. He’s not going to discuss it with the Cavalons, though—not yet, anyway. If he’s wrong, they’d be devastated all over again. And if he’s right…

  They’ll be devastated anyway.

  He was up all night going back over the situation, just to make sure he had the details straight.

  He did.

  Garvey Quinn said his girlfriend had killed the kid—probably on his say-so, but of course he’d never admit it. He said he’d already left the country, with his daughter, when the kid was killed. Claimed he didn’t know what had happened until weeks later, when she told him.


  What if she hadn’t obeyed his orders?

  No reason to think that she wouldn’t, but…

  What if…?

  Putting himself into her shoes, Mike could imagine what she’d been thinking.

  What if she’d simply abandoned Jeremy there, in Mumbai—or Bombay, as it was called back then? Who would ever know the difference? He’d never find his way back. In fact, he’d probably wind up dead anyway, sooner or later—but at least she wouldn’t have a kid’s blood on her hands.

  Somehow, the theory he’d initially considered impossible no longer seems so.

  Anything is possible. Anything at all.

  Even Jeremy Cavalon being alive.

  Yeah. It makes sense.

  So what next?

  There he is—a seven-year-old kid, abandoned in a foreign country swarming with abandoned kids. Eleven million in Bombay alone that year, according to a conservative UNICEF estimate.

  What, most likely, would have become of him?

  There’s only one way to find out.

  As luck would have it, a direct flight to Mumbai leaves from Logan in just a few hours—and there’s an available coach seat.

  Mike dumps the folded clothes into an open duffel bag, adds another pair of boxers for good measure, and heads for the door.

  When the phone rings at precisely nine o’clock, Lauren Walsh is standing on a ladder, paintbrush in hand, about to apply the first coat of semigloss onto the primed molding above the kitchen window.

  She hesitates, wondering if she should bother to answer. She just hung up with Sam a few minutes ago, and doubts it’s him again. Her two oldest kids, Ryan and Lucy, are both at school this morning in the midst of finals, so it won’t be them, either. And her youngest, Sadie, is in the next room, playing with the dog.

  Other than Sam and her children, there really isn’t anyone else whose call Lauren would jump to answer these days. Her parents, her sister Alyssa, her friend Trilby…they all mean well, but every time they call, Lauren feels as though they’re checking up on her, convinced she’s going to snap any second now.

  There had been a time, before she met Nick, when she was strong and independent, a career woman in the city. Marriage changed that—but her marriage didn’t last forever. She was already in the process of relearning, last summer after Nick left, how to survive on her own. So she more or less had a head start on widowhood before her soon-to-be-ex-husband entangled himself in Garvey Quinn’s web and paid the ultimate price.