Scared to Death

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “If you could talk, you’d probably beg me to put you out of your misery, wouldn’t you?” asks the person looming over Mike, terrifyingly close. “Guess what? It’s your lucky day.”

  Helpless, gripped by fear, Mike senses a swift, furtive movement beside him.

  “There. All set. This should be quick.”

  Quick…?

  What should be quick?

  Oh…

  Oh God.

  Oh no.

  He’s suffocating.

  Horror seeps in, saturating his body as if to replace the precious oxygen that’s been deliberately cut off.

  “It’s okay…Just let it happen.”

  Just…let…it…happen…

  The voice seems far away now, fading.

  Mike has always wondered what it would be like to die—whether it would hurt, whether the end would come quickly…

  Now you know.

  Funny, he thinks as he plummets into the darkness, that death is an even greater paradox than life.

  Death—his death—is excruciating yet painless, agonizingly drawn out even as it happens in a flash…

  It’s over.

  Another one bites the dust.

  Ah…that was the title of an oldie but goodie, and the perfect addition to life’s little soundtrack.

  Mike Fantoni looks so peaceful, lying there with his eyes closed. No different, really, than he did a minute ago, when he was alive.

  I really did do him a favor. Euthanasia. No need to feel bad about this one.

  It’s what lies ahead that remains a bit troubling.

  Taking the life of a healthy child isn’t exactly doing anyone any favors.

  But it’s no less necessary, and there’s some comfort knowing that it will be done out of love.

  In the end, as far as Jeremy is concerned, that’s all that’s really going to matter.

  Straining to keep one hand on the wheel and an eye on the road, Brett struggles to reach the ringing phone on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat. At last his fingers close around it.

  “Elsa?”

  “Brett!”

  “Thank God you’re all right!”

  “How did you know where we were?”

  “I—” He’s so relieved to hear her voice that it takes him a minute to grasp the question. “What do you mean? Where are you?”

  “Didn’t you just call me?”

  “I just called—wait, are you home?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No, I meant to call your cell, but…Is everything okay there?”

  She hesitates long enough that he realizes she isn’t telling the whole truth when she answers that it is.

  “Elsa—are you sure?”

  “Yes, I was just asleep when the phone rang and by the time I got to it, it had gone into voice mail.”

  “But why aren’t you at your mother’s?”

  “It’s a long story. Where are you, by the way? I thought I’d find you here when we got back.”

  “Another long story,” he tells Elsa. “But I’m on my way home. Are the doors locked?”

  “The doors, the windows…trust me, we’re fine. Just hurry home. We have to figure out what’s going on…if anything even is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know…I’m starting to wonder if I might not just be…paranoid.”

  Paranoid?

  It’s not the right word, he knows. But it’s the only one she can bring herself to say.

  “I love you,” he says simply, relieved that she at least grasps the possibility that she’s suffering from a relapse. Now they can work together to get her the help she needs.

  Hanging up, Brett makes a U-turn back toward the highway.

  Was it really just six hours ago that you were about to climb into bed in a hotel in Times Square, exhausted?

  It seems like a month has passed since the GPS alert that Brett Cavalon was on the move. Interesting how the human body responds to stress. Just when you think you’re too exhausted to even reach over and turn off the bedside lamp, you somehow find the energy to grab a cab to the airport, hop a flight, rent a car, and carry out yet another unfortunate but necessary death sentence.

  Adrenaline is a wonderful thing.

  But now…

  It’s time to get some sleep at last.

  At least this time, it won’t be in a cold, impersonal hotel room. Not when there’s a huge, vacant house with beds dressed in the finest European linens Montgomery money could buy.

  At this hour, with hardly another soul on the road, the fifteen-mile trip from downtown Boston will be a breeze.

  Nottingshire, here I come…again.

  Did I just make a terrible mistake? Elsa wonders as she hangs up the telephone. Lying to Brett about having been asleep when it rang—that was no mistake. Later, when he gets here, and she can explain the whole story, she’ll tell him the truth: that she had been afraid the lines were tapped.

  Had been afraid…

  Or are you still?

  Answering the call in the first place—that might have been her terrible mistake.

  Earlier, after Renny’s nightmare, she’d convinced herself that she’d conjured the stalker situation in her paranoid maternal brain.

  Paranoid?

  Try mentally ill.

  But as she lay there in the dark, listening to Renny’s even breathing and the silence of the house that no longer felt familiar, she wasn’t so sure.

  Okay. So either she’s crazy, or they’re in danger.

  Which is it?

  Some choice.

  No wonder you can’t decide.

  Anyway, when the phone rang, her first instinct was not to take any chances.

  A moment later, after it had gone into voice mail, she decided that was ridiculous—particularly when she saw on the caller ID that it had been Brett.

  She didn’t even bother to listen to his message, just carried the phone into the next room and called him right back.

  It’s a relief to know where Brett is and that he’s on his way home, but…

  Did she just broadcast Renny’s whereabouts to a stranger listening in?

  So now you’re back to the theory that (A) you’re not crazy and (B) you’re in danger. Terrific.

  She paces over to the living room window and peeks through a crack in the curtains, half expecting to see the silhouette of a man watching the house.

  But the street is empty…and so, she notices with a frown, is Meg Warren’s driveway.

  At this hour?

  Maybe Meg really does have a secret love life.

  Anything is possible, Elsa tells herself. Anything at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Not even five A.M., yet the sky above Regis Terrace is already streaked with dawn’s pink glow.

  Strolling past one grand brick Colonial after another, Jeremy thinks back six months to the first time he came to Nottingshire. Back then, he’d marveled at how, this far east in mid-December, dusk fell before four o’clock.

  He’d come here that day looking for La La Montgomery.

  What happened when he found her wasn’t what he’d intended—not at all. He’d only wanted to see her, maybe talk to her for a minute, try to explain…

  As if there was any satisfying explanation he could offer for having taken a golf club and shattered her skull.

  His emotions, when he came face-to-face with her, were raw. After so many years alone, keeping everything pent up inside him, he’d gotten carried away. He’d known it was wrong, but he couldn’t help it.

  Afterward, he’d promised himself it would never happen again.

  And now look. Look where you are. Look what you’ve been doing.

  He picks up his pace a little, almost as if instinctively trying to outrun the demons that brought him back here on that cold December dusk.

  Haven’t you learned by now that you’re never going to escape what happened to you?

  Even coming back to his old
life, revisiting the scenes of the crimes—his own, and Garvey Quinn’s—can’t help him reconcile the past.

  Maybe he does know it’s no use, deep down inside.

  It’s not as if he’s going to reclaim his rightful place in Elsa Cavalon’s heart, or in Marin Quinn’s.

  And yet…

  He can’t walk away, either. Not until it’s over.

  It will be. Soon. Today.

  He just can’t take it anymore.

  Can’t take her. He can’t take seeing her this way, seeing what she’s become, wondering what might have been…

  He can’t take the guilt, the waiting, the wondering if there’s a part of her that really does love him…

  Just as there’s a part of him that hates her still, even after all these years.

  Hearing a car on the street, Elsa peeks through the curtains.

  Brett!

  Thank God.

  She hurries to the front door, opening it just as he turns off the ignition in the driveway. Hesitating just a moment, she weighs the wisdom of leaving Renny alone and asleep in the house for a minute.

  But she has no choice. There’s a lot to say to Brett, and she doesn’t dare say it inside the house.

  Granted, she’s spent the last few hours combing every room for bugs and found nothing. But she didn’t even know what she was looking for, exactly. What does a listening device look like? Where might it be hidden? The clueless search did little to ease her fear.

  Brett is out of the car in a flash, looking worried. “Where’s Renny?”

  “Inside.”

  “Alone?”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  Brett sweeps Elsa into a fierce, fleeting hug, releases her quickly, and starts toward the house.

  “Brett, no, wait. We need to talk.”

  “We can talk inside. Renny won’t hear us if she’s asleep, and—”

  “Renny isn’t the only one who might hear us in there.”

  He stops walking. Pivots to look at her. “What do you mean? Who’s there?”

  “No one’s there, exactly, but…”

  Elsa takes a deep breath. This is it. If she tells him everything that’s happened—everything she’s thought has happened—there will be no going back.

  If it turns out she’s delusional, Brett will have to decide whether she’s any more fit to parent Renny than Renny’s birth mother was.

  But I would never hurt her. Never. No matter what.

  Still…could she ever really trust herself again, knowing her mind is capable of playing such terrible tricks on her? Could Brett ever trust her?

  Hopefully, she’ll never have to find out. But she has to tell him.

  “Brett, someone followed us to New York.”

  Jeremy had expected to have Regis Terrace all to himself at this hour.

  However, just up ahead, right in front of the Montgomery house, as luck would have it, a neighbor is walking her dog.

  She’s one of those upscale housewife types you see around here—fit and attractive, wearing yoga pants and sneakers, holding a mug that’s presumably from her nearby kitchen and filled with hot coffee.

  She glances up, making eye contact with Jeremy as her dog pokes along the curb. “Hello.”

  “Hi.” He’s careful not to be too friendly, but not unfriendly, either.

  “Looks like it’s going to be a nice day, doesn’t it?”

  He nods, slowing his pace a bit, wondering if he should keep right on walking. Sneaking a peek at the house, he notes that the shades are drawn.

  “Did you know them?”

  The question catches him off guard, and he looks up to see the woman following his gaze.

  “The Montgomerys, I mean.”

  His instinct is to lie, but what if she’s seen him around here before?

  He settles on a vague “Not very well.”

  She shrugs. “It’s just such a horrible thing. I know it’s been six months now, but every time I look at that house, I feel sick just thinking about what happened. Poor La La.”

  “Yes,” Jeremy agrees, his heart pounding, even though she can’t possibly know. “Poor La La.”

  “Well? What do you think?” Elsa watches Brett, waiting for him to say something now that she’s spilled the whole story.

  Uneasy, he looks away, back at the house, where Renny lies sleeping.

  His daughter.

  But she won’t be, if the adoption doesn’t go through.

  What do I think?

  About someone stalking my wife and child with a butcher knife?

  He looks again at Elsa. Finding out her son is dead, combined with the renewed strain of foster motherhood, must have plunged her back into the nightmare of acute stress disorder.

  She actually admitted that she might have imagined the part about the knife—or even more.

  Still…what about those surveillance pictures of Renny? Did she actually go to such great lengths? Taking the pictures, mailing them, claiming not to recognize them—or perhaps really not recognizing them, in her state of mind.

  Oh God. If that’s the case; if she really is that ill…

  Yet maybe there’s some other explanation. Something not as sinister as it seems. Maybe the photos were taken by the press.

  Or maybe they were from someone who wants to blackmail the Cavalons to keep their new child out of the media…

  And the person forgot to put in the blackmail note? Yeah, right.

  Well, maybe that envelope was sent by the foster care agency, as some kind of…

  What? Official procedure? Why wouldn’t there be any paperwork?

  Well, maybe the paperwork that was supposed to accompany the photos was accidentally missing, or…

  All of those scenarios seem pretty far-fetched. But really, are they any more unlikely than the house being bugged, and someone following Elsa and Renny to New York, and—

  And what about Mike?

  Chances are, the hit-and-run really was a freak accident.

  But why would he bother to follow a dead-end trail overseas after all these years? And why—since the trip obviously has some connection to Jeremy’s kidnapping—didn’t he bother to tell Brett and Elsa he was going?

  Unless…

  “When was the last time you checked your cell phone voice mail, Elsa?”

  “I don’t know, but I told you, either I lost my phone in New York, or—”

  Or it was stolen from her mother’s apartment by the knife-wielding intruder.

  Yeah. He knows.

  “Maybe you should check it. I know your battery was dead—”

  “But not until yesterday afternoon. I called you from my phone when I got to New York, remember?”

  That’s right. She did.

  He’d been thinking that Mike might have tried to call Elsa yesterday morning, before the accident. But she’d presumably had her phone with her the whole time. She would have heard it and picked it up.

  But we were traveling, and in that motel room…

  If Mike had tried to call when they were in a no-service area, it would have gone into voice mail.

  “You should check your messages,” he urges. “You don’t even need the phone to access the mailbox, you can dial it from the house.”

  “What if the line is bugged?”

  He pulls his own cell phone from his pocket. “Dial it from here.”

  “It might be bugged, too.”

  “If it is, then it’s too late to do anything about it anyway. I’ve been using it nonstop. Here. Hurry up and call.”

  He glances again at the house as she dials. She left the front door ajar so they can hear Renny, just in case…

  “Hurry,” he urges Elsa again.

  “I am!”

  It isn’t like her to snap at him.

  He bites his lip to keep from snapping back, knowing she’s under terrible pressure. They both are. He can feel his jaw clenching painfully as he watches her punch in her PIN.

  “I have messages,” she murmur
s after a moment.

  “Some are from me. I left you a bunch.”

  She nods, listening. Her eyes grow wide.

  “What? What is it? Is it Mike?”

  “No, it’s…” She presses the replay button and passes the phone to him, her hand trembling. “Listen to this. Oh my God, Brett. Oh my God. She’s the one who did this…”

  She? She who? What on earth is she talking about?

  Brett quickly raises the phone to his ear. The message is already under way.

  “—need to talk to you,” an unfamiliar female voice is saying. “Over the phone or in person, whatever…I, um, understand if you’d rather not talk to me after…after all this. But I hope you will. I’m sorry.”

  The caller hangs up.

  “Who?” Brett asks Elsa, his pulse racing. “Who is this?”

  “Marin Quinn. Jeremy’s birth mother,” she adds, as if he doesn’t know.

  “What is she talking about? What is she apologizing for?”

  “What do you think? It must have been her. She’s the one who took those pictures of Renny.”

  “But why? Why would she do this to us?”

  “She’s a mother who lost a child, Brett. That does terrible things to a person.”

  Yes. Nobody knows that better than we do.

  “She gave him up when he was a newborn, though,” Brett points out. “It’s not the same thing as raising a child and having him kidnapped and murdered.”

  Elsa is shaking her head before he even finishes speaking. “She still lost him. You can’t assign degrees to the pain. That’s like saying that losing Jeremy didn’t hurt me as much as it would have if I’d given birth to him. He was my son. He was her son. She’s probably torturing herself, thinking that if she hadn’t given him up, he’d—”

  “Or blaming us,” Brett cuts in as it dawns on him.

  Elsa presses a hand to her mouth. “You think…?”

  “She wants to punish us for not taking care of her son.”

  “By harming our daughter?”

  “Or at least by threatening to.”

  “But that’s…”

  Crazy. Yes. Better Marin Quinn than his wife.

  “You said it yourself, Elsa. Grief does terrible things to a person. Anyway, she reached out to us. That message made it sound like she’d thought better of it.”

  “You’re right. So you think it’s over?”