Scared to Death

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Jeremy’s eyes snap open.

  He lunges for the gun.

  La La presses the trigger.

  Jeremy is alive.

  Alive.

  And Renny is gone.

  Cradling his wife in his arms, Brett tries to grasp the situation—tries to figure out what one unbelievable fact might have to do with the other.

  Detective Gibbs seems to be waiting for him and Elsa to absorb the miracle.

  “Are you saying…” Brett shakes his head rapidly, starts again. “Is Jeremy connected to the woman who took our daughter?”

  “He may be.”

  “No,” Elsa says sharply, lifting her head at last. “He wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “You don’t even know him, Elsa,” Brett can’t help snapping. Even now, even after all these years, the old pattern has resumed. Elsa’s defense of Jeremy, and Brett’s wariness.

  “He wouldn’t hurt her,” she repeats stubbornly, wrenching herself from his arms and standing to face him.

  “How can you even say that? Look what he did to—”

  All at once, it hits him.

  Melody Johnson…

  He knows where he’s seen her before. Years ago, and her face is different, but her eyes…those blue eyes…

  Even the name…

  Melody.

  “La La.” Brett turns abruptly to Detective Gibbs. “Her name was—is—La La Montgomery.”

  Numb with horror, Caroline watches Jeremy fall to the floor.

  Standing over him with the gun in her hand, La La shakes her head. “I told you you’re pathetic.”

  It’s as if she’s forgotten Caroline is there.

  I have to get out of here.

  She turns her head slightly, checking the pathway behind her. The house, when Jeremy led her through, was a maze. Can she even find her way back to the door?

  “Don’t try it.”

  Startled, she sees that La La is looking at her. Aiming at her.

  “Come on.” La La calmly sidesteps Jeremy’s crumpled, bloody form. “Let’s go.”

  “Go…” Caroline whispers, paralyzed with fear.

  La La jabs the gun into her ribs. “I said, let’s go! Walk!”

  Caroline walks.

  In the master bedroom, Marin once again stands holding a plastic pill bottle in her hand, poised over the toilet.

  This time, though, there’s no hesitation. This time, her hand is sure and steady as she dumps the contents into the bowl.

  Then she empties another bottle, and another, and when they’re all gone, every last pill, she flushes them down the toilet.

  Turning away, she sees Annie standing in the doorway.

  “Mom,” she says, “the detectives want to talk to you. They said they think they know why Caroline went to Boston.”

  Moving through the big house, prodded along by La La’s gun in her back, Caroline struggles to keep her wits about her.

  Where is she taking me?

  What is she going to do?

  No, she knows what La La is going to do.

  This is, unmistakably, a death march.

  They’ve reached the kitchen now, and the back door is just a few yards away. Beyond it, through the glass window, Caroline can see leafy trees, and sunshine, and a wide blue sky.

  Freedom.

  But she doesn’t dare run for it, knowing she’ll be shot in the back.

  La La yanks open a door—a different door, and Caroline sees a steep flight of stairs before her.

  “Go!”

  Caroline hesitates, knowing beyond a doubt that if she descends into the shadows, she’ll never again see the light of day.

  This is her only chance.

  “Move!”

  She moves.

  But not forward.

  No, she flings herself backward, full force, into La La Montgomery.

  Sitting beside Brett in the back of Detective Gibbs’s car, hurtling north up Interstate 95 toward Boston, Elsa closes her eyes, seeing her lost little boy—the boy she’d always known, deep down inside, would never come home again.

  And Renny…

  “She’s going to be okay,” she tells Brett, opening her eyes to see him staring grimly out the window.

  He turns to look at her. “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  All those years, her heart had told her that her little boy was lost to her forever. She was right about that.

  Jeremy the child is gone forever.

  But Jeremy the man is alive.

  And he’s still her son, no matter what.

  The wind knocked out of her, La La falls to the kitchen floor with Caroline on top of her.

  “Get off me!” she snarls, her arms pinned beneath their combined weight, her right hand still clenching the gun.

  She can feel Caroline clawing for it.

  Keeping her finger tight on the trigger, she summons every bit of strength to heave her upper body from the floor. The other girl goes flying and La La scrambles to her feet.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.” She stands over Caroline with the gun in both hands now, straight out in front of her as she takes aim for the girl’s chest.

  Then she thinks better of it and changes her vantage, aiming instead for Caroline’s head. Yes, that’s better. This way, her pretty face will be destroyed, just like—

  Sensing a whoosh of movement behind her, La La whirls around…

  Just in time to see Jeremy, enraged, swinging a golf club toward her head.

  No, she realizes in the split second before it hits.

  It’s not a golf club at all.

  It’s an andiron.

  “Oh my God. Jeremy!”

  Standing over La La, seeing the blood pooling beneath her head, Jeremy is vaguely aware of Caroline’s shocked horror—but well aware of his own, and of the agonizing pain in his arm.

  “You…you’re bleeding.” Caroline has turned to him.

  He looks down, sees the blood running down his hand, covering the andiron.

  “No, that’s hers.” All at once, his fingers release the weight of it and it thuds to the floor beside her body.

  “Yours, too. Let me see.” Caroline touches his arm gently, and her hand comes away red. “She shot you, Jeremy.”

  “She…shot me?” He closes his eyes, feeling faint, then forces them open and looks down at his arm.

  Caroline is right. He was shot. He was on the floor, in the living room…

  “Here, sit down.”

  He lets Caroline guide him into a chair.

  “I’ll call for help,” she’s saying.

  All he knew, when he was lying on the floor, was that he had to stop La La before she hurt his sister.

  And now…

  “Don’t worry,” Caroline tells him, already dialing 911. “It’s going to be all right. Just hang in there, okay?”

  Hang in there.

  Jeremy leans his head back and smiles faintly.

  Hang in there. That, he can do.

  He’s done it all his life.

  When her cell phone rings in her hand, Marin literally jumps out of her chair.

  “Mom?” Annie is up, too, right beside her. “Is it…?”

  Yes. Caroline’s number is in the caller ID window.

  In the moment before she answers the call, blurting her daughter’s name, Marin has a flash of doubt.

  The police are certain Caroline is in Boston…with Jeremy.

  What if I’ve lost her—lost them both—for good?

  “Mom?”

  “Caroline,” she says again, and then her voice breaks.

  “Mom…I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Caroline—her stoic, unemotional daughter, so like Garvey—or so Marin has always believed—is crying. Apologizing.

  Tears streaming down her face, Marin asks, “Are you all right?”

  “I am. We both are.”

  “Both?”

  “Jeremy—he’s been shot, but the paramedics are here, and he�
�s going to be okay.”

  “Jeremy…”

  “He saved my life.”

  “Jeremy…”

  “My brother. Your son.”

  Yes. Her son.

  “Mom,” Caroline sobs, “I want to come home. I just want to come home.”

  Through her own tears, Marin smiles.

  Riding through the streets of Nottingshire, Elsa is lost in memories of Jeremy. Not, this time, of losing him—but of Jeremy alive, clinging to her hand as they walked down Main Street, and teeter-tottering in the park, and running up the hill toward the red brick school.

  But the familiar spots fall away as Detective Gibbs takes them into a part of town they rarely visited. Here, the homes are massive, set wide apart and back from the wide, leafy streets.

  As they turn on to Regis Terrace, Elsa spots police cars and ambulances. An icy tide of dread sweeps through her.

  Detective Gibbs parks quickly at the curb across from the hub of the action: a stately home Elsa knows belongs to the Montgomerys.

  “You folks sit tight for a minute.” The detective is out of the car in a hurry, striding toward a cluster of uniformed cops out front.

  Elsa’s pulse races as she and Brett wait in silence, watching the house.

  Renny…

  Jeremy…

  Her children…

  Detective Gibbs strides back to the car. Elsa grips her husband’s hand.

  “Amelia Montgomery is in custody—and injured, in critical condition,” he announces without ado. “Jeremy has been shot, but he’s safe. So is Caroline Quinn.”

  “Caroline Quinn?” Looking bewildered, Brett voices the question Elsa can’t bring herself to ask. “What about Renny?”

  Detective Gibbs clears his throat. “We don’t know where she is. I’m sorry, Mr. Cavalon. But we’re doing everything we can to find her.”

  Propped on the couch where they moved him, away from the bloody kitchen, Jeremy winces.

  “Sorry…does that hurt?” asks the motherly paramedic who’s wrapping a bandage around his wounded arm. A uniformed police officer hovers nearby, keeping a wary eye on things.

  On Jeremy.

  “It’s okay,” he tells the paramedic. “I’m good with pain.”

  She raises a dubious gray eyebrow. “This is more than just pain, honey. You’ve been shot.”

  Yeah, well, he’s been through worse.

  Much worse.

  “All right,” the woman says as she finishes up. “They want to talk to you now.”

  “Who does?”

  “The detectives.” She gives him a sympathetic pat on the arm and disappears.

  The police officer looks at Jeremy as if to say, Don’t try anything.

  It was self-defense! he wants to shout. I had to do it. She was going to kill—

  Several men stride into the room, the one in the lead saying briskly, “I’m Detective Gibbs. Are you Jeremy Cavalon?”

  Jeremy Cavalon…

  It’s been years since he heard the name. Tears spring to his eyes.

  They know.

  They know it’s me.

  “Yes,” he says simply. “I’m Jeremy Cavalon.”

  Isolated in the den of the Montgomery mansion with a pair of female police officers, Caroline tries hard to focus on their questions.

  But they have so many, and some don’t even make sense.

  They just showed her a photo of a little girl she’s never even seen before, and asked what she knew about her.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “So you have no idea where she is?” one of the officers—the one who looks like her face would crack if she tried to smile—asks Caroline.

  “I don’t even know who she is.”

  “She’s missing. Amelia Montgomery abducted her from her home in Groton.”

  “Amel—”

  “La La,” the other officer says. “That’s what she was called.”

  Caroline nods. “But I don’t know anything about this.”

  “She didn’t say anything about a little girl?”

  “No. Nothing at—” Caroline stops, remembering. “She did say something.”

  The officers wait, pens poised over their notes.

  “She said…” Caroline closes her eyes, trying to remember. “She told Jeremy he was like a little girl, afraid of everything…she kept talking about stuff like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know…fear. Like, she said something about how some people are afraid of being trapped in small spaces…”

  The two women look at each other, then again at Caroline.

  “The child we’re trying to find has a severe case of claustrophobia,” the humorless officer tells her. “She might have hidden her somewhere to scare her. Do you have any idea where she might have—”

  Caroline gasps. “Yes! The basement!”

  “Excuse me…I’m sorry to interrupt, but this is urgent.”

  Looking up to see a female police officer poking her head into the living room, Jeremy welcomes the interruption. Sitting here, telling the detectives about Papa—about what he went through, in Mumbai, and here—it’s harder than he ever imagined it would be.

  The only other person he’s ever told was La La—but that was almost as if he were talking to himself, purging his soul of the horror.

  Little did he realize she was registering every last detail, planning to use the information to launch her vengeful crusade.

  “We think she might have hidden the little girl somewhere in the basement,” the female officer announces from the doorway. “There must be a closet down there, or something.”

  “There are a few,” Jeremy speaks up. “And there’s a wine cellar too, and a voice studio.”

  “Voice studio?”

  “It’s not like…I mean, it’s really small. Her father built it for her, because she—”

  “Small?” The female officer echoes. “Where is it, exactly?”

  “I can show you.”

  The authorities all look at one another.

  “Go ahead, let him take you down,” Detective Gibbs instructs. “I’ll be waiting outside with the Cavalons.”

  Jeremy’s heart stops. “They’re here?”

  “Yeah, they’re here.” The detective’s tone is all business, but his eyes aren’t unkind. “And they want their daughter back alive.”

  Elsa can’t take it.

  Something is going on inside that house.

  The way Detective Gibbs comes striding out here so purposefully…

  “Did you find her?” She rushes toward him.

  “Not yet.” He rests a firm hand on her arm, guiding her back over to the car.

  But he expects to find her, or he expects…something. The air is unmistakably charged.

  Brett’s arm is tight around Elsa’s shoulders; she can feel the expectant tension in his body as well. He’s waiting; they’re all just sitting here waiting…waiting…

  The door of the house is thrown open; they all look up.

  Nothing could have prepared Elsa for the sight that greets her.

  A male figure stands in the doorway, holding something in his arms.

  Jeremy…with Renny.

  With a scream, Elsa races toward them, toward her children, Brett right alongside her.

  “Mommy!” Renny calls out. “Daddy!”

  Jeremy bends over to gently set her on her feet.

  Brett gets to her first, scooping her into his arms and holding her close.

  Reaching them, Elsa gives her daughter a fierce hug.

  “I was so scared, Mommy.”

  “I know you were, sweetheart, but you’re going to be okay.”

  “That boy found me.” She points at Jeremy. “He let me out.”

  Boy…he’s not a boy.

  He’s a man.

  Elsa swallows hard and turns toward him. He’s just standing there, waiting…waiting…

  He looks nothing like the little boy she lost, and yet…

&n
bsp; Their eyes connect, and she knows.

  My son.

  Glancing quickly over at Brett, she sees that his eyes, above Renny’s dark head, are shiny. “Thank you,” he says raggedly. Balancing Renny on his hip, he holds out a hand.

  Jeremy looks down at his feet, then shyly up at Brett. “You’re welcome.” He stretches out a hand to shake Brett’s, but is swept into a bear hug instead.

  “You’re crushing me!” Renny squeals, and they all laugh through their tears.

  At last, Brett releases him and he looks at Elsa.

  “Jeremy,” she whispers, and opens her arms. “Welcome home.”

  Epilogue

  The airport is packed on this Friday morning, with the line for security snaking across the terminal.

  “I hope we don’t miss the flight,” Elsa tells Brett as they wrestle their bags another couple of feet forward.

  “The line’s moving fast. Here, Renny, let me take your bag.”

  “No, I’ve got it.” She wheels her small Vuitton suitcase—a gift from Maman, of course, in honor of this long-awaited trip—and anxiously asks, “What if the plane leaves without us?”

  “It won’t, I promise.”

  “But you just said it might,” she reminds Elsa, who smiles and shakes her head.

  “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

  “Nope. And I been waiting for this day for so long.”

  Brett rests a hand on Renny’s shoulder. “We all have.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they reach the head of the line. The security guard is jovial as Brett hands him their three IDs.

  “Let’s see…we have Brett Cavalon, Elsa Cavalon, and…” He looks down. “Renata Cavalon. Is that your name?”

  “No.” She shakes her head fervently, and he raises an eyebrow.

  Elsa and Brett look at each other.

  “Sweetie,” Elsa says, “it is now, remember? The adoption? You’re a Cavalon now.”

  “But I’m not Renata. It’s Renny,” she informs the security guard, who grins and hands back the documents.

  “All right, Renny Cavalon. You have a good trip. Where are you going?”

  “To Disney World!”

  As they make their way toward the gate, she gallops along pulling her little bag, singing her favorite Ariel song.

  The one about becoming part of your world, Elsa thinks.