Scared to Death

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Renny still isn’t sick of the song, or of The Little Mermaid.

  And I’m not, either, thinks Elsa, who often goes around singing the poignant lyrics herself. So does Brett.

  “It’s like our family theme song,” he comments now, as he and Elsa pull the luggage along toward the gate, just up ahead.

  “They’re here!” Renny breaks off to announce excitedly. “Can I run ahead?”

  Elsa hesitates. This is a public place, and there are so many strangers…

  “Just be careful,” she tells Renny, who breaks into a happy run.

  “Good job, Mom.” Brett nods his approval.

  “What?”

  “Letting go.”

  “I’m learning,” she says with a smile. “And anyway, look—they see her coming.”

  She points toward the gate, where the rest of the family are waiting for Renny to reach them.

  Jeremy, Marin, Caroline, Annie.

  The Cavalons and the Quinns may not be technically related, but they’ve come to think of one another that way these past few months, with Jeremy as the bridge between them.

  Anyway, no one knows better than Elsa that blood doesn’t create a familial bond.

  Love does.

  Turn the page for a preview of

  HELL TO PAY

  the next book from

  New York Times bestselling author

  Wendy Corsi Staub

  Coming soon

  from Avon Books

  Who so sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.

  —Genesis 9:6

  Bridgebury Correctional Facility

  Massachusetts

  Something is wrong.

  Lying awake in her bunk, she senses it even before she hears or feels it.

  Later, looking back on this moment—something she will do every day for as long as she lives—she’ll acknowledge this flash of prophecy that saved her life. She’ll wish she could share the incredible story with the world.

  But she can’t.

  This memory, like the others that will continue to haunt and inspire her, will be her secret. No one—other than Chaplain Gideon, of course—will ever know about the premonition that kept her from dying in her bed on a cold winter New England night.

  All around her, the others are sound asleep in their cells. They’ll never know what hit them.

  For her, though, the awareness strikes out of nowhere, like one of her ferocious headaches.

  Yes, something is wrong…

  The perception is so strong—so earth-shattering, she’ll wryly think later, with no one to appreciate the clever wordplay—that her eyes fly open and she braces herself for…something terrible.

  She fully expects to find someone looming over her bed. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  But it isn’t that. It isn’t about her at all.

  No, this is bigger—much bigger, rushing at her like a freight train: distant rumbling; the ground begins to shake. Instinctively, she dives off the bed and rolls beneath the steel frame just as the first chunk of mortar lands on the floor beside it.

  A bomb?

  No—that would be a single explosion; perhaps a series of them. This is an endless detonation, and as the world crumbles all around her, she knows. She knows.

  It has come to pass, just as the Bible foretold in the Book of Revelation.

  “…and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.”

  Huddled in a fetal position, she stays under the bed as brick and concrete rain down. Metal beams and iron bars groan and collapse, reducing the impenetrable fortress to rubble.

  She can hear the others’ terrified screams in the face of God’s fury, but she herself remains calm. Panic would trigger a flight response; were she to budge from under the bed, she’d surely be crushed to death in an instant.

  Deep down, she knows she’s meant to be spared. She can’t die. Not here. Not now. Not with Jeremy Cavalon still out there in the world, living his life, while she’s been caged like an animal.

  Every time she allows herself to think of him, helpless rage wells up inside of her. There’s nothing to do about it but pray to God that one day Jeremy—and the others, too—will get what they deserve. Yes, justice at the Almighty’s hands, or, by some miracle, at her own.

  At last, the shaking subsides.

  She opens her eyes to a stinging cloud of dust. She can hear wailing car alarms, sirens, moans and shrieks of the trapped and dying. Dust clogs her lungs so that she can barely breathe, but she’s in one piece. Alive.

  She feels her way out from under the bed, squirming through the debris until she’s standing. The cell floor is cracked and littered with wreckage, and there, beside the bed that shielded her, is her precious dog-eared Bible.

  Trembling, she picks it up, clasps it to her chest.

  The dust has begun to settle, falling strangely cold and wet. She tilts her head back and for the first time in years, sees the wide-open night sky, swirling with snowflakes.

  Richard Jollston has been predicting it for decades.

  But when it actually happens—when a major earthquake strikes his native New England—he isn’t even there to witness it firsthand. No, he’s a continent away, safe and sound in California of all places, sitting at the hotel bar nursing a stiff bourbon and water after a grueling day of conference presentations.

  “Shit,” the young bartender mutters, and Richard looks up from his drink to see the kid gazing at the television screen mounted high above the top shelf liquor—top shelf, in this modest hotel, being Jack Daniel’s.

  “What’s going on?” Richard squints at the blurry montage of images and captions. Only one is discernable: the enormous, distinctive BREAKING NEWS graphic.

  Back in the old days, before the ubiquitous cable news crawls and headline-generating reality TV-star scandals, a special report might have generated serious notice among the cluster of people seated at the hotel bar. But tonight, after a cursory glance, most go back to their conversations. Only the bartender is watching the TV, and now—because unlike the others, he’s sitting alone—so is Richard.

  Too bad he can’t see a damned thing, having stopped in his room to take out his contact lenses before coming down to the bar. He’s been wearing them only a few weeks and isn’t used to them.

  Terribly nearsighted, for years, he’d resisted contacts. But it’s hard enough to re-enter the dating scene after divorcing your high school sweetheart. He’d figured out pretty quickly that most single women aren’t interested in a bespectacled, asthmatic, perpetually penniless seismologist.

  Not that they’re any more interested in an asthmatic, perpetually penniless seismologist in contact lenses.

  “Earthquake,” the bartender informs Richard as he peers at the TV screen. “Major one.”

  “Where?”

  “Near Boston.”

  “What?!”

  “Yo, that shit is messed up, right? Whoever heard of an earthquake there?”

  “There was a 7.0 in New Hampshire in 1638, a 6.2 off Cape Ann in 1755,” Richard rattles off, “a 7.2 off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1929, and a—”

  “Yeah? How do you know? Were you there?”

  Ignoring the bartender’s smirk, Richard says simply, “It’s my life’s work.”

  He’s spent over twenty years analyzing historical seismic activity in the northeast—and the better part of the last decade warning public officials, private administrators, the media. He told anyone who would listen that the ancient infrastructure of most New England cities, along with modern coastal construction built on landfill, simply could not withstand a quake of the magnitude seen in 1755. And that the area was long overdue for another.

  Convinced that a series of minor recent tremors were actually foreshocks, he’d even created a seismic hazard map of the most vulnerable South Shore zones, indicating private homes and municipal buildings that were at risk.

&n
bsp; Now that the inevitable has come to pass, are any of them left standing?

  And oh, dear Lord…

  Sondra.

  Richard fumbles for his cell phone in the pocket of his tweed blazer. It starts ringing before his hand even closes around it.

  “Hello?”

  “Go ahead and say it,” his ex-wife greets him, and he’s so relieved to hear her voice that it takes him a second to regroup and address her greeting.

  “Go ahead and say what?”

  “’I told you so.’ Seriously, go ahead.”

  Any other time, he’d be tempted to say it…about a lot of things.

  But right now, he’s just glad to know she’s alive. They may be divorced—which wasn’t his idea—but he still cares about her. Probably more than he should, considering all the nasty things she’s done.

  But as his late mother liked to tell him, no one is all good or all evil. There’s a little of both in everyone.

  “Even you?” he’d asked, unable to fathom even a hint of evil in his sainted mother.

  “Even me.”

  If there was, he never glimpsed it. But he saw plenty of Sondra’s evil side these last few years—and it got the better of their marriage.

  “Are you okay?” he asks her now.

  “I am, but…it was so scary. Buildings are collapsed everywhere, Rich.”

  “Around you?”

  “No, over toward Bridgebury.”

  Bridgebury. Pretty much Ground Zero on Richard’s “map of doom,” as one reporter had referred to the document he’d made public time and again.

  “The power is out here so my sister is following it on the news in Vermont,” Sondra tells him, “and she’s been texting me updates. She said there are fires, too.”

  “Broken gas lines. Don’t light any matches until you know—“

  “Too late. I had to light a candle. I couldn’t find the big flashlight. But don’t worry, the house is still standing, in case you were wondering.”

  He was—but does it even matter? The house, a vintage cape in Taunton, is all Sondra’s now, along with half his pension. He got the big flashlight, though. Terrific.

  He also got a third-floor walk-up in Quincy—hardly the “bachelor pad” of his dreams.

  “Where were you when it happened?” he asks his ex-wife.

  “Sleeping. It woke me up.”

  Right. It’s past midnight on the east coast. All those people sound asleep in houses, hospitals and nursing homes, prisons…

  How many, Richard wonders, have been crushed to death in their beds?

  Lush snowflakes fall through jagged holes in what’s left of the prison roof, dusting her gray-streaked hair and making her shiver despite the blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

  Still clutching her Bible, she picks her way around a heap of bricks and over yet another half-buried, bloody body in an orange jumpsuit.

  So many of them, dead…

  But you’ve survived. You are the chosen one, a prophet.

  Freedom is so close—just a few more yards, and she’ll have made it past the ruins that mark the outermost wall of the collapsed prison.

  Hearing a groan, she looks around to see a guard, one she knows all too well. He works the perimeter of the prison and was the first, though not the last, to rape her. When it started, she was still pretty, still slender, still naïve enough to believe the abuse would stop if she lost her looks and her figure.

  It didn’t.

  The guard is lying on the ground in what used to be the prison yard, his arm pinned beneath a boulder-sized hunk of masonry. Face contorted in agony, he writhes in a futile effort to free himself.

  “Please,” he begs her. “Please help me.”

  Stepping closer, she regards the situation, wondering what to do.

  Ah, Deuteronomy: I will render vengeance to mine enemies.

  She reaches toward the guard.

  “Thank you.” He exhales and his eyes flutter closed in anticipation of relief.

  Pulling his gun from the holster at his hip, she takes aim and fires.

  Fragments of skull, flesh, and brain scatter into the drift of dust and snow at her feet.

  “Thy will be done,” she whispers, satisfied.

  Hurrying on toward the woods behind the prison, she’s about fifty yards away when she hears the deafening explosion.

  Whirling around, she sees that the prison—what’s left of it—is engulfed in flames.

  For a long moment, she allows herself to stand and watch, a wondrous smile playing at her lips, the words of the prophet Isaiah ringing in her ears.

  For, behold, the LORD will come with fire…to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.

  Then she steals into the night, clutching the gun in one hand and her Bible in the other.

  The Ansonia, New York City

  One year later

  Nothing like a hot bath on a cold February night, Sylvie Durand muses, as hot water runs into the tub and the bathroom fills with the scent of Chanel bubble bath. A glass of Haut-Brion waits amid flickering white votives beside the tub, and Edith Piaf croons over the recently installed surround-sound speakers.

  Music piped into the bathroom—it was the perfect Christmas gift from her grandson Jeremy, who installed the wiring in less time than Sylvie takes to put on makeup for an evening out.

  “There, Mémé—now you can listen to your music while you relax in the bath. It’ll be just like a spa,” he told her.

  He’s grown into a wonderful man, Jeremy. To have overcome such tragedy in his young life…

  He’d been given up at birth by his unwed parents, winding up in the foster care system. After several troubled placements, he was one of the lucky school-aged children who found his way into a loving adoptive home. Elsa and her husband Brett had their hands full—Jeremy was a troubled child—but they adored him. They were devastated when he was abducted from their backyard as a seven-year-old.

  Sylvie—like the rest of the world—assumed he’d fallen victim to a child predator and would never come home again. She was right—and wrong.

  She shakes her head, remembering the terrible day she’d learned that Jeremy had been murdered overseas not long after his abduction—and that his own birth father, the powerful and famously pious New York gubernatorial candidate Garvey Quinn—was responsible.

  Less than a year later, Jeremy turned up alive after all. It was a miracle.

  They can happen, Sylvie has learned. But one miracle in a lifetime is more than anyone should hope for. She learned that the hard way a few years ago, when Jean Paul became ill.

  Humming along to “Mon Dieu,” she admires her reflection in the mirror above the sink.

  Just this morning at the salon on Madison Avenue, as she was leaning back in the sink chair to be washed, the new shampoo girl commented, “You know, I was expecting to see facelift scars, but you don’t have any.”

  “Pardon?” Sylvie decided that she would never become re-accustomed to brash American manners.

  Having lived in New York most of her adult life, she’d returned to her native France for over a decade after rekindling a teenage romance. Adapting to her native culture had been surprisingly easy, but the homecoming wasn’t meant to be permanent. Her heart may be in Paris, but her daughter and grandchildren—not to mention her own fabulous apartment—are not.

  And so, after Jean Paul passed away, Sylvie settled back in on the Upper West Side. That wasn’t nearly as seamless a transition as she’d anticipated. Maybe she’s simply too old to deal with change.

  American culture feels foreign to her even now; she’s perpetually caught off guard by this penchant for barging into strangers’ lives with such audacity. Europeans tend to respect each other’s privacy.

  “It’s just that your skin is so beautiful, and your bone structure is amazing,” the shampoo girl continued, massaging Sylvie’s temples, “I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised—I know who you are—but I figured you must have had
some work done. It seems like everyone does, especially in your business.”

  “Not I,” Sylvie replied haughtily, though she was secretly flattered by both the praise and the recognition of her stellar career.

  The shampoo girl refused to leave well enough alone. “I thought that was why you always go around wearing those hats with the little veils—to cover the scars.”

  Sylvie was speechless at the audacity—so much so that she couldn’t point out that she’s been wearing hats with blushers for decades. They were—and remain—her personal trademark.

  Now she turns her head from side to side, her legendary blue eyes narrowed as she studies herself in the misty mirror. Yes, the porcelain complexion and facial bone structure that made her one of the world’s first supermodels have certainly withstood the test of time. And her hair, freshly dyed a becoming shade of brunette, looks as natural as it did when she was strutting the runways.

  No wonder the handsome waiter mistook her and Elsa for sisters just the other day, when they were out to lunch with Elsa’s daughter Renny, a student at NYU.

  “Would you like to order dessert?” the waiter asked Elsa, turning to her after Sylvie had ordered the crème brûlée, “or shall I just bring two spoons for your sister’s?”

  Sylvie—never big on sharing dessert—would have gleefully gone along with it, and with the waiter’s mistaken assumption about their relationship, had her outspoken granddaughter not nipped it in the bud, probably because she thought the waiter was flirting with her mom.

  He might very well have been. Elsa is strikingly beautiful even in middle age—nearly as beautiful as Sylvie herself. But her marriage to Brett Cavalon, having weathered many a storm, is stronger than ever.

  “Actually, they’re mother and daughter,” Renny promptly informed the waiter, “not sisters.”

  “Is that so? Well, I sure can see the family resemblance in all three of you.”

  As soon as he walked away, Renny rolled her eyes and sipped the pinot noir she’d glibly ordered as a newly minted twenty-one-year-old. “He’s so full of crap.”

  Sylvie scolded, “Renny! Such language at the table!”

  “Oh, it could have been worse, Maman.” Elsa grinned. “She could have said he’s full of—”