Live to Tell (30 page)

At a glance, Jeremy appears to be smiling as well.

But now, looking closer, Elsa can see that it’s more of a smirk. Why didn’t she notice that before now?

At the time, she remembers, she was simply relieved that they’d made it to the golf course at all, after the usual morning drama. That he actually agreed to pose with Brett—and cracked a grin at her “Say cheese”—had seemed too good to be true.

Jeremy didn’t want golf lessons.

“Do it for me,” she begged him, and, when that didn’t work, “Do it for Daddy.”

That didn’t work, either. He went, kicking and screaming—literally. It wasn’t unusual. It was the way Elsa got him to school some mornings, and to whatever doctor he was seeing at the time.

When they got to the golf course, Brett was waiting. Jeremy underwent one of his miraculous temporary transformations.

But it didn’t last for long. God, no.

Elsa shudders, remembering.

That was the day she realized Jeremy needed more help than they’d been giving him. Serious help.

She’ll never forget the sight of him marching off onto the green with the madras-clad instructor and a quartet of eager junior golfers, one an adorable little girl with blond braids swinging behind her.

Nor will Elsa ever forget the bloodcurdling screams that reached her ears a half hour later, as she and Brett sat waiting, sipping gin and tonics with the other parents.

One of the kids, ashen-faced, came dashing down to the clubhouse bellowing, “Call 911! Hurry!”

All hell broke loose.

Elsa remembers tearing across the plush grass in heels, her heart in her mouth, fearing that something had happened to Jeremy.

Brett beat her to the scene. By the time she made it there, people were hovering around a crumpled figure on the ground—the little girl with blond braids, now streaked with red.

Anguished screams from the child’s mother, chaotic voices all around.

“
What happened to her?
”

“
Is she breathing?
”

“
Does anyone know CPR?
”

Brett turned to look at Elsa, and the moment she saw his face, she knew. Knew even before she spotted Jeremy, standing there with the bloody seven-iron still in his hand.

“What did you do?” Brett hollered at him, as medics carried away the unconscious child.

“I didn’t mean it. She laughed at me, and I got mad.”

The child survived, thank God.

And so, somehow, did Elsa and Brett.

But Jeremy…

Less than six months later, Jeremy was gone.

Elsa closes the book and sits, for a long time, looking back.

Maybe it’s time she stopped doing that.

Maybe it’s time she started looking ahead after all. Maybe it’s time she gave serious thought to the question that’s been floating around for a while now, in the back of her mind, where Jeremy lives.

Have you ever considered another child, Elsa?

And hope, like the dangling ribbons of a helium balloon on a soft summer breeze, drifts back within her grasp at last.

Epilogue

Dallas, Texas

T
he sun is blistering hot today as he steps out of the air-conditioned pickup truck in front of the barbecue joint out on North Stemmons.

His boots kick up a cloud of dust from the parking lot to the front door, and sweat breaks out on his forehead beneath the brim of his Stetson. He’s never been big on hats, but when in Rome…

Stepping over the threshold, he’s greeted by a welcome blast of air-conditioning and a decidedly unwelcome blast of honky-tonk music.

Damned Texans.

“Hello there, sugar.” The hostess is teased and dyed and primped to death, with a pair of double Ds sticking halfway out of her denim shirt. “All by your lonesome?”

He shrugs. He’s been alone for just about as long as he can remember, but never lonesome.

There are women. They always come into his life willingly—and some leave that way as well, never knowing his secret, but perhaps sensing that something is off.

The ones who don’t…well, they leave, too. He gets rid of most the easy way—“It’s not you, it’s me… I’m not ready for a serious relationship… I think we both need to see other people…”

Some women are more tenacious than others, though. Stubborn. Nosy. Asking too many questions. He takes care of them the hard way…

Then again, is it really so hard at all, anymore?

You do what has to be done, and then you wash your hands and you move on.

He heard that somewhere, a very long time ago. It stuck with him. It’s served him well.

The hostess consults her clipboard. “Gonna be about a ten-minute wait. You wanna step over there into the bar and have a cold one till I call you?”

“Why not?”

“You sure you’re twenty-one?”

“Hay-ell, yes.” Tossing her a look, he walks toward the bar.

“Wait, sugar?”

He turns to see the hostess with a pen poised over the clipboard.

“I need your name.”

“It’s Jeremy.”

Turn the page for a preview of

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

M
ind 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 transported 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.