Scared to Death (32 page)

“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…

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.”

T
he 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.

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

S
omething 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, help
less 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.

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 L
ORD
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.