Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(2)
Now, the name—her name—echoes back at him from the cobweb corners of his mind.
Elsa.
CHAPTER ONE
Norwich, Connecticut
June
Another day, another dollar…
Which about sums up my salary, Roxanne Shields thinks as she cuts the incredibly loud engine of her aging car, desperately in need of a new muffler—or something.
“You need to get that fixed,” her boss at the agency told her just yesterday. “It’s just not appropriate to visit clients in a muscle car.”
“Muscle car?” She snorted. “It’s a seven-year-old Hyundai.”
“Well, it sounds like a muscle car. Fix it.”
Yeah. Sure. She’ll get right on it—as soon as she’s taken care of two months’ back rent on this dumpy apartment, her overdue utility bills, and the student loan that’s about to default.
How ironic that she was the first in her family to go to college, yet she can’t even afford a nice wooden frame to display her bachelor’s degree in social work from Southern Connecticut State. The BSW is still in its cardboard folder, tucked away in the back of her underwear drawer since graduation last May—over a year ago already.
“When I grow up, I just want to help people. I don’t care about money,” she always liked to say, mostly because it made her mother beam with pride as Roxanne’s less-noble siblings rolled their eyes.
These days, her brother—a welder in Waterbury—is driving a BMW and her sister—a cocktail waitress at some fancy Newport restaurant—just bought a water-front condo.
Meanwhile, how is Roxanne supposed to help people—namely, kids—when the agency is so under-funded and understaffed that she can’t possibly keep up with a caseload that grows larger by the day?
She gets out of the car, opens the trunk, and picks up a box filled with client files.
“Looks like somebody’s got a pile of homework to do tonight,” a voice calls, and she looks up to see old Mr. LoTempio waving from his aluminum lawn chair under a tree across the street.
“Not really,” she calls back. “I just don’t want to leave anything in the car overnight. It’s been broken into a few times lately.”
“Who’d want to steal a big box of papers?”
“You never know—next time, they might want to steal the car itself.”
“That bomb? Anyway, the whole neighborhood would hear it driving off down the street.”
She can’t help but grin at that. Mr. LoTempio isn’t one to mince words.
“You know,” he continues, “this isn’t the kind of weather for you to be wearing all that black.”
Here we go again.
“Would it kill you to try on a little color sometime?”
“It might,” she replies tartly.
“You must have been sweating all day in that.”
She was, but she’ll never admit it.
After a cool spring, summer weather literally arrived overnight. Today has been freakishly hot—particularly when one is wearing leather boots. But her style isn’t about fashion or comfort—it’s a way of life. She doesn’t expect an eighty-year-old man to understand that, though. So few people do.
“Have a good night, Mr. LoTempio.”
“You too, Morticia.”
Morticia. He’s been calling her that since the day they met last fall, not long after she moved in. She doesn’t mind, considering she never much cared for her real name, inspired by the old Sting ballad. “I just liked the song. Who knew it was about a hooker?” Ma would say with a helpless shrug.
Roxanne lugs her box of files across the patch of dandelion-sprinkled grass to the two-family house sorely in need of a paint job—as well as a handyman to fix the wobbly wrought-iron rail and the broken lock on her bedroom window.
If she ever manages to catch up on her rent, maybe she’ll dare to mention it to the landlord. For now, she’ll deal with what she’s got.
The stairwell smells of Pine-Sol and roast pork, courtesy of the downstairs tenants, who cook three hot meals on even the most sweltering day of the year.
In her apartment, Roxanne plunks the file box on the floor just inside the door and bolts it behind her. As she starts for the kitchen, trying to recall whether there’s anything edible in the fridge, a floorboard creaks behind her.
Seized by a paralytic rush of fear, she realizes she’s not alone.
Then the knife slashes deeply beneath her right jaw, and her left, and it’s over.
Groton, Connecticut
“Mommy…”
Elsa Cavalon stirs in her sleep.
Jeremy.
Jeremy is calling me.
“Mommy!”
No. Jeremy is gone, remember?
There was a time when that realization would have jarred her fully awake. But it’s been fifteen years now since her son disappeared, and almost a year since Elsa learned that he’d been taken overseas and 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 harboring the secret belief that Jeremy was never coming home again.
All those years, she’d longed for closure. When it came last August, she braced herself, expecting her already fragile emotions to hit bottom.