Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(29)

Brushing her teeth over a motel sink clogged with cloudy, saliva-tainted water and God only knows what else, Elsa can just imagine how Maman would feel about this place.

“Zee peets!” she would say, wrinkling her perfect French nose.

Then again, she once said just that about her suite at the Grand Hotel et de Milan, which had previously been occupied by the queens of Belgium and Sweden—sufficient for foreign royalty, but not for the fair Sylvie Durand.

This low-budget chain motel somewhere off I–95 is a far cry from the Grand Hotel et de Milan. And room 103 definitely isn’t what Elsa had in mind when she and Mike convinced Brett that it wasn’t a good idea to sleep at home tonight, just in case.

As she turns off the tap, the pipes make a horrible groaning sound.

They probably should have stayed right in Boston, where there are plenty of nice hotels, but Brett wanted to get closer to home—and the office. With no reservation, no vacancies at the halfway-decent places they tried, and an overtired little girl, they settled on this.

“It’s just for one night,” Brett reassured Elsa, as she checked beneath the fitted sheet for evidence of bedbugs in the mattress seams.

“Mike said we should find someplace to stay for a while.”

“I know he did, but either way, it’s not going to be here.”

“Either way? We can’t just go home, Brett, like nothing ever happened.”

Brett looked like he was about to say something, but then he shrugged. “Never mind. We’ll figure out something in the morning.”

Or maybe, Elsa couldn’t help but think, we’ll wake up and find out this is all just a bad dream.

Now, gazing at herself in the mirror, cast in a greenish tint from the overhead light, she knows it’s all too real. Yet she can’t help but wonder whether Brett’s thinking that she’s overreacting—and whether he might be right about that.

No. No way. I know what I saw.

Anyway, Mike took her seriously. He took the bag of dolls and the Spider-Man figure, promising to get right on it. He seems to think there’s a possibility that someone might want to hurt them.

Someone who knows about Spider-Man’s significance.

Garvey Quinn keeps popping into her head. Unless he’s broken out of jail—which would surely be front-page news—he wasn’t the one prowling through their house last night. Yet he’s proven that he’s not beyond getting others to do his dirty work.

To what end, though? He has nothing to gain by hurting the Cavalons.

Someone must.

What happened makes no sense, but she keeps telling herself that it might, if she thinks it through logically; that she might be missing something.

She’s too exhausted for logic at this point, though.

A toilet flushes in the adjacent bathroom, on the other side of the paper-thin wall.

Exhausted and disgusted, Elsa takes one last look in the mirror, wishing she’d thought to pick up some eye makeup remover when they’d stopped at Walgreens to buy the toothbrushes.

The sliver of cheap motel soap succeeded only in smudging this morning’s mascara around her lash line. In her modeling days, makeup artists used that trick to make her eyes look bigger. Now it only accentuates the haunted expression in them.

She flicks off the bathroom light and hurries into the next room, not wanting to imagine what might crawl up through the drains in the dark.

God, this is depressing. What are we doing here?

The moment of self-pity immediately gives way to self-contempt.

We’re protecting our daughter, that’s what we’re doing. And I’d live in this dump for the rest of my life if that were what it took to keep Renny out of harm’s way.

Feeling her way across the unfamiliar room, Elsa can hear traffic from the nearby highway, and distant voices, and what sounds like a bottle being thrown across pavement into a chain-link fence. Through it all, of course: Brett’s peaceful snoring.

Claustrophobic Renny wanted the room door left ajar, which of course was out of the question. They agreed to leave the curtains open instead.

Uneasy, Elsa goes over to the window and looks out into the night. When they checked in, there were only two other cars. Now there are three.

Not a soul in the parking lot, and yet she has the sudden sensation that someone is lurking…

She darts a quick look over her shoulder. Her heart stops; a figure is standing in the shadows across the room.

Her mouth opens.

A scream lodges in her throat.

Then she sees that it’s just Brett’s clothing on a hanger dangling from the outer hinge of the closet door—the closet itself too musty-smelling for clothes.

Her heart beats again, fast and hard, her senses on full alert. She checks the window latch, the chain and lock on the door. It’s a dead bolt, but the kind that opens with a key, rather than an electronic key card. Any previous guest could have made a copy…

But it’s not the previous guests I’m worried about.

She quietly lugs the lone chair over from the desk and puts it in front of the door, where a would-be intruder will trip over it. A feeble trap, perhaps, but it makes her feel a little better.

She returns to the window and takes one last look at the parking lot before tugging on the vinyl-lined curtains. They don’t quite meet in the middle; red neon from the “Vacancy” sign falls through the crack. Anyone could see in…