Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(4)
“I didn’t say I want to…I said I feel like I should know more about her. About him.”
“Has she been in touch with you?”
“No.”
“Then let it go,” Mike advised, and for the most part, Elsa has. Just once in a while…she wonders. That’s all. Wonders how the other woman is feeling, and coping. Wonders whether she has questions about Jeremy; wonders whether she can answer some of Elsa’s.
She finds Renny sitting up in bed, knees to chest. Her worried face is illuminated by the Tinker Bell nightlight plugged into the baseboard outlet and the canopy of phosphorescent plastic stars Brett glued to the ceiling.
“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 recapped the father-daughter evening.
“Because we wanted to celebrate the end of the school year, and it’s fun to spoil her.”
“I know, Brett…but don’t do it with sugar. 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 pink quilt clutched to her chin.
“I’m not sick, Mommy.”
“Did you have a nightmare?” 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,” 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 was stirring, not even a mouse…
Which nursery rhyme was that?
Does it matter?
Really, right now, the only thing that matters is getting away from the house without being spotted.
Yet this is far less challenging than escaping Norwich earlier in broad daylight. That went smoothly; no reason why this shouldn’t as well. At this hour, the streets are deserted; there’s no one around to glimpse the dark figure stealing through the shadows.
Not a creature was stirring…
Damn, it’s frustrating when you can’t remember a detail that seems to be right there, teasing your brain…
Sort of the way Jeremy had forgotten Elsa Cavalon until, by chance, he caught a glimpse of her on television back in September.
Anyone who doesn’t understand what Jeremy’s been through might wonder how a person can forget his own mother.
How, indeed.
The human mind doesn’t just lose track of something like that, like the name of a nursery rhyme. More likely, out of self-preservation, the brain attempts to erase what’s too painful to remember.
What’s too painful to remember…
Hmm…Wasn’t that a long-ago lyric?
Maybe. But the song title, too, is elusive—and unimportant.
One thing at a time.
Not a creature was stirring…
Leaning on the terrace railing, gazing at the smattering of lighted 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—Caroline, a striking brunette with her father’s coloring, and Annie, a blue-eyed blonde like her mom. They were destined to live happily ever after on the Upper East Side, and—if the expected nomination came through and the election turned out predictably—in the governor’s mansion…and someday, perhaps, 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 backseat 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 downfall on a city street.