Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(81)

“Renny isn’t the only one who might hear us in there.”

He stops walking. Pivots to look at her. “What do you mean? Who’s there?”

“No one’s there, exactly, but…”

Elsa takes a deep breath. This is it. If she tells him everything that’s happened—everything she’s thought has happened—there will be no going back.

If it turns out she’s delusional, Brett will have to decide whether she’s any more fit to parent Renny than Renny’s birth mother was.

But I would never hurt her. Never. No matter what.

Still…could she ever really trust herself again, knowing her mind is capable of playing such terrible tricks on her? Could Brett ever trust her?

Hopefully, she’ll never have to find out. But she has to tell him.

“Brett, someone followed us to New York.”



Jeremy had expected to have Regis Terrace all to himself at this hour.

However, just up ahead, right in front of the Montgomery house, as luck would have it, a neighbor is walking her dog.

She’s one of those upscale housewife types you see around here—fit and attractive, wearing yoga pants and sneakers, holding a mug that’s presumably from her nearby kitchen and filled with hot coffee.

She glances up, making eye contact with Jeremy as her dog pokes along the curb. “Hello.”

“Hi.” He’s careful not to be too friendly, but not unfriendly, either.

“Looks like it’s going to be a nice day, doesn’t it?”

He nods, slowing his pace a bit, wondering if he should keep right on walking. Sneaking a peek at the house, he notes that the shades are drawn.

“Did you know them?”

The question catches him off guard, and he looks up to see the woman following his gaze.

“The Montgomerys, I mean.”

His instinct is to lie, but what if she’s seen him around here before?

He settles on a vague “Not very well.”

She shrugs. “It’s just such a horrible thing. I know it’s been six months now, but every time I look at that house, I feel sick just thinking about what happened. Poor La La.”

“Yes,” Jeremy agrees, his heart pounding, even though she can’t possibly know. “Poor La La.”



“Well? What do you think?” Elsa watches Brett, waiting for him to say something now that she’s spilled the whole story.

Uneasy, he looks away, back at the house, where Renny lies sleeping.

His daughter.

But she won’t be, if the adoption doesn’t go through.

What do I think?

About someone stalking my wife and child with a butcher knife?

He looks again at Elsa. Finding out her son is dead, combined with the renewed strain of foster motherhood, must have plunged her back into the nightmare of acute stress disorder.

She actually admitted that she might have imagined the part about the knife—or even more.

Still…what about those surveillance pictures of Renny? Did she actually go to such great lengths? Taking the pictures, mailing them, claiming not to recognize them—or perhaps really not recognizing them, in her state of mind.

Oh God. If that’s the case; if she really is that ill…

Yet maybe there’s some other explanation. Something not as sinister as it seems. Maybe the photos were taken by the press.

Or maybe they were from someone who wants to blackmail the Cavalons to keep their new child out of the media…

And the person forgot to put in the blackmail note? Yeah, right.

Well, maybe that envelope was sent by the foster care agency, as some kind of…

What? Official procedure? Why wouldn’t there be any paperwork?

Well, maybe the paperwork that was supposed to accompany the photos was accidentally missing, or…

All of those scenarios seem pretty far-fetched. But really, are they any more unlikely than the house being bugged, and someone following Elsa and Renny to New York, and—

And what about Mike?

Chances are, the hit-and-run really was a freak accident.

But why would he bother to follow a dead-end trail overseas after all these years? And why—since the trip obviously has some connection to Jeremy’s kidnapping—didn’t he bother to tell Brett and Elsa he was going?

Unless…

“When was the last time you checked your cell phone voice mail, Elsa?”

“I don’t know, but I told you, either I lost my phone in New York, or—”

Or it was stolen from her mother’s apartment by the knife-wielding intruder.

Yeah. He knows.

“Maybe you should check it. I know your battery was dead—”

“But not until yesterday afternoon. I called you from my phone when I got to New York, remember?”

That’s right. She did.

He’d been thinking that Mike might have tried to call Elsa yesterday morning, before the accident. But she’d presumably had her phone with her the whole time. She would have heard it and picked it up.

But we were traveling, and in that motel room…

If Mike had tried to call when they were in a no-service area, it would have gone into voice mail.

“You should check your messages,” he urges. “You don’t even need the phone to access the mailbox, you can dial it from the house.”