Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(84)

But not this morning. Not here, anyway.

The last thing I want to do in this house is wake the dead.



If it wasn’t too late to call Jake last night, Caroline reasons, then it probably isn’t too early to call him this morning. Right? Right.

She dials his number quickly, before she can question her own logic.

Who knows? Maybe he didn’t sleep any better than she did, as anxious to see her today as she is to see him.

She almost expects him to pick up on the first ring, but he doesn’t. It takes several before she hears a click and a “Hello?”—a groggy-sounding one, at that.

“Jake?”

“N—I mean, yeah. Yeah, hi.”

She forces a laugh. “Did you forget your own name there, for a second?”

“No, I…sorry, I’m just…sleeping.”

“Really? I guess no one told you this is the city that never sleeps,” she says lightly, trying to make the best of having woken him up so early.

“Yeah…about that…”

Uh-oh.

“I’m kind of…not exactly in New York.”

Her heart sinks. “‘Kind of not exactly’?”

“I’m not. I got called away yesterday by…a friend.”

“Oh.” Bummed, but trying not to sound it, she asks, “Where are you?”

“Just outside of Boston. I might need to be here for a couple of days.”

“Boston? That’s not so bad.”

“Bad?”

“Far, I mean. I could meet you there,” she blurts.

Are you crazy? In Boston?

“In Boston?” he echoes her incredulous thought aloud.

“Sure, why not?”

Why not? Really? Why not?

She can think of a thousand reasons why she can’t just take off and go to Boston to meet some guy…beginning with the fact that he didn’t invite her.

But she can think of an even better reason why she should—the only reason she really even needs.

She has to get away from this apartment and her mother for a while.

Maybe even for good.

She hears herself say, “Just tell me where to meet you, and when, and I’ll be there.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am dead serious, Jake.”



Renny is still in their bed, but when Brett checked her a few minutes ago, in the room to grab his laptop, she was beginning to stir. They need to make this quick.

Opening the Internet search engine as Elsa hovers behind his kitchen chair, he types “Marin Quinn.” He hits enter and almost immediately, a list of hits pops up on the screen.

“What are we even looking for?” Elsa asks as they scan the results.

“Anything. Anything we can find out about her. Anything that might tell us what she’s been up to lately, and—whoa. Look at this.”

He quickly slides the mouse, moving cursor over the third item down: a New York Post entry.

Elsa leans in closer. “That’s today’s date!”

“Exactly.” Brett holds his breath and clicks on it. Waiting for the screen to pop up, he wonders why Marin Quinn is in the news. Did she do something drastic, like…kill someone? Kill herself?

But he finds himself looking at a grainy photo of a woman on a city street. She’s attractive, but a far cry from the polished political wife in all the file photos shown back when the news first broke about her husband.

“That doesn’t even look like her,” Elsa tells him.

“I guess it does now.”

“When was it taken?”

Brett points to the accompanying caption.

Reclusive Marin Quinn emerges for a rainy day stroll on an Upper East Side street yesterday morning.



“Yesterday morning? Brett—you said that’s when Mike was hit by that car in Boston.”

“Right.” He nods slowly. “So she couldn’t have done it.”

“You said you didn’t think it was deliberate anyway.”

“No…I know.”

He said—thought—a lot of things. But he isn’t positive about any of it.

Isn’t it too coincidental that Mike was mowed down just hours after Elsa and Brett went to him for help—and just as he was leaving for Mumbai? Now he’s dead.

“She doesn’t strike me as a cold-blooded murderer,” Elsa comments, gazing at the woman onscreen.

“Neither would her husband, at a glance. But look what he did.”

Eyes hardening, Elsa turns away.

Brett takes another long look and closes out of the screen, wondering where Marin Quinn is right this moment and hoping—praying—that she’s far, far from here.



Drenched in a cold sweat, her heart racing frantically, Marin huddles on her bed. Her gasping breaths are coming too hard and too fast, terrible pain gripping her chest every time she inhales.

What’s going on? Is she having a heart attack? Is she dying? Having some kind of reaction to the medication? Did she accidentally take too much of it last night?

She could have sworn she’d had the usual dose, but maybe she was mistaken.

I need to call someone…

Ron.

Heather’s husband is a doctor; he’ll know what to do.