Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(89)

Maybe she wouldn’t be so uneasy about Renny’s safety if she thought Brett was still assured of it.

But he’s looking pale, thrumming his fingertips on the tabletop.

At last, Debra Tupperman, an office administrator, comes on the line.

“Hi, Debra, it’s Elsa Cavalon.” She does her best to sound breezy.

“Elsa! How funny—you were on my list of people to call this morning.”

“Really?” She looks at Brett, who raises a questioning eyebrow. “Why were you going to call me?”

That news—and the resulting expression of concern on Brett’s face—do nothing to ease her anxiety.

“I just wanted to talk to you about Roxanne Shields.”

“Oh…right.” Relieved, Elsa gives Brett a thumbs-up. “We were sorry to see her go,” she lies.

“Go?”

Elsa frowns. “She left the agency…didn’t she?”

“No, she’s just been sick for a few days. You were on her schedule, so—”

“Wait, she’s sick? She didn’t leave?”

“Leave? No.”

Shaken, Elsa sinks into a chair, her head spinning. “So you haven’t replaced her?”

“Replaced her? Not at all.”

Vaguely aware of Brett beside her now, clutching her arm, Elsa struggles to form her next question.

“But what…who…oh my God. Oh my GOD!”

Brett grabs the phone from her. “Debra, has a woman named Melody Johnson been assigned to our case?”

Elsa can’t hear the answer above the full-blown panic screeching through her brain, but she knows.

She knows.

It’s happening again.

Her worst nightmare has come true: Renny has been stolen away, just like Jeremy.



Her given name was Amelia.

When she was little she couldn’t pronounce it, and so, her parents told her years later, she called herself La La.

It stuck.

It was the perfect nickname, because she was always singing. She would use anything at hand as a pretend microphone—a Barbie doll, a carrot, a bottle from her parents’ liquor cabinet—and she’d perform.

As she grew older, she told anyone who would listen that she was going to be a huge star when she grew up, like the favorites she mimicked in her “act”: Mariah Carey, Gloria Estefan, Madonna…

Isn’t that nice, they would say politely—the substitute teacher, the woman in the supermarket checkout line, the new babysitter…

Then she would sing for them, and their eyes would widen, and sometimes, they’d even call other people over to listen. You gotta hear this kid, they’d say, and La La would sing for them all.

“That’s my girl,” her doting father would say. “She’s going to be a huge star. You just wait and see.”

Everyone believed in her—especially Daddy. He even built a small, soundproof voice studio in the basement of their home in Nottingshire.

Then, one day on the golf course, Jeremy Cavalon came at her with a seven-iron. He beat her head, her face, her neck.

The tracheal intubation saved her life, her parents were told. But it resulted in vocal cord paralysis. The condition was temporary, the doctors promised. One day very soon, she’d be able to talk again.

They were right.

She could talk.

But she couldn’t sing. Not the way she used to.

La La’s voice was never the same after the attack.

Nothing was ever the same.

Her parents got her into piano lessons. They figured playing an instrument might help make up for her lost voice.

It didn’t.

She was talented. Not so talented that people would stop what they were doing when she played, and say, You gotta hear this kid.

But it was something. She admitted as much to Jeremy when he found her years later, still living in her childhood home. By then, her father had died of liver failure brought on by alcoholism. La La knew he wouldn’t have drunk so much if it hadn’t been for her injury. The brutal attack might not have killed her, but in the end, it was what killed him.

For La La, college was a welcome reprieve. She went to Tufts—close to home, but she lived on campus—and she majored in music.

After returning to Nottingshire after graduation last summer, it didn’t take her long to conclude that being around her mother was more depressing than being alone.

Never a particularly warm woman, Candace Montgomery had grown increasingly brittle over the years. She didn’t live life so much as she endured it, armed with dry martinis that rendered her a dismal drunk, as opposed to the slaphappy one her husband had been.

La La was planning on moving out last fall when Jeremy found her.

At the time, she wasn’t sure where she was going, or what she would do when she got there—and she didn’t really care. All she wanted was to get away from her mother, far from the pall that had shrouded the brick Colonial mansion on Regis Terrace since her father’s death.

If Jeremy hadn’t come along, La La might have had a chance to get away, make something of herself.

But, like so many other things in this life, it wasn’t meant to be.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN




Why aren’t you talking?” she asks the child strapped into the passenger seat of the Mercedes.