Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(96)

She laughs, a sound that sends chills down Caroline’s spine.

She’s going to kill us.

Oh God. I’m going to die.

She wants her mother so badly that the pain takes her breath away.

Mom.

Not Daddy.

Mom is the one who’s there for her, she realizes. The only one.

There was a time when Caroline was convinced she’d be better off without her mother—and vice versa.

It’s not true. I need her. And I’m never going to get the chance to tell her.



Staring at the gun, Jeremy knows he’s running out of time. He has to do something.

Any second now, La La is going to kill him, and Caroline, too.

“After all I’ve done for you…you were going to leave me?”

“What have you done for me?” He looks past her, scanning the living room for some way out, or for a weapon…

“I’ve done everything you’re too weak to do. I’ve punished them all for what they did to you, and this is the thanks I get?”

“Who?” he asks, his gaze falling on a pair of andirons beside the hearth, just a few feet away. “Who did you punish?”

“Who do you think?” She laughs again. “Look at you—you’re pathetic. You’re nothing.”

In her eyes, he sees the same streak of mocking cruelty that made him lash out at her all those years ago.

Back then, she was just a mean little girl, and he was a confused, angry, abused little boy.

Now she’s a cold-blooded killer…

And I’m…

I’m not pathetic.

I’m not nothing.

I’m a man.

Looking at her, he sees Papa’s face, and he sees the faces of all the others, too, the ones who tortured him before he came to Elsa.

He closes his eyes so he won’t have to see, and he claps his hands over his ears, trying to drown out the scornful laughter filling his head.

“What’s the matter, Jeremy? Are you scared?”

Scared?

No.

He’s not scared. He’s been to hell and back, and nothing will ever scare him again.



Jeremy’s eyes snap open.

He lunges for the gun.

La La presses the trigger.

Jeremy is alive.

Alive.

And Renny is gone.

Cradling his wife in his arms, Brett tries to grasp the situation—tries to figure out what one unbelievable fact might have to do with the other.

Detective Gibbs seems to be waiting for him and Elsa to absorb the miracle.

“Are you saying…” Brett shakes his head rapidly, starts again. “Is Jeremy connected to the woman who took our daughter?”

“He may be.”

“No,” Elsa says sharply, lifting her head at last. “He wouldn’t hurt her.”

“You don’t even know him, Elsa,” Brett can’t help snapping. Even now, even after all these years, the old pattern has resumed. Elsa’s defense of Jeremy, and Brett’s wariness.

“He wouldn’t hurt her,” she repeats stubbornly, wrenching herself from his arms and standing to face him.

“How can you even say that? Look what he did to—”

All at once, it hits him.

Melody Johnson…

He knows where he’s seen her before. Years ago, and her face is different, but her eyes…those blue eyes…

Even the name…

Melody.

“La La.” Brett turns abruptly to Detective Gibbs. “Her name was—is—La La Montgomery.”



Numb with horror, Caroline watches Jeremy fall to the floor.

Standing over him with the gun in her hand, La La shakes her head. “I told you you’re pathetic.”

It’s as if she’s forgotten Caroline is there.

I have to get out of here.

She turns her head slightly, checking the pathway behind her. The house, when Jeremy led her through, was a maze. Can she even find her way back to the door?

“Don’t try it.”

Startled, she sees that La La is looking at her. Aiming at her.

“Come on.” La La calmly sidesteps Jeremy’s crumpled, bloody form. “Let’s go.”

“Go…” Caroline whispers, paralyzed with fear.

La La jabs the gun into her ribs. “I said, let’s go! Walk!”

Caroline walks.



In the master bedroom, Marin once again stands holding a plastic pill bottle in her hand, poised over the toilet.

This time, though, there’s no hesitation. This time, her hand is sure and steady as she dumps the contents into the bowl.

Then she empties another bottle, and another, and when they’re all gone, every last pill, she flushes them down the toilet.

Turning away, she sees Annie standing in the doorway.

“Mom,” she says, “the detectives want to talk to you. They said they think they know why Caroline went to Boston.”



Moving through the big house, prodded along by La La’s gun in her back, Caroline struggles to keep her wits about her.

Where is she taking me?

What is she going to do?

No, she knows what La La is going to do.

This is, unmistakably, a death march.