Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(97)
They’ve reached the kitchen now, and the back door is just a few yards away. Beyond it, through the glass window, Caroline can see leafy trees, and sunshine, and a wide blue sky.
Freedom.
But she doesn’t dare run for it, knowing she’ll be shot in the back.
La La yanks open a door—a different door, and Caroline sees a steep flight of stairs before her.
“Go!”
Caroline hesitates, knowing beyond a doubt that if she descends into the shadows, she’ll never again see the light of day.
This is her only chance.
“Move!”
She moves.
But not forward.
No, she flings herself backward, full force, into La La Montgomery.
Sitting beside Brett in the back of Detective Gibbs’s car, hurtling north up Interstate 95 toward Boston, Elsa closes her eyes, seeing her lost little boy—the boy she’d always known, deep down inside, would never come home again.
And Renny…
“She’s going to be okay,” she tells Brett, opening her eyes to see him staring grimly out the window.
He turns to look at her. “How do you know?”
“I just know.”
All those years, her heart had told her that her little boy was lost to her forever. She was right about that.
Jeremy the child is gone forever.
But Jeremy the man is alive.
And he’s still her son, no matter what.
The wind knocked out of her, La La falls to the kitchen floor with Caroline on top of her.
“Get off me!” she snarls, her arms pinned beneath their combined weight, her right hand still clenching the gun.
She can feel Caroline clawing for it.
Keeping her finger tight on the trigger, she summons every bit of strength to heave her upper body from the floor. The other girl goes flying and La La scrambles to her feet.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” She stands over Caroline with the gun in both hands now, straight out in front of her as she takes aim for the girl’s chest.
Then she thinks better of it and changes her vantage, aiming instead for Caroline’s head. Yes, that’s better. This way, her pretty face will be destroyed, just like— Sensing a whoosh of movement behind her, La La whirls around…
Just in time to see Jeremy, enraged, swinging a golf club toward her head.
No, she realizes in the split second before it hits.
It’s not a golf club at all.
It’s an andiron.
“Oh my God. Jeremy!”
Standing over La La, seeing the blood pooling beneath her head, Jeremy is vaguely aware of Caroline’s shocked horror—but well aware of his own, and of the agonizing pain in his arm.
“You…you’re bleeding.” Caroline has turned to him.
He looks down, sees the blood running down his hand, covering the andiron.
“No, that’s hers.” All at once, his fingers release the weight of it and it thuds to the floor beside her body.
“Yours, too. Let me see.” Caroline touches his arm gently, and her hand comes away red. “She shot you, Jeremy.”
“She…shot me?” He closes his eyes, feeling faint, then forces them open and looks down at his arm.
Caroline is right. He was shot. He was on the floor, in the living room…
“Here, sit down.”
He lets Caroline guide him into a chair.
“I’ll call for help,” she’s saying.
All he knew, when he was lying on the floor, was that he had to stop La La before she hurt his sister.
And now…
“Don’t worry,” Caroline tells him, already dialing 911. “It’s going to be all right. Just hang in there, okay?”
Hang in there.
Jeremy leans his head back and smiles faintly.
Hang in there. That, he can do.
He’s done it all his life.
When her cell phone rings in her hand, Marin literally jumps out of her chair.
“Mom?” Annie is up, too, right beside her. “Is it…?”
Yes. Caroline’s number is in the caller ID window.
In the moment before she answers the call, blurting her daughter’s name, Marin has a flash of doubt.
The police are certain Caroline is in Boston…with Jeremy.
What if I’ve lost her—lost them both—for good?
“Mom?”
“Caroline,” she says again, and then her voice breaks.
“Mom…I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.”
Caroline—her stoic, unemotional daughter, so like Garvey—or so Marin has always believed—is crying. Apologizing.
Tears streaming down her face, Marin asks, “Are you all right?”
“I am. We both are.”
“Both?”
“Jeremy—he’s been shot, but the paramedics are here, and he’s going to be okay.”
“Jeremy…”
“He saved my life.”
“Jeremy…”
“My brother. Your son.”
Yes. Her son.
“Mom,” Caroline sobs, “I want to come home. I just want to come home.”
Through her own tears, Marin smiles.
Riding through the streets of Nottingshire, Elsa is lost in memories of Jeremy. Not, this time, of losing him—but of Jeremy alive, clinging to her hand as they walked down Main Street, and teeter-tottering in the park, and running up the hill toward the red brick school.