Scared to Death

Until an hour ago, when an orderly pushed a wheelchair through the doorway, Jeremy had the double hospital room all to himself. He should have known it was too good to be true.

Most good things are.

An image flashes into his head, and he winces.

Funny how even after all these years, that same faceâa beautiful female faceâpops in and out of his consciousness. He doesn't know whose face it is, or whether she even exists.

“Hey, are you in pain?” the stranger in the next bed asks, interrupting Jeremy's speculation about the face:
Is she a figment of my imaginationâor an actual memory?

He almost welcomes the question whose answer is readily at hand.

Am I in pain?

He feels as though every bone in his face has been broken. That's pretty damned near the truthâand not for the first time.

“I can ring the nurse for you,” the man offers, waving his good hand. The other handâlike Jeremy's faceâis swathed in gauze. Some kind of finger surgery, he mentioned when he first rolled into the room, as if Jeremy might care.

Reaching for the bed rail buzzer, he adds, in his lazy twang, “That Demerol's good stuff, ain't it?”

“No, thanks.” Jeremy starts to shake his head.

Bad idea. The slightest movement above the neck rockets pain through his skull. He fights the instinct to scream; that would be even more torturous.

“You sure you're okay, pal? You look like you're hurting.”

His jaw tightensâmore agony. Dammit. Why won't this guy leave him alone?

Jeremy closes his eyes.

He's in another hospital, long ago and far away. In pain, terrified, surrounded by strangersâ¦

“You don't have to be a hero, you know,” his roommate rambles on.

But there's another voice, in his head, the one that belongs to a face he still sees in nightmares even after all these years: “All you have to do is triple up on his pain meds tonight. Maybe quadruple, just to be sure. Then tuck him into bedâ¦”

“If you're in pain, pal, all you need to do is call a nurse and she'll give you something for it.”

Jeremy's eyes snap open.

“I'm fine. Really. Justâgo ahead, turn on the TV.”

“You sure? Because if it'll bother you I don't want toâ”

“I'm positive. Watch TV.”

“Yeah? Thanks.” Working the remote with the healthy hand, his roommate begins to channel surf.

Face throbbing, Jeremy gazes absently at the barrage of images on the changing screen, half hearing the snippets of sound from the speaker. Audience applause, country music, stock reports, a sitcom laugh track, meaningless words.

“â¦ladies and gentlemen, please welcomeâ¦”

“â¦be mostly sunny with a high ofâ¦”

“â¦and the Emmy-nominated drama will return onâ¦”

His roommate pauses to ask, “Anything in particular you feel like watching?”

“Nope.”

“You a sports fan?”

“Sometimes.”

“Rangers?”

“Sure,” Jeremy lies.

“News should be on. Let's see if we can get us some scores.”

More channel surfing.

More fleeting images.

More meaningless sound, and thenâ¦

“â¦in Manhattan today indicted the congressman forâ¦”

“Here's the news.” The clicking stops. “I'll leave it. Sports should be coming up soon.”

“Great.” As if Jeremy gives a damn about sports, or the news, orâunlike the rest of the world, it seemsâtelevision in general.

“You don't know what you're missing,” someone said to him in a bar not long ago, when he professed ignorance about the reality show finale playing on the television overhead.

True. And when you grow up deprived of something, you can't miss it.

Or can you?

“â¦kidnapping the seven-year-old son of Elsa and Brett Cavalon. In an incredible twist, the childâ¦”

A close-up flashes on the screen: a photograph of a striking couple. The womanâ¦

Jeremy gasps, his body involuntarily jerking to sit up.

“What?” Glancing over, his roommate immediately mutes the volume. “What's wrong? Pain, right? I knew it!”

Jeremy can't speak, can't move, can only stare at the face on TV. It's as if the pain exploding inside Jeremy's head has catapulted a piece of his imagination onto the screen. Of course, that's impossible.

But so is this, unlessâ¦

As suddenly as she appeared on the screen, she's gone, and the camera shifts back to the anchorman.

Unlessâ¦

Unless she's real.

She was there. On TV.

She does exist. She has a nameâone he's heard before, in another place, another timeâ¦

Now, the nameâ
her
nameâechoes back at him from the cobweb corners of his mind.

Elsa
.

CHAPTER ONE

Norwich, Connecticut
June

A
nother day, another dollarâ¦

Which about sums up my salary
, Roxanne Shields thinks as she cuts the incredibly loud engine of her aging car, desperately in need of a new mufflerâor something.

“You need to get that fixed,” her boss at the agency told her just yesterday. “It's just not appropriate to visit clients in a muscle car.”

“Muscle
car?” She snorted. “It's a seven-year-old Hyundai.”

“Well, it sounds like a muscle car. Fix it.”

Yeah. Sure. She'll get right on itâas soon as she's taken care of two months' back rent on this dumpy apartment, her overdue utility bills, and the student loan that's about to default.

How ironic that she was the first in her family to go to college, yet she can't even afford a nice wooden frame to display her bachelor's degree in social work from Southern Connecticut State. The BSW is still in its cardboard folder, tucked away in the back of her
underwear drawer since graduation last Mayâover a year ago already.

“When I grow up, I just want to help people. I don't care about money,” she always liked to say, mostly because it made her mother beam with pride as Roxanne's less-noble siblings rolled their eyes.

These days, her brotherâa welder in Waterburyâis driving a BMW and her sisterâa cocktail waitress at some fancy Newport restaurantâjust bought a water-front condo.

Meanwhile, how is Roxanne supposed to help peopleânamely, kidsâwhen the agency is so under-funded and understaffed that she can't possibly keep up with a caseload that grows larger by the day?

She gets out of the car, opens the trunk, and picks up a box filled with client files.

“Looks like somebody's got a pile of homework to do tonight,” a voice calls, and she looks up to see old Mr. LoTempio waving from his aluminum lawn chair under a tree across the street.

“Not really,” she calls back. “I just don't want to leave anything in the car overnight. It's been broken into a few times lately.”

“Who'd want to steal a big box of papers?”

“You never knowânext time, they might want to steal the car itself.”

“That bomb? Anyway, the whole neighborhood would hear it driving off down the street.”

She can't help but grin at that. Mr. LoTempio isn't one to mince words.

“You know,” he continues, “this isn't the kind of weather for you to be wearing all that black.”

Here we go again.

“Would it kill you to try on a little color sometime?”

“It might,” she replies tartly.

“You must have been sweating all day in that.”

She was, but she'll never admit it.

After a cool spring, summer weather literally arrived overnight. Today has been freakishly hotâparticularly when one is wearing leather boots. But her style isn't about fashion or comfortâit's a way of life. She doesn't expect an eighty-year-old man to understand that, though. So few people do.

“Have a good night, Mr. LoTempio.”

“You too, Morticia.”

Morticia
. He's been calling her that since the day they met last fall, not long after she moved in. She doesn't mind, considering she never much cared for her real name, inspired by the old Sting ballad. “I just liked the song. Who knew it was about a hooker?” Ma would say with a helpless shrug.

Roxanne lugs her box of files across the patch of dandelion-sprinkled grass to the two-family house sorely in need of a paint jobâas well as a handyman to fix the wobbly wrought-iron rail and the broken lock on her bedroom window.

If she ever manages to catch up on her rent, maybe she'll dare to mention it to the landlord. For now, she'll deal with what she's got.

The stairwell smells of Pine-Sol and roast pork, courtesy of the downstairs tenants, who cook three hot meals on even the most sweltering day of the year.

In her apartment, Roxanne plunks the file box on the floor just inside the door and bolts it behind her. As she starts for the kitchen, trying to recall whether there's anything edible in the fridge, a floorboard creaks behind her.

Seized by a paralytic rush of fear, she realizes she's not alone.

Then the knife slashes deeply beneath her right jaw, and her left, and it's over.

Groton, Connecticut

“Mommyâ¦”

Elsa Cavalon stirs in her sleep.

Jeremy.

Jeremy is calling me.

“Mommy!”

No. Jeremy is gone, remember?

There was a time when that realization would have jarred her fully awake. But it's been fifteen years now since her son disappeared, and almost a year since Elsa learned that he'd been taken overseas and murdered shortly afterward.

The terrible truth came as no surprise. Throughout the dark era of worrying and wondering, she'd struggled to keep hope alive while harboring the secret belief that Jeremy was never coming home again.

All those years, she'd longed for closure. When it came last August, she braced herself, expecting her already fragile emotions to hit bottom.

Instead, somehow, she found peace.

“It's because you've already done your grieving,” her therapist, Joan, told her. “You're in the final stage now. Acceptance.”

Yes. She accepts that Jeremy is no longer alive, accepts that she is, andâ

“Mommy!”

Jeremy isn't calling you. It's just a dream. Go back to sleepâ¦

“What's wrong?” Brett's voice, not imagined, plucks Elsa from the drowsy descent toward slumber. Her eyelids pop open.

The light is dim; her husband is stirring beside her in bed, calling out to a child who isn't Jeremy, “What is it? Are you okay?”

“I need Mommy.”

“She's sleeping. What's wrong?”

“No, Brett, I'm awake,” she murmurs, sitting up, and calls, “Renny, I'm awake.”

“Mommy, I need you!”

Elsa gets up and feels her way across the room as Brett mumbles something and settles back into the pillows. With a prickle of envy-tinged resentment, she hears him snoring again by the time she reaches the hallway.

It was always this way, back when Jeremy was here to disrupt their wee-hour restâand when his palpable, tragic absence disrupted it even more. All those sleepless nightsâ¦

Brett would make some halfhearted attempt to respond to whatever was going on, then fall immediately back to sleep, leaving Elsa wide awake to cope alone with the matter at hand: a needy child, parental doubt, haunting memories, her own demons.

“Mommy!”

“I'm coming, I'm coming.” Shivering, she makes her way down the hall toward Renny's bedroom.

The house is chilly. Before bed, Elsa had gone from room to room closing windows that had been open all day, with ninety-degree sunshine falling through the screens. The weather was so glorious that she and Renny had spent the whole day outside, even eating their lunch on a blanket beneath a tree.

Now, however, it feels more like March. Late spring in coastal New England can be so unpredictable.

And yet, Elsa wouldn't trade it for the more temperate climates where Brett's work as a nautical engineer transported them in recent years: Virginia Beach, San Diego, Tampa. It's good to be settled back in the Northeast. This is home.

Especially now that we have Renny.

Technically, she isn't their daughter yet, but optimis
tically thinking, it's only a matter of time and paperwork. As far as Elsa and Brett are concerned, Renata Almeida became Renata Cavalon on the October day she came to live with them.

Or perhaps just Renny Cavalon. Elsa isn't crazy about the given name bestowed by the abusive birth mother who has since, thank God, signed away her rights.

Renataâit's so lofty, pretentious, evenâbetter suited to a European princess, or a supermodel, than a cute little girl who looks far younger than her seven years. Elsa and Brett shortened it immediately, with Renny's blessing. Maybe they'll make it official on the adoption papers.

Any day nowâ¦

Elsa will feel a lot better when the adoption process is behind them and they're on their way to Disney World for a long-planned celebratory trip with Renny. Until then, with all of them under the close scrutiny of yet another new caseworkerâthe over-burdened, underpaid agency staff seems to turn over constantlyâthere's always the nagging concern that something will go wrong.

No. Nothing can go wrong. I can't bear to lose another child. I just can't.

Renny's bedroom door is ajar, as always. Plagued by claustrophobia, she's unable to sleep unless it's open. That's understandable, considering what she's been through.

Whenever Elsa allows herself to think of Renny's past, she feels as though a tremendous fist has clenched her gut. It's the same sickening dread that used to seize her whenever she imagined the abuse Jeremy had enduredâboth before he came into their lives, and after he was kidnapped.

But Renny isn't Jeremy. Everything about her, other
than the route she traveled through the foster system and into Elsa's life, is different.

Wellâalmost everything. She's a docile child with a sunny personality, unlike Jeremyâbut with her black hair and eyes, Renny resembles Elsa as much as he did. No one would ever doubt a biological connection between mother and child based on looks alone.

Their bond goes much deeper than that, though. From the moment she saw the photo on the agency Web site, Elsa felt a connection to the little girl whose haunted eyes stared out from beneath crooked bangs.

And yetâ¦had she felt the same thing when she first saw Jeremy?

I just don't know. I can't remember.

There was a time, not so long ago, when her memory of her son was more vivid than the landscape beyond the window. Now, it's as if the glass has warped, distorting the view.

Now.

Nowâ¦what?

Now that I know Jeremy is dead?

Now that there's Renny?

Elsa pushes aside a twinge of guilt.

Her daughter's arrival didn't erase the memories of her son. Of course not. She'll never forget Jeremy. But it's time to move on. Everyone says so: her husband, her therapist, even Mike Fantoni, the private eye who had finally brought the truth to light by identifying Jeremy's birth mother.

“Why would you want to meet her now?” he'd asked Elsa the last time they'd seen each other, over the winter.

“I didn't say I want toâ¦I said I feel like I should know more about her. About
him
.”

“Has she been in touch with you?”

“No.”

“Then let it go,” Mike advised, and for the most part, Elsa has. Just once in a whileâ¦she wonders. That's all. Wonders how the other woman is feeling, and coping. Wonders whether she has questions about Jeremy; wonders whether she can answer some of Elsa's.

She finds Renny sitting up in bed, knees to chest. Her worried face is illuminated by the Tinker Bell nightlight plugged into the baseboard outlet and the canopy of phosphorescent plastic stars Brett glued to the ceiling.

“What's wrong, honey? Are you feeling sick?” Elsa is well aware that her daughter had eaten an entire box of Sno-Caps at the new Disney princess movie Brett had taken her to see after dinner.

“Why would you let her have all that candy?” Elsa asked in dismay when he recapped the father-daughter evening.

“Because we wanted to celebrate the end of the school year, and it's fun to spoil her.”

“I know, Brettâ¦but don't do it with sugar. She's going to have an awful stomachache. She'll never get to sleep now.”

Renny proved her wrong, drifting off within five minutes of hitting the pillow. And right now, she doesn't look sick at allâ¦

She looks terrified. Her black eyes are enormous and her wiry little body quivers beneath the pink quilt clutched to her chin.

“I'm not sick, Mommy.”

“Did you have a nightmare?” It wouldn't be the first time.

“No, it was
real
.”

“Well, sometimes nightmares
feel
real.”

And sometimes they
are
real. Renny knows that as well as she does. But things are different now. She's
safe here with Elsa and Brett, and nothing will ever hurt her again.

Elsa sits beside her daughter and folds her into an embrace. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It wasn't a nightmare,” Renny insists, trembling. “A monster was here, in my roomâ¦I woke up and I saw him standing over my bed.”

“It was just a bad dream, honey. There's no monster.”

“Yes, there is. And when I saw him, he went out the window.”

Elsa turns to follow her daughter's gaze, saying, “No, Renny, see? The window isn't evenâ”

Open
.

But Elsa's throat constricts around the word as she stares in numb horror.

The window she'd closed and locked earlier is now, indeed, wide openâand so is the screen, creating a gaping portal to the inky night beyond.

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouseâ¦

Which nursery rhyme was that?

Does it matter?

Really, right now, the only thing that matters is getting away from the house without being spotted.

Yet this is far less challenging than escaping Norwich earlier in broad daylight. That went smoothly; no reason why this shouldn't as well. At this hour, the streets are deserted; there's no one around to glimpse the dark figure stealing through the shadows.

Not a creature was stirringâ¦

Damn, it's frustrating when you can't remember a detail that seems to be right there, teasing your brainâ¦

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