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 yet…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.
Now…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 to…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 while…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, Brett…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 all…
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 room…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 even—”
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 open—and so is the screen, creating a gaping portal to the inky night beyond.
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…
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 stirring…
Damn, it’s frustrating when you can’t remember a detail that seems to be right there, teasing your brain…
Sort of the way Jeremy had forgotten Elsa Cavalon until, by chance, he caught a glimpse of her on television back in September.
Anyone who doesn’t understand what Jeremy’s been through might wonder how a person can forget his own mother.
How, indeed.
The human mind doesn’t just lose track of something like that, like the name of a nursery rhyme. More likely, out of self-preservation, the brain attempts to erase what’s too painful to remember.
What’s too painful to remember…
Hmm…Wasn’t that a long-ago lyric?
Maybe. But the song title, too, is elusive—and unimportant.
One thing at a time.
Not a creature was stirring…
Leaning on the terrace railing, gazing at the smattering of lighted windows on the Queens skyline across the East River, Marin Hartwell Quinn finds herself wishing the sun would never come up.
When it does, she’ll be launched headlong into another exhausting, lonely day of single motherhood, a role she never imagined for herself.
At this time last year, the storybook Quinn family was all over the press: Marin, Garvey, and their two beautiful daughters—Caroline, a striking brunette with her father’s coloring, and Annie, a blue-eyed blonde like her mom. They were destined to live happily ever after on the Upper East Side, and—if the expected nomination came through and the election turned out predictably—in the governor’s mansion…and someday, perhaps, the White House.
But in a flash—a flash, yes, like those from the ever-present paparazzi cameras—Garvey was transported from Park Avenue to Park Row, the lower Manhattan street that houses the notorious Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Naturally, the photographers who had dogged Congressman Quinn along the campaign trail were there to capture the moment he was hauled away in handcuffs on a public street. And when the detectives had driven off with their prisoner, sirens wailing, the press turned their cameras on Marin, still sitting, stunned, in the backseat of the limousine.
Later, she forced herself to look at the photos, to read the captions. One referred to her as the humiliated would-be first lady, another as a blond, blue-eyed Jackie Kennedy, shell-shocked at witnessing her husband’s sudden downfall on a city street.
That wasn’t the first time the press had drawn a Kennedy-Quinn comparison. But while the slain JFK had remained a hero and his wife was lauded as a heartbroken, dignified widow, the fallen Garvey Quinn was exposed as a coldhearted villain—and his wife drew nothing but scorn from his disillusioned constituents.
No one seemed to grasp—or care—that Marin herself had been blindsided; that the man she loved had betrayed her—and their children—with his unspeakable crime. That Elsa Cavalon wasn’t the only mother bereaved by Jeremy Cavalon’s kidnapping and murder. Marin, his birth mother, grieved as well. And, unbearably, her own husband—Jeremy’s own father—was responsible for his death.
What the hell is she supposed to do with that knowledge, and the accompanying guilt? How the hell is she supposed to move past it?
So far, she’s come up with only this: Force herself to get up every morning—if she manages to stay in bed that long—and face the wreckage of her life.
One foot in front of the other, one day after another. Just move on, blindly, preferably not looking back, not looking ahead.
With a sigh, Marin turns away from the railing. Still no hint of sunrise on the eastern horizon, but it will appear any moment now, and the day will be under way.
Time to get moving: Shower and dress, make some coffee, check her e-mail…Oh, and the cleaning service comes today.
Marin had felt only mild
disappointment when Shirley, their longtime housekeeper, gave notice two months ago. She wasn’t one of those warm and fuzzy domestic employees who become part of the family. No, she kept her distance, even amid all the upheaval—not as much out of professional discretion, Marin suspects, as because she just didn’t give a damn.
It’s just as well. The last thing her daughters needed was another shakeup on the home front, however small. Marin was pretty sure no one was going to miss Shirley, and she was right. It took a few days for the girls to even realize she was gone—and even then, it was only the growing pile of laundry that tipped them off.
“Aren’t we going to hire a new maid?” Caroline had asked, dismayed.
“Nope,” Marin heard herself say, shocking Caroline—not to mention herself.
Until that moment, she’d been meaning to get around to calling the domestic agency her friend Heather Cottington recommended. But suddenly she couldn’t bear the thought of bringing a new person into the household—someone who’d undoubtedly be well aware that this is Garvey Quinn’s family. Someone who’d wonder—and maybe talk—about the “episodes” Marin suffers with more and more frequency.
She figured she was perfectly capable of running the house herself, at least until this fall, after the move. What else did she have to do?
On good days, she’s done a fairly decent job on the basics—laundry, emptying the dishwasher, running the vacuum. On bad days, the girls came home from school to drawn shades and toast crumbs still on the countertops, and their mother in bed.
On occasion, Marin even made her daughters help around the house, something they’d never had to do and weren’t particularly happy about—particularly Caroline, who tends to make a scene over the smallest imagined slight.
“Don’t you think you’re being too hard on them?” Heather asked when she heard. “They’ve lost their father. They’ve been through hell. You’re planning to move them out of the only home they’ve ever known. And now you have them cleaning toilets?”
Maybe she was right.
Maybe not.
All Marin can do is feel her way through one day at a time. And now, with Realtors about to descend, every room has to be scrubbed from floor to ceiling.
Marin just doesn’t have it in her. She spent all day yesterday boxing up every framed family photograph and most of the contents of Garvey’s home office—anything that might negate the seller anonymity clause in the real estate contract and thus betray their identity to prospective buyers.
In the master bedroom, she smooths the lavender coverlet on her side and arranges the floral print European throw pillows. She bought new bedding after Garvey left; would have bought a whole new bed if she could have disposed of the old one privately. But she could just imagine photographers snapping photos of the California king–sized mattress being moved out, and printing them above a caption like: The wishful widow Quinn purges her upscale digs of everything jailbird hubby touched.
Wishful widow…one of the tabloids gave her that nickname, assuming she thinks she’d be better off if Garvey were dead.
They’re right. Bastards.
Anyway, public contempt is nothing compared to the rest of it: mourning her firstborn; helping her surviving children cope with the realization that their father is a criminal; preparing to sell an apartment that’s too big, too expensive, and holds too many memories; looking Garvey in the eye through protective visitors’ room glass and telling him she’ll never forgive him, and that even if he manages to be found innocent when the case goes to trial, he won’t be coming home to her.
She strips out of her nightgown and hangs it on a hook in her walk-in closet.
Beside it, Garvey’s closet door remains closed, as it has been for months now. His expensive suits and shirts, shrouded in dry cleaner’s plastic, are presumably still inside, along with dozens of pairs of Italian leather shoes and French silk ties.
What is she supposed to do with any of it? Burn it? Give it away? Save it? For what? For whom?
She has no idea, and doesn’t have to make any decisions until the move, and so his clothes hang on in a dark limbo, like Marin herself.
In the large marble bathroom—her dream bathroom, she once told Garvey, when they were walking through as prospective buyers, a lifetime ago—she showers, brushes her teeth, blows her hair dry.
Same routine every morning, yet today will be different. Still a living hell, but June has arrived. Finals are over for the girls, as are the latest round of lessons and extracurricular activities that consumed the weekends. The school year that began in the immediate aftermath of Garvey’s downfall has come to an end at last. This morning, instead of heading over to their private high school off York Avenue, Caroline and Annie will be here at home with Marin, along with strangers from the cleaning service who may not turn a blind eye.
Which means you’ll have to hold yourself together.
No crying. No ranting. No hyperventilating. No swallowing a couple of the prescription pills her friend Heather gave her to make it all go away—some pills for stress, others for her relentless headaches, still others that let her crawl into bed in the middle of the day to capture the sleep that evades her in the night.
Maybe it’s better that way.
When she sleeps, she dreams.
Dreams of a little boy with big black eyes, and he’s calling for her.
“Mommy…Mommy, please help me…”
Not dreams—nightmares. Because she can never help him. Nobody can.
It’s too late to save Jeremy.
And maybe, Marin thinks, staring at her haggard reflection in the bathroom mirror, too late to save herself as well.
Brett yawns audibly, evoking a dark glance from his wife. He belatedly covers his mouth and resumes a riveted expression. Too late.
“You’re not even listening to me.” Elsa sounds more weary than irritated. She reaches for her mug of coffee.
She insisted on brewing it, insisted on sitting here in the kitchen to rehash what happened. In her lace-edged pale pink cotton robe, the front strands of her shoulder-length dark hair caught up in a barrette on top of her head, her lovely face scrubbed free of makeup, she looks more like a young girl than the worried mother of one.
“I’m listening,” Brett tells her. “I’m just tired. It’s five in the morning, and we don’t even have to be up for another—”
“I know, but there’s no way I can sleep now.”
Maybe not, but he certainly can. In fact, after he’d dutifully gone through the entire house clutching a baseball bat, checking inside closets and under beds for prowlers, he’d had every intention of climbing right back under the covers. He saw no reason to lose any more sleep. Even Renny had gone from frantic to drowsy, allowing Brett to tuck her back in with reassurances that there were no monsters.
Not in this house, anyway.
And the man—the monster—responsible for Jeremy’s death is behind bars, so…
“It was just a nightmare,” Brett had told Renny—and he tells Elsa the same thing now.
“But the window was open.”
“Maybe you just thought you’d closed it.”
“What about the screen? I never open that. Ever.”
“Maybe you did, and forgot.”
She gives him a look. One that says, I’m not crazy.
He knows she isn’t. Really, he does.
Though there was a time when he’d thought…
No. He’d never believed Elsa was actually crazy, had he?
But back when Jeremy was newly missing, she’d gone through a frightening period when she’d completely lost her grasp on reality. Most of the time, she was completely out of it—dissociative behavior, Brett later learned, was the psychiatric term. He would hear her talking to Jeremy as if he were still here, or find her frantically looking for him as if he’d just disappeared, so distraught that he feared she might harm herself. She even talked about wanting to die, but he convinced himself that she was just grief-stri
cken, that she’d never really try to take her own life.
When she did—when she overdosed and nearly died—he’d blamed himself.
From that moment on, he’d vowed to save his wife. From therapy to medication for what was diagnosed as acute stress disorder, from rehashing the tragedy to sidestepping the topic, from avoiding children to considering parenthood again—he swore he’d do whatever was necessary to help Elsa recover.
And she had. The sorrow never left her, but she was stable. For years.
When they learned last August that Jeremy had been murdered, Brett was poised for a relapse. She’d been grief-stricken, as had he—but there was no frightening dissociative behavior.
None that he’s seen, anyway.
What about now? he wonders uneasily, but promptly pushes the thought away. No. No way. After a decade and a half of torture, having found the answers she sought so desperately, Elsa is finally healing—or perhaps, healed.
Renny’s arrival in their lives has given her a sense of purpose again.
And yet, watching his wife with their soon-to-be-adopted daughter, Brett has worried all along.
She’s trying so hard to be the perfect mother—from preparing organic food and limiting treats and screen time, to what would probably be considered hypervigilance by any standard. Constantly fearing the worst has made her overprotective of Renny; maybe even paranoid.
Who can blame her? Their first child was kidnapped and murdered.
But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again.
It doesn’t mean there really was someone in Renny’s room in the dead of night.
So you do think she imagined it, is that it?
“I think we should call the police,” Elsa announces.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“The press is finally off our backs. Do you really want to stir it all up again?”
“The press doesn’t have to be involved. I’m just talking about calling the police and—”
“You don’t think it’s going to get out somehow that the mother of Jeremy Cavalon thinks someone is prowling around her new kid’s bedroom?”
Scared to Death Page 2
