She remembers reaching into her bag a few times before he got there, to check for her iPod. There was no rat…not until after he arrived.
But that doesn’t mean it was him. And it doesn’t mean the whole place isn’t infested with rodents, and one didn’t happen to crawl into her purse.
Yeah…one that managed to work the zipper with its paw?
She has other things to worry about right now, though. Like dying from rat bite fever.
No wonder she can’t sleep.
Someone knocks on Caroline’s bedroom door.
Daddy! she thinks for an exhilarating moment. Then she remembers, and the fragile shimmer of hope shatters like crystal on granite.
In the old days, he’d come home late and check to see if she was still awake. He’d come into the room and tickle her toes, always hanging out at the bottom of the mattress. They both sleep that way—not wanting to be confined like mummies by tightly tucked sheets.
Sometimes, she’d get up and sit in the kitchen with Daddy while he ate a sandwich or sipped a cup of tea. Mom never joined them, and Annie was always asleep—or perhaps just uninvited.
It was no secret to anyone that Dad loved Caroline best.
She cherished those late night encounters.
Another knock, louder this time. She checks the digital clock, irritated at the interruption to her thoughts, if not her sleep.
Then again…only nine-thirty? Why does it feel like the middle of the night?
“Caroline?” Mom calls through her door. “Are you awake?”
“No.”
The door opens. “Very funny.”
The light from the hallway spills into the room. It’s not that bright, but Caroline throws her arm up to shield her eyes, pointedly letting her mother know she doesn’t welcome the visit.
Mom used to be such a classy lady, always dressed to the nines, meticulously styled with scarves and jewelry. These days, she spends a lot of time in old jeans that are much too big for her, her blond hair in a bedraggled ponytail, like right now.
Way to let yourself go, Mom.
Between Mom wasting away and Annie blowing up a couple of sizes, Caroline wonders if Daddy will even recognize them when he comes home.
I’m the only one who’s holding it together, she often tells herself. Daddy will be so proud of me.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay, Car.”
“Sure. I’m great. No big deal at all that I found a live rat in my bag.”
Mom closes her eyes, like she’s counting to ten. When she opens them, she asks, “Do you think we can have one conversation without sarcasm?”
Caroline tilts her head, mulling it over. “Mmm, no,” she says, “I don’t think we can. We wouldn’t want to squelch my creative personality, would we?”
“Oh, is that what we’re calling it now?” Mom manages to crack a grin.
“Hell, yes.”
“Don’t swear, Caroline.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mom. Daddy says ‘hell’ isn’t a swear word.”
Her mother’s mouth straightens into a firm line. Watching her, Caroline pretty much knows what she’s thinking about Daddy and hell.
But Mom quickly shifts gears, as she has a habit of doing. “Annie and I saved you some Chinese. Want me to heat it up?”
“No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“Are you sure?”
“Even if I was…I mean, Chinese? Really? They use rat meat in kung pao chicken.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everyone knows that.”
Mom crosses the room and bends over to pick up the sandals Caroline had been wearing this afternoon. She opens the closet door, places them neatly on the shoe rack, closes the door.
Then she turns and says, “Listen…about the rat…”
Caroline tenses, realizing that her mother isn’t just here to tidy up or make her eat leftover takeout.
“I thought all along that it must have crawled into your bag. But now I’m wondering…maybe I was wrong.”
Her heart beats faster. Yes, she’d been thinking the same thing. But hearing Mom say it…
Suddenly, she’s frightened—and irritated with her mother for scaring her.
She isn’t Daddy. She doesn’t protect Caroline the way he did. So why would she come in here and make things worse?
“Is there anyone you can think of who might want to upset you?”
Other than you? “No,” Caroline tells her. Then, to be fair, she adds, “I mean, a lot of people hate me—us—because of…”
Daddy. She can’t say it. It’s so unfair, the way they judge.
“That’s what I was thinking, but…” Mom peers at her in the dark, maybe seeing the look on Caroline’s face, because she quickly says, “Who knows? Maybe the rat just crawled in there. This is New York, after all.”
“Yeah, and everyone knows that New York rats have outstanding fine motor skills. Zippers? Totally not a problem.”
“I’m trying to help you here, Caroline.”
“You’re making me feel like someone is out to get me.”
“I didn’t say that. All I said—”
“Was that someone put the rat there on purpose. Why would you even come in here and bring this up now?”
Mom hesitates, looking as though she wants to say something.
Caroline waits.
“Did you give them your name?”
“What?”
“When you reported the incident to the manager…did you tell him who you were?”
“Report it? You think I, like, calmly went and ‘reported it’?” Caroline can’t believe that her mother doesn’t get it. “Basically, I screamed and went hysterical, and they hustled me into the back room.”
“Did you tell them your name?”
Suddenly realizing what her mother’s getting at, she shakes her head. “Are you kidding? Do you think I wanted it to get out? The next thing you’d know, they’d be calling me Rat Girl on the front page of the Post.”
“So no one knew you were—”
“No, Mom. No one knew I’m related to the dreaded Garvey Quinn.”
“I was just worried that…”
“Someone’s out to get me.”
Even in this light, she can see her mother’s eyebrows shoot up. “You think so?”
“No, but you do.”
“Oh, Caroline…I didn’t mean to…Here, just get some sleep.” Mom kisses her forehead and bends over to snugly tuck in the sheet and blanket around the foot of the bed.
Caroline waits until her mother has left the room before she angrily kicks them all loose again.
Brushing her teeth over a motel sink clogged with cloudy, saliva-tainted water and God only knows what else, Elsa can just imagine how Maman would feel about this place.
“Zee peets!” she would say, wrinkling her perfect French nose.
Then again, she once said just that about her suite at the Grand Hotel et de Milan, which had previously been occupied by the queens of Belgium and Sweden—sufficient for foreign royalty, but not for the fair Sylvie Durand.
This low-budget chain motel somewhere off I–95 is a far cry from the Grand Hotel et de Milan. And room 103 definitely isn’t what Elsa had in mind when she and Mike convinced Brett that it wasn’t a good idea to sleep at home tonight, just in case.
As she turns off the tap, the pipes make a horrible groaning sound.
They probably should have stayed right in Boston, where there are plenty of nice hotels, but Brett wanted to get closer to home—and the office. With no reservation, no vacancies at the halfway-decent places they tried, and an overtired little girl, they settled on this.
“It’s just for one night,” Brett reassured Elsa, as she checked beneath the fitted sheet for evidence of bedbugs in the mattress seams.
“Mike said we should find someplace to stay for a while.”
“I know he did, but either way, it’s not going to be here.”
“Either way? We can�
��t just go home, Brett, like nothing ever happened.”
Brett looked like he was about to say something, but then he shrugged. “Never mind. We’ll figure out something in the morning.”
Or maybe, Elsa couldn’t help but think, we’ll wake up and find out this is all just a bad dream.
Now, gazing at herself in the mirror, cast in a greenish tint from the overhead light, she knows it’s all too real. Yet she can’t help but wonder whether Brett’s thinking that she’s overreacting—and whether he might be right about that.
No. No way. I know what I saw.
Anyway, Mike took her seriously. He took the bag of dolls and the Spider-Man figure, promising to get right on it. He seems to think there’s a possibility that someone might want to hurt them.
Someone who knows about Spider-Man’s significance.
Garvey Quinn keeps popping into her head. Unless he’s broken out of jail—which would surely be front-page news—he wasn’t the one prowling through their house last night. Yet he’s proven that he’s not beyond getting others to do his dirty work.
To what end, though? He has nothing to gain by hurting the Cavalons.
Someone must.
What happened makes no sense, but she keeps telling herself that it might, if she thinks it through logically; that she might be missing something.
She’s too exhausted for logic at this point, though.
A toilet flushes in the adjacent bathroom, on the other side of the paper-thin wall.
Exhausted and disgusted, Elsa takes one last look in the mirror, wishing she’d thought to pick up some eye makeup remover when they’d stopped at Walgreens to buy the toothbrushes.
The sliver of cheap motel soap succeeded only in smudging this morning’s mascara around her lash line. In her modeling days, makeup artists used that trick to make her eyes look bigger. Now it only accentuates the haunted expression in them.
She flicks off the bathroom light and hurries into the next room, not wanting to imagine what might crawl up through the drains in the dark.
God, this is depressing. What are we doing here?
The moment of self-pity immediately gives way to self-contempt.
We’re protecting our daughter, that’s what we’re doing. And I’d live in this dump for the rest of my life if that were what it took to keep Renny out of harm’s way.
Feeling her way across the unfamiliar room, Elsa can hear traffic from the nearby highway, and distant voices, and what sounds like a bottle being thrown across pavement into a chain-link fence. Through it all, of course: Brett’s peaceful snoring.
Claustrophobic Renny wanted the room door left ajar, which of course was out of the question. They agreed to leave the curtains open instead.
Uneasy, Elsa goes over to the window and looks out into the night. When they checked in, there were only two other cars. Now there are three.
Not a soul in the parking lot, and yet she has the sudden sensation that someone is lurking…
She darts a quick look over her shoulder. Her heart stops; a figure is standing in the shadows across the room.
Her mouth opens.
A scream lodges in her throat.
Then she sees that it’s just Brett’s clothing on a hanger dangling from the outer hinge of the closet door—the closet itself too musty-smelling for clothes.
Her heart beats again, fast and hard, her senses on full alert. She checks the window latch, the chain and lock on the door. It’s a dead bolt, but the kind that opens with a key, rather than an electronic key card. Any previous guest could have made a copy…
But it’s not the previous guests I’m worried about.
She quietly lugs the lone chair over from the desk and puts it in front of the door, where a would-be intruder will trip over it. A feeble trap, perhaps, but it makes her feel a little better.
She returns to the window and takes one last look at the parking lot before tugging on the vinyl-lined curtains. They don’t quite meet in the middle; red neon from the “Vacancy” sign falls through the crack. Anyone could see in…
But no one even knows we’re here.
Swiftly, she strips off the yellow dress she’s been wearing all day and gingerly drapes it over the lone chair in the room. Then she pulls on the polyester blend T-shirt she picked up at Walgreens.
About to climb into the double bed with Brett, she thinks better of it.
Instead, she slips beneath the flimsy, satiny quilted bedspread of the other bed. Careful not to wake Renny, she wraps a firm arm around her, not entirely convinced she’s safe anywhere—not even here.
That was nothing, Mrs. Quinn. Stay tuned.
Lying awake in the California king she once shared with Garvey, Marin can almost hear the words in her head, spoken in a menacing, disembodied voice.
Spooked, she saved the text message on her phone, along with the other one—the emoticon that really does, as Annie pointed out, look like a rat.
Marin made her promise not to say anything to Caroline about it, though. “It’ll only make her more upset if she thinks someone did it on purpose.”
“Is that even possible, Mom?”
“That someone put a rat into her bag?”
“No—that she can get more upset,” Annie said dryly, and they both listened for a moment to Caroline still carrying on loudly in her room, on the phone with her friend.
“Just don’t talk to her about it, okay, Annie? She’s having a hard time.”
“I know. Don’t worry. I get it, Mom.”
God, I love Annie, she thinks now, staring at the shadowy ceiling.
She loves Caroline, too, of course.
Equally.
If that’s the case, why do you always seem to be reminding yourself of that lately? Is it because Caroline reminds you so much of Garvey? Is it because she has that cold, sarcastic side to her that makes you wonder about things that run in the family, and what she might be capable of?
No! Of course not.
Marin will not allow herself to go there. Not tonight. Not when she’s worried that someone out there wanted—or wants—to hurt Caroline.
She could have very easily chalked up the first message to a stray text sent to the wrong address—a text containing a bunch of symbols that just happened to look like a rat…
Although not to me.
Not at first, anyway, and certainly not at a glance.
It took Annie to point that out because Marin, apparently, is too old and out of touch to have even realized the message was a—what was it called? An emoticon.
Does that mean it was sent by a kid, then?
That concept is much more comforting than her initial reaction to the second message.
That was nothing, Mrs. Quinn. Stay tuned.
It seemed sinister.
And the use of her name—clearly, the text messages didn’t go astray; they were meant for her. She just isn’t sure if they were sent after the fact—by a witness who had recognized Caroline and thought it would be fun to further torment the Quinns—or if they were sent by someone who had planned and executed the whole ordeal, targeting Caroline in the first place.
That’s why she had gone into Caroline’s room earlier. To see if her daughter had noticed anything strange lately, maybe even to give her a heads-up to be extra careful.
Instead, she succeeded only in scaring a kid whose steely veneer, until now, has been largely impenetrable.
Nice going there, Mom. While you’re at it, you might as well put Annie on a starvation diet.
She rolls over, restless, wondering if she should take a sleeping pill now, or wait another hour or two. They only knock her out for a short window of time. It would be nice to sleep past dawn for a change.
Again, she finds herself thinking of Elsa Cavalon.
It would be healthy to have one less piece of unfinished business hanging over her head. After all, this summer is supposed to be all about healing and moving on.
She knows how to contact Elsa. Presumably, Elsa
could figure out how to get in touch with her, too.
But she hasn’t.
I wouldn’t blame her if she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.
Still…despite Marin’s connection to Garvey, despite what he did…
Maybe Elsa is waiting for Marin to make the first move.
Tomorrow, she tells herself, as she sits up in bed and reaches for the orange prescription bottle on the nightstand. Tomorrow, I’ll call her.
Three floors above the Italian butcher shop on Hanover Street, Mike Fantoni paces across the ancient hardwoods, Elsa Cavalon’s words ringing in his head.
There’s only one way anyone would link Spider-Man to Jeremy…and that’s by having been there when he disappeared fifteen years ago.
The only witness to Jeremy’s kidnapping—the person who snatched him from his own backyard—has been dead for almost a year. Jeremy himself has been dead for fifteen.
Who, then?
Mike stops at the refrigerator and yanks open the door.
Empty.
And you were expecting…what? A nice tray of leftover homemade lasagna? Tiramisu?
It’s been years since he’s tasted homemade anything.
It’s been years since he lost Tanya, who loved to cook, and loved to eat, and loved him…or so she claimed when she married him.
Mike closes the fridge. It’s even more disconcerting to open the one at home and find it empty—his real home, the one he shared with her. He doesn’t spend much time there anymore. Instead he stays here, in the city, in a dumpy apartment that was meant to be simply a place where he could run his business.
There are no memories of his ex-wife here. Tanya never set foot in this apartment; never wanted to. Irony of ironies: She didn’t approve of his being a private detective—not at first, anyway—because it took him away from her at all hours, sometimes for days at a time. Nights at a time.
Caught up in whatever case he was working on, Mike didn’t always think to call to check in. Then one night, he did—and sensed that she wasn’t alone. That was the beginning of the end.
How many philandering spouses had he nailed through his work? Too many. But somehow, he seemed to have compartmentalized his life, convincing himself that his own marriage was different, overlooking classic signs that would have been red flags if he were investigating a case.
Scared to Death Page 9
