Keeping her back to her, Elsa drops the toy back into the bottom of the chest and hurriedly wipes her eyes.
“I’m going to go pick out the clothes I want to bring to Mémé’s house,” Renny tells her. “How many dresses do you think I need?”
“Wait, first you need to put away the puzzles and other toys you played with yesterday,” Elsa tells her, conscious that Brett is right under her bedroom window. “Oh, and you can choose some things to bring with us while we’re away. Come on, let’s go see what we can find.”
“Okay.” Renny skips down the hall. Elsa hurriedly puts the chest back together and locks it. As she returns the key to the bedside drawer, she reminds herself that she needs to pack the keys to Maman’s apartment, before she forgets.
In the kitchen, Renny is putting her toys back into the rainy day bin. She’s excited about the impromptu weekend in New York—even though Elsa and Brett explained to her that her grandmother won’t be at home.
Renny is full of sightseeing ideas—and some of them, to Elsa’s dismay, sound like New York, Sylvie Durand style. Pretty impressive, considering they haven’t seen Maman since her Mother’s Day visit last month—when, fresh from a few days in Manhattan, she regaled them with tales from the city.
Now Renny wants to see Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Tiffany’s…
“Tiffany’s?” Elsa asked incredulously.
“For breakfast. Mémé told me about it.”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Of course. It was Sylvie Durand’s favorite movie, and back then, she traveled in the same circles as its leading lady. When Elsa was growing up, Maman’s highest—and most frequently paid—compliment was that Elsa looked just like Audrey Hepburn. Later, when she was modeling, the resemblance wasn’t lost on her booking agents, who cultivated her chic, sleek, gamine style.
She might as well wait until they get to New York before she straightens out Renny’s misguided impressions. She has a lot to do before they leave, and she definitely needs to grab a quick shower—a real shower, as opposed to the earlier one that left her eyes still rimmed with old makeup and her hair limp from cheap shampoo.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s such a minor detail, but maybe it’ll help her to feel more normal.
As if anything could possibly feel normal right now.
Her eyes go to the hook beside the door, where she always keeps Renny’s tote bag to grab when they’re on their way out.
The thought of someone touching it, desecrating it…
Spider-Man. Who would have known? Who would want to remind them of something so painful?
Turning away, Elsa opens the top drawer of the kitchen desk. As she pulls out the set of keys to her mother’s apartment, she remembers how she’d laughed when Brett, Mr. Organization, had fastened an identifying tag to the ring.
“It’s a Louis Vuitton keychain, Brett. Do you actually think we’re going to forget whose keys they are?”
“You never know,” he told her, but even he had to grin.
Elsa tucks the keys into her purse. Then, remembering that she left wet laundry yesterday, she heads toward the utility room off the kitchen. The washing machine is on its last legs, but at least this time it completed the spin cycle.
As she opens the dryer to transfer the load of clothes, she hears the door open and Brett calling her name.
“I’ll be right there! I just have to—”
“Elsa—right now. C’mere.”
Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good. Abandoning the laundry, she returns to the kitchen. Seeing the look on her husband’s face, she turns immediately to her daughter.
“Renny, why don’t you go into your room and pack your clothes?”
“You said put the puzzles away first.”
“That can wait. Go ahead.”
As Renny disappears down the hall, Elsa whispers, “Did you see the footprint?”
“No, it must have washed away.”
She was afraid of that. “What about the—”
“The branch. I saw it. But Elsa…”
She realizes, then, that he’s holding something: a manila envelope. “What is that?”
“It just came in the mail. You need to see this.”
Marin could tell Lauren was surprised when she took her up on the invitation to visit her in Glenhaven Park today. She herself was perhaps even more surprised.
But after spending yesterday mired in emotion, between packing away—and throwing away—all those mementos, and dealing with the girls’ endless arguing, topped off by the rat experience…it was as if Lauren had thrown her a rescue ring, and she’d instinctively grabbed it.
Once she’d said yes, she felt as though she were standing at the base of an enormous mountain with no idea how she was going to climb it.
The only thing to do, she realized, was stop thinking about it and start moving. As quickly as possible, for that matter, hoping she’d gain enough momentum to keep on going.
She’s made it out onto the rainy street and is all but running toward the parking garage a block away when it happens.
“Hey, look, it’s that lady!” she hears someone say. “The one whose husband—”
Suddenly, a camera flashes in front of her.
Blinking, she hesitates for a split second, wondering whether to keep going, or turn around and head back home.
Home sounds better—but she’s closer to the parking garage.
And anyway, is she really going to let a couple of shameless, camera-wielding strangers ruin her plans? That would be pathetic.
No. No way.
Holding her head high, Marin picks up her pace once again, heading for the parking garage.
Stepping out onto the sidewalk, Mike hears a cheerful, familiar “Hey, Mike-ey!”
“How’s it going, Joe?”
The Sicilian butcher, in his usual smoking spot—leaning against a globed lamppost in front of the shop—shrugs. “Aches and pains. I’m getting old.”
“Yeah, who isn’t?” Mike figures Joe is about a decade older than he is, probably in his mid-fifties. He likes to complain good-naturedly about his mother, his wife, his kids, his grandkids, all of them sending him to an early grave, he claims. But Mike doesn’t buy a word of it. What he wouldn’t give to have a family. His own parents are both gone, and so is his brother. None of them lived to see Mike get married—or divorced.
“You going somewhere, Mikey?” Joe asks, waving his cigarette like a pointer to indicate the duffel bag over Mike’s shoulder.
“Yeah. The airport.”
“Where you headed? Long weekend? Or a vacation?”
Mumbai. Some vacation.
“Yeah,” he tells Joe again. “Just for a coupla days.”
Joe pushes himself off the lamppost, grinds out the cigarette with his heel. “You take care of yourself.”
“I always do, Joe.” Mike gives him a wave and steps off the curb.
Suddenly, the sound of a revving engine explodes in his ears. Startled, he looks up, and is stunned to see a car roaring toward him. For a split second, the driver is visible through the windshield—looking right at him, Mike realizes in horror. Aiming right at him.
The last thing he hears before it hits is Joe’s horrified “Miiikkee-eeeyyy!”
Elsa stares in horror at the contents of the envelope, spread before her and Brett on the kitchen counter.
Photographs.
Of Renny.
They appear to have been taken with a long-angle lens, and recently.
Renny in the supermarket. Renny at the beach. Renny licking an ice cream cone in their own backyard, the photo snapped through the trees with their house in the background.
Her embroidered tote bag is over her shoulder in most of the shots.
“Whoever took these pictures,” Brett tells Elsa in a low voice, “knew that Renny hardly ever leaves home without that bag. He knew it wouldn’t be long before we stumbled across Spider-Man.”
Elsa nods, unable to speak. She’d been
wondering why the toy would have been hidden away in the tote rather than left right out in the open for them to discover more readily.
Now she knows.
Placing the toy in Renny’s bag sends a far more ominous message.
And those pictures…
Someone is watching…again.
She finds her voice at last. “Brett…we have to go to the police.”
“We’ll lose her if we do.”
“I’m afraid that if we don’t…” She swallows hard, forces herself to say it, “We’ll lose her anyway.”
Hurting Mike Fantoni was never part of the plan—not even after it became clear that people would have to die. But it was absolutely necessary. There’s no telling what he knows—and what he might do with the information.
It’s pretty obvious the Cavalons met with the detective last night. Why else would they have driven to Boston and left their car parked for several hours in the North End, just a few blocks from Fantoni’s address?
The moment the GPS registered that the car had stopped in that particular location, it made perfect sense.
Of course, in their time of need, they’d turn to the private detective who’d devoted all those years to their case, and ultimately led them to Jeremy.
Well…not really. Mike Fantoni had led the Cavalons to Jeremy’s trail—a dead end, in the most literal sense.
Or so they believe.
But if anyone could have dug up the truth, it was Mike.
Such a shame to think of him lying in the middle of Hanover Street in a pool of his own blood.
Really, of everyone who’s ever been involved—he’s one of the good guys. And if anyone could have saved Jeremy…
But then he didn’t, did he?
No one saved Jeremy. Not even Mike.
That’s all right. He doesn’t need any of them. Now he knows that there’s only one person in the world he can count on, someone who will never let him down like the others have, one by one, over the years.
Now it’s their turn. One by one, they’re going to pay. All of them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In good weather, the view from the Gold Star Memorial Bridge high above the Thames River is striking: a picturesque Connecticut shoreline dotted with red brick, gray shingle, or white clapboard buildings; water bobbing with fishing boats, sailboat masts, and the occasional ferry or ship.
Today, however, as Brett drives across the bridge toward the New London train station, the world beyond the windshield is blanketed in dull gray to match his mood. He keeps a close eye on the rearview mirror. There are so few other cars on the rain-splashed road that he’s almost sure no one is trailing them.
Almost.
After seeing those pictures in the mail, Elsa was much too shaken to get behind the wheel herself. Brett wouldn’t have agreed to let her do it anyway. Not now.
As they huddled in the kitchen with the horrifying surveillance photos, they weighed every possible scenario…
But one.
Brett hates that he’s even capable of thinking it; hates the truth even more, but he has to face it.
Elsa herself might have sent the photos.
She wasn’t in any of them, and they were taken at times when she would have been alone with Renny.
Just as she was alone with Renny when that window was open after the nightmare, and when she found the footprint in the mud, and Spider-Man…
It doesn’t make sense, but…
What if some paranoid, delusional fragment of her brain just splintered off, and…
But why? Why would she—why would her brain—want to create the illusion that Renny is in danger?
He doesn’t understand, but then it wouldn’t be the first time. He didn’t understand how she was seeing and talking to Jeremy after he disappeared, but she was convinced he was really there. And he didn’t believe that she would actually try to kill herself even though she talked for months about wanting to die, and…
And this time, I know that anything is possible.
No, he’s not going to call the police. Not yet, anyway. That would just guarantee that they’d lose Renny, and for what?
If there is an outside threat, then the first thing to do is get Elsa and Renny to a safe place and assess the situation with Mike.
If there’s no outside threat, then he has to get Elsa the help she needs.
One thing is certain: No matter how fragile she is, she’d never, ever, ever hurt Renny or let anything happen to her.
They arrive at the station to find the red brick building nearly deserted. Brett hurriedly buys two tickets on the next southbound train, which happens to be running fifteen minutes late.
“Otherwise, you would have missed it,” the attendant informs him. “Guess this is your lucky day!”
“Guess so.” Brett’s smile is strained as he takes the tickets from her.
When he first suggested this morning that Elsa take Renny to New York, he’d been trying to humor her. A change of scenery would be good for her, he figured, and by the time she was ready to come home, her paranoia would have blown over. He never imagined that the situation would escalate the way it has.
Elsa rests her head on his shoulder as they wait beneath an overhang, watching the rain drip miserably onto the tracks. The platform, too, is sparsely populated: just a young businessman in a suit and an elderly woman dressed in so many layers you’d think it was February instead of June. Neither seems to pay any attention to the Cavalons. Brett notices that Elsa is keeping a wary eye on them anyway.
“You don’t have to worry,” he reminds her in a whisper. “Even you didn’t know you were going to be here until an hour ago, so the chances that someone could be lying in wait for you here are—”
“What if the house is bugged, though?” Seeing his expression, she adds quickly, “I know it sounds crazy, but we did talk about the train at home…”
Crazy.
Oh, Elsa…
“But really,” she goes on, “is it any more crazy than anything that’s already happened?”
He shakes his head.
Mike. He needs to talk to Mike about this.
As soon as he gets Elsa and Renny on the train, he’ll call Mike.
Maybe it was wrong not to go ahead and call the police, he thinks again.
But then he looks down at Renny—at her sweet, hopeful face, waiting for the train to pull in and carry her and Mommy away on an adventure—and he knows he can’t risk it. Not yet. There’s no way the agency is going to allow her to stay on with them under the circumstances. Not if someone is stalking them, and not if Elsa is losing touch with reality again.
Is it selfish of Brett not to want to give her up—even for her own good?
But who’s to say she’d be any safer anywhere else? If she is in danger, Brett refuses to believe that anyone in the world would fight for Renny the way he and Elsa will. They know how dangerous the world can be, and they would die for her, both of them.
I don’t care what the paperwork says or doesn’t say. We’re her parents, and we’re not going to let anything happen to her. And if Elsa needs help, I’ll get her help. But losing Renny—she couldn’t bear that.
He keeps his arm around Elsa and a protective hand on Renny’s shoulder as she excitedly watches the track for the train. She’s never ridden the rails and was thrilled, back at the house, when they told her of the change in plans.
Now, when a whistle sounds in the distance, Brett can’t decide if it’s too soon or not soon enough.
Renny bounces excitedly. “It’s coming! It’s coming!”
Elsa looks up at him and he kisses her forehead. “I hate that we have to leave you here.”
“Someone has to stay and figure out what the hell is going on.”
“Call me as soon as you get there.”
“I will.”
“You’ll be safe in your mother’s building.”
“I know. I’m not worried about us.”
“I’ll be safe, too.�
��
“You’ve got to talk to Mike.”
“I will.”
Brett releases her and swings Renny up into his arms as the train clangs into the station. “Have fun on the train and in New York, sweetheart.”
“I will, Daddy. I wish you could come with us.”
“So do I, but I have to go to work. When it’s time for Disney World, though—” He breaks off, his throat thick. He buries his face in her soft, dark hair for a moment, then smooths it as he sets her back on her feet.
Elsa is watching, tears in her eyes further smudging the makeup she never had a chance to remove. Once they’d decided they were going, she threw some things into a couple of bags, hurriedly changed into jeans, and they were on their way.
It’s unnerving, seeing her looking so haggard. He can’t help but flash back to the old days, after Jeremy, before Renny, when it was all Elsa could do to wake up in the morning…
“All a-bo-ard!” the conductor calls from his perch in the open door as the train rolls to a stop.
Elsa grips Renny’s hand and walks her toward the door. Brett picks up their luggage and follows, looking around to make sure no last-minute passengers have shown up. Coast is clear: The businessman and the older woman are boarding a few cars down.
The conductor takes the bags from Brett, greeting Renny with a jovial “Hello, there, young lady! Ready to go for a ride?”
Suddenly, Renny looks uncertain.
Brett’s heart sinks. She’s so small standing there, dwarfed by the conductor, the train, even the luggage.
“I don’t want to go!” She shakes her head, holding back.
Elsa tries to coax her, which only makes her dig in her heels, starting to cry. “I want Daddy to come, too!”
Brett pastes a reassuring smile on his face, tells her they’ll see each other again before they know it.
“Come on, Renny.” Elsa reaches for their daughter, her eyes meeting Brett’s. Seeing tears in them, he opens his mouth to tell her not to go. But then Renny is in Elsa’s arms, squirming and crying, and it’s too late: the two of them disappear onto the train, the doors close, and the train chugs away, leaving him alone on the platform.
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