Norwich, Connecticut
June

Another day, another dollar…

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 muffler—or 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 it—as 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 May—over 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 brother—a welder in Waterbury—is driving a BMW and her sister—a cocktail waitress at some fancy Newport restaurant—just bought a water-front condo.

Meanwhile, how is Roxanne supposed to help people—namely, kids—when 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 know—next 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 hot—particularly when one is wearing leather boots. But her style isn’t about fashion or comfort—it’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 job—as 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

“Mommy…”

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, and—

“Mommy!”

Jeremy isn’t calling you. It’s just a dream. Go back to sleep…

“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 rest—and when his palpable, tragic absence disrupted it even more. All those sleepless nights…

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 optimistically 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.

Renata—it’s so lofty, pretentious, even—better 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 now…

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 caseworker—the over-burdened, underpaid agency staff seems to turn over constantly—there’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 endured—both 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.

Well—almost everything. She’s a docile child with a sunny personality, unlike Jeremy—but 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 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-stricken, 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?”

Now she’s irritated, setting down her coffee cup. “New kid?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

New kid. As in replacement for old kid.

God. Brett rakes a hand through his hair. That’s not what he meant at all. What’s wrong with him? He knows how fragile she is when it comes to this—when it comes to everything. For years now.

“If you honestly think there’s a reason to call the police,” he tells his wife, “go ahead. You know I would never take a chance with Renny.”

“I know that.” She toys with a dry pink petal that dropped from the vase of rhododendron blooms in the center of the table.

“Don’t make yourself nuts with this.” Brett reaches out and pats her thin shoulder. “Everything is fine. Renny is fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“There’s always something to worry about when you have a child.”

“Yes, but not…not like that. Not what you’re thinking.”

Elsa just looks at him. She can be so damned stubborn…

So can I.

“Look, there’s no reason to call the police just because a window was open.”

“How did it get open?”

“Maybe Renny sleepwalked and did it herself.”

Elsa tilts her head. Clearly, she hadn’t thought of that.

Brett hadn’t, either, until it popped out, but who knows? Maybe it’s true. And if it’s not, there are countless other explanations for the open window. Explanations that don’t involve a monster creeping around their little girl’s bedroom—or his wife going crazy. The simplest answer is usually the right one.

Brett presses on. “Think about it. The adoption isn’t even finalized. You don’t want to risk it, do you? How do you think Roxanne is going to react?”

Something else she hadn’t thought of, obviously. Sharp-eyed Roxanne Shields, Renny’s latest social worker, makes Elsa nervous.

“She’s just not what I expected,” Elsa said the first time they met the young woman, with her multiple piercings—including her nose and tongue—and black-everything, from her clothes and dyed hair to her eyeliner and the ankh tattoo on her forearm.

Brett was also taken aback by her appearance, though he didn’t admit it to his wife.

As always, Elsa has enough to worry about.

For that matter, so does he. They’ve been laying off employees at work again, and rumor has it another round is coming. If he loses his job, his family loses their sole source of income, aside from the fostering stipend—which would certainly make the agency think twice about allowing the adoption to go through.

Yeah. So would a police report.

“Look, if we bring the cops in, it’s going to go on the records,” he reminds Elsa. “Roxanne will have to become involved.”

“I know.”

Brett glimpses a spark of uncertainty in Elsa’s beautiful dark eyes. They’ve both heard the horror stories about would-be adoptees being removed from their prospective parents over the slightest incident.

Just last month, Todd and Zoe Walden, a couple who had gone through the training program with the Cavalons, lost their foster daughter after their biological son was suspended from school for fighting. Never mind that he was defending himself from a bully. Apparently it doesn’t take much to trigger the beleaguered foster agency staff to decide that it’s not in the child’s best interest to remain in the home.

“I’m scared, Brett. I just don’t know whether I’m more scared of the agency taking Renny away, or of something happening to her like it did to Jeremy.”

“Lightning doesn’t strike the same spot twice.”

“Is that a scientific fact, or just a meaningless old saying?”

He shrugs. “Elsa, we can’t take a chance and call the police about this. Absolutely not. That would pretty much guarantee that we’d lose her.”

“But if we explain—”

“They’re still going to err on the side of caution, and you know it.”

“You’re right. We can’t call.”

He nods, relieved.

And yet, what if…?

No, he tells himself firmly. Just like you told Elsa—and Renny, too—there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

 

Ah, there’s the rental car: conveniently parked on a quiet waterside street several blocks from the Cavalon home—a perfect spot, near the marina. Fishermen, rising in the early hours to pursue the day’s catch, often leave their vehicles here.

It would probably have been a good idea to have some poles and a tackle box in the backseat. Just in case someone came along.

Oh well. Next time.

The engine turns over with a quiet rumble.

Mission accomplished.

For tonight, anyway.

With a crunching sound, the tires begin to roll along the gravel lane that leads back to the main road.

There’s no other traffic at this hour, not out here. It might pick up in a few miles, closer to the southbound interstate, but it’s still pretty early for that. Without rush hour congestion, it’s only about two hours’ drive from Groton to New York. With traffic, it can be considerably longer. That’s okay. There’s no hurry.

Plenty of time for a detour along Thames Street. Not a soul to witness the car pulling up in front of the tiny post office, or its driver hurrying over to drop a stamped manila envelope into the curbside mailbox. Local delivery; the package should arrive the day after tomorrow. No—it’s well past midnight. Make that tomorrow.

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…

What the heck was the rest of it?

Not even a mouse…

Not even a mouse…

Oh, the next line is: The children are nestled all snug in their beds…

Ha. Isn’t that fitting. Renny Cavalon certainly was nestled all snug in her bed just a short time ago.

Then she opened her eyes and screamed.

No wonder.

That hideous rubber mask—now tucked safely into the glove compartment—would scare anyone to death, looming in the dead of night.

Night…

Night…

’Twas the Night Before Christmas…

That’s it!

It wasn’t a nursery rhyme after all; it was a storybook, one Mother loved to read aloud, years ago, in the soft glow of Christmas tree lights.

Is Elsa Cavalon planning to read it to Renny when the holidays roll around?

Ha. Come December, Renny will be long gone.

Just like Jeremy.