The Escape Artist (11 page)

“Do you think Susanna can hear the show?” Valerie asked.

“Yeah, actually I do.” He swallowed a spoonful of soup. “Before she left, she asked me if I’d play ‘Suzanne’ for her, so she must have been thinking she would hear it, wherever she was. I’ve been trying to come up with some way to get a message to her through the show. I’d just like to say hello somehow, but I’m afraid the cops and this PI and who knows who else, are going to be listening pretty carefully. They seem certain I’m in on her escape somehow. They even have a search warrant to check on who I make phone calls to and who I get them from. And they can get a list of the return addresses on my mail from the post office.”

“Big Brother,” Valerie said. “Why don’t you play ‘Suzanne’ for her every week, then? She’ll know it’s your way of keeping in touch with her.”

“Every week.” He groaned. “I don’t want to think about her being gone that long.”

“So, you’re hoping they find her, huh?” Grace asked.

He rested his spoon in his empty bowl. “I want her back,” he said, “but not if she doesn’t want to be here.” It still hurt to think that she could leave him with such ease.

He helped the women clean up after dinner, then disappeared into his studio to read his faxes—and smoke a cigarette—while they watched TV in his family room. He felt like he was being baby-sat, but it didn’t bother him. It was after ten when Grace knocked on his studio door.

“Come into the family room,” she said. “Hurry!”

He walked into the family room to see Peggy and Jim on the television.

“It’s a press conference,” Grace said.

Linc picked up the remote from the coffee table to turn up the sound. “What have they said so far?” He sat down on the floor next to Grace.

“Nothing. The announcer’s been—”

“Sh!” Linc interrupted her as Jim opened his mouth to speak.

“We have reason to believe that Susanna Miller has kidnapped our son, Tyler,” Jim said.

Linc let out his breath from between clenched teeth. Until now, no one had introduced the concept of Susanna having kidnapped Tyler. All he’d heard in the news reports was that she and the boy were missing.

Jim and Peggy looked ashen-faced in the flashing lights of the cameras.

“Tyler has a very serious heart condition,” Jim continued, “and we are extremely concerned that he be returned home to get the medical care he needs. Susanna Miller has a history of mental illness—”

Linc pounded his hand on his knee. “What crap,” he said. He missed whatever Jim said next.

“Please,” Jim continued. “We are offering a twenty thousand dollar reward to anyone who can give us information leading to the safe return of Susanna and Tyler Miller.”

A photograph of Susanna and Tyler appeared on the screen along with an 800-number. The picture was one Linc had taken of the two of them at the park, Susanna holding Tyler on her lap at the top of a sliding board. The photograph had been framed and sitting on top of the television in her apartment. The police must have taken it and he was glad he’d thought to rescue her photograph albums.

He muted the sound on the TV when the newscaster moved on to his next story.

“Mental illness,” he said. His face felt hot and he knew that telltale patches of red were standing out on his cheeks, as they always did when he was angry or upset. “She was depressed, you bastard,” he said to the TV. “She never would have been in that hospital if it hadn’t been for you.”

“Down, boy,” Grace put her hand on his arm.

“Let him get it out,” Valerie argued. She was always one for encouraging people to express their emotions.

“I’m sure he’d be the picture of mental health if he walked in on pretty Peggy-O screwing another guy,” Linc said.

“You tell him!” Valerie said.

“He makes her sound deranged. I just hope Susanna’s far enough away that she can’t see Peggy and Jim begging for the safe return of ‘their’ baby on TV. Christ.”

“I don’t get Peggy.” Grace leaned back on her elbows. “I mean, she could write her own ticket as far as a job goes, and she’s married to one of those lean, mean money-hungry lawyers, but she works at Legal Aid. Does that make sense?”

He shrugged, not wanting to talk about Peggy. It bothered him to think she might have one or two noble bones in her body. He had no room to feel sympathy for her when his mind was fixed on Susanna.

“Peggy’s not worth the energy it would take to figure her out. It’s Susanna I’m concerned about.” He shook his head. “I’m really mad at her right now.”

“Of course you are,” Valerie agreed.

“She shouldn’t have run away,” he said. “She did it so much as a kid that it’s her natural response to a problem. I’d always find her and drag her home. And then you know what would happen?”

“What?” Grace asked.

“She’d get beaten up. I’d take her home and the bastard—her father—would beat the shit out of her.” Until the last time he brought her home, at least, when Linc put a permanent end to the beatings. But he didn’t want to get into that now. Grace and Valerie knew he’d killed Susanna’s father. Everyone knew it, but no one, not even these two close friends, ever dared to question him about it.

“Men are scum,” Valerie said.

“Thanks,” he said sarcastically. “That helps.”

“You are the rare exception to the rule.” Grace got to her feet. “Are you all right to be left alone?” she asked him.

“Hallelujah.” He looked up at her from his seat on the floor. “You two are leaving and I can finally light up.”

“Like you haven’t been smoking in your studio all night,” Valerie said. “Call us if you hear anything, okay?”

He didn’t bother walking them to the door. Nor did he really feel like smoking. Instead, he lay down on the floor, his head on a throw pillow, and watched the muted TV until he fell asleep.

ELLEN AND ONE OF
her massage clients were talking on the front porch, and Kim was trapped in her apartment. She sat on the sofa, staring out the front window at the branches of the maple tree. She was gutless. Why didn’t she simply walk past the two women, nod hello, get in her car and drive to the computer store as she’d been planning to do this morning? It wasn’t Ellen she feared. It was the stranger with her. She trusted no one. The fewer people she had to meet, the better off she would be.

Everyone looked suspicious to her lately. She’d taken at least one long walk every day since her arrived on Sunday, pushing Cody in his stroller over the brick sidewalks and trying not to look as uneasy in public as she felt. All eyes in town seemed to be trained on her and her son and she worked at being inconspicuous. It was a lonely existence she was carving out for herself. She had not thought about how unbearable self-imposed isolation could be.

Cody looked up at her from his seat on the floor, annoyance in his face. She didn’t blame him. She’d put his sweater on him in preparation for going outside and then made him sit in it for ten minutes in the too-warm apartment.

“We’ll give them five more minutes, Cody,” she said, glancing toward her door. She’d left it open so she would know when Ellen and her client finally decided to come into the house. “If they haven’t left the porch by then, we’ll do it anyhow. What’s the worst that could happen?”

The worst that could happen was too easy for her to imagine. Maybe Ellen’s client down there on the porch was not a bona-fide client at all. Maybe she had called Ellen to make an appointment for a massage, hiding the fact that she was, in reality, a private investigator hired by Jim. What better way to worm her way into Kim’s new home than through Ellen? Jim had no doubt hired someone to help him locate her. It would be clever of him to hire a woman.

She’d kept busy the past few days, afraid to allow herself too much idle time for thinking. The day before, she’d gotten a phone number and car insurance in her new name, along with a new driver’s license, new plates for her car, and a checking account. Kim Stratton existed now. Once you existed on paper, you were real. She practiced her new signature, giving all the letters a backward slant, hoping that even an expert would not be able to equate Kim Stratton s signature to that of Susanna Miller. She stared at the driver’s license for hours, studying the picture of the fair-skinned, copper-haired stranger next to the stranger’s name. She thought again of the baby in the grave back in Boulder. She’d stolen that baby’s life and she felt a keen responsibility to make it a life worth living.

She’d found the library the day before, a short drive from the center of town. She’d walked inside, pushing Cody in the stroller. He was quiet for as long as it took her to study the map of New Jersey and pick out a little suburb of Trenton as the place she would have lived with her mythical husband in case anyone ever asked her to get more specific. Then she turned to the Maryland map. Where would her imaginary family, the people she’d moved to Annapolis to be near, live? She selected Bowie, not too close, yet not too far. She began thinking about that family. There was warmth and love between its members. She had sisters, she decided, several of them. And brothers who had teased her and protected her as she was growing up. The fabricated family became so vivid and real in her mind that she scared herself. This was the happy, normal family she’d always wanted, the family she’d thought she could create with Jim.

Her attention was drawn back to the maple tree outside her apartment window as a squirrel suddenly hopped onto a branch only a couple of feet from where Kim was sitting.

“Cody,” she whispered, leaning toward her son.

He crawled to her and she lifted him onto her lap and pointed at the squirrel. He started to let out one of his squeals of delight.

“Sh,” she whispered. “Don’t scare him away.”

The squirrel was nibbling on something, its jaw working furiously and its tail jerking back and forth, and Kim was jarred by a sudden memory. She’d been seven or eight years old, peeking into her parents’ bedroom from behind their slightly open door. Her father was standing by the window and he was dressed handsomely, although his tie was partly undone and a strand of blond hair fell over his forehead. A cigarette dangled from his lips and, as usual, an open bottle of whiskey rested on his night table.

Slowly, very slowly, he moved his hands toward the bottom of the window. Susanna watched in curiosity as he carefully removed the screen. Only then did she see what her father had been looking at through the open window. A few yards away, a fat gray squirrel sat on one of the branches of a tree. Her father never took his eyes off it as he quietly opened his night table drawer. He reached inside and pulled out a gun.

At first she thought it was a toy. Her eyes widened and she had to bite her lip to hold in her surprise. She had never seen a gun in their house before. She’d never even known her father possessed one. She watched as he raised the gun in front of his face and pointed it at the squirrel.

It’s a toy
, she told herself.
It has to be
.

She closed her eyes as he pulled the trigger and the sudden explosion made her yelp, but her father didn’t seem to hear her. When she opened her eyes, the squirrel had disappeared—as had any remaining shred of trust in her father.

That was the first time she ran away. She’d thought of simply going next door, where Linc’s mother, Geri, would hug her and rock her and reassure her that the squirrel had probably hopped to another branch at the last minute. But she knew that Geri would eventually make her go home, and so she ended up hiding in the little room above Linc and Geri’s garage instead. Her parents never even realized she was gone. Could you call it running away if your parents didn’t miss you?

She’d returned home after spending one night above the garage, but for weeks afterward, she avoided the part of the yard where the squirrel would have fallen. That way, she could continue to pretend it had found its way to safety.

A sudden burst of laughter slipped through her open apartment door and she knew that Ellen and her client were finally inside the house. Ellen’s door closed with a click, and Kim stood up, Cody still in her arms.

“We’re on our way, Cody-boy,” she said.

Downstairs, she pulled the stroller from the closet where Ellen was letting her store it and carried it onto the porch and down the front steps. She put it in the trunk of her car, then strapped Cody into his car seat before checking the directions Ellen had given her. Computer Wizard, the store was called. “Best prices on computers,” Ellen had said, although she admitted she didn’t own one herself. But she knew about the store through the grapevine. Ellen had her fingers on the pulse of Annapolis. She seemed to be the hub of a network that was both impressive and unnerving. It would be hard to hide much from Ellen King.

Kim drove out of town by a new route, stopping for a red light at a busy intersection. Cody pointed to the side of the bank building on the corner, and it was a minute before Kim understood what had caught his attention. There was another of the murals, only this one was unfinished, a work in progress. The painting was of a whimsical village, snow-covered, but only half there, and she wondered if one day she would stop at this corner to find the artist lost in his work.

In addition to the painting of the tall ship with the billowing white sails, she had noticed several other murals during her walks through town. All of them had been painted by the same artist, Adam Soria, and all were identifiable by their clear, intense colors. She spotted them on the sides of buildings, some almost hidden from view, others out in the open, and she found herself walking longer and farther in an effort to discover more of them. Her favorite was a jungle scene with a circle of white birds in flight against a deep green backdrop of trees. In the lower right-hand corner, Adam Soria’s name stood out in gold.

She’d studied the murals with fascination, admiring the artist’s skill and thinking about how rewarding it would be to have such a huge and public canvas on which to paint. She thought back to the smaller mural she’d painted on Cody’s wall at home. What would her old landlord think when he discovered Noah’s Ark in the baby’s room? She used to worry that she’d never get her security deposit back on that apartment because of the painting. That worry seemed pretty laughable at this point.