The Escape Artist (29 page)

“I’m sure it will be worth the wait,” Kim said, although she couldn’t imagine spending that sort of money on a costume for a child. Apparently, Roxanne did not do her shopping at garage sales,

“I told my husband he’ll have to be the one to open the package when it arrives, though,” Roxanne continued. “After those bombings, I’m nervous about opening anything that gets delivered to the house.”

“Well, those bombs didn’t actually come through the mail, so I think you’ll be safe,” Kim said. She wished she could tell Roxanne that she had nothing to fear. She could practically guarantee that Roxanne could safely open any package that came to her door. It was Ryan Geary who had to be careful, and it was beginning to look as though it was up to Kim to make sure he never got that package.

She left the park after half an hour and started walking toward town and the bank. She’d gotten a check from Noel the day before and she couldn’t cash it soon enough.

As she neared the bank building, she noticed something different about the unfinished mural painted on its outside brick wall. At first she thought it was the clean, bright October sunshine that gave the painting its new look, but then she saw that the enchanting little snow-covered village depicted in the mural had been given a few new buildings, and children now skated on a frozen pond, surrounded by pine trees laced with snow.

Best of all, though, the artist himself was there. Kim stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, a smile spreading across her face.

Adam stood on a ladder at the far side of the mural, a huge paintbrush in his hand as he worked a white cloud into the vivid blue sky above the village.

“
Hooray
,” she said under her breath. There was a bench on the sidewalk a few feet from where she stood, and she quietly took a seat, then leaned over to whisper to Cody. “Adam’s painting, Cody,” she said. “See the pretty church? See the children on the pond?”

She sat there at least five minutes before one of Cody’s squeals caused Adam to turn around and spot them. He smiled, waving the hand with the paintbrush in it, and climbed down the ladder to walk toward her.

“How long have you been sitting here?” he asked.

“Just long enough to feel overjoyed. How wonderful to see you working.”

Adam looked over his shoulder at the mural, then sat down next to her. “Great weather for this,” he said. “My favorite time to paint. And the dreams were there this morning. They’ve been there for a few days. Guess all I needed was a couple of rolls in the hay.” He grinned at her.

With a jolt, she realized that was the sort of thing Linc would say. Adam and Linc shared an irreverence she found appealing.

“Glad I could help,” she said. She lifted Cody out of the stroller and let him climb on the bench.

“My dream last night was about you, actually,” he said. “I think that means I should paint you.”

She groaned. “Try to find some other meaning in it, okay?” Everyone wanted to immortalize her today.

An elderly woman walked by and let out a gasp of pleasure when she saw the mural. Then she noticed Adam sitting on the bench.

“I’ve been praying every day to see you back at that wall again, Mr. Soria,” she said.

“Thanks.” Adam waved at her. “I can use all the prayers I can get.” Once the woman had passed, he returned his attention to Kim. “Want to go to a movie with Jessie and me tonight?”

She wondered if Jessie would want to go out with them, given the conversation she and Kim had had the day before.

“I don’t think I’d better.” She nodded toward Cody. “Remember how noisy he was the last time we tried it?”

“Look,” Adam said. “I’ve got a list of baby-sitters a yard long. We used them for Molly and Liam, so they’re tried and true. Let me call one of them for you. They can watch Cody at my house or yours or wherever—”

“No.” She wrapped her arm lightly around her son. He was standing on the bench next to her, bouncing up and down, grinning at the traffic as it passed by on the street.

Adam frowned. “It would be good for you to have some non-maternal time, Kim. Good for both of you.”

She couldn’t quite shake the feeling that leaving Cody with someone else for a few hours made her a bad mother. But Adam was right. She didn’t want Cody to grow up afraid of being separated from her. Even the best mothers left their kids with sitters from time to time.

“All right,” she agreed, “But I’ll want to talk to the baby-sitter myself, okay?”

“Sure. That’s great.”

She needed to talk to him about Jessie, but now was not a good time. He was too happy. She didn’t want to bring him down.

Adam glanced at his mural. “You going to watch for a while?” he asked.

“If that’s okay with you.”

“Be my guest.”

She watched him work with a mixture of envy and admiration. There was something about the vast canvas that appealed to her, that made her arm ache with longing to sweep paint across that wide brick wall. Other people joined her on the bench, all of them smiling and fascinated by the work of art taking shape in front of them.

She thought back to her conversation with Jessie. Adam was ready to move on, no matter what Jessie thought. His being back at work had to be a good sign; his relationship with Kim could only be helping. Why should he suffer any longer than he had to just to keep his sister company in her misery?

KIM LEFT CODY WITH
a baby-sitter that night while she and Adam and Jessie went to the movies. The sitter, a seventeen-year-old girl who brought a stack of textbooks with her to Adam’s house, seemed competent enough, and Adam assured Kim that the girl had taken care of Liam and Molly for several years before the accident.

There were actually periods of time during the evening when Kim didn’t think about Cody at all, but she declined Jessie’s suggestion to get something to eat after the movie, and Adam supported her need to get home.

“It’s mama’s first night out.” Adam hugged Kim’s shoulders as they left the theater. “She needs to make it short.”

Jessie didn’t argue. Although she was quieter than usual, she didn’t seem to harbor any ill feelings toward Kim, and she even attempted to comfort her on the drive home with stories of the sitter’s trustworthiness.

Kim felt ridiculous for her anxiety once they arrived at Adam’s house. The sitter reported that Cody had slept through the entire evening. Kim checked on him, and found him still sound asleep, peacefully curled up with his monkey in Liam s bed.

Jessie went over to her own house to “check on the kittens,” she said, but she returned shortly, and although she was cheerful and agreeable, she seemed determined to foil any attempts at intimacy between her brother and Kim for that night. Kim finally went home around eleven.

The following night, though, Adam escaped from his chaperone and stayed at Kim’s apartment. They spent the evening playing board games and watching a movie on TV. They spent Sunday together as well, Adam showing her sights around Annapolis she hadn’t yet taken the time to explore. As Sunday night approached, though, and Adam gave no indication of going home, Kim finally had to tell him she needed some time alone.

“You needed to be alone last Sunday night, too,” Adam said. It didn’t sound like a complaint, but she thought she detected some hurt behind the words.

“I just like to have some time for myself once in awhile,” she said.

“I bet I know how you spend your Sunday nights,” Adam said. “You probably pamper yourself, right? You take a long bath with exotic oils in the water. You sip herbal tea and lather cream on your skin.”

“How did you know?” she asked, and he didn’t press her further. She could hardly tell him that she spent Sunday nights lying in bed, the radio playing on the shelf behind her head, with her mind—and her heart—two thousand miles away from Annapolis. She was having an affair with a voice on the radio.

She lay in her bed that night as she waited for the start of Linc’s show, trying to form an image of his face in her mind. She wished she’d saved a picture of him. Even when he’d been in prison, she’d had pictures of him to hold on to and visits with him every month. Now, her memory of his face was beginning to blur.

‘Song for the Asking’ came on the radio, and she closed her eyes to wait for Linc’s voice. But before he even bothered to greet his listeners, he played the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie,” and she sat up straight in the bed.

“I’m awake, Linc,” she said, as she tuned in the station more clearly. She was impatient as she waited out the rest of the song. She knew without a doubt that he was playing it for her. He never played the Everly Brothers on his show.

“Good evening, everyone,” Linc said, in his slow, easy radio voice.

She could immediately see him again in her mind’s eye. His blue eyes, his high cheekbones and shaggy blond hair.

“Got a lot of requests this week, from all over the country,” Linc said. “Requests from Leslie Potters…and James Abbott…and S.T.U. Downe.”

Kim grinned to herself. He rarely read the names of his requesters. He was letting her know. Not only had he received her fax, he was saying, he had understood it, and he knew she was listening right now. Although she knew he’d taped this show four days earlier, she felt more connected to him than she had since she’d left Boulder.

“Some songs for Ms. Downe,” he said, and he opened with “Philadelphia” by Bruce Springsteen. She hadn’t requested “Philadelphia,” and he didn’t ordinarily play Springsteen. He had to be trying to communicate something to her.

She grabbed her sketch pad from under the bed and wrote down the song title and a few of the lines which seemed as though they might have some sort of meaning. Did he think that’s where she was? Philadelphia?

Next he played Simon and Garfunkel’s “At the Zoo.” Frowning, she wrote it down.

Then “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and she thought she was beginning to understand. Was there a zoo in Philadelphia? When he played “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting,” she laughed out loud. Did he mean next Saturday? And how would she know what time? The lion sleeps tonight. Was the zoo open at night?

But then he played “Five O’clock World,” by the Vogues.

“Yes!” She laughed.

Linc finally spoke again. “Those were all for Ms. Downe,” he said. “And now we’ll move on to Leslie Potters’s selections.”

Kim continued to listen, to write down every song, every odd turn of phrase, but it was apparent that Linc was simply covering his tracks, not wanting anyone to be able to put two and two together. The music Leslie Potters and his other listeners had requested were a melange of songs more typical of
Songs for the Asking
. Old Joan Baez and Tim Hardin and Tom Paxton. Linc’s listeners had to be wondering why S.T.U. Downe had ever tuned in to the Linc Sebastian show in the first place.

She looked down at her pad again. Unless she was reading him completely wrong, Linc was asking her to meet him the following Saturday, at five o’clock, at the lion enclosure at the Philadelphia zoo. She had one single tiny fear that it might be a setup of some sort. Perhaps he was being coerced. Maybe they’d bargained with him. If they thought he was aiding and abetting her, could they threaten him with jail time again if he didn’t cooperate to help them find her? Or maybe Linc himself was convinced that she’d done a terrible, criminal, insane thing and he would have the cops waiting there for her at the lion enclosure. Or worse, the men in the white coats. He’d had her locked up once before. But he would never betray her. If there was anyone in the world she could still trust, it was Linc. What she didn’t trust completely was her own judgment. She knew that the thought of seeing him was sapping her reason, but she didn’t care.

Tomorrow she would buy a map of Philadelphia.

PEGGY HATED SUNDAYS. SHE
hated weekends, actually, because she couldn’t talk to the man who was working on Tyler’s case at the National Agency for Missing Children. She couldn’t talk to the police, or to Bill Anderson, either; that is, she wasn’t supposed to. She did call Bill yesterday, though, to ask him if he’d checked Susanna’s health insurance records again and if he’d thought of looking up her old friends from high school. Jim had Susanna’s yearbook from her junior year, she told him. She’d been reading the things people had written to her, personal notes that made Susanna sound quiet and sweet natured. Maybe she’d kept in touch with some of those old friends.

Bill didn’t appreciate being bothered on a Saturday, and he let her know it. She backed down with an apology. The last thing she wanted to do was alienate any of the people who were supposed to be helping them find Tyler, but she was disgusted with herself for her weakness. She was changing, and the change was not for the better. Her entire life, she’d been strong and capable, someone who took action, who righted wrongs. Now she’d been reduced to a timid, ineffectual woman who was expected to wait around for others to solve her problems. And it was taking those others entirely too long. No one cared as much as she and Jim did about getting Tyler home. She worried that she was not putting enough of her own effort, her own brain cells, into finding him.

Jim took her to an afternoon movie in an attempt to “get her mind off things.” She still didn’t understand how her husband could simply block the situation with Tyler from his thoughts with such ease. He turned everything over to the authorities, put his trust in them, and then concentrated on his day-to-day workload. Peggy, on the other hand, was fairly useless on the two days a week she was spending at Legal Aid. She wondered if she could still call herself a good lawyer.

When they got home from the movie, the plot of which she could not have recounted for any amount of money, she made dinner while Jim did some work he’d brought home with him. She left him parked in front of his computer while she boiled water for rice and turned on the radio. In five minutes, Linc’s show would be on.

She was sautéing chicken breasts when she decided there was something strange about Linc’s show tonight. True, she’d only been listening faithfully to the program since Tyler’s disappearance, but she’d never before heard Linc name the people from whom he’d received requests. And he usually had a theme to his program, some featured musician or a certain type of music. Tonight’s music was a mishmash, some of it rock and roll instead of the old and mellow folk-type songs he usually played. And he played “Wake Up Little Susie.” And a little later, “Fire and Rain,” with the line “Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you,” and that’s when she turned off the burner under the chicken and ran upstairs to Jim’s study.