The Escape Artist (6 page)

Jim cupped his hand over the receiver. “He says she knew I was going to pick him up today. She was dreading it and—” He removed his hand from the receiver. “What, Linc? All right, good. I’ll be there in twenty minutes,”

Jim hung up the phone. His face was pinched and white. “Linc sounds worried himself.”

“Oh, God,” Peggy said. “If she did anything to Tyler, I’ll—”

“Hold on, Peg. No point in borrowing trouble.”

“You’re going over there?”

“Yes.” Jim reached for his car keys on the counter. “He has a key to her apartment, so he’ll meet me over there in twenty minutes and we can make sure there’s—you know, nothing wrong.”

“I’m coming too.”

“No.”

“Yes, Jim, I am.” She grabbed her sweater, and he didn’t object as she followed him out to the car.

Neither of them spoke on the ride to Susanna’s apartment complex on the other side of town. Peggy was afraid to give words to her fears. They reached the apartment a little after six and parked on the street.

Linc pulled up in his van as they were getting out of the car. He looked more like himself now than he had in court. The small loop earring was back in his ear again, and he was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved, dark green jersey. Well, his conservative get-up in court hadn’t helped him much.

“Did you ring the bell?” Linc asked.

“We just got here,” Jim said.

They followed Linc to the front security door of the complex and watched as he rang the buzzer for Susanna’s apartment.

“Someone let me in earlier,” Jim said. “I went up and knocked on her door, but there was no answer.”

When it became apparent that no one was going to respond to the buzzer, Linc slipped his key into the lock. They followed him up the stairs to a long hallway where he knocked on the first door to his right. Peggy had never been here before. The hallway was dark and smelled of mildew.

She realized she was holding her breath as she watched Linc unlock the door. He poked his head inside. “Susanna?”

She and Jim followed him into the apartment. The living room was small, but neat and uncluttered, and Peggy felt relief. She realized she’d been expecting to find Susanna and Tyler lying in a pool of blood.

“You two stay here,” Linc said.

Jim started to protest, but Peggy took her husband’s arm and nodded toward the sofa. Linc scared her a little, and she thought they should go along with whatever he said. She sat down on the sofa as he walked into the kitchen, but Jim paced back and forth between the window and the entrance to the hallway.

“There’s got to be a simple explanation for this,” he said, peering down the hall. “I can’t believe that Susanna would have the gumption to defy a court order.”

Peggy pressed her hands together in her lap and bit her lip to keep from speaking. For the first time, she was wondering if Jim had ever really known his ex-wife.

THERE WAS NOTHING OUT
of order in the kitchen, but Linc did not have a good feeling about this situation. He had to force himself to walk into the master bedroom. The curtains were open and there was still a splash of sunlight on Susanna’s neatly made bed. No sign of anything out of place. The bathroom looked clean and orderly, and he felt a relief he did not want to give a name to. He hadn’t really expected her to harm herself, though. She was not the same person she’d been when Jim left her, and he couldn’t imagine her trying to take her own life at this point. But where was she, then? What the hell was going on?

Tyler’s room was on the other side of the hall and the first thing that greeted Linc was the mural she’d painted on the wall across from the crib—a large, colorful rendition of Noah’s Ark. She’d painted it a few months earlier, terrified that her landlord would have a fit when he discovered it. He stood in the middle of the small room and turned slowly in a circle. Nothing missing or out of the ordinary, as far as he could tell. Except…He frowned at the changing table. She usually put Tyler’s diaper bag there, but the changing table was bare. That didn’t mean much, he told himself. He checked the crib. Tyler’s monkey was gone, but that made sense. Wherever Tyler was, he’d have his monkey with him. It would have been more ominous to find the monkey alone in the crib.

Back in Susanna’s bedroom, he checked her closet where she kept her old duffel bag. It was not there.

Susanna
, he thought, incredulous.
You didn’t
.

“Linc?” Peggy called from the living room. “Have you found anything?”

“No,” he called back. He knew he’d have to let them see for themselves. He was walking past the bathroom again when he noticed a small, reddish brown smear on the countertop. He froze. Blood? He stared at it for a minute. Hair dye. He knew that’s what it was. Knew it beyond any shadow of a doubt, and he took a few sheets of toilet paper, wet them, wiped the stain away, and slipped the damp paper into his jeans pocket. Starting right then, he began looking not so much for clues to her disappearance as for clues she might have left behind that someone else might find. There was a pain in his heart, but it was born of understanding. He went back to the living room, forcing himself to keep his face expressionless.

Jim, arms folded, was leaning against the wall by the window. Peggy stood up from the sofa, the look on her face so frightened and worried that he could not help but feel an instant of sympathy for her.

“There’s no sign of her,” he said. “The apartment looks perfectly normal. I don’t see Tyler’s diaper bag or his monkey, but otherwise, everything seems to be in place.”

“I told you we should have gotten him last night,” Jim said to his wife.

“You were right,” Peggy said. “I just thought she should have one last night with him. I never thought she’d—”

“Is she at your place?” Jim looked at Linc with what had to be hatred.

“Sure,” he said. “She’s at my place and I’m snooping around here for my health.”

Jim scowled at him. “I want to look around myself, and then I’m getting the police on the phone,” he said. He walked into the kitchen, calling back over his shoulder. “And you don’t go anywhere.”

Linc could barely tolerate Jim’s pomposity. The man was a walking ego. But he managed to swallowed his annoyance as he sat down next to Peggy to wait for Jim’s return.

“When did you talk to her last?” Peggy asked. “Did you see her this morning?”

“I spoke to her last night.” He had tried to call her several times today. He hadn’t really been worried, though. She was often out walking Tyler or running errands. He was still stunned by the realization that she’d taken off without telling him. He hadn’t thought she was that gutsy.

“When was the last time you talked to her?” Jim asked as he walked back into the room.

“Last night,” Peggy answered for him. “What did the police say?”

“They’re sending someone over here.” He turned to Linc again. “Did she say anything about going away?”

“Not a word.”

Jim raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t believe him, and Linc could easily picture him in a courtroom, grilling a witness.

“No hint?” Jim asked. “Nothing? What sort of mood was she in?”

“Oh, she was in a great mood. She couldn’t wait to give her baby away.”

“Cut the sarcasm, all right?” Jim said. “You’d better get used to answering questions because I have the feeling you’re going to be getting plenty of them.”

“She was down,” Linc said. “Quiet. Exactly what you’d expect from a mother who’d been told she has to give up the child she loves.”

“Linc,” Peggy pleaded. “The judge made the right decision. I’m sorry you don’t see it that way but it was the only sane decision anyone could possibly make.”

“Spare me.” Linc stood up and walked to the window. As soon as he was out of here, he was buying a pack of cigarettes.

He saw the police car pull up outside and let out a long sigh. Jim was probably right; he was going to have to face a torrent of questions. He was suddenly glad that Susanna had left him none of the answers.

There was just one officer, which seemed to distress Peggy and Jim no end. He was middle-aged, gray-haired, well-seasoned, and unexcitable, and he doubted that Susanna was really missing.

“In cases like this,” he said, standing in the middle of Susanna’s living room, “where someone’s been gone just a few hours, they usually turn up visiting their sister down the street.”

“She has no sister down the street,” Jim said in annoyance. “She has no family, period.”

Linc tried to play along with the officers casual demeanor. “Sure, Susanna probably bumped into a friend at the grocery store and they got to talking and she forgot she was supposed to give her baby away today.” But he knew better. Susanna had a long history of running away. Even as a child, she’d escape to the little room above his family’s garage. He knew that was her hiding place and he’d find her there, give her a little lecture about not running away from her problems, and take her home. This time was different, though. She was no longer a child, and his family no longer owned that garage. He didn’t have a clue where to look for her, and he knew she’d planned it that way.

The police officer told them to contact him again when—and if—Susanna remained missing for twenty-four hours. Linc let Jim and Peggy out of the apartment the same time the policeman left, but he remained behind. He looked through the rooms one last time, deciding to take Susanna’s photograph albums home with him. If Susanna did indeed remain missing, he didn’t want all those pictures of Tyler to end up with Jim.

It wasn’t until he was driving home that the hurt and betrayal overwhelmed him.

Why didn’t you tell me, Suze?
He pounded the steering wheel with his fist.
How could you just walk out like that?
Where did she go? Would he ever see her again?

He felt numb that night as he walked Sam down the winding street in his neighborhood, numb as he smoked a Marlboro and stared out at Boulder from the glass wall of his living room. But when he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth and get ready for bed, he saw the scrap of paper he’d taped to his mirror.

Susanna wants to hear me play “Suzanne” for her Sunday night.

Suddenly, he understood her words. His show was nationally syndicated. It reached listeners across the United States every Sunday night. No matter where Susanna was, she would be able to hear him.

He read the words again and shook his head, not certain if he should laugh or cry.

THE BUS SMELLED LIKE
the inside of a locker room by the time it reached St. Louis. People were sleeping in their cramped seats, some of them snoring, but Kim Stratton was wide awake. She had dozed off only once or twice during the night, and Cody had slept fitfully, sometimes on the seat next to her, sometimes in her lap. He was awake now but understandably cranky, confused by the upset in his routine and the strangeness of the hour. It was not quite five in the morning.

Her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had grown mushy and inedible sometime the evening before, the white bread purple where the jelly had seeped through. Her stomach was growling, and poor Cody was entirely off his schedule despite her attempts to keep him on track. Yet she was not anxious to leave the safety of the bus. She perched on the edge of her seat, looking out the window, hunting in the darkness for a police officer who might be awaiting her arrival. There were a couple of men in uniform out there, but she thought they were bus drivers. From where she sat, it was difficult to separate one uniform from another.

For the past hour, Cody had been making his screaming, yelping sounds of annoyance, those sounds he made when he wanted her to get him out of his crib and get him started on the day. Plus, he was in dire need of a change. She turned around to look apologetically at the couple riding behind them.

“Sorry he’s been so noisy this morning,” she said.

The woman smiled at her. “Too long a trip for a baby,” she said.

Kim knew the woman meant the comment sympathetically, yet she heard criticism in the words.

Her body was stiff as she worked her way down the tight aisle of the bus carrying Cody and the diaper bag. The rest of her belongings were in the belly of the bus, and once on the sidewalk, she looked anxiously over her shoulder as she waited for them to be unloaded. When she had everything she owned with her, she moved into the terminal. The lights seemed far too bright inside and her eyes hurt for a second as they adjusted. Cody, back in his stroller once again, began to howl.

“I know, baby,” she said to him. Looking around the nearly empty terminal, she spotted the ladies’ room a few yards to her right. A police officer stood in front of a takeout vendor near the room’s entrance and Kim hesitated, but the cop seemed oblivious to her. He was laughing with the woman pouring him coffee and Kim walked past him without incident.

She changed Cody in the not-too-clean rest room, then washed her face and brushed her teeth, staring in amazement at the copper-haired stranger in the mirror.

It was not even five-thirty—still dark enough to put the next part of her plan into action. She left the rest room and shoved her bags in one of the terminal’s lockers, then pushed Cody outside. The street was well-lit, but there was one dark patch near the rear of the terminal, and she headed toward the cars parked at its core. She selected one at random, pulled a small wrench from her pocket, and knelt down by the car’s front bumper to remove its license plate. Her hands trembled. She could not quite shake her guilt over what she was doing.

When she had removed both plates and slipped them behind the seat of Cody’s stroller, she walked back into the terminal. The police officer had disappeared, so she bought a cup of coffee and a stale doughnut for herself and mixed some formula for Cody. Then she bought a newspaper and sat down in the corner, relieved to see that more people were filling the terminal. She and Cody would not stand out quite so much.

Cody drank a little of the formula, but he seemed more interested in sleep now that he was back in the familiar confines of his stroller, Kim opened the paper to the used car ads. She was allotting fifteen hundred dollars to a car, and she’d decided it was safest to buy from an individual to avoid having to fill out a lot of paperwork. There were several cars that fell into that price range, and she circled two of them. An ‘85 Toyota Corolla. “Runs great,” the ad read. It was exactly fifteen hundred. The second, an ‘85 Toyota Celica was sixteen-fifty “firm,” but she liked its description: “very well-kept; a gem to drive.” Plus, it had a sunroof.