The Great Escape (3 page)

people who had worked for the Jansons for years and hiring people of

her own choice. Eventually Dee was surrounded by complete

strangers.

She had had one friend by her, though, and that was her private tutor.

Until, that was, the autumn of her sixteenth year.

The exacting and excellent tutors that Dee had had over the years had

been chosen with great care by her parents, and they, along with her

innate, quick intelligence, had made her education leap ahead of the

accepted normal rate for most teenagers. She conceived a love for

learning and knowledge, and she devoured books voraciously. It was

a very nice escapist tactic, to immerse oneself in an exciting and well

written book. It also kept her quiet and out of Judith's way. As a

result, with a ridiculous ease that had blossomed right along with her

intellect, Dee was passing college entrance exams, never batting an

eye.

That was why Judith and Howard decided that the best thing for

everyone concerned would be to pack Dee up and send her away to

college. A prestigious Eastern university had been selected, her

application sent in and her things packed without further ado. Howard

saw Dee to the airport and shook her hand before watching her board

the plane, and that was that.

As sheltered as Dee had been, gaining her education from tutors and

generally leading an isolated existence, college came as an intense,

jolting shock to her system. It had been the worst year of her life.

She was too young and inexperienced, and so achingly, desperately

lonely for companionship she could have died for it. Word got around

that she had money, and that combined with her instinctive shyness

that came across as aloofness to the other girls, along with her

extreme youth, managed to keep just about everyone away from the

small quiet blonde girl from Kentucky.

She got straight A's, full high marks for both terms, and was nearing a

collapse when summer finally came around and she was able to go

back to Kentucky. She had stopped thinking of it as home quite some

time ago. It was no relief to leave school just to get back to Judith's

increasing hostility and caustic comments, but the definite low point

in her life was when no one remembered her birthday on May the

fifteenth.

That was why, some weeks later, she was sitting in the darkness,

staring off into nothing, and seriously contemplating suicide.

She crept downstairs for a sandwich later that evening, and

impulsively stopped into the library to pick up a book to read. It might

make her feel a little better to try and immerse herself in a

make-believe existence, one with happy endings and scary plots, or

perhaps a chilling mystery to unravel and tease the mind.

It was the turning point in Dee's young life, that quick stealthy trip to

the library. That was because she happened to pick up a book about a

girl who had disappeared into thin air.

Her intelligence and imagination supplied the rest.

She was going to escape. She was going to make the greatest escape

of all time. She was going to run away from all the unhappiness and

hostility and apathy in this life and have fun, like she used to do with

her mother and father. She was going to use her intelligence to work

out the slyest, the sneakiest, the most devious way to ravel her trail so

that no one would eyer find her again. She was going to use the world

as her playground instead of viewing it as the enemy to be fought.

The world wasn't the enemy, people like Judith and Howard were.

People who didn't know how to think for themselves, or to take risks,

or to simply enjoy life with zest and enthusiasm—those were the kind

of people to avoid, and she had been living in a poisoned atmosphere

for years now.

Her mind suddenly active again, Dee plotted out her course of action.

While she watched and waited, she paid a gas station attendant to call

up the house a few times and ask for her specifically, which

convinced Judith and Howard that she was actually meeting

someone. She also used every opportunity she could to get away from

the house, refusing to tell Judith where she had been, which was like

waving a red flag under the older woman's nose. Judith ranted and

raved up and down, accusing Dee of all sorts of things, of meeting

someone on the sly, of going to wild parties, of whatever came to her

mind. Dee sat back and listened to the various lectures, and if she

didn't smile physically, she smiled in her soul.

She also wrote in deliberately childish handwriting a slightly

incoherent letter of farewell to everyone, saying that she was running

away with her boy-friend and that they were going to California. She

sprinkled a few drops of water over the page and ended the missive

on a plaintive nobody-loves-me note, signing her name in full. It took

her a while; she had been trained for years to be concise and logical in

her writing and to argue a point clearly and well. When she finally

sealed up her farewell letter, she was chuckling irrepressibly. She'd

contrived a masterpiece of nonsense!

Dee watched and waited, and the Friday she was to go to a party with

Judith and Howard, she went to the bank and withdrew all her savings

from her allowance, which was a tidy amount. She became suddenly

very ill, actually becoming violently sick (a very difficult and painful

state to achieve, she discovered, much to her own discomfort). She

obviously couldn't go to the party in such a state, so the housekeeper

was to keep an eye on her while Judith and Howard went. Dee had the

evening to herself. She waited until her aunt and uncle were - actually

gone and then got to work, trailing around in her huge bedroom in her

nightgown and ready to pop back into bed in case the housekeeper

should check on her. She packed a small canvas bag of things, she

couldn't bear to leave, along with a few clothing essentials, and called

the airport to book two flights if any were open on an evening flight to

California, to confuse the issue. It would be one more indication that

she was running away with someone else. Of course she had no

intention of being on the flight.

The one place in the entire state of Kentucky where no one would

ever think to look for her was in her own bedroom, and in Deirdre's

room was both a walk-in closet and a private bath. The house was not

only very large but also very old, and Dee had lived in that room all

her life. She knew it intimately, and she was especially familiar with

the small square opening in the roof of her closet. It led to a tiny

cubbyhole that was in the attic but was sealed off from the larger open

space by a crosswork of beams, rendering that corner of the attic

invisible. A loose board painted the same colour as her closet lay over

the square, panelled hole. It had been her favourite hiding place as a

child and her mother might have eventually thought to look there for

her, but she knew that neither Judith nor the relatively new servants

knew of its existence. Even if they thought to check it, they would

assume that it led to the attic, and they would look there. She could sit

on the board if anyone actually pressed a curious finger at it.

She pushed the board aside and hauled up everything that she was

going to take with her, plus a canister of water and food stolen from

the kitchen. She also went down to the library and picked out several

paperbacks, leisurely unlocking the front door as she went. Back in

her room she made up her bed to look as if she were still in it, propped

her farewell letter on the dressing table in front of her mirror, and

shoved the books along with a powerful flashlight and extra batteries

up into the hole.

She then jumped into swift action, tearing out of her nightdress and

yanking on sturdy clothes, fearful of being discovered. Then, to

assure herself of an escape route, she climbed out of her window and

slid down the branch of the nearby oak tree. No limbs broke and she

didn't break her own neck, so if it worked the first time, it would work

again. She stole in by the front door, locked it behind her, and stole

back upstairs. She was ready to escape.

Uncontrollable giggles assailed her as she attempted to negotiate the

cramped opening with extreme difficulty. It had never been this tight

of a squeeze, but then she had been smaller before, and hadn't so

much packed in the hole. She really had to struggle, slight as she was,

to get her hips through the tiny opening, and rather doubted that

anyone else would believe that anyone but a slight child could fit

through. She found that she was enjoying herself immensely in a way

that she hadn't for years, and the happy excitement, the thrill of

adventure, and the just plain mischievousness of it all was

exhilarating.

The uproar of the house the next morning, when she was found

missing, was quite entertaining. She munched through a breakfast of

apples as she listened to everything, holding a hand over her mouth to

keep from laughing aloud at her aunt and uncle's reaction. They were

stupefied, incredulous, and Judith was absolutely furious. Dee heard

herself called some names that she'd never heard before, and that was

sobering, but she was soon seeing the humour of the situation, since

her aunt's opinion of her didn't matter in the slightest. The noise in her

room was quite racketing, and she heard several conversations

between the police and members of the household. Everyone agreed

that the house should be searched, and a few people came up to the

attic to shine a few flashlights into corners, but as everyone

wholeheartedly believed that she was gone, it was a half-hearted

effort, and she relaxed afterwards.

When three in the morning rolled around, she slipped out of her hole

and used the bathroom quickly, refilling her water supply stealthily,

heart pounding and ears tuned. No one was up, though, and she made

it back to her hiding place uncaught.

The next day was sheer torture for her, cramped in such a confining

way and unable to make a sound. She began to understand just what

the Jews must have gone through when they had been forced into

hiding during Hitler's regime. She was bored, very stiff, and aching

all over. The day crept by agonisingly until in the late afternoon she

heard sounds coming from below that made her stiffen.

Footsteps entered her room. Someone had left the closet door open

earlier that day and she could hear everything quite clearly. Judith

was speaking. 'I'm so glad you were available, Mr Carridine. Yes, this

is her room. Everything is just about how we found it, even the bed.'

A deep, masculine voice answered her. 'Where's the letter that she

left? May I see it, please? .. . Thank you.' There was silence for a few

moments while he apparently perused the contents of the missive, and

when he spoke again his voice was overtly polite but with undertones

of sarcasm that Dee caught, even through a layer of wood. 'Mrs

Kimble, does this letter strike you at all as being odd?'

Dee sat up straight in the darkness and pricked up her ears. She had

met Mike Carridine only once before, and that had been a few years

ago, when he had been hired to find a missing document for her

guardians. He had been quick, methodical, and highly intelligent, and

she remembered vividly what he looked like. He was big, very big.

He also had a way of looking right through a person as if he could tell

what they were thinking by staring into their eyes. She somehow had

thought he could, too, and she cursed her luck at having someone like

him on her trail. She had the impression that he would be a

formidable opponent and she didn't want to cross wits with

him.Judith was answering, 'Why, I don't know what you mean.'

His low, pleasant voice replied, 'How old is Deirdre?'

There was a silence as Judith hesitated, and then, 'Seventeen, I

believe. Yes, she is seventeen.'

'Her own guardian isn't sure?' Dee could imagine him with his eyes

sardonic and one eyebrow cocked. She had seen him do that once,

those years before, and it had made quite an impression on her.

'Doesn't it strike you as being odd, Mrs Kimble, that a highly

intelligent girl who had just made straight A's at one of the most

demanding and prestigious universities in the country would write

such a pack of nonsense?'

'I'd never thought of it before.' Judith was sounding flustered.

Footsteps sounded as if someone were pacing the room.

'Apparently, Mrs Kimble, there's a lot that you don't know about your