The Great Escape

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  The old ferryboat, painted black with highway yellow striping, smelled of mildew, rope, and spent fuel. A dozen passengers boarded with her. One of them, a college kid hauling a backpack, tried to strike up a conversation by asking where she went to school. She told him she’d dropped out of Memphis State and walked away, her heavy combat boots thumping on the deck.

  She stayed in the bow for the rest of the trip, watching the island gradually materialize in the fading light. It was shaped like a reclining dog—head at one end, harbor where its belly would be, lighthouse raised like a stubby tail at the other end. The island lay fifteen miles out in Lake Michigan, according to a tourist brochure. It was ten miles long by two miles wide with a year-round population of three hundred, a number that jumped into the thousands during the summer. According to its chamber of commerce, Charity Island offered visitors secluded beaches, pristine woods, fishing and hunting, as well as cross-country skiing and snowmobiling in the winter, but she only cared about finding answers to her questions.

  The ferry bumped against the dock. She headed below to get her rental car. She had friends all over the country—all over the world—who would have given her a place to stay. Yet here she was, getting ready to disembark on an island in the Great Lakes on the strength of nothing more than a farewell kiss and a resident ferry pass. She pulled the ignition key from her backpack and told herself she had nothing better to do with her time, which wasn’t quite true. She had amends to make, a life to rebuild, but since she didn’t know how to do either, here she was.

  The harbor was filled with charter fishing boats, modest pleasure craft, and an ancient tug anchored near a small barge. She drove down the ramp into a gravel parking lot bordered by a sign reading MUNICIPAL DOCKS. The two-lane main street—optimistically named Beachcomber Boulevard—held an assortment of stores, some weather-beaten, others spruced up with bright colors and kitschy window displays to attract the tourists—Jerry’s Trading Post, McKinley’s Market, some restaurants, a couple of fudge shops, a bank, and a fire station. Sandwich boards propped along the road advertised the services of fishing guides, and Jake’s Dive Shop invited visitors to “Explore Nearby Shipwrecks.”

  Now that she was here, she had no idea where to go. She pulled into a parking lot next to a bar named The Sandpiper. Once she got inside, it wasn’t hard to pick out the locals from the sunburned tourists, who had the glazed look of people who’d squeezed too much into one day. While they clustered around the small wooden tables, the locals sat at the bar.

  She approached the bartender, who eyed her suspiciously. “We card here.”

  If she hadn’t lost her sense of humor, she’d have laughed. “Then how about a Sprite?”

  When he brought her drink, she said, “I’m supposed to be staying at this guy’s place, but I lost his address. You know a dude named Panda?”

  The locals looked up from their drinks.

  “I might,” the bartender said. “How do you know him?”

  “He … did some work for this friend of mine.”

  “What kind of work?”

  That was when she discovered Viper had no manners. “You know him or not?”

  The bartender shrugged. “Seen him around sometimes.” He went off to help another customer.

  Fortunately a couple of seniors seated at the other end of the bar were more garrulous. “He showed up here a couple of years ago and bought the old Remington place out on Goose Cove,” one said. “He’s not on the island. I know for a fact he didn’t come by plane, and if he’d been on the ferry or a charter, one of us would of heard about it.”

  Finally a piece of luck. Maybe she could get her questions answered without having to see him again.

  The old man rested his forearm on the bar. “He don’t talk much. Kind of standoffish. Never heard what he does for a living.”

  “Yeah, that’s the way he is,” Viper said. “Is Goose Cove far from here?”

  “Island’s only ten miles long,” his pal replied. “Nothing’s too far from here, although some places are harder to get to than others.”

  Their directions involved a confusing number of turns, as well as locating a boat shed, a dead tree, and a boulder somebody named Spike had spray-painted with a peace sign. Fifteen minutes after she left the bar, she was hopelessly lost. She drove aimlessly for a while and eventually managed to get back to the main road, where she stopped at a bait shop that was closing up for the night and got another set of directions, almost equally confusing.

  It was getting dark by the time she spotted the battered mailbox with the name REMINGTON faintly visible on the driftwood sign above it. She turned off the road into the potholed drive and parked in front of a double set of garage doors.

  The big, rambling beach house had started life as a Dutch Colonial, but over the years, it had been haphazardly expanded with a porch here, a bay there, another porch, a short wing. Its weathered shingles were the color of old driftwood, and twin chimneys poked from its jumbled roofs. She couldn’t believe it belonged to Panda. This was a house designed for families—a place for sunburned kids to chase their cousins up from the beach, for moms to trade family gossip while their husbands fired up the charcoal grill, where grandparents stole naps on a shady porch and dogs lazed in the sun. Panda belonged in a run-down fishing cabin, not at a place like this. But the address checked out, and the men had been clear about the name Remington.

  An unimpressive front door stood to the right of a two-car garage. On the landing, a chipped clay flowerpot held some dead soil and a faded American flag from a long-forgotten Fourth of July. The door was locked. She followed an overgrown path around the side toward the water, where she discovered the heart of the house—a sprawling screen porch, an open deck, and rows of windows facing a sheltered cove with Lake Michigan just beyond.

  She made her way back around the house looking for a way to get in, but everything was locked. She’d seen a couple of inns while she was driving around, some guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts, so there were plenty of places to stay. But first she wanted to see inside.

  She reached through a piece of torn porch screening and unfastened the hook latch on the door. The boards creaked as she wove between some chaise longues with mildewed canvas cushions that had once been a bright marine blue. A broken wind chime made of spoons hung crookedly in one corner, an abandoned cooler sat in another. The door to the house was locked, but that didn’t stop Viper. She broke one of the small glass panes with a rusted garden trowel, reached inside, and opened the lock.

  The musty scent of a closed-up house met her as she stepped into an old-fashioned kitchen. At some point, the tall wooden cabinets had been unwisely painted institutional green. They still bore what were surely the original cup handles and matching drawer pulls. An exceptionally ugly fake Victorian table sat in a breakfast nook too small for its size. The scarred white laminate counter held an old microwave, a new coffeemaker, a knife block, and a salt crock stuffed with bent spatulas and scorched plastic spoons. A ceramic pig dressed like a French waiter sat by the sink.

  She turned on some lights and explored the downstairs, walking through a living room and a sunroom and sticking her head into a musty den before ending up in a large first-floor bedroom. The queen-size bed had a navy-and-white-patterned spread, end tables shaped like cable spools, a triple dresser, and two unmatched upholstered chairs. A pair of cheaply framed Andrew Wyeth prints hung on the wall. The closet held a windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, and a Detroit Lions ball cap. The sizes seemed about right to belong to Panda, but that was hardly conclusive proof that she’d broken into the right house.

  The attached bathroom with its outdated robin’s-egg-blue ceramic tile and fresh white shower curtain was no more revealing. She hesitated, then opened the medicine cabinet. Toothpaste, dental floss, Advil, an Atra razor.

  She went back to the kitchen and inspected the one object that was out of place, a state-of-the-art German coffeemaker, exactly the sort of thing a highly paid professio
nal bodyguard who loved good coffee might own. It was what she discovered in the refrigerator, however, that convinced her she’d found the right place. On a nearly empty shelf, she spotted a jar of orange marmalade, exactly the same brand she’d seen Panda slather on her homemade bread.

  “Real men eat grape jelly,” she’d said when she’d seen him pick up an identical jar at the grocery near Caddo Lake. “I’m serious, Panda. If you buy orange marmalade, you have to turn in your man card.”

  “It’s what I like. Deal with it.”

  The refrigerator also held two six-packs of Coke. No beer. She’d spent countless highway miles thinking about that first morning when she’d awakened by the lake and seen the pile of empties from the six-pack Panda had bought the previous night. What kind of bodyguard drank when he was on duty? But try as she might, the only real drinking she’d witnessed involved his taking a few slugs before she’d gone into the trees and the sight of him draining the bottle when she came out. Then there was the six-pack he’d set on the dresser their first night in that motel. How much of it had she really seen him drink? Not more than a couple of sips. As for their time at Caddo Lake … He’d only drunk Coke.

  She glanced toward the stairs that led to the second floor but couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for investigating. It was fully dark now, and she still needed to find a place to stay. But she didn’t want to go anywhere. She wanted to sleep right here in this big spooky house with its memories of summers past.

  She returned to the main-floor bedroom. Ugly vertical blinds covered sliding doors that led to an open deck, and a sawed-off broomstick resting in the door track provided the only security. After more snooping, she found a stack of the same low-cut boxer briefs he’d bought during their shopping trip, along with a pair of black and white board shorts for swimming. She retrieved her things from the car, locked the bedroom’s outer door to keep the wild things away, and settled in.

  Unexplained creaks disturbed her sleep, and toward morning, a troubling dream had her running through a house with too many rooms but no way out. The dream awakened her.

  The room was cool, but her T-shirt stuck to her skin. Early morning light trickled through the vertical blinds. She stretched, then shot up in bed as she heard the click of a latch.

  A boy came through the door she’d locked before she’d fallen asleep. “Get out,” she gasped.

  He seemed as shocked to see her as she was to see him, but he recovered faster. His wide eyes narrowed into a belligerent glare, as if she were the interloper.

  She swallowed hard. Sat up. What if she was in the wrong house after all?

  He wore a baggy pair of none-too-clean gray athletic shorts, a bright yellow T-shirt printed with an electric guitar, and scuffed sneakers without socks. He was African-American, his skin a couple of shades lighter than her brother Andre’s. Small and scrawny—maybe ten or eleven—he had short, nappy hair, knobby knees, gangly arms, and a hostile expression designed to proclaim his toughness to the world. It might have worked if his antagonism hadn’t been sabotaged by an extraordinary set of thickly lashed, golden-brown eyes.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, thrusting out his chin.

  She thought fast. “Panda said I could stay.”

  “He didn’t say anything to Gram about it.”

  So this was the right house after all. Although her brain had recovered from the shock of his appearance, the rest of her hadn’t stopped shaking. “He didn’t mention you, either,” she said. “Who are you?”

  But even as she asked the question, she suspected she knew the answer. This was Panda’s kid. And Panda’s beautiful, pregnant, African-American wife was in the kitchen right now, getting the place opened up for the family’s annual summer vacation, while his mother-in-law loaded the refrigerator with the groceries they’d bought on the way. All of which meant that Lucy, who’d won two good citizenship awards in high school and been president of the student body her senior year in college, was an adulterer.

  “I’m Toby.” He practically spit out his name. “Who are you?”

  She had to ask. “You’re Panda’s son?”

  “Yeah, right. You don’t know him at all, do you? You’re some druggie from the mainland, and you broke in here because you was scared to sleep on the beach.”

  His scorn was a relief. “I’m not a druggie,” she said. “My name is … It’s Viper.” The word rolled off her lips, sang in her head. She wanted to say it again. Instead, she slid her legs over the side of the bed and glanced toward the door. “Why did you break in my bedroom?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be locked.” He scratched the back of his calf with the toe of his opposite sneaker. “My gram takes care of this place. She saw your car and sent me over to see who was here.”

  She refrained from pointing out that “Gram” was the world’s lousiest housekeeper. From what she’d seen, the floors had been swept only in the middle, and Gram’s dusting hadn’t included more than a few tabletops. “Meet me in the kitchen, Toby. We’ll talk there.” She straightened her twisted pajama shorts and got out of bed.

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “Go ahead,” she countered. “I’ll call Panda and tell him a ten-year-old kid broke into his bedroom.”

  His golden brown eyes grew indignant. “I’m not ten! I’m twelve.”

  “My mistake.”

  He shot her a hostile glare and sauntered out of the room before she could figure out how to ask him if he happened to know Panda’s real name. By the time she got to the kitchen, he’d disappeared.

  THE UPSTAIRS BEDROOMS HAD SLOPING ceilings, mismatched furniture, and a hodgepodge of old draperies. A large dormitory extended the width of the house, the light seeping through its dusty windows revealing four sets of scarred bunk beds with thin, striped mattresses rolled up at the footboards. Sand from long-ago summers still lodged in some of the floorboard cracks, and she imagined wet bathing suits abandoned wherever they’d been dropped. The house seemed to be waiting for the Remingtons to return from their life in Grand Rapids or Chicago or wherever they came from. What had possessed Panda to buy a place like this? And what possessed her to want to stay?

  She carried the coffee she’d made in his fancy machine out the back door into the yard. The morning was sunny and the sky clear. The clean air brought back memories of precious mornings at Camp David, the sight of her sisters chasing one another around the stone pool deck at the Aspen Lodge, her parents setting off on a hike, just the two of them. Here an old oak sheltered a splintered picnic table, and a metal stake waited for a game of horseshoes. She curled her fingers around the coffee mug and breathed in the crisp lake air.

  The house sat on a bluff with a long flight of rickety wooden steps leading down to an old boathouse and dock, both of them weathered a soft, sea gray. She couldn’t see any other docks jutting from the rocky, tree-lined shore or any neighboring rooftops peeking through the canopy. The Remington house seemed to be the only one on Goose Cove.

  The water in the cove was a painter’s palette of colors, dark blue at the center, a grayer blue toward the edges, with streaks of tan marking the shoreline and the top of a sandbar. As the cove emptied into Lake Michigan, the morning sun flung silver spangles over the rippling surface.

  A pair of sailboats reminded her uncomfortably of her grandfather, who loved to sail. She knew she couldn’t postpone it any longer. She set aside her coffee mug, reached for her cell, and finally called him.

  Even before she heard the patrician voice of James Litchfield, she knew exactly what the former vice president of the United States would say. “Lucille, I do not approve of what you’re doing. I don’t approve at all.”

  “That’s a surprise.”

  “You know I detest sarcasm.”

  She tugged on the orange dread dangling near her ear. “Has it been awful?”

  “It hasn’t been pleasant, but Mat seems to have the press under control.” His tone grew even colder. “And I suppose you’re
calling me because you want me to somehow aid and abet.”

  “I’ll bet you would if I asked you to.” Her eyes stung.

  “You are so much like your mother.”

  He didn’t say it as if it were a compliment, but she thanked him anyway. And then, before he could light into her, she pointed out what they both knew. “Running away made Nealy a better person. I’m sure it’ll do the same for me.”

  “You’re sure of no such thing,” he snapped. “You simply don’t know what to do next, and you don’t want to face the consequences of your actions.”

  “That, too.” She said to him what she hadn’t been able to say to her parents. “I dumped the perfect man, and I’m not even sure why.”

  “I’m certain you had your reasons, but I wish you’d done it before I was forced to fly to Texas. You know how I detest that state.”

  “Only because you couldn’t carry it. The election was almost thirty years ago. Maybe you should get over it?”

  He harrumphed around, then said, “How long do you intend for this vacation of yours to last?”

  “I don’t know. A week? Maybe more.”

  “And I’m sure you won’t tell me where you are.”

  “If I told you, you might be forced to lie about it. Not that you aren’t really good at it, but why put an old man in that position?”

  “You are the most disrespectful child.”

  She smiled. “I know. I love you, too, Gramps.” He hated it when she called him Gramps, but it was payback for that “Lucille.” “I’m staying at a friend’s house on an island in the Great Lakes,” she said. “But then you probably already know that.” If he didn’t, he would soon, since she’d paid for that rental car with her credit card, and her loving parents were almost certainly keeping track.