The Escape Diaries: Life and Love on the Lam

by Juliet Rosetti

  I held the shampoo bottle under the tap and filled it to the brim with water, making no attempt to keep my boobs covered. If Mr. Seeker-of-Truth got interested enough, he might forget he was supposed to be keeping me prisoner and start thinking about something else. Get him to come a little closer and I’d give him War and Peace; I’d smack him in the gonads with the bottle of Head and Shoulders, then I’d step over his writhing body and make my escape.

  I was tired of thinking of him as Moose. “What’s your name, anyway?” I asked.

  “Labeck.”

  “Labeck. So that’s what—Canadian?”

  Ignoring my question, he asked, “What happened to your wrists?”

  Ugly red gashes braceleted my wrists, souvenirs of the Sunnybrook Farm torture chamber. I shrugged. So many nasty things had happened since I’d escaped, I could barely keep track of my cuts and scrapes.

  “You didn’t try to—”

  “Slash my wrists?” Anger boiled up in me. I’d come within an inch of being sexually assaulted by a sex-crazed yokel, and now Moron Number Two thought I’d tried to slit my wrists? “Yup. Suicide by baling wire.”

  “Those cuts need disinfecting.” Rummaging through his medicine cabinet, he found a bottle of first-aid spray. He stepped toward the tub. “Hold out your hands.”

  To hell with that. Snatching the bottle out of his hands, I first-aided myself, splashing a molecule or two of the liquid onto my wrists. I didn’t trust antiseptic stuff. Get a scrape at Taycheedah and they treated you with a caustic solution that felt like salt rubbed into an open wound.

  “You’re not using enough antiseptic,” Labeck pointed out. “A big, tough convict like you is scared of a little sting?”

  I scowled. Keep it up. Let’s see how the little sting feels when I squirt it in your eye.

  Before I could consider eye squirting as an escape strategy, Labeck said, “You’re starting to get pruney. Let’s get you out.”

  Let’s get you oot. You can take the guy out of the tundra, but . . .

  I was willing to bet my secret decoder ring that the big lout was Canadian. Evidence A: the Manitoba cap. I was probably one of the few Americans who knew that Manitoba was not somewhere in Montana. Evidence B: The dead giveaway oot. I’d spent six weeks in Montreal during junior year of college and that was how Canadians talked. Oot. Get oot of the warteh.

  He took a towel out of a cupboard. It was the kind of towel men like: sheet-sized, white, no frou-frou. He bent and all in one easy movement yanked the shampoo bottle out of my hand and hauled me out of the water. So much for my gonad-whacking plans. In seconds I was all mummied up in the towel. Labeck unlocked the bathroom door. Keeping me close, he steered me to his kitchen and shoved me into a chair.

  “Move a single eyeball toward that knife block,” he growled, “and I tie you to that chair.”

  Escape tip #11:

  Whiskey is the best anesthetic.

  I sat, too excited at the prospect of food to cause trouble. Labeck opened his refrigerator, took out a frozen pizza, and popped it in the microwave. I gazed around the kitchen checking for telltale signs of serial killer syndrome: suspicious stains on the rugs, surgical instruments in the knife block, bone fragments in the dish drainer. It was an ordinary-looking kitchen with lots of white appliances and a big round pedestal table possibly inherited from a great-grandparent. Labeck took two cans of ginger ale out of the refrigerator, popped them both, and handed me one. I took a gulp, experiencing a rush as the tiny bubbles fizzed up my nose. Go a long time without carbonated beverages and you learn to appreciate life’s little pleasures. I belched in a spectacularly unladylike way.

  “How long since you ate?” Labeck asked.

  I had to think. “Not counting jelly beans? Two days.”

  Labeck opened the fridge again, took out a round plastic container, and set it in front of me. It was a divided veggie tray, the kind supermarkets sell to people who don’t have time for a lot of fiddly peeling and chopping. Broccoli, cherry tomatoes, celery, and baby carrots, served with a tiny container of dill dip. The vegetables were crisp and fresh. In prison we never had fresh veggies. They were always out of a can, cooked to mealy mush. We will serve no pea before its time.

  I left the tomatoes alone. Everything else I wolfed down like a starving hyena snatching a kill away from lions. My mother would have been aghast that I hadn’t said thank you, but I figured that captives had no obligation to be polite to their captors.

  A prisoner’s first duty is to escape. I’d read that in a book about a World War Two prisoner of war camp and was totally on board with that program. Rations first, though. Can’t go digging tunnels on an empty stomach.

  Labeck leaned back against the counter and watched as I stuffed. “Don’t like tomatoes?”

  “They fight back.”

  He picked up an innocent-looking cherry tomato and bit into it. Seeds and juice squirted out, dribbling down his shirtfront. He looked extremely stupid. I laughed out loud. Couldn’t help it; the chortle just bubbled up, as unstoppable as a fart. I tried to disguise it as a cough. This man might have the desiccated remains of a dozen women stashed in his closets and I didn’t want to be the thirteenth. He turned and reached for something behind him, possibly a garrote to strangle me for daring laugh at him.

  Not a garrote. A ceramic cookie jar shaped like a pumpkin. He plunked it onto the table. “Help yourself.”

  Oreos! Real, live Oreos, no mistaking those decadently dark circles of crisp chocolate layered with creamy white frosting. Dessert before the meal—this guy was a rule bender for sure. Possibly that could work in my favor. I felt a tiny flicker of hope. If he’d intended to kill me, he would already have done so, wouldn’t he?

  No. I quashed the flicker. Maybe he was an eat-first-dismember-later guy.

  Labeck watched as I demolished a cookie in two bites.

  “My girlfriend always took the cookie apart and licked the filling. Sometimes she didn’t even eat the cookie part.”

  He had a girlfriend. That made him seem normal. On the other hand, he’d used the past tense. She might have infuriated him by licking the filling first. Maybe her rotting body lay beneath the floorboards. Did I dare ask him whether his girlfriend was still alive?

  No. Dangerous territory. I took another Oreo, recalling a survival tip I’d picked up in prison. To fend off an assault, make yourself as unattractive as possible. I chewed the cookie but allowed the crumbs and gunk to stay on my teeth.

  The grimy teeth bit wasn’t working. Labeck wasn’t averting his eyes. And he had a one-track mind; he studied me cooly before reverting to his truth-seeking quest. “That nanny cam tape,” he said. “If it wasn’t you, who was it?”

  I chewed on another Oreo. “I don’t know. Nobody else could have been in our house.”

  “You’re certain of that? Where were you when your husband was shot?”

  “In our guest bedroom. Asleep.”

  Labeck cocked an eyebrow. “You and your husband—what was his name again—Kip? You didn’t . . . uh . . . sleep together?”

  “Not after I found out he was bonking Miss Upper Crust.”

  “The other woman.”

  This was good. Talking to the bad guy was good. Rule number two for staying alive in the clutches of a potential psycho killer: Get him to see you as a person. The more he learned about you, the harder it would be for him to carve out your heart and stick it in the freezer between the microwave burritos and the Klondike bars. So I prattled on, Mazie the motormouth.

  “It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d picked someone predictable—a lingerie model or yoga instructor. Instead he went for Prentice Stodgemore. God—even her name was boring. We’d see her at parties. I’d be pigging out on the angels on horseback—”

  “The what?”

  “Oysters wrapped in bacon.” Probably Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t know his appetizers either. “But Prentice would be nibbling from a baggie of carrot sticks she brought along. I guess she was terrifie
d she might blimp up to a size two.”

  Labeck looked startled. “Is there such a thing?”

  I tried to imagine what it must be like belonging to a gender that never worried about fitting into its pants.

  “Trust me on that. Anyway, Kip started seeing Miss Trust Fund when they both served on some charity board. I guess wiping out illiteracy or saving the rain forests wasn’t easy, because Kip and Prentice were forced to meet for a lot of ‘working lunches.’ I found out later that what they were working at was screwing each other silly.”

  It was hard picturing anyone doing the deed with Prentice, though. Those collarbones would rip you to shreds. I toweled my wet hair with a corner of the bath sheet. “Maybe it was her money that revved Kip’s engines. Oldy, moldy money. Shake her family tree and the DuPonts and Vanderbilts start falling out.”

  “What about you? No silver spoons in your family?”

  “Nope. We eat with our hands.”

  Labeck cracked a grin.

  Hmm.

  “I think Kip was attracted to me at first because I was different from the women he usually dated. Maybe he married me to spite his mother—to prove she didn’t control him. But she had the last laugh. When he married me, she cut off his allowance.”

  “You’re kidding, right? The guy was what—thirty years old and he’s still getting an allowance?”

  I spoke through a frenzy of crumbs. “Kip was thirty-two when we got married. And Vanessa—that’s his mother’s name—had always footed his bills. When Mommy Dearest turned off the money faucet, Kip blamed me for it. He still had his nickel-and-dime trust fund and his salary, but it wasn’t enough.”

  “What did your husband do for a living?”

  “He worked for his uncle’s company, Brenner Brewing. He was a VP in some department where he couldn’t do much harm. But his wages were being garnisheed. Kip didn’t tell me this before we got married, but he’d invested a big chunk in real estate just before that whole bubble burst. He ended up owing his creditors a lot of money. They got a court order to take what he owed out of his wages. But Kip didn’t understand the concept of cutting back. He was spending way more than we could afford, and the bills were piling up. He even—”

  I stopped, feeling a flush creep from hairline to neck.

  “Come on, just between us girls here.”

  “Kip only made a small down payment on my engagement ring. But he didn’t keep up the monthly payments, so . . .”

  “The Mafia came and chopped off your finger?”

  Even after five years the memory still stung. “I had to return the ring to the jeweler.”

  Taking a deep breath, I continued. “Kip and I starting fighting a lot. I’d cry, he’d walk out. I’d grovel and Kip would sort of—well, you know how you peel off a puppy who’s trying to crawl up your leg? I thought we were just going through a rough patch. The marital advice experts all say that’s normal in the first couple of years. So I tried seducing Kip back into my arms. I starved myself, tried different makeup, new hair colors, new lingerie . . .”

  “Did it work?”

  “Kip liked the lingerie. He liked the sex. Only he wasn’t . . .”

  There. The man I thought I’d married was no longer present. Maybe he’d never been there in the first place. Maybe I’d been so dazzled by the man I’d created in my mind that I’d never seen the shallowness at the core of Kip’s personality.

  The two-minute warning signal on the microwave pinged.

  “I found out that Kip was seeing Miss Junior League, but I didn’t have the guts to confront him. We started avoiding each other. This wasn’t hard since our schedules were so different. Kip stayed out late most nights and slept late in the morning. I was out of bed and driving to work by the crack of dawn.”

  “Wait—you were married to one of the Vonnerjohn heirs and you still worked?”

  “How else were we going to make our mortgage payments? I taught high school music. Which is a damn tough job—I was ready to crawl into bed by ten o’clock every night. Kip and I communicated by notes.”

  Each note a little more hostile.

  Buy toilet paper.

  Your mother wants you to call her back.

  Keep your goddamn pantyhose out of the sink.

  Refill the ice cube trays! In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have a butler!

  Third notice from the security company. Pay the bill, for Christ’s sake!!

  Turn the kitchen faucet all the way off. Water dripped all over the floor last night.

  F. U.

  “Instead of telling me face-to-face he wanted a divorce, Kip stuck the divorce papers on the refrigerator with a Scooby Doo magnet. And attached to that was a legal notice requesting that I quit the premises within thirty days.”

  Labeck took out the pizza, set it on the counter and started slicing it. “You were being kicked out of your own house?”

  “Yes. Even though we’d used my money to make the down payment.”

  We’d bought a two-story colonial in Whitefish Bay, a pricey Milwaukee suburb. It was a step down status-wise from Vanessa’s River Hills neighborhood, where the homeowners mulched their flowerbeds with thousand-dollar bills and even the garbage collectors had PhDs. Still, Whitefish Bay was an expensive neighborhood. Somebody should have thrown a bucket of ice water in my face and told me I was biting off too much house, but I was in the throes of first love and wouldn’t be talked out of my rose-covered cottage fantasy.

  Unfortunately, the reality of keeping up a house and yard soon dampened the warm glow of new home ownership. “I was the one who mowed the lawn, cleaned out the gutters, and caulked the windows,” I told Labeck. “All the maintenance work Kip never learned growing up as a poor little rich boy. I started to feel resentful. He’d spend his weekends whacking golf balls while I spent mine whacking crabgrass. It turned out that the house had problems I couldn’t fix—the roof needed replacing, we had a centipede infestation, and the basement walls were cracking.”

  So was our marriage. The bloom was definitely off the rose by our second year of wedlock, and I had learned to my bitter regret that caveat emptor ought to apply not just to picking out a long-distance carrier or a Blu-ray TV but to choosing a spouse. “A week after he served me with divorce papers, Kip was shot to death.”

  “Bad timing.”

  “For him or for me?”

  “Both, I guess. What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I slept through the whole thing. I’d just gotten up and was about to step into the shower when I heard someone yelling downstairs.”

  Labeck set the pizza on the table. Mozzarella, mushrooms, olives, peppers—all my favorites. I took a slice, tried to eat, discovered a raw knot the size of a tennis ball lodged in my throat.

  I tried to swallow the knot, blinked back tears. “It was the Bug-Off guys, the exterminators. I’d forgotten they were coming that morning. They’d found the house unlocked and the burglar alarm disarmed. Actually it hadn’t worked for months, since we’d stopped paying the bill. So they let themselves in, hauled in their equipment, and headed toward the basement. One of them happened to glance into Kip’s office and noticed red splotches on the rug. He took a couple steps into the room and saw Kip’s body. I ran downstairs when I heard him yelling. And I saw him. Kip, I mean. Lying on the floor next to his desk. His head was . . .”

  Do not picture it.

  Labeck opened a cupboard and pulled out a bottle. Bushmills Irish whiskey. He uncapped it, poured a slug into a glass and handed it to me. “Mange-toi du pain blanc.”

  I puzzled it out, using my rusted French. “Eat your white bread?”

  “My grandma used to say that. It means things are only going to get worse, so you should enjoy what’s in front of you.”

  That was a really good saying, I decided, tossing back the whiskey in one gulp. It burned all the way down to my tailbone. Steam may actually have puffed from my ears.

  Labeck’s mouth quirked. “Not much of a drinker,
are you?”

  “Nuh-uh,” I rasped. “The bar at Taycheedah doesn’t stock my favorite pinot.”

  “Going back to the scene of the crime, you said the cops showed up?”

  The whiskey had dissolved the tennis ball. “One of the Bug-Offs must have phoned because the police and an ambulance showed up within seconds. Kip’s mother arrived a few minutes later. I swear that woman has ESP. The police tried to keep her from seeing Kip, but she pushed past them, threw herself on Kip’s body, howled, tore her hair, screamed like a banshee. Then she pointed at me and shrieked, ‘She did it! She murdered my son!’ Until then the police officers had been nice, bringing me coffee, making me sit down, talking in soothing voices. I think they figured Kip’s murder for a break-in gone bad. But now they started looking at me all squinty-eyed. When they searched the house, they found my nightgown hidden in the basement. It was spattered with blood—Kip’s blood—they did DNA tests on it later. They also found the gun that had been used to kill him, stuck away in a vent. It was Kip’s own gun, the one from his nightstand. Then Vanessa started screeching about the nanny cam. I never even knew it existed.”

  “But your mother-in-law did?”

  “Vanessa has a contract with the devil. Vanessa knows everything. The video camera was hidden on a shelf, left behind by the people who’d sold us their house.”

  He frowned. “They wanted to spy on you?”

  “No. I think they just forgot it when they moved. Probably they used it to spy on their kids’ nanny, see whether she was smoking dope on the job. Kip’s office used to be their kids’ playroom.”

  Labeck’s eyes sharpened. “Analog or digital?”

  “What, the nanny cam? Analog, I think.” I was on shaky ground here. Handed a camera, I could barely tell the lens from the focus, and all my photos were striped with fingers.

  “What brand?”

  “How do I know? I only caught a glimpse of it before the police whisked it into an evidence bag. It was big and clunky. My parents had one like it years ago. You had to load in a cartridge of film.”