The Escape Artist

by Diane Chamberlain

  "That would probably be a good topic for one of your articles," she suggested. She was liking Lucy a bit more this morning.

  "Oh, I've written that one a thousand times."

  Kim watched Lucy bend over to pick up a couple of Cody's blocks. She held them out to the little boy, weaning him away from her necklace.

  "Do you have children of your own?" Kim asked.

  "Five. And eight grandchildren."

  "Wow. Do they all live around here?"

  "Well, I raised all my kids here in Annapolis, but only a couple of them still live here. Two are in California. One's in Florida."

  "Do you happen to know of a good pediatrician close by?" she asked. It was nearly time for Cody to have his inoculations and a checkup. He'd also need to have an echocardiogram sometime in the next few months, but she'd deal with that later.

  "Oh, sure," Lucy said. "I used to take my kids to Dr. Sweeney over in West Annapolis. His son's taken over his practice, and he's supposed to be just as good."

  "Thanks." She stared out at the street, committing the doctor's name to memory and wondering how she would be able to give him the information in the medical records. It was essential that he know Cody's medical history, yet every sheet in those records had the name Tyler Miller printed on it, not to mention the names of the doctors who had treated him and the names of the hospitals where he'd been a patient. She had a sudden disconcerting thought. Could doctors around the country have been alerted to look for a year-old male child who'd had surgery for coarctation of the aorta?

  "That's right," Lucy said to Cody. "That's the red block, and it fits into the blue one. Just like that."

  The radio in Ellen's living room switched from music to the news, and Kim heard the newscaster announce that there were still no leads in that bombing at the house she'd walked past the previous week.

  "Did you hear about that woman who was killed by a bomb at her house?" Kim asked Lucy.

  "Yes, I did," Lucy said. Cody was squirming to get down, and she set him on his feet in front of her. He started walking, holding on to the glider, then dropped to the floor and crawled over to his blocks. "They said it was an express mail package. Only it didn't actually come through the mail, I guess. Someone just left it on her porch and rang the bell."

  "That's what I heard, too."

  "Probably an ex-husband," Lucy said with a smirk. "You and I'd better watch what mail we open."

  "Do you know anything about her?" Kim asked. "Was she married? Did she have kids?"

  "No, I haven't heard a thing, though I did hear the police say they had no suspect and no motive." Lucy drained her mug and set it on the floor next to the glider. "You know, Kim, I've been toying with the idea of writing an article about single mothers with small children," she said. "Seeing you with Cody here is inspiring me. Maybe you'd let me interview you?"

  Kim was still imagining the horror of being blown apart, maybe leaving a little child behind, but she was able to catch the danger in Lucy's suggestion nevertheless.

  "Oh, I don't think I'd make a very good …" Her voice drifted off as she noticed a man walking on the sidewalk a short distance away. He was looking in their direction, and she followed him anxiously with her eyes until she realized he was Adam Soria. He waved and turned onto the sidewalk leading up to the house.

  "Good morning!" he called out.

  "Hi, Adam." She smiled, waving back.

  He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, holding a white bag in the air. "Would you ladies care to join me for some bagels and cream cheese?" He still looked tired, but his smile this morning was genuine.

  "Lucy, this is Adam Soria," she said. "He's the artist who paints the murals around town. Have you noticed them?"

  "Oh, of course!" Lucy said. "My, you're very talented."

  Adam bowed slightly. "Thank you." He turned to Kim. "And besides breakfast, I've brought you some work."

  "Work?"

  "Yeah. You know, that activity people perform to earn money?"

  "Really?"

  "Really." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. "Kitty Russo. She's a secretary in an engineering firm in the Spire Building. She's a friend of ours, and I spoke with her yesterday and she said to have you call her. The woman who usually does a lot of their typing has a new baby and is taking a break, so Kitty was happy to hear about you."

  She reached out to take the scrap of paper from his hand, trying to hide her disbelief. "Fantastic," she said. "Thank you so much."

  "So how about it?" he asked again. "Bagels, anyone?"

  "I'd love one," Kim said.

  "No thanks," Lucy said. "Sunday might be a day of rest for some people, but not for me." She picked up her coffee cup from the floor and got to her feet.

  Kim leaned over to put Cody's blocks back in their canvas sack.

  "It was nice meeting you, Adam, " Lucy said as she opened the door and headed into the house. "You two have a good breakfast."

  "Thanks," Kim said. She looked at Adam. "Why don't you come up to my apartment? I'll make some coffee."

  "Great idea."

  Cody wanted to walk up the stairs holding on to her hands and the going was slow, but Kim was buoyant. She had work! What a stroke of luck it had been meeting Adam and Jessie.

  She let Adam into the apartment, glad she'd spent the day before fixing it up a bit. She had picked up a couple of paintings at a garage sale. Nothing special, but they gave the living room some color and warmth. The computer and printer still took up half the table in the dining corner of her living room, though. When she made some money, she would buy a desk.

  Kim started the coffee while Adam took the bagels out of the bag and set them on a plate. He spotted one of her brochures on the kitchen counter and picked it up.

  "Hey, this is nice!" he said. "Did you design it?"

  "Yes."

  "Very nice work." He opened it and read the information inside. "Do you do mostly graphics?"

  She laughed. "I don't 'do' mostly anything," she said. "I taught myself how to use a graphics program because I had to come up with something for the brochure. And I sketch a little. That's about it."

  "Really? Let me see your sketches," he said.

  She wrinkled her nose. "Do I have to?"

  He smiled. "Uh huh."

  She walked across the living room and pulled the sketchbook from the magazine rack, knowing she wanted his appraisal of her drawings despite her hesitation. She'd been drawing every day, but she felt as if she were working in a vacuum. It wasn't like high school, where she'd received constant feedback. She had no idea if she was any good or not.

  She handed the sketchbook to Adam and leaned against the cabinets, arms folded across her chest.

  He set the book on the counter and went through it, page by page.

  "Not bad," he said when he reached the fifth page and her drawing of the house across the street. He turned the page and saw her sketch of the sofa with its downy cushions. "You seem to be improving on every page," he said.

  "I got some books out of the library. I'd forgotten a lot. I haven't really done any drawing since high school, so I'm afraid I'm stuck at that level."

  "Hmm. No, you don't seem stuck at all." He turned the page to one of her numerous sketches of Cody. "Wow," he said, and she couldn't help but beam. "People are your forte."

  "You think so?" She remembered hearing the same words from one of her teachers in high school, although that praise had been overshadowed by her father's rage when he found one of her books on figure drawing.

  "Absolutely." Adam leafed through the book until he found another sketch of Cody. "I can't believe you didn't keep up with this. You're very talented."

  "Thank you. I planned to, but…I sort of lost steam when my father died." She wondered if that made any sense to him at all.

  "When was that?"

  "When I was seventeen," she lied, but only by a year.

  "You must have been very close to him, huh?"

&n
bsp; It took all her strength to force herself to nod.

  "How did he die?"

  She thought quickly. "Cirrhosis of the liver." Almost certainly her father would have killed himself with his drinking if Linc hadn't beaten him to it with a gun.

  Adam raised his eyebrows. "Alcohol?" he asked.

  She nodded.

  "That stuff ruins a lot of lives," he said bitterly.

  "Well, it was more than my father dying, really. My husband wasn't very supportive."

  "Oh, that's right. The doctor, huh? I remember you said you put him through school?"

  She had almost forgotten that she'd made Jim into a doctor. A doctor named Ted. She really had to get her story straight. "Right," she said.

  "I hate that." Adam closed the sketchbook. "I hate hearing about a creative person who's been forced to put their creativity aside. I feel personally cheated of whatever they might have produced that I could enjoy, whether it's a book or a play or a painting. It's a crime."

  She nodded. She felt cheated herself.

  "You know, it's never too late to get back to it," Adam said. "This sketchbook is a great start."

  "Well, I'm just dabbling, actually."

  "You're free of your husband now. Don't let him hold you back even when he's not with you. Why don't you let me give you a lesson or two? I'm not painting myself. I might as well help someone else do it."

  "Maybe," she said hesitantly. She was afraid of committing to anything anymore without thinking through every possible consequence.

  She put Cody down for his nap, then poured them each a cup of coffee and cut the bagels. "Shall we take these down to the porch?" she asked. "I can leave the window open so I can hear Cody."

  "Good idea." He took one of the mugs from her and led the way down the stairs, where the scent of vanilla now filled the air.

  They settled down on the porch, Kim on the glider, Adam in the rocker. He told her more about Kitty Russo, the woman who needed her typing help. He told her about the Spire Building and the variety of businesses it housed. She was certain she'd sent some of her brochures to that building.

  "It was very nice of you to tell Kitty about me."

  "Glad I could help both of you out. I wish—"

  She held up a hand to stop him, cocking her head to listen. Had she heard a noise from upstairs?

  Silence. The only sound was the soft music from Ellen's radio. "Sorry," she said. "Didn't mean to interrupt you."

  "You're hypervigilant," Adam said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means that you're always on the lookout, as if you're expecting something terrible to happen. You startle easily. I noticed it the first night I met you at the gallery, and the other night at dinner."

  She looked down at her cup so he couldn't read her eyes. "I think you're imagining things."

  "Maybe," he admitted. "I've been hypervigilant myself since the accident. It's not that I actually expect someone to leap out of the shadows at me, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. I don't trust the world much anymore. I don't trust it to be the same tomorrow as it is today. Things can change so quickly." He stared out at the street.

  She nodded slowly as she broke off a piece of the bagel and slipped it in her mouth. A dark curtain was falling over him, and she wasn't certain whether she should try to lift it. She didn't want him to confide in her. She didn't want him to bare his soul to her when she couldn't reciprocate. She would make a mockery of his honesty.

  But he wanted to talk. "It was Molly's tenth birthday," he said. "We'd had a little party. Just Dana and Molly and Liam—my son, who was five—and Jessie and Noel, her boyfriend. After the party, we all planned to go to a bike store to pick out a bike for Molly. There were too many of us to fit in one car, so Dana took Liam and Molly, and Jessie, Noel, and I followed in my car. We were driving down Route 50, and we came to an intersection. Dana's car was in front of me. She pulled into the intersection on a green light, but a guy from the other direction ran the red at full speed. He was drunk."

  "Oh, my God. You saw the whole thing?"

  He nodded. "He bulldozed into Dana's car and smashed it up against the side of a truck. The three of them were killed instantly. I know that for a fact, since I was there and saw them." He looked down into his cup, and she wondered what horrors he saw reflected there. "I doubt they even had a chance to realize what was happening. I hope not, anyway."

  "What happened to the other driver?" she asked. "The one who hit them?"

  Adam snorted. "Essentially nothing. Not in the accident and not in court. He got off with a slap on the wrist."

  "That's not fair."

  "An understatement. I would like to personally lay him down in the street and run my car back and forth over him until he…He looked up at her, his cheeks red. "Sorry," he said.

  "Don't be. I don't blame you a bit. No one would. As a matter of fact, I'd hold him down for you while you ran over him."

  Adam smiled. "So now I start over. Not doing a bang-up job of it, either."

  "It's too soon to do a bang-up job. I think you're supposed to let yourself grieve for a while."

  "Let myself? My self isn't giving me any choice in the matter."

  She wished she could tell him the extent to which she was starting over. She'd lost Linc. Lost her friends in Boulder. And she'd nearly lost Cody, first to heart disease, then to Jim and Peggy. It was not the same thing, of course, and she had to admit that losing Linc and her friends had been her own doing. Still, she felt a bond with Adam. She wanted to share back. Be careful, she told herself.

  "When Cody was born," she said softly, "he had a heart condition. They thought he would die. They had to transport him to a hospital with a pediatric cardiac surgeon who saved Cody's life." She would be forever grateful to Ron Myerson for the care he took with her son. Somehow, she'd managed to separate her feelings about Ron from her feelings about his sister. "But for those few days when he was so sick," she continued, "I was in terrible shape. I imagined his death over and over again." She felt suddenly embarrassed that she'd tried to make a comparison between her experience and his. "I know it's not the same as what you've gone through. I can only imagine what it's been like for you."

  "Cody seems so healthy," Adam said. "I'm surprised to hear there was anything seriously wrong with him."

  "He was very lucky. Me too. The one thing I don't think I could survive is losing him. He seems so vulnerable to me. If I'm hypervigilant, that's why. I'm always afraid something might happen to him. I hate loving someone that much. It seems…unhealthy. I would do anything for him. I would give away government secrets."

  "Do you have any?"

  "Any what?

  "Government secrets?"

  She laughed. "No."

  "You'd better not get any, then." He finished his coffee and set the cup on the floor of the porch next to his empty plate. "I know what you mean, though. I'd about gotten over feeling afraid for the kids all the time. I'd gotten complacent. Liam broke his arm, and he bounced right back. Molly fell and cut her cheek, and it healed in a few days. I began to take their resiliency for granted. Then suddenly wham, they're gone."

  Kim winced.

  Adam stretched his arms out in front of him and let out a sigh, obviously bringing the conversation to a close. "Well," he said, standing up, "I didn't mean to get into all of that."

  She stood too. "I'm so glad you stopped over. And thanks for the bagels. Not to mention the job."

  "You're very welcome." He started down the stairs. "Jessie says hi, by the way. She's excited because Victoria's pregnant."

  "Victoria?"

  "Her cat. Jess is so thrilled, you'd think she's pregnant herself."

  She remembered Jessie's affection toward Cody. "She seems like she's cut out to be a mother."

  Adam opened his mouth as though he were about to say something but then changed his mind.

  "What happened with her boyfriend?" Kim asked. "Noel, is it?"

  "Nice guy, but he
drinks too much," Adam said.

  "Oh." Kim nodded. "Say no more."

  Adam waved and turned to leave, and Kim carried their plates and mugs upstairs, anxious to return to her sketchbook.

  She put Cody to bed at quarter to eight that night, turned on the radio on the shelf behind her bed, and crawled under the covers to wait.

  Linc was her one source of pain, and she'd made a decision this week. She would not allow herself to think of him except on Sunday nights from eight to ten. Otherwise, those thoughts would take over her life. She had to remind herself that she had her son; that was the most important thing. And she had a few friends.

  Even Lucy was not so bad. Having Lucy next door would be a bit like having a mother to turn to for advice. She certainly had never had that when she was growing up, although Linc's mother had filled that role for a long time. She'd actually lived with Geri after her own mother kicked her out of the house. Geri had gotten her a job waitressing at the coffee shop where she worked, and on weekends the two of them would visit Linc in prison. Linc and Geri became her family. She'd grieved when Geri died. Now Linc was dead to her, too.

  Immediately after Simon and Garfunkel sang "Song for the Asking," Linc played a recording of Pete Seeger singing "Froggie Went a-Courtin'," and Kim knew that was his birthday present to Cody. Or rather, to Tyler. Linc sang that song to him often. She thought of waking Cody up to hear it, but what could she say to him? "Listen, Cody, Linc's playing one of your favorite songs!" She never mentioned Linc to Cody anymore. It could only confuse him. So she gave up on that idea, got comfortable under the covers, and figured she would be the first person in the universe to listen to "Froggie Went a-Courtin'" with tears in her eyes.

  She waited to hear if Linc would say anything after "Froggie" ended, but he moved right on to another Seeger song, and her mind began to drift.

  Linc had moved in with his mother when he got out of prison, and Kim—Susanna—had been overjoyed by his long-awaited freedom. She'd always blamed herself for his incarceration. If it weren't for her, he never would have been at her house that night her father went crazy. He would not even have known where her father kept his gun.