Swerving around the patrol car, I took off running. The trouble with this town was its size. I ran out of Vonnerjohn in about thirty seconds and found myself on its designer golf course, Whistling Creek. Once—back in my other life—Kip and I had played nine holes here. The greens fee had been three hundred dollars plus one kidney per person—but of course that had included the cart rental. I plunged onto the course. The blood from my cut dribbled down onto the manicured grass, laying out a nice, easy trail for the bloodhounds to follow.
Escape tip #7:
Corn: it’s not just
for flakes anymore.
You know the scene in North by Northwest where Cary Grant ducks into a cornfield to avoid getting machine-gunned by the guys chasing him in an airplane? As it turned out, cornfields do make excellent cover. The tasseled-out corn, ten feet tall, closed over me like a rain forest canopy. Even someone in a helicopter hovering two feet over the field couldn’t have spotted me beneath the lattice of leaves.
I figured I had a small window of time before the cops realized they’d let the notorious murderess slip through their fingers. After that it would be open season on Mazie Maguire. In the meantime, I was using every precious second, pounding through the cornfields that bordered the village, trying not to shriek when I crashed through the sticky webs strung up between rows by fat spiders.
The corn rows ran ruler-straight for miles. When I ran out of corn I commando-crawled through fields or duckwalked through pastures. I slogged on through the blistering heat of midday. I walked until my lungs felt as though they’d been skewered with barbecue forks and my feet felt like they’d been pressed to hot coals. I waded through streams because that was how Cool Hand Luke had thrown the bloodhounds off his trail. So far I hadn’t actually heard any dogs, but there were helicopters, two of the pesky things buzzing back and forth, sometimes flying so low I could feel the wash of their rotors.
I drank stream water, too thirsty to worry about any malign organisms lurking in it. I wrenched off a cob of corn and gnawed on the kernels, but they sat like sharp-edged pebbles in my stomach and I was soon nostalgic for the Kronenwetter jelly beans. I worked generally south, detouring if I came out on a road and spotted patrol cars with gimlet-eyed cops raking the ground with binoculars. Miraculously, I wasn’t spotted.
When it got dark, the helicopters went away. I kept walking, wondering how far I’d come. What felt like a trip to the south pole was probably only about seven or eight miles. My legs cramped. I had bugs on my teeth. My face felt radioactive with sunburn. My stomach bitched and moaned. The corn that had been my friendly protector by day turned menacing by night, the leaves rustling as though they were telling secrets. The spiderwebs between the rows, now damp with dew, felt even creepier. I kept whirling around, certain I heard stealthy footsteps behind me. Somehow I’d wandered into Stephen King territory. I didn’t want to be out here in the dark, feeling alone and unloved.
Why didn’t I just give myself up? All I’d accomplished was to make myself miserable. I had bug bites the size of gopher mounds and E. coli bacteria in my guts. What was the point? Eventually I’d be caught anyway.
I’m confident my team and I will have her in custody by the end of the day.
Irving Katz’s sharp-angled face rose up before me. He was still out there hunting me; I could feel him. He was smart, determined, and undoubtedly using all the tools at his disposal: body heat sensors, night-vision goggles, and topographical maps showing every ridge, rivulet, and rabbit hole within a thirty-mile radius. The net was probably tightening around me at this very moment.
Something inside, a small streak of perverse pride, reared up. However steep the odds against me, I wasn’t going to let that arrogant city slicker meet his deadline. He was not going to have me in custody by the end of the day. Tomorrow, most likely. But not today. Tapping into some hidden reservoir of energy, I slogged on.
I found myself trampling through an unfamiliar crop, each footstep spuming a spicy fragrance. It was like stamping through a giant packet of drawer sachet. Lavender! This was a lavender field! A cozy farmhouse sat at the edge of the field, its mailbox identifying the place as belonging to The Kucksdorfs. I could see the Kucksdorfs through a lighted bedroom window—a mother and three little Kucksdorfs. The kids were in their pajamas, bouncing on the bed, carrying on with the kind of monkeyshines kids typically use to delay bedtime. A man—probably Papa Kucksdorf—entered the room carrying a book. The kids scrambled over, arranging themselves around him on the bed, elbowing one another for better spots.
I nearly burst into tears. Twenty years folded back. It was the Maguire farmhouse and my dad was telling my brothers and me a bedtime story. Unlike my mom, who preferred to read us classics like Robin Hood and Treasure Island, Dad spun stories out of his imagination, tales in which the Maguire kids hunted buried treasure, sword-fought with pirates, and vanquished dragons.
My parents gave me that rarest of experiences: a happy childhood. We lived on a dairy farm outside a small town called Quail Hollow. It was a wonderful place to grow up. There were always kittens to cuddle, piglets to raise, eggs to gather. No kids my age lived nearby so I spent a lot of time with my older brothers, Brendan and Jimmy, playing football, falling out of trees, and building soapbox cars out of lawn mower wheels and scrap lumber. When my brothers weren’t attempting to kill me, they taught me the lessons that would serve me well throughout life: never tattle, never whine, and never get caught.
Never get caught, dummy! Standing here with my nose pressed to the Kucksdorfs’ windows like the Little Match Girl, I was practically begging Katz to swoop in and nab me. I forced myself to move on.
Cornfield. Cornfield. Another cornfield. A full moon rose, silvering the night, making it easier to navigate. A farm loomed just ahead. Barn, silo, sheds, house, everything run-down and ramshackle. No lights shone from the house. No dogs barked. Maybe nobody lived here. Creeping cautiously around the farmyard, I found the unlocked door of a shed and let myself in. Dark inside, fragrant with the smell of hay. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness I could make out haylofts above a wooden floor.
Leave now, you moron! This was my brain.
Feed me: stomach.
Not one step farther: feet.
Feet won. My legs Jell-O-ed out from under me and abruptly I was sprawled atop a heap of loose hay. I explained to my brain that I was just resting and would move on in a minute. My sweat dried, leaving me clammy and shivering. I untied the hoodie from around my waist, intending to pull it on, but that required too much effort. I let it drift over my chest like a blanket.
I’d changed my outfit nine times the day Kip took me to meet his mother. I was trying to strike exactly the right note between too casual (jeans and T-shirt) and trying too hard (heels and little black dress).
“What should I wear?” I asked the Sunday afternoon Kip was presenting me to the queen.
“Nothing,” he whispered, reaching for my bra hooks. “I’ll phone her and say we’re going to be late—something has come up.” He pressed himself against my back, demonstrating exactly what it was that had come up.
Which explained why we were an hour late when we arrived at Kip’s mother’s place. Vanessa Vonnerjohn extended her hand and greeted me politely, but her cold pale eyes skimmed over me like a strip search, taking in the J. C. Penney skirt, the Younkers shoes, the Target belt. She didn’t miss the bagged-around-the-ankles pantyhose, the hastily brushed hair, the post-sex eyes.
Vanessa’s mouth clamped in a rictus of a smile, but there was no mistaking her silent message: slut! The whole thing sailed right over Kip’s clueless male senses; this was a woman-to-woman thing, as primitive as two female wolves bristling their ruffs, sniffing each other’s butts, and baring their teeth.
Kip’s mother had never held a job. This was a waste of talent because—aside from the fact that she was totally fucked-up-bonkers-fruit-loops—she had a shrewd instinct for money management and formidable executive abilities. If sh
e’d aimed her cutthroat capabilities at bond trading or negotiating hostile takeovers, she would probably have ended up as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board instead of a cookie-baking nut job.
As soon as Kip was old enough to date she’d begun tossing eligible females at him—girls from good families, who’d gone to the right schools, who knew how to dress, who had their own trust funds. Kip had escorted eleven different debutantes to their coming-out cotillions one year, a duty he’d agreed to only because Vanessa threatened to cut up his credit cards.
In college Kip threw off his mother’s yoke and went wild. He drank, he partied, he was the life of his fraternity. Handsome and well-connected, he exuded the air of glamour that clings to college guys who have an unending supply of booze, dope, and dough for spring breaks to the Keys.
Kip’s bacchanal continued even after he graduated and started working for his mother’s family, the Brenners, who owned one of the largest breweries in the Midwest. He moved back to Milwaukee, bought a share in a downtown condo, and began a life devoted to good times, his job a minor inconvenience that rarely interfered with his sports or skirt-chasing. This continued for about ten years, Kip happily mired in perpetual adolescence, his indulgent mother picking up his credit card bills when he overspent. A couple of times Kip got so close to the altar he almost felt the brush of bridal tulle around his neck, but he managed to weasel out in time.
Then he met me—naïve, wet-behind-the-ears Mazie Maguire—so starry-eyed I foolishly believed that forsaking all others meant that Kip and I would be faithful to each other until death did us part. Whereas Kip’s take on the concept was more like: I won’t have sex with another woman in your actual presence. But that was the future, still unbaked, and during our engagement period, which lasted a mere two months, there’s at least a one-in-ten chance that Kip was monogamous.
Vanessa’s plans for her son had not included his wedding a nobody, a girl who didn’t even have the decency to bring a stock portfolio to the marriage. But she was outwardly cordial that first day we met. We sat around her sunroom, sipping tea and nibbling at a plate of thin, buttery wafers Vanessa told me she’d baked herself. Kip snagged all the cookies—sex always made him ravenous—and slumped down in his chair, looking completely bored, but I kept alert, on my guard.
“So, Millie,” Vanessa said.
“Mazie.” I resisted the urge to fidget.
“Mazie.” She practically tasted the name, like a foreign food you try, then discreetly spit into your napkin. “That’s . . . different. And you’re from—where was it again?”
“Quail Hollow. Over in the southwestern corner of the state, near the Mississippi?”
“Oh, yes. Kip tells me your people owned land there?”
“Just a dairy farm.”
“A farm! That’s so very all-American.”
I didn’t know until later that Vanessa’s fact-finding foray was phony; she’d already found out everything about me, having hired a private detective firm to track down every last detail about my life, including the boys I’d dated in college.
But Vanessa would no more have admitted to invading my privacy than she would have admitted to using a less than fifteen hundred thread count for her sheets. No, we had to go through this bizarre catechism, Vanessa peppering me with questions designed to point out the fact that I had no right to breathe the same rarified air as herself and her son.
“So tell me about your parents,” Vanessa said. “Kip said your father is . . . umm . . . debilitated?”
I aimed a reproachful look at Kip. I’d wanted to personally explain my dad’s medical condition. Later, when I grew to know Vanessa, I discovered exactly how difficult it was to keep anything from her. She was like a skilled interrogator, one who used velvet-lined thumbscrews and psychological torture.
“My dad was injured in a farm accident,” I explained, choosing my words carefully. “He suffered brain damage. He recovered, but still has short-term memory loss.”
Vanessa muttered something meant to be sympathetic, but I picked up the subtext: mentally defective parent.
The interrogation went on. Vanessa grew larger and taller. She was looming over me, demanding to know why I hadn’t eaten her cookies. “I was up all night baking them,” she boomed. “And you will eat them!”
Cramming a fistful of cookies into my mouth, she ground them against my clenched teeth. The cookies were sprinkled with cockroaches writhing in their death throes because the cookie dough was poisoned. Then the poison reached my system, because I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my ribs.
“Get up!” Vanessa snarled. “Get up and take your medicine!”
Escape tip #8:
Offer your captor something he wants . . .
more than kinky bondage sex.
“Get up!”
I opened my eyes. The tines of a pitchfork jabbed against my ribs.
Oh, shit!
The pitchfork was gripped in the baseball mitt hands of the man standing over me. He wore baggy bib overalls over a bare torso, a Jung Seeds cap, and clodhopper work boots caked with manure. He had a farmer tan: hands, forearms, and neck deep copper, everything else fish belly white.
“You’re that escaped lady convict,” the farmer said. He had a voice like boiling gravel. “That Mazie Maguire. You’re all over TV. Big reward out for you.” He grinned, his bright blue eyes glittering in a firecracker-red face. “Kee-rist, I can’t believe my luck—that reward is gonna buy me a brand-new manure spreader.”
I rubbed the bleary out of my eyes, hoping this was still part of my nightmare.
“Move, dammit!” Snatching me by my hair, he jerked me painfully upright. He tossed aside the pitchfork, twisted my left arm behind my back, and marched me out of the shed, using my arm as a steering lever. My attempts to wriggle out of his grip only made him crank my arm to a higher level of pain. Dimly I took note of my surroundings: sheds, corncribs, some reeking pens, and a mound of barnyard manure the size of a ski hill. He marched me across a stretch of weed-choked dirt and finally shoved me into a concrete block shed built onto a barn.
“This’ll keep you nice and cool till the police come,” he said.
I rubbed my aching arm, where his fingers had dug purple marks. “You’re making a mistake,” I choked out. “I was camping with my family, I got lost—”
“Bullcrap.” Digging in his overalls, he retrieved a coil of baling wire. He forced my arms together and wound the wire around my wrists, circulation-stopping tight. Then he looped the wire around a narrow pipe that ran along the shed’s ceiling. He heaved on the wire’s loose end, jerking me off my feet like a side of beef, my arms nearly yanking out of their sockets; my toes barely touching the floor, and my shoulders wrenched as though they’d been run through a wringer washer.
“Please,” I whimpered, starting to cry. Snot oozed from my nose and I couldn’t wipe it away. Why hadn’t I given myself up when I’d had the chance? Now I was totally screwed, at the mercy of this heinous hayseed.
He pulled a cellphone out of another pocket and jabbed the buttons with thick, calloused fingers. Someone answered and he spoke, his voice vibrating with excitement. “Yeah, hey, this is Norbert Lautenbacher. Out on County Trunk M, Fire number seventy-eight. I got the escaped convict! I got Mazie Maguire!”
He listened for a moment, scowled. “No this is not a friggin’ joke. I got her right here, tied up in my milk house. You going to send someone out to get her or not? Half a hour? Okay—she ain’t going nowhere. Bring that reward check along.”
When Hollywood does Wisconsin, they have the locals talk with Midwestern twangs. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Wisconsin natives sound more Brooklyn than Kansas. We have trouble with our th’s. We say dem Packers, dose Brewers. We shoot tirdy-point bucks, we drive up nort, we drink from bubblers, we say aina for isn’t that right. Manure spreader comes out ’ner spriddur.
Norbert Lautenbacher had a Wisconsin accent thick enough to snowmobile on. He jammed his phone back in his pocket and moved
so close to me I could smell his breath. Slim Jims and Pabst, breakfast of champions. Something reptilian crept into his small, crafty eyes. He set a meaty hand on my thigh. “Be awhile before the cops get here. Meanwhiles you and me could have a little fun, girl. Bet it’s been a long time since you had some man-loving.” He slid off his bib top, exposing a sweaty mat of grayish curls.
My stomach lurched. I was going to throw up. I was going to choke on my own vomit.
“Always wondered what you jail-birdies did, laying around locked up together all day. You got a girlfriend, back in the can, Mazie?”
I shook my head.
“Sure you do. Come on, spill. Are you the boy-girl or the girl-girl?”
His hand crept higher. “I bet you give each other massages with those fancy-smelling oils. I seen this movie called Reform School Girls where the bitches tore the clothes off each other and had naked-ass pillow fights.”
Norbert’s porn fantasy bore not the slightest relationship to reality. We weren’t even issued pillows in Taycheedah.
He put a big red paw on my breast.
I gave a loud shriek, trying to fling myself away from him, but my own momentum swung me right back into his hands.
“Touch me and I’m telling your wife!” I spat.
“Up and left a year ago, the ugly old bat. Good riddance.”
I’d always thought the notion of rape being a fate worse than death was ridiculous. How could a physical assault be worse than dying? But now, with this pervert poking his pecker against my belly, I knew I’d rather die than let him have his way with me. Who knew where his disgusting worm had been? Probably ol’ Bossy starts to look pretty good when you’re stuck out in the boonies without a wife. The creep might have bovine herpes or sheep crabs. And how exactly did you catch swine flu?
The Escape Diaries: Life and Love on the Lam Page 6
