The Escape Diaries: Life and Love on the Lam

by Juliet Rosetti

  Vanessa had originally been a Brenner, a member of the Brenner brewing clan, a family whose fortune had been built on Milwaukee’s most famous product. She’d grown up in the city, but had gone east to attend Radcliffe. Although she was a baby boomer, Vanessa had missed all the turbulence of the sixties. While her classmates were marching against the Vietnam War and burning their bras, Vanessa was collecting cashmere sweaters, dancing at charity balls, and waiting around for a man from a Good Family to marry her.

  She’d settled on Christopher Vonnerjohn. Brewery Fortune, meet Plumbing Fortune. Beer and toilets, was that a marriage made in heaven? Apparently not—the Vonnerjohns weren’t quite up to snuff by the standards of Milwaukee’s high society. Christopher Vonnerjohn was one of the toilet tycoon’s numerous grandchildren and had inherited a measly one-eighteenth of the plumbing pie. The home he’d purchased for his new bride was puny by North Shore standards, more a large house than a mansion: three stories, built of pale sandstone that turned gold in the light of the setting sun, with towering faux chimneys designed to give it a Jacobean appearance. Vanessa had always considered the house second-rate, but Kip told me he loved growing up there; it was perfect for rainy day hide-and-seek, with odd nooks and crannies and old wooden wardrobes that looked as though they might lead to Narnia.

  I pointed out the Vonnerjohn driveway. We drove around to the service entrance at the rear of the house. “Vanessa will know she didn’t call for cable repair,” I said, suddenly panic-stricken as it sank in on me that we were actually going to go through with this.

  “Nah—that’s the beauty of being a cable guy. You can waltz into people’s homes, tell ’em you might have to shut down service for a while, and they let you do it. People wait around for months, stay home from work, bend over backward just to please the cable company jerks. The hard part is when the poor schmucks trail along with you, explaining how the cable company screwed up their Internet or begging you to set the billing department straight.”

  “Now I feel even guiltier.”

  Labeck clamped his hat on his head. “Let’s roll.”

  We got out and went around to the van’s rear doors. Labeck started hauling stuff out. He handed me a spool of wire and an industrial-sized tape measure. “You’re the scrub team,” he said. “While I fool with the TV, you sneak around pretending you’re checking the outlets. Only you’re actually hunting for that video, right?”

  “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “Crazy like a fox,” Labeck winked at me. “What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll get fired and you’ll go back to prison for the rest of your life.”

  If I’d been shaking any harder I would have set off a seismograph. My hands were so numb I could barely grip the tools. Labeck hoisted a toolbox and a roll of orange cable, strode purposefully to the back door, and rang the bell. We waited, my stomach plunging to the soles of my clownishly-oversized sneakers. A minute ticked away. Then the door jerked open. It wasn’t Vanessa, I saw to my relief, but Purvis Jackson, her housekeeper, blinking in the bright morning sunlight, wiping her hands on a towel. I fidgeted with the tape measure, keeping my head ducked so she wouldn’t recognize me.

  Labeck began, “We’re here to fix—,” but a frenzied yapping set up in the hallway behind Purvis and suddenly a tide of snarling fur balls engulfed us, growling, snapping, and clearly stating in dog language: We’re going to tear you to kibble and gnaw your ears like they’re dried apricots. These were the fiends from hell—Vanessa’s venomous shih tzu-bichon frises. Their names were Muffin, Tufty, and Snookums, kittenish names for creatures with the volatility of land mines and the temperament of wolverines. Tufty sank his fangs into my heel.

  I yelped in pain.

  “Bad dogs!” Purvis, who was hard of hearing, apparently hadn’t picked up on my voice. She aimed a kick at Tufty. If Vanessa had witnessed this sacrilege, Purvis would have been sacked on the spot, forty years of service or not. “Go lay down now! Down!” She scooped up Tufty and Snookums, who squirmed around and tried to bite her, but she was too wise to them; she held their muzzles squashed against her watermelon-sized boobs. Labeck nabbed Muffin, locking the creature’s vicious little snout in a hand vise.

  “I apologize,” Purvis said. “Those dogs never got trained. They’re like animals—they need that Dog Whisperer.”

  I’d have whispered to them all right. Go play fetch on the freeway, you little furry turds! Go pick a fight with a pit bull.

  “The missus home?” Labeck asked.

  “Nope. She left a couple hours ago. Didn’t say when she’d be back.”

  Purvis was not exactly the loyal old family retainer. She and Vanessa waged an ongoing war over the kitchen, Purvis believing the room was her sacred turf, while Vanessa, who cooked as a hobby and baked as a religion, trespassed in the kitchen whenever she felt like it, probably to whip up new varieties of poisoned pastries. She left her dirty dishes for Purvis to wash, messed up Purvis’s alphabetically arranged spices, and put the utensils away in the wrong drawers, offenses that sent Purvis into muttered rants and fits of cabinet slamming. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Vanessa ended up facedown on the kitchen tiles one day, the duck boning knife sticking out of her back with Purvis’s fingerprints all over it.

  “Glad you’re here. We haven’t been getting any cable at all lately,” Purvis said. Labeck shot me a smug look. “Since Saturday, if I recollect. It stopped just like that. You think you can get it fixed today? I don’t like to miss my programs.”

  “Ho-kay. Just point me toward the nearest TV set and I’ll take it from there,” said Labeck. Holding Muffin at eye level, he spoke sternly. “You gonna behave?”

  Muffin spiked out his fur, bared his teeth, and snarled. Purvis peeled him off Labeck and steamed away with the squirming bundles in her arms, looking as though she intended to toss them lock, stock, and collar into the microwave. Us cable guys swaggered into the living room. The room stretched the width of the house, with floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a stunning view of Lake Michigan. The décor didn’t live up to the view, though; the furnishings looked as though they’d been lacquered in place during the Eisenhower era and never moved since. Olive green brocade sofas and matching wing chairs perched atop vine-patterned carpets. Prissy vases, figurines, and silk flowers were arranged on end tables like museum exhibits. Frankly, my cell at Taycheedah wasn’t this depressing.

  Labeck found the massive cabinet that housed the television set, squatted down and started messing around with a screwdriver. He actually looked like he knew what he was doing. He was even displaying the repair guy’s butt crack.

  “Fifteen minutes and out,” he warned.

  With pounding heart, dry mouth, and wire spooling out behind me, I scuttled up the stairs. I eased cautiously into Vanessa’s bedroom. The dill pickle color motif lived on here in the bedspread and curtains. Hands shaking, I rummaged through drawers, hoping to find a secret side to Vanessa—movies with titles like Porking Polly, a gorilla-sized dildo, a cat-o’-nine-tails . . . actually, the whip wasn’t all that far-fetched. Vanessa’s lily of the valley scent hung heavily over the room, making my insides go all squishy with fear. I’d been scared of Vanessa when she was my mother-in-law; now that I was breaking and entering her house, I was nearly gibbering in terror.

  Convinced that the video wasn’t here, I tiptoed down the hall to Kip’s boyhood bedroom. The day he’d introduced me to Vanessa he’d given me a tour of the house, which had ended with him dragging me onto his boyhood bed for a reenactment of an adolescent fantasy. Kip had the finish line all to himself that day. The thought of his mother bursting into his room and finding us naked cast an icy wet blanket over my libido.

  It was hard not to feel sorry for Kip, growing up an only child in this house. His dad had died when he was ten, leaving him at Vanessa’s mercy. Considering how she alternately bullied and spoiled him, it was amazing that he hadn’t turned out to be more screwed up than he was. Now, gazing around at the mode
l airplanes, the sports trophies, the bed with its plaid spread, everything preserved as it had been when Kip was a teenager, I realized that Vanessa would never have left the videotape of her son’s murder in this room.

  I was about to let myself out when my eye lit on Kip’s bedside lamp, a heavy glazed ceramic pot whose base screwed on and off over a hollow interior. Kip had showed it to me that day we’d made whoopee on his bed. When he’d been a teenager, he’d stashed his dope and emergency cash in the lamp base, safe from his mother’s prying eyes.

  Maybe his stash was still there! Even fifty bucks would keep a desperate fugitive alive for a couple of days. The screws holding the lamp base in place loosened with a twist of my fingers. I pulled aside the base and groped inside. A baggie of graying hash fell out and—yes!—a baggie of bills! I was about to rip open the bag and count the money when an icy chill jagged up my spine and my nape hair stood on end.

  Vanessa was here. There was no way I could have known it, but I did. My heart began to thump in ragged beats. Every system in my body went on red alert. Had I just heard raised voices, a shout, from the first floor? The dogs were barking up a storm. Maybe they’d treed Labeck atop the television cabinet. But I didn’t really believe that. She was here, and she was hunting me.

  Ramming the baggie into my pants, I blazed for the door, ran out into the hall, and hurtled toward the stairway. Too late. Footsteps on the stairs. Someone was coming up, moving fast. It wasn’t Labeck; he would have called out. Frantically I looked for a place to hide. The linen closet! After Vanessa walked past, I’d sneak out of the closet and streak down the stairs. Inside, the closet was dark and stuffy. It smelled like rubber vacuum hose and had shelves that jutted into my spine.

  The footsteps reached the top of the stairs. A pause, then a heavy tread down the hall. Whoever it was knew this house well. The person halted in front of the closet door. The scent of lilies of the valley wafted to my nostrils. The knob turned. The door opened. Light flooded the closet.

  Vanessa Vonnerjohn stood there, wearing a triumphant, terrible smile. She was holding a gun. She raised it until it was pointing directly at my heart, and I saw my own death in the barrel’s small, round hole.

  “I knew you’d come back,” she crowed. “I haven’t slept a wink since you escaped. I left the doors unlocked at night, I turned off the burglar alarms, I drove away from the house every morning hoping you’d sneak in. And you did! You fell right into my trap, you stupid little tramp!”

  Her eyes glittered and her hands shook. Vanessa is tall, with wide shoulders, flat boobs, and the long, muscular legs of a tennis player. She has an outthrust jaw, vodka on the rocks eyes, and a small, tight mouth. Her hair is shoe polish black, teased and sprayed into a bullet-deflecting helmet that looks as though it might harbor poisonous spiders. Her taste in clothes fossilized forty years ago. Today she was wearing a shin-length corduroy skirt, a puffy-sleeved blouse, a frilly apron, and orthopedic running shoes. She accessorized with said gun.

  “Walk,” she ordered, gesturing with the gun barrel toward the stairs leading to the third floor.

  She wouldn’t shoot me while Purvis was in the house, I told myself. Purvis hated Vanessa even more than she hated the dogs; if she heard shooting, she’d call the police.

  “Don’t think that old fool Purvis is going to save you,” Vanessa sneered. My bowels turned to icy mush; I’d always had the eerie feeling that my mother-in-law could read my mind. “I sent her out for groceries. While she was gone, you broke into my house. You attacked me. I shot you in self-defense.”

  “Nobody will—”

  “Hush, Jezebel!” She lunged at me, whacking the gun barrel against my skull, staggering me against the wall, then yanking me upright by my hair. She was amazingly strong, as though she worked out with anvils.

  “Do you recognize this gun?” she crooned in my ear. “You ought to. It’s my son’s gun, the one you used to take him away from me.”

  She shoved me forward, keeping the gun snugged against my spine. Terrified that the slightest movement would jar the trigger, I allowed her to bump and bully me up the narrow, uncarpeted stairway that led to the servants’ quarters on the third floor. The ribbed corduroy of her skirt made scritching noises like insects rubbing their legs.

  No fancy carpets or hand-carved woodwork up here. Worn linoleum and unpainted plaster walls were considered good enough for the servants who’d once lived here. Iron beds stood in empty, dormitory-like rooms. The air was stale, underlaid with mildew.

  “Get in there.” Vanessa thrust me into the servants’ bathroom. A bathtub was filled with water and a space heater was set out on the floor, plugged in and turned on.

  Uh-oh.

  “You should have gone to the electric chair,” Vanessa hissed. “But those bleeding heart legislators outlawed the death penalty. While my son lay cold in his grave, you went on living with your three meals a day, your free dental work, your bowling, your stinking rights!” Her lips curled back from her teeth.

  “Vanessa, listen to me! I didn’t—”

  “Oh, I know how cushy you scum have it in prison these days with your pedicures, your poetry readings, your self-esteem therapy sessions—”

  “That’s completely—”

  “And of course the prison psychiatrists tell you that your crime wasn’t your fault. No, it was society’s fault, boo-hoo-hoo. Well, guess what? I, for one, am not buying it. I intend to see that you get what’s coming to you.”

  “If you’d give me a chance to—”

  “Get. In. The. Goddamn. Tub. Or I’ll shoot your kneecaps off.”

  Looking into the icicle eyes, I knew she would do it. I was wearing the shoes Labeck had lent me—a pair of his old Nikes, ludicrously large, along with three pairs of athletic socks to achieve a semi-fit. I put one jumbo foot in the bathwater. Vanessa impatiently waved at me and I lifted the other foot in. Water sloshed over onto the tile floor. Did she intend to drown me?

  I opened my mouth to yell for Labeck.

  Vanessa sneered. “Don’t think that repairman is going to rush in to save you. He’s locked in the basement. I’ll decide what to do with him after I deal with you.”

  The water was frigid. I had to set my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

  “Take a bath, you dirty pig—all the way in!”

  When I just stood there, Vanessa aimed at the wall above the tub and pulled the trigger. Instinctively I dived into the tub, creating a small tidal wave. A chunk of tile above my head exploded. The noise was deafening. I clapped my hands to my ringing ears as shards of tile rained into the tub. On the first floor, the dogs went insane, barking and yowling.

  “When I tell you to do something, do it!” Spit flecked Vanessa’s lips. She looked down at me, crouched in the water, my arms flung protectively over my head. “Are you frightened?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Good. You ought to be.”

  She pulled out the St. Christopher medal she wore on a chain around her neck. Vanessa was an old-style Catholic who went in for novenas, scapulars, prayer books, and lighted candles. If she’d lived five centuries ago she’d have been an enthusiastic rack-turner for the Inquisition. The Christopher medal was in honor of Kip’s patron saint. She brought it to her lips and kissed it. “When Kip was killed, I lost my faith in God. But I was wrong. I was wrong and beg God to forgive me. I should have known that in His all-beneficial mercy God would hear my prayers. God arranged that tornado to deliver you to me.”

  Still pointing the gun at me, Vanessa backed up, reached for the space heater, and hoisted it off the floor. It was an old-fashioned model: large and clunky, turned to the highest setting, its bars glowing fiery orange, its frayed cord plugged into an ungrounded outlet. Clutching it by the handle, she advanced toward the tub.

  “You cheated the electric chair, Mazie Maguire, but you won’t cheat God. God wants you to suffer before you die. God wants you to experience the agony of having electricity course through your body. God wants
you to jump and twitch and lose control of your bowels.”

  Vanessa’s trolley had jumped its tracks long before Kip’s death, but now she had completely derailed. I had no doubt that she intended to carry out my electrocution. I started to scramble out of the tub, but Vanessa shot at me again, the bullet pinging off the waterspout, ricocheting and nearly hitting my knee. I screeched in terror. Still keeping the gun aimed at me, Vanessa swung the heater toward the tub.

  At that moment Muffin exploded into the room, bounded onto the tub, and launched himself at my face. Gasping in horror, Vanessa halted her throw mid-swing and dropped the heater. It bounced against the rim of the tub and clunked to the floor. There was a sizzling crackle as a lightning-blue spark jittered along the length of the cord. Standing in a bathwater puddle, Vanessa was jolted backward by the force of the electrical shock and flung against the opposite wall, the cord wrenching loose as she tripped on it.

  Meanwhile I had my hands full with Muffin. I pried him off, trapped his muzzle, and did something I’d always dreamed of: I spanked his furry little behind. He yelped in outrage. Clutching him against my chest, I heaved myself out of the tub, my legs quivering so violently I could scarcely stand. I bent to examine Vanessa, who was wedged between the toilet and the sink. She appeared dazed, her eyes unfocused, a stream of drool running out of one side of her mouth. Her fingers were twitching and her legs were jerking, but I guessed she’d have all her neurons firing in a minute or two. Then she’d come after me.

  I picked up the gun, which had shot out of Vanessa’s hands and skittered under the sink. I didn’t want it, but I figured it ought to be taken away before Vanessa started taking potshots at the neighbors. Gun in one hand and dog in the other, I bolted down to the main floor, terrified that I’d accidentally pull the trigger and blow my foot off.

  Curses and thumps came from the basement. Still clutching Muffin, my hand clamped over his nasty little snout, I crept down the basement steps. Labeck was locked inside Vanessa’s luggage closet, attempting to kick down the door. A padlock was attached to the door hasp, its key nowhere in sight.