The Great Escape: A Vintage Contemporary Romance, Page 2

  “Do you remember my friend Kim, from work? These are the keys to her car. She’s going to be picking it up later. Could you give them to her?”

  “Of course,” the elderly lady replied, taking the keys in one gnarled hand. “But aren’t you going to be home? If you aren’t well, you should—”

  “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment,” Dee lied, crossing her fingers childishly behind her back. “Have to go and get ready—thanks, Mrs. Gordon!” She didn’t give the old lady any time to react, but hurried up the stairs to her tiny apartment. It was really converted from two bedrooms, with a minuscule bath and kitchenette put in. There was a shower stall with no tub, and it was possible to sit on the stool, reach with one hand to turn on the shower and reach with the other hand to turn on the sink taps. One person could turn around in the tiny space; two was a terrible squeeze.

  Her kitchen was as tiny, with a refrigerator that reached her waist and the ancient stove and sink exactly one step away. The kitchen and the bathroom had been built into one of the two bedrooms, and the other was her living area, with a single bed doubling as a couch, with huge throw pillows against the wall as the back. She had a portable television on a stand across the room and green potted plants all over the place.

  It wasn’t quite the Ritz, but it was cheap and well within her budget, and she had decorated it in yellows, browns and oranges with, of course, the green from the plants. One entire wall held her paperback collection, the one luxury that she had allowed herself with the money left over from paying her bills. All the rest of the money had gone into the bank.

  Once inside, she didn’t waste any time. Her movements were brisk, quick, and economical. She whisked around the small apartment, pulling out her suitcase and all the clothes on hangers. She threw it all on the couch-cum-bed and then went to make a quick call to a taxi company, making arrangements for a cab to come around in half an hour. Then she started throwing things in the open suitcase, practice and adrenalin making her swift. While her hands were busy, her thoughts were too, vivid images from the past coming before her attention. Would she have run away if she had known how hard it was going to be? Who could really know that for sure? She rather thought she would have, though. As she remembered, she hadn’t really had any choice.

  All the same, she had been just seventeen when she had left, with no notion of how to handle herself or how to handle life in the working world. All she could remember was that things had just got to be too much to handle, staying. That terrible feeling of being trapped, being lonely, being isolated—it all came back to her too vividly.

  The night she particularly remembered with a nightmarish clarity of past pain and despair had been the breaking point.

  Dee stared outside at the miserable wet darkness. Inside it was just as dark, for she had the lights off in her large bedroom. Depression gloomed in her young mind like a big black spider. Her heart ached. She was tired, and it always seemed that she was tired nowadays. Depression could do that to a person, she knew. And unhappiness.

  What she wanted to do was to sob out her fears and tears, and all the pain her heart carried. She wanted to be held in that old remembered way, and she wanted to feel like a little girl again, warm and safe and loved. But that was impossible. Her mother was dead, and had been dead for three years. She had been killed along with Dee’s father when a train was derailed and crashed into several cars that had been waiting to cross the tracks. Their car had been literally torn apart, and she had never seen them again, for the funeral had been with closed coffins. Her imagination had done terrible things, and her dreams supplied the rest. Dee had dreamt for months that their bodies had been chopped to pieces, and would wake screaming in full-throated horror. Sleeping pills had been prescribed. They had helped only a little.

  The death of Charles Janson and his wife had been splashed all over national newspapers, for her father had been a millionaire several times over and his death particularly sensational. When everything had finally quieted down into a semblance of normality, Dee found herself living with her aunt and uncle in the huge house that had once seemed barely large enough to contain all the love and the laughter her family had shared. To be realistic, she couldn’t miss her father as much as she missed her mother, for he had always been away on business trips and having important meetings. But he had been kind and loving when he had been home, and Dee’s mother had been a ray of sunshine in the little girl’s life.

  Now it seemed as if the house was a great hulking empty shell.

  Her father and mother had left just about everything to her, and Dee supposed vaguely that she was very, very rich, but she had no idea just how much she owned. It wasn’t really hers until her eighteenth birthday anyway, and she wouldn’t have full control over the estate until she was twenty-one.

  But she had started to hate her money. She started to hate anything connected with her money.

  Her aunt had been her mother’s sister, and her aunt and uncle had been appointed as her legal guardians, for there was virtually no one else, and they had wasted no time in moving into the house as soon as the funeral was over. They didn’t give a damn about her. She was very intelligent and sensitive to emotions and atmospheres, but even then Judith had made no effort to disguise what she felt. Howard, Judith’s husband, was a rather weak man, and he didn’t seem to mind her much, but he certainly didn’t actively seek her out in any way.

  Dee would never forget how Judith’s mouth had tightened and her face had whitened with rage when her parents’ will had been read. The plump woman’s face went suddenly sharp and pinched, in spite of her double chin. She had managed to hold on to her temper until the lawyers had left, and then she had rounded on her husband in a fury. Dee was ignored as she huddled all curled up in an armchair, her own small face white and drawn from exhaustion and grief, and incomprehension.

  “Not a stinking, filthy penny!” Judith shrieked at Howard, who slid down in his chair as if to escape from the whole situation. Dee sat, stunned. “We didn’t get a stinking, lousy penny! All we get for watching the brat is an allowance!” This last was said with a sneer. “And that gets cut off when she comes of age. We even have to submit the household books to an accountant to get the bills paid! God, I always knew my sister was tight, but I never thought she’d forget us so completely! All that money, and we get a damned pittance, while a little skinny brat of a—” She broke off suddenly, as she noticed Dee peering out from behind the chair’s high winged side, eyes huge and shocked. “Go to bed. Now!” This last was as Dee hesitated, looking from Judith to Howard. Howard averted his eyes hastily and she had been left to drag herself up to bed alone.

  It had been quite devastating, to a girl of fourteen, who had just lost both her parents. She wandered around the huge house for weeks with a stunned and uncomprehending look in her large, blank blue eyes. As she slowly came out of the shock, Judith went gradually but methodically about the process of changing the house staff, letting go people who had worked for the Jansons for years and hiring people of her own choice. Eventually Dee was surrounded by complete strangers.

  She had had one friend by her, though, and that was her private tutor. Until, that was, the autumn of her sixteenth year.

  The exacting and excellent tutors that Dee had had over the years had been chosen with great care by her parents, and they, along with her innate, quick intelligence, had made her education leap ahead of the accepted normal rate for most teenagers. She conceived a love for learning and knowledge, and she devoured books voraciously. It was a very nice escapist tactic, to immerse oneself in an exciting and well written book. It also kept her quiet and out of Judith’s way. As a result, with a ridiculous ease that had blossomed right along with her intellect, Dee was passing college entrance exams, never batting an eye.

  That was why Judith and Howard decided that the best thing for everyone concerned would be to pack Dee up and send her away to college. A prestigious Eastern university had been selected, her application sent in a
nd her things packed without further ado. Howard saw Dee to the airport and shook her hand before watching her board the plane, and that was that.

  As sheltered as Dee had been, gaining her education from tutors and generally leading an isolated existence, college came as an intense, jolting shock to her system. It had been the worst year of her life.

  She was too young and inexperienced, and so achingly, desperately lonely for companionship she could have died for it. Word got around that she had money, and that combined with her instinctive shyness that came across as aloofness to the other girls, along with her extreme youth, managed to keep just about everyone away from the small, quiet blonde girl from Kentucky.

  She got straight A’s, full high marks for both terms, and was nearing a collapse when summer finally came around and she was able to go back to Kentucky. She had stopped thinking of it as home quite some time ago. It was no relief to leave school just to get back to Judith’s increasing hostility and caustic comments, but the definite low point in her life was when no one remembered her birthday on May the fifteenth.

  That was why, some weeks later, she was sitting in the darkness, staring off into nothing, and seriously contemplating suicide.

  She crept downstairs for a sandwich later that evening, and impulsively stopped into the library to pick up a book to read. It might make her feel a little better to try and immerse herself in a make-believe existence, one with happy endings and scary plots, or perhaps a chilling mystery to unravel and tease the mind.

  It was the turning point in Dee’s young life, that quick stealthy trip to the library. That was because she happened to pick up a book about a girl who had disappeared into thin air.

  Her intelligence and imagination supplied the rest.

  She was going to escape. She was going to make the greatest escape of all time. She was going to run away from all the unhappiness and hostility and apathy in this life and have fun, like she used to do with her mother and father. She was going to use her intelligence to work out the slyest, the sneakiest, the most devious way to ravel her trail so that no one would ever find her again. She was going to use the world as her playground instead of viewing it as the enemy to be fought. The world wasn’t the enemy, people like Judith and Howard were. People who didn’t know how to think for themselves, or to take risks, or to simply enjoy life with zest and enthusiasm—those were the kind of people to avoid, and she had been living in a poisoned atmosphere for years now.

  Her mind suddenly active again, Dee plotted out her course of action. While she watched and waited, she paid a gas station attendant to call up the house a few times and ask for her specifically, which convinced Judith and Howard that she was actually meeting someone. She also used every opportunity she could to get away from the house, refusing to tell Judith where she had been, which was like waving a red flag under the older woman’s nose. Judith ranted and raved up and down, accusing Dee of all sorts of things, of meeting someone on the sly, of going to wild parties, of whatever came to her mind. Dee sat back and listened to the various lectures, and if she didn’t smile physically, she smiled in her soul.

  She also wrote in deliberately childish handwriting a slightly incoherent letter of farewell to everyone, saying that she was running away with her boy-friend and that they were going to California. She sprinkled a few drops of water over the page and ended the missive on a plaintive nobody-loves-me note, signing her name in full. It took her a while; she had been trained for years to be concise and logical in her writing and to argue a point clearly and well. When she finally sealed up her farewell letter, she was chuckling irrepressibly. She’d contrived a masterpiece of nonsense!

  Dee watched and waited, and the Friday she was to go to a party with Judith and Howard, she went to the bank and withdrew all her savings from her allowance, which was a tidy amount. She became suddenly very ill, actually becoming violently sick (a very difficult and painful state to achieve, she discovered, much to her own discomfort). She obviously couldn’t go to the party in such a state, so the housekeeper was to keep an eye on her while Judith and Howard went. Dee had the evening to herself. She waited until her aunt and uncle were actually gone and then got to work, trailing around in her huge bedroom in her nightgown and ready to pop back into bed in case the housekeeper should check on her. She packed a small canvas bag of things she couldn’t bear to leave, along with a few clothing essentials and called the airport to book two flights if any were open on an evening flight to California, to confuse the issue. It would be one more indication that she was running away with someone else. Of course she had no intention of being on the flight.

  The one place in the entire state of Kentucky where no one would ever think to look for her was in her own bedroom, and in Deirdre’s room were both a walk-in closet and a private bath. The house was not only very large but also very old, and Dee had lived in that room all her life. She knew it intimately, and she was especially familiar with the small square opening in the roof of her closet. It led to a tiny cubbyhole that was in the attic but was sealed off from the larger open space by a crosswork of beams, rendering that corner of the attic invisible. A loose board painted the same colour as her closet lay over the square, paneled hole. It had been her favourite hiding place as a child and her mother might have eventually thought to look there for her, but she knew that neither Judith nor the relatively new servants knew of its existence. Even if they thought to check it, they would assume that it led to the attic, and they would look there. She could sit on the board if anyone actually pressed a curious finger at it.

  She pushed the board aside and hauled up everything that she was going to take with her, plus a canister of water and food stolen from the kitchen. She also went down to the library and picked out several paperbacks, leisurely unlocking the front door as she went. Back in her room she made up her bed to look as if she were still in it, propped her farewell letter on the dressing table in front of her mirror, and shoved the books along with a powerful flashlight and extra batteries up into the hole.

  She then jumped into swift action, tearing out of her nightdress and yanking on sturdy clothes, fearful of being discovered. Then, to assure herself of an escape route, she climbed out of her window and slid down the branch of the nearby oak tree. No limbs broke and she didn’t break her own neck, so if it worked the first time, it would work again. She stole in by the front door, locked it behind her, and stole back upstairs. She was ready to escape.

  Uncontrollable giggles assailed her as she attempted to negotiate the cramped opening with extreme difficulty. It had never been this tight of a squeeze, but then, she had been smaller before, and hadn’t so much packed in the hole. She really had to struggle, slight as she was, to get her hips through the tiny opening, and rather doubted that anyone else would believe that anyone but a slight child could fit through. She found that she was enjoying herself immensely in a way that she hadn’t for years, and the happy excitement, the thrill of adventure, and the just plain mischievousness of it all was exhilarating.

  The uproar of the house the next morning, when she was found missing, was quite entertaining. She munched through a breakfast of apples as she listened to everything, holding a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing aloud at her aunt and uncle’s reaction. They were stupefied, incredulous, and Judith was absolutely furious. Dee heard herself called some names that she’d never heard before, and that was sobering, but she was soon seeing the humour of the situation, since her aunt’s opinion of her didn’t matter in the slightest. The noise in her room was quite racketing, and she heard several conversations between the police and members of the household. Everyone agreed that the house should be searched, and a few people came up to the attic to shine a few flashlights into corners, but as everyone wholeheartedly believed that she was gone, it was a half-hearted effort, and she relaxed afterwards.

  When three in the morning rolled around, she slipped out of her hole and used the bathroom quickly, refilling her water supply stealthily,
heart pounding and ears tuned. No one was up, though, and she made it back to her hiding place uncaught.

  The next day was sheer torture for her, cramped in such a confining way and unable to make a sound. She was bored, very stiff, and aching all over. The day crept by agonisingly until in the late afternoon she heard sounds coming from below that made her stiffen.

  Footsteps entered her room. Someone had left the closet door open earlier that day and she could hear everything quite clearly. Judith was speaking. “I’m so glad you were available, Mr. Carridine. Yes, this is her room. Everything is just about how we found it, even the bed.”

  A deep, masculine voice answered her. “Where’s the letter that she left? May I see it, please?…Thank you.” There was silence for a few moments while he apparently perused the contents of the missive, and when he spoke again his voice was overtly polite but with undertones of sarcasm that Dee caught, even through a layer of wood. “Mrs. Kimble, does this letter strike you at all as being odd?”

  Dee sat up straight in the darkness and pricked up her ears. She had met Mike Carridine only once before, and that had been a few years ago, when he had been hired to find a missing document for her guardians. He had been quick, methodical, and highly intelligent, and she remembered vividly what he looked like. He was big, very big. He also had a way of looking right through a person as if he could tell what they were thinking by staring into their eyes. She somehow had thought he could, too, and she cursed her luck at having someone like him on her trail. She had the impression that he would be a formidable opponent and she didn’t want to cross wits with him.

  Judith was answering, “Why, I don’t know what you mean.”

  His low, pleasant voice replied, “How old is Deirdre?”

  There was a silence as Judith hesitated, and then, “Seventeen, I believe. Yes, she is seventeen.”

  “Her own guardian isn’t sure?” Dee could imagine him with his eyes sardonic and one eyebrow cocked. She had seen him do that once, those years before, and it had made quite an impression on her. “Doesn’t it strike you as being odd, Mrs. Kimble, that a highly intelligent girl who had just made straight A’s at one of the most demanding and prestigious universities in the country would write such a pack of nonsense?”