The Escape Diaries

Advance Reader's Copy — Not for Sale

The Escape Diaries

Life and Love on the Lam

A
Loveswept
Contemporary Romance

Elise Sax

Ballantine Books

This is an uncorrected eBook file.

Please do not quote for publication

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Tentative On-Sale Date: December 10, 2012

Tentative Publication Month: December 2012

Tentative eBook Price: $5.99

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Loveswept

An imprint of the Random House Publishing Group

1745 Broadway • New York, NY • 10019

The Escape Diaries
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Patricia
Kilday

Excerpt from
The Devil’s Thief
copyright © 2012 by Nancy Kattenfeld

Excerpt from
Paradise Café
copyright © 1988 by Adrienne Staff

Excerpt from
The Perfect Catch
copyright © 1995 by Linda Cajio

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Loveswept,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York.

Loveswept
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Cover illustration: Anne Keenan
Higgins

Cover design: Derek Walls

eBook ISBN
978-0-345-53431-6

www.ReadLoveSwept.com

To Ethel and Allen

My mother-in-law sends me poisoned
cookies. Occasionally she sends rat pellet pie or drain cleaner doughnuts, but
mostly she sticks with the cookies. I can picture her in her big, cheery
kitchen, wearing a frilly apron and humming as she mixes the ingredients:
flour, sugar, eggs, butter, cyanide...

           
Inmates
haven’t been allowed food packages since crystal meth disguised as rock candy
sneaked into the system and everyone’s teeth started falling out. But that
doesn’t discourage my mother-in-law. She keeps cranking out the toxic treats,
convinced that one day the strychnine snickerdoodles or the carbolic caramel
bars will make their way to my digestive tract.

           
Although
I don’t get the goodies, the mailroom staff passes the packing cartons along to
me. This is how they’re addressed:

Mazie
Maguire

 
Murdering Scum

Inmate
#3490082

Wisconsin
Correctional Institute

750
County Road K

Taycheedah,
Wisconsin 54935

Sometimes they’re
addressed to
Murdering Bitch,
but Vanessa Vonnerjohn has standards for
ladylike speech and usually restricts herself to
Trash, Trollop, Jezebel,
and the like. The lah-di-dah standards stretch only so far, however. Given the
opportunity, my mother-in-law would claw my beating heart out of my chest and
feed it to her dogs. Vanessa believes in Family, Church, and Vengeance, not
necessarily in that order.

I’m always Mazie
Maguire
on
the care packages, never Mazie
Vonnerjohn.
Apparently I’d trashed my
good standing in the family when I put a bullet through Kip Vonnerjohn Junior’s
handsome head.

           
My
husband’s murder was captured on nanny cam. The police found the murder weapon,
my blood-spattered nightgown, and a video of me committing the crime. All the
physical evidence rolled up in a tidy package and tied up with a ribbon of
motive: I’d killed my husband because he was going to leave me for his
squash-playing, matched-set-of-pearls–wearing, lockjawed, flat-assed,
Junior League girlfriend.

Arrested, tried,
found guilty, sentenced to life in Taycheedah.

           
I’d
been terrified the day I arrived. I was small, scrawny, and street-dumb. I knew
how to unjam a copier, tune a piano, and duct tape a sagging skirt hem, but I
had no clue how to survive in a prison full of hard-as-nails women. I’d seen
Chicks
in Chains;
I imagined tough girls in denims and barbed wire tattoos pinning
me up against the bars and setting to work with a plunger handle.

           
As
it turned out, nobody pinned or plunger-handled me. In fact, I was treated like
a celebrity. Taycheedah’s inmates had watched my trial the way people had once
followed the OJ Simpson proceedings. To the crack dealers, meth chefs, paper hangers,
and stickup artists on my cellblock, I was a star. I was right up there with
Hilda Hoffacker, who’d sliced off her philandering boyfriend’s head with a
chain saw. I got more fan mail than Annie May O’Reilly, who’d brained her
battering spouse with a grain shovel and buried him in a pigpen.

           
Two-thirds
of the women in Taycheedah had been beaten or abused by males, so if a woman
got a little of her own back—well, you go, girl. Forget the
Slammer
Babe
movies. No frenzied rattling of cage bars—for one thing, there
aren’t any bars, just bulletproof glass. Nobody looks like the hot babes in the
reform school movies either, since inmates aren’t allowed to wear makeup and
everyone resembles the
before
pictures in the magazine makeovers.

           
 
Prison isn’t fun. No pizza, popcorn, or
nail polish, and the toilet is right in the room with you. Whatever secrets you
confide in a girlish giggle fest may end up being whispered in the warden’s ear
in exchange for a dime off someone’s time.

           
I’ve
gotten the hang of prison life. I’ve learned how to use margarine for
moisturizer. How to mend ripped denims with Elmer’s glue and pocket lint. How
to survive Christmas by sleeping through it. I’ve become a model prisoner.

I’ve turned
twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and twenty-nine in the can. Thirty is staring me in
the face. I’ll go through menopause and Metamucil behind bars. I tell my
counselor I’m resigned to spending my life in prison.

But here’s the
truth: I spend a lot of time pondering ways to break out of this place. And
wondering what I’d do if I succeeded.

The Escape Diaries :

A Guide to Breaking Out of Prison

Escape tip #1:

Be prepared.

Actually I wasn’t
prepared at all. I just wanted to go to bed. I was tired and cranky, sweat was
puddling between my boobs, and my armpits smelled like sprouting onions.
Deodorant cost one ninety-five at the prison canteen, well beyond the means of
someone who earned ten cents an hour. Given a choice between M&Ms or
Mennen, I’d pick the sweet and live with the stink. Repulsive, yes—but
chocolate is what gets you through the day, and no one else smells any better.

If I’d stuck to
chocolate, things might have turned out differently. But I had a leftover cough
drop from a bout with bronchitis, and when my cellmate, Tina Sanchez, developed
a tickly throat, I gave her the cough drop. Just being a pal, right?
 

Wrong. You’re
supposed to return unused medications to the medical director. The staff tracks
pharmaceuticals the way the CIA tracks yellow cake in the Middle East. A
cellblock officer caught the menthol scent on Tina’s breath and wrote her up
for taking a nonprescription drug. Since I was the one who’d dished out the
illicit substance, I was written up, too. Along with a bunch of other drug
offenders—aspirin pushers, Alka-Seltzer peddlers, and Midol
dealers—Tina and I were sentenced to garden detail.

Not exactly the
Bataan death march in a suburban peas and petunias plot, but Taycheedah’s
gardens are a whole different chunk of real estate. Looking out over them is
like gazing at the Great Plains; you wouldn’t be surprised to see buffalo and
buzzards roaming around out there.

The first days of
September had been sunny and hot, and in the perverse way of growing things,
every tomato on six acres had ripened on the same day. Ten thousand of the
squishy red things, demanding to be handpicked before thunderstorms swept
through and turned them into salsa. We picked. And picked. And picked some
more. All morning, all afternoon, and into early evening. When it got to be
five o’clock I thought we’d be dismissed for dinner. But no-o.
You do the
crime, you do the time:
that was the warden’s motto. The kitchen staff sent
out sandwiches and bottles of water and we ate sitting cross-legged in the
dirt. Then we hauled ourselves to our feet and went back to work.
 

My spine was an
archipelago of ache, my skin felt scalded, and my teeth were filmed with bugs.
The rank, catnippy odor of tomatoes clung to my clothes. I straightened and
stretched at the end of my gazillionth row, rubbing my back and anxiously
scanning the sky to the west, which had turned the pus-yellow of a fading
bruise. The air was thick enough to stir with a spoon. Crickets chirped storm
warnings. Lightning flickered in a raft of distant clouds.

           
Lightning
terrified me. I glanced uneasily at the officer on duty, hoping she’d let the
tomatoes go to mush and order us back inside. She didn’t. She just yawned,
leaning against a tree, staring glassily into space. Obviously, distant
lightning wasn’t high on her list of concerns.

           
“Did
you know that lightning can strike as far as ten miles away?” I said to Tina,
who was picking on the opposite side of my row.

           
“So
what?” Tina scoffed. “Your chances of getting hit by lightning are less than
winning the Powerball.”

           
“You’ve
got it backward.” The heat was making me cranky. It was Tina’s fault I was on
this gulag detail in the first place. “The odds against winning the Powerball
are greater than your chances of being struck by lightning.”

           
“I
ain’t never won the lottery and I ain’t never got hit by lightning neither, so
that proves my point.”