“Bad
timing.”
“For
him or for me?”
“Both,
I guess. What happened?”
“I
don’t know. I slept through the whole thing. I’d just gotten up and was about
to step into the shower when I heard someone yelling downstairs.”
Labeck
set the pizza on the table. Mozzarella, mushrooms, olives, peppers—all my
favorites. I took a slice, tried to eat, discovered a raw knot the size of a
tennis ball lodged in my throat.
I
tried to swallow the knot, blinked back tears. “It was the Bug-Off guys, the
exterminators. I’d forgotten they were coming that morning. They’d found the
house unlocked and the burglar alarm disarmed. Actually it hadn’t worked for
months, since we’d stopped paying the bill. So they let themselves in, hauled
in their equipment, and headed toward the basement. One of them happened to
glance into Kip’s office and noticed red splotches on the rug. He took a couple
steps into the room and saw Kip’s body. I ran downstairs when I heard him
yelling. And I saw him. Kip, I mean. Lying on the floor next to his desk. His
head was . . .”
Do not picture
it.
Labeck
opened a cupboard and pulled out a bottle. Bushmills Irish whiskey. He uncapped
it, poured a slug into a glass and handed it to me.
“Mange-toi du pain
blanc.”
I
puzzled it out, using my rusted French. “Eat your white bread?”
“My
grandma used to say that. It means things are only going to get worse, so you
should enjoy what’s in front of you.”
That
was a really good saying, I decided, tossing back the whiskey in one gulp. It
burned all the way down to my tailbone. Steam may actually have puffed from my
ears.
Labeck’s
mouth quirked. “Not much of a drinker, are you?”
“Nuh-uh,”
I rasped. “The bar at Taycheedah doesn’t stock my favorite pinot.”
“Going
back to the scene of the crime, you said the cops showed up?”
The
whiskey had dissolved the tennis ball. “One of the Bug-Offs must have phoned
because the police and an ambulance showed up within seconds. Kip’s mother
arrived a few minutes later. I swear that woman has ESP. The police tried to
keep her from seeing Kip, but she pushed past them, threw herself on Kip’s
body, howled, tore her hair, screamed like a banshee. Then she pointed at me
and shrieked, ‘
She
did it! She murdered my son!’ Until then the police
officers had been nice, bringing me coffee, making me sit down, talking in
soothing voices. I think they figured Kip’s murder for a break-in gone bad. But
now they started looking at me all squinty-eyed. When they searched the house,
they found my nightgown hidden in the basement. It was spattered with
blood—Kip’s blood—they did DNA tests on it later. They also found
the gun that had been used to kill him, stuck away in a vent. It was Kip’s own
gun, the one from his nightstand. Then Vanessa started screeching about the
nanny cam. I never even knew it existed.”
“But
your mother-in-law did?”
“Vanessa
has a contract with the devil. Vanessa knows everything. The video camera was
hidden on a shelf, left behind by the people who’d sold us their house.”
He frowned. “They
wanted to spy on you?”
“No. I think they
just forgot it when they moved. Probably they used it to spy on their kids’
nanny, see whether she was smoking dope on the job. Kip’s office used to be
their kids’ playroom.”
Labeck’s eyes
sharpened. “Analog or digital?”
“What, the nanny
cam? Analog, I think.” I was on shaky ground here. Handed a camera, I could
barely tell the lens from the focus, and all my photos were striped with
fingers.
“What brand?”
“How do I know? I
only caught a glimpse of it before the police whisked it into an evidence bag.
It was big and clunky. My parents had one like it years ago. You had to load in
a cartridge of film.”
“What size
cartridge?”
“About the size
of a pack of pocket tissue. Black, hard plastic, with spoolie things.”
“Spoolie things.”
Labeck ran a hand through his hair, giving me a disgusted look. “You make a
lousy detective. How many minutes on the tape?”
“I don’t know.
Hours, I think. It was motion-sensitive, it only turned itself on when—”
“I know what motion-sensitive
means.” He thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “You’re talking
about a
camcorder.
”
“That’s what I
said.”
“No, you didn’t.
So now it makes sense. Modern spy cams transmit to a computer, even a cellphone.
Using a camcorder is really old technology.”
“Yeah. When I spy
on my nannies, my technology will be up-to-date.”
Labeck shoved the
pizza toward me. “Eat,” he said.
The
pizza was piping hot and burned my tongue, but I didn’t care. I chewed and
gobbled and stuffed. My stomach swooned in gratitude. Labeck sat down across
from me, still watchful, but at least relaxed enough to eat. I focused on my
pizza. This was probably the last decent meal I’d ever have, then it was back
to macaroni and cheese minus the cheese in the prison cafeteria. I washed it
down with the last of my ginger ale, then helped myself to another slug of
Bushmills. The stuff grew on you. It reminded me of one of my dad’s old jokes:
Why
did God invent whiskey? To keep the Irish from taking over the world.
Labeck poured
himself a slug of Bushmills, too, which put me on red alert again. Liquor
brought out whatever violent tendencies lurked inside a man. Just because a guy
feeds you doesn’t mean he’s not going to kill you.
“I’ve
been following your escape,” Labeck said. “When I heard you’d been caught at
that farm outside Campbellsport, Bob and I hightailed it over there. I was
filming from the hill above the farm when I spotted you diving into the
sunflowers. So I drove the camera van over where I thought you might come out
and left the doors hanging open.”
“You
live-trapped
me?”
He
nodded. “The second I got in the truck and smelled the daisies, I knew you were
there. If the police had stopped me, I would have claimed I didn’t know you
were stowed away.”
“You
still haven’t told me why you didn’t turn me in.” I folded my arms and narrowed
my eyes at him. Labeck folded his own arms and tilted his chair back. We
engaged in a staring contest.
Labeck lost. He
broke eye contact and shifted his gaze to the refrigerator.
“I was at your
trial,” he finally mumbled.
Well,
now we were getting somewhere.
“Working
for a local cable station back then, filming. It was a weird trial. Nothing
seemed to fit together. You just didn’t strike me as the kind of woman who’d
kill her husband in cold blood, then hide the murder weapon in her basement.
Although you did come across as too dumb to know how to shoot a gun.
That
I believed.”
“Well, the jury
sure didn’t. The prosecutor sliced me to smithereens on cross-exam and I got
all flustered. My lawyer warned me not to testify, but I didn’t listen to him.”
He snorted. “Your
lawyer was Sterling Habenmacher, right? No wonder you were convicted.”
“Sterling’s very
respected. He was personally recommended to me by Senator Brenner.”
“Brenner? This
just keeps getting better and better. How do you know Brenner?”
“He’s Kip’s first
cousin. And he happens to be a close friend.”
“Politicians
don’t have close friends. They have ass-kissers. Look, you want some advice?”
“No.”
“Get
yourself a new lawyer. Just close your eyes and point to a random name in the
attorneys section of the phone book. Then have your new lawyer negotiate the
terms of your surrender.”
Surrender,
Dorothy.
The words painted across the sky by the Wicked Witch of the West.
I knew Labeck was
right. I had to give myself up. It was the smart thing to do. It might even be
fairly painless. Maybe the warden wouldn’t come down too hard on me if she knew
I had some big-shot barracuda backing me. Except that I couldn’t afford a
barracuda. I couldn’t even afford a minnow.
So
surrender. That was my choice. I had no money, no car, and no one to help me.
My brothers might be willing to hide me for a few days, but they lived two
hundred miles away and there was no way to get to them. I had to face it: my
escape had been a disaster from the second I’d jumped the fence.
So what had kept
me going? Why had I slogged through swamps and cornfields, stolen a car, nearly
gotten myself blasted to smithereens by the toilet police, and risked breaking
my neck jumping out of a barn when I could have given myself up a dozen times?
What had kept me
going, I thought, popping a schnibble of mozzarella into my mouth, was anger.
Anger over being convicted of a murder I hadn’t committed. Anger over the fact
that someone had murdered my husband and walked free. Anger at the friends and
relatives who’d turned their backs on me. Now, clean, fed, and possibly safe
for the moment, I brought out the idea that had been quietly percolating at the
back of my mind from the moment that roof had come sailing out of the storm. I
turned the idea over, studying its angles, letting it grow on me. What if I
didn’t
give myself up? What if I tried to find the person who’d really killed Kip?
It hadn’t been a random murder. The weird video proved that. Who was the woman
wearing my nightgown? How had she gotten hold of Kip’s gun? Who benefited from
Kip’s death?
Naturally, I’d
mulled over these questions hundreds of times over the past four years, sitting
in my cell, but I’d never been able to come up with answers. Now I was only a
few miles from my old house, and in a position to start looking for the
murderer. Was I going to waste this opportunity?
Labeck had been
watching me closely, as though he was following my train of thought. “You look
beat,” he said gruffly. “You can stay here tonight, get some sleep.”
“Thank you,” I
said stiffly, grudging every syllable.
“Take my bed.
I’ll sleep on the couch.”
The couch, right.
I didn’t trust this guy one inch. I was going to watch him like a hawk. I was
not going to close a single eye all night.
Escape tip #12:
Real women wear skivvies.
“Wake
up—you’ve got to see this.”
Someone
was shaking me. I came groggily awake. It was morning. I was curled up against
Labeck’s pillow, wearing his pajamas, lying in his bed.
I
stared blearily at the TV on the dresser. The
Today
news anchor was
smirking into the camera and saying,
“. . . and in small town Campbellsport,
Wisconsin, the scene was the same. Dozens of fans lining the streets, chanting
and holding up signs.”
The
camera cut to a street scene. Throngs of people were waving to a rolling camera
van and yelling. “
Go, Mazie, go!”
Teenaged girls were jumping up and
down in front of the camera, waving homemade signs:
Run, Mazie, Run!
“It’s called
Mazie-mania, Sarah,”
said a young red-haired male reporter,
“and it
seems to have taken over the state.”
The scene
switched to a tavern. Guys on bar stools were watching the overhead TV, tuned
to the scene where I dive out of the barn. They were whistling and pounding
their beer mugs on the bar as though they were seeing the Packers trounce the
Bears in the playoffs.
“Law
enforcement authorities say they’ve never seen anything like it,”
the
reporter continued excitedly.
“Instead of helping police officers capture
the wanted fugitive, local citizens seem to be rooting for her. Maguire, who
escaped from prison on Friday night, has eluded capture for three days,
stealing a car, causing an estimated hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage to
a plumbing display room, and escaping through a cattle herd despite being
pursued by a small army of law enforcement officers.”
The camera
switched to the street outside the tavern, focusing on a black SUV with federal
plates and a forest of antennae. The door opened and Marshal Irving Katz
emerged, looking grumpy. The film must have been shot yesterday, because he was
wearing the clothes he’d had on at the farm. His pants were smeared with brown
stuff. He used the curb pavement to scrape something off his shoe soles.
“No
comment,”
he snapped at the swarming news crews, before slamming into a
coffee shop.
I laughed out
loud.
Labeck switched
to
Good Morning America.
Wanda Kronenwetter appeared on-screen, beaming
and looking a world removed from Walmart—lipstick, new hairstyle,
whitened teeth. “When I seen my van was gone, I figured some kids took it to go
joyriding,” Wanda said, nervously licking her lips. “Then the state patrol shows
up and tells me Mazie Maguire stole it! First I freaked out, but then I figured
what the heck. It’s kind of an honor, sort of like being robbed by Bonnie and
Clyde, you know? If you’re watching this, Mazie, no hard feelings, aina?” She
blew a kiss.