The Escape Artist Read online

  When she came into the living room, Linc was setting Tyler down on the floor next to the basket filled with plastic blocks.

  "I could make dinner for you," Linc suggested, "or would you rather I just—" He gestured toward the door.

  She nodded. "I'll need more from you tomorrow night," she said, looking down at her son. "That will be my first night without him."

  Linc shoved his hands in his pockets, then knelt down to kiss the top of Tyler's head. "Bye, Ty," he said.

  She walked with him to the front door, where he stopped and rested his hand on her shoulder. "Are you regretting—I mean, maybe we shouldn't have continued seeing each other when the whole custody thing came up."

  "I couldn't have gotten through this without you," she said. "I don't regret us being together at all."

  He leaned over to kiss her goodbye, lightly, as if he wasn't certain how she was feeling about him at that moment, and the reality of what she was about to do washed over her. She closed her arms around him, holding onto him, fighting hard against her tears. This was the last time she would see him.

  "You've been my best friend for so long," she whispered.

  "And I always will be."

  "No matter what?"

  "No matter what."

  She was as close as she'd come to telling him about her decision. She had to get him out the door before the words spilled from her mouth.

  "You've got to go," she said. "I love you."

  He looked suddenly alarmed. "You don't sound like yourself, Susanna."

  She read his thoughts, saw the worry in his eyes. He thought she might do something really crazy. Kill both herself and Tyler. She nearly smiled at his misperception. She was over that now. That sort of depression could not get its grip on her again.

  "I'm all right," she said.

  "Do you want me to be with you when Jim and Peggy come for Tyler tomorrow?"

  She shook her head. "Tomorrow's Wednesday. You have to tape your show."

  "The music's already picked out. It doesn't matter what time I get around to it."

  "I think I'd better do it alone," she said.

  "Well, if you change your mind, please—"

  "I know. Thanks." She leaned forward to kiss him. "I love you, Linc," she said.

  "I love you, too. And I'm going to call you later tonight to check on you, all right?"

  "All right." She wished he wouldn't, but she couldn't possibly tell him not to.

  She shut the door quickly behind him and immediately went into action. She fed Tyler and got him into bed, read him a story. Then she positioned herself in front of the bathroom mirror, scissors in hand.

  She had worn her blond hair long all her life. Very long. She probably could have selected a more flattering style, but she'd loved the way people stared at her hair, the way they wanted to touch it. She knew it made her look far younger than twenty-nine.

  Her hand shook as she raised the scissors, and it shook as she placed them down on the sink again. Not yet. She'd do everything else she had to do first. But she got the bottle of dye she'd been saving for weeks from her bathroom cabinet. Copper Glow, the color was called. It was an auburn shade, and the woman on the package smiled coyly from beneath her deep, coppery bangs. Susanna read and reread the directions. She'd never dyed her hair before. She was a true blond. A pale blond. Her features belonged with blond hair. Nearly invisible eyebrows and eyelashes. Delicate white skin. Pale blue eyes that Tyler had inherited. She looked in the mirror and tried to imagine her face with darker hair. It wasn't going to work. Her disappearing eyebrows would be a giveaway. No one with auburn hair would have such pale eyebrows. It said right on the package not to use the dye on eyebrows, but she was already breaking more rules than she could count. She would break that one as well.

  She walked into her bedroom and reached between the mattress and box spring of her bed, pulling out a large, thick envelope. It held the copy of Kimberly Stratton's birth certificate she'd sent for, using the information from the headstone in the cemetery. The envelope also held nearly eight thousand dollars she'd withdrawn from her savings account, as well as the copies of Tyler's medical records she'd requested. The money was in hundreds and twenties, and she divided it up, slipping some of the bills into her purse, some into her duffel bag, and some into Tyler's diaper bag. She left a thousand on her dresser to put in her pocket the following morning.

  She made several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for herself and put them in a bag, along with some bananas, baby oatmeal, formula, crackers, and juice boxes. Then she carefully packed a few sets of clothing for Tyler and herself in the duffel bag. She did not let herself think about all the things she was leaving behind. It would do no good to dwell on losses. She would have her son. Her priorities were very clear.

  She had done everything but cut and dye her hair by the time Linc called at eleven-thirty. She sat on the edge of her bed feeling wired and restless, but she tried instead to sound tired on the phone, yawning loudly, muffling her voice. She hated this dishonesty with the person who knew her better than anyone else.

  "Are you getting depressed again?" Linc asked. There was anxiety behind the question.

  "No, really, I'm fine. Just wiped out from this whole fiasco." She looked at herself in her dresser mirror and pulled her hair away from her face, trying to imagine how she would look with her new identity. She would be a different person in the morning. A stronger person. More independent. Gutsy and self-reliant. She would have to be.

  Linc was talking quietly, completely unsuspecting, probably picturing his sweet, blond girlfriend on the other end of the phone line, and suddenly, she could stand it no longer.

  "Linc?"

  "Yes?"

  "Is it too late for me to request a certain song for your show Sunday night?"

  "No. What would you like to hear?"

  "'Suzanne.'" It was one of her favorite songs, and Linc often sang it to her along with a dozen other songs that incorporated some variation of her name.

  "I should have guessed," Linc said. "Whose version?"

  "The original." She didn't really care what version he played, but she knew that was Linc's favorite.

  "Leonard Cohen," he said. "Okay."

  "Please make a note to do it."

  "I won't forget."

  "I'm serious, Linc. I want you to write it down. Do you have a pen?"

  "Uh—hang on. Yeah, I've got one."

  "Write down, 'Susanna wants to hear me play "Suzanne" for her on Sunday night.'"

  "How about we spend Sunday night listening to it together?"

  "Please just write it down. Word for word."

  She heard him sigh.

  "Okay," he said. "I never knew you were so demanding."

  "Now tape it to your bathroom mirror."

  Linc laughed. "What's with you, Suze?"

  "Nothing's with me. Just promise me you'll tape it to the mirror in your bathroom before you go to bed tonight, okay?"

  "If you say so."

  She drew the conversation to a quick close, afraid she might be tempted to give him even grander hints. Then she returned to her own bathroom. She read the directions on the dye through once more. This was it.

  She focused on her image in the mirror as she raised the scissors to her hair, and with the first cut, high and deep, she knew there was no turning back. She was going to kill Susanna Miller. She was bringing Kimberly Stratton back to life.

  –3–

  Linc didn't bother going to bed. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat in front of the wall of windows in his living room looking out at the lights spread over Boulder like a blanket of glitter. He would have given anything for a cigarette. He hadn't lit up in a year and a half, not since Susanna told him she was pregnant. He'd wanted to be able to help her out, and he hadn't wanted that unborn baby breathing second-or third-hand smoke, so he'd taken the opportunity to quit. He must not have had a physical addiction to nicotine because quitting had not been that hard. Or maybe
, as Grace had suggested slyly, he'd found something that met his needs better than smoking. But if there had been a Marlboro in the house tonight, he'd be a fallen man.

  There'd been a message from Grace on his voice mail when he got home after dropping Susanna and Tyler off at the apartment. "I heard the verdict," Grace said. "I hope you and Susanna are okay. I assume you're over there tonight, so give me a call tomorrow. Love you."

  Linc shook his head at the memory of that message. He took a swallow of coffee and stared out at the lights. He could see nearly all the way to Susanna's apartment complex on the eastern side of town from here. Was she asleep yet? And why didn't she want him around tonight? It seemed crazy. She hated being alone. Okay, so tonight was different from any other night. Tonight was her last night as custodial parent of her son. But until now, she'd always included him in Tyler's life. He'd gone through the childbirth classes with her. He'd been there for Tyler's birth and held her hand during those first uncertain, unnerving days of Tyler's life. Susanna had treated him as though he were Tyler's father, and he'd slipped happily into that role. When it came right down to it, though, she apparently did not think of him that way at all. Maybe she blamed him for the custody verdict after all.

  He'd talked with her lawyer about it at length. How much did his involvement with Susanna figure into whether or not she retained custody? Not much, Ann had assured him. "It just doesn't help her case any." That struck him as an understatement. Having a relationship with a man who'd served four years in prison for murder hardly made a woman an attractive choice for custody. Early on, he'd asked Ann if he should end his relationship with Susanna. It was too late, Ann had said. Everyone already knew about it, and it would only seem like a calculated move to the judge. Then Linc suggested that he and Susanna get married. He fully intended that to happen one of these days, anyway. And he had money. Jim and Peggy would no longer have the battle won on financial resources. But Ann thought that was a terrible idea.

  Linc got up, stepping over Sam who was asleep at his feet, and walked into the kitchen. He pulled out a few of the drawers, hoping one of them might yield an old pack of cigarettes. He remembered cleaning the kitchen well when he quit, but still he couldn't resist the temptation to see if maybe one lone, stale cigarette existed in an overlooked corner of a drawer. Nothing. He poured himself a second cup of coffee and carried it to his studio, where he pulled out the Leonard Cohen CD with "Suzanne" on it to add to the stack of CDs he'd be using to record his show the following day.

  He was opening the jewel box to check the disc when his eyes fell on the framed photograph standing on the table next to the mixing board. It had been a gift from Susanna for his last birthday, an enlargement of a picture she'd had for years: the two of them as children on a swing in his back yard. Susanna was sitting on the swing and Linc was standing behind her, his feet on either side of her. She was just six years old in the picture, a slender child with long white braids. Linc, at twelve, had been wiry and tall, but equally as blond, and in this picture he looked like he might be the older brother of the little girl. Her protector. He had fancied himself that back then, although he had never quite known how to go about protecting her. He only knew that she needed it.

  He and his mother had moved next door to the Wood family a few months before that picture had been taken, shortly after his father's sudden death from a stroke.

  His mother had tried to manage the family butcher shop in Philadelphia alone, but her heart had never been in it, and when her sister in Boulder pleaded with her to move to Colorado, she and Linc were easily swayed.

  Linc suffered culture shock when he arrived in Boulder. "Fifteen square miles surrounded by reality," people said of the town. It was filled with natural food stores, head shops, vegetarian restaurants, and counterculture politicians. But Linc quickly found friends who shared his love of music, and his mother found work in her sister's small coffee shop, which catered to students at the university, and Boulder soon began to feel like home.

  The day after they'd moved into their small house near the center of town, Linc's mother was stacking dishes in the kitchen cabinets when he caught her staring out the window. He followed her gaze to the small, blond waif playing hopscotch by herself in the driveway next door.

  "That little one looks like she'll break in two if you breathe on her," his mother said, and for weeks Linc couldn't look at Susanna without picturing the seed ball of a dandelion, delicate and fragile.

  Sometimes, if Susanna's parents were going to be out at night, they'd ask Linc to baby-sit for her. That was how he came to know what life was like in the Wood household. Susanna's father was mean. Downright cruel. Linc didn't see it at first, because it was so unimaginable to him that a father could be that way. His own father had been soft-spoken and gentle. Linc had friends whose parents yelled at them or put them down, but this was different. There was always a threat in Paul Wood's yelling.

  "You behave while we're out or else," he'd say to Susanna as he and his wife walked out the door, or "you get those toys picked up or you know what will happen, don't you?" Susanna would nod, and her father would come back with, "Say it. Say it out loud. What will happen if you don't pick up your toys?" And he'd grip Susanna by the arm until she answered him in a voice as pale as her hair. "I'll get the belt." You couldn't blame someone for having an aversion to conflict when every altercation in her growing up years had led to that sort of pain.

  It wasn't only Susanna who suffered her father's abuse. Linc saw him kick a neighbor's dog one day, and Susanna once told him she'd seen her father kill a squirrel. Then there was the incident with the kittens. But that was later, and Linc had worked hard to block it from his mind.

  Susanna had liked Linc to read to her when he baby-sat, although she had very few books of her own. She liked to draw as well, and he thought she was pretty creative for such a little kid. Once she drew a picture of a lion, and he suggested they hang it on her refrigerator, but she said they couldn't. Her parents wouldn't allow it.

  When Linc realized how bad Susanna's situation was, he told his mother he didn't think he could baby-sit for her anymore. Being in the Woods' house made him feel sick, he said. His mother listened to him carefully and then said he needed to go over there more often, not less, even when he wasn't being paid to baby-sit. "And we need to have her over here, too," she'd added. "I'm afraid her parents have a serious drinking problem. She desperately needs good people in her life."

  He'd never really known anyone with a drinking problem, and so he'd never thought to notice it next door, but after his mother mentioned it, the smell of booze in the Woods' house became inescapable. He understood then the reason that Susanna's father could be almost docile one minute and brutish the next. And he knew why her mother couldn't hold a job, why she was so often "sick."

  He never actually saw Susanna's father hit her, but he'd seen the bruises on her legs. He'd seen them on her mother's face and arms as well. And sometimes in the summer, when everyone had their windows open, he and his mother could hear the battle being waged in the Wood household. His mother called the police a few times, but Susanna's father always managed to get out of whatever charge was levied against him, and her mother would never stick up for her. That tore Linc's mother apart, and she'd once again talk about how much Susanna needed their help, their love. She started inviting Susanna to their house after school or for dinner. She'd buy the little girl books and let her hang her pictures all over their kitchen walls. Susanna was a different child, a happy, relaxed child, at his house. He liked thinking that his home had become her haven. So he grew up with a special feeling for his younger neighbor, a bit fatherly, a bit brotherly. At least he'd felt that way for a while.

  When he formed his band during his second year of high school, Susanna would sit on the mildewy sofa in his garage and listen to them practice. That went on for years. She might do her homework or, when she got a little older, sketch one of the guys or the instruments or whatever caught her eye th
at day. She grew into an excellent artist. Whenever her school needed a poster designed for the hallway or for one of the offices, it was Susanna they called on. She won a couple of contests, and she was planning to enter a huge, statewide competition when her father was killed. She dropped out of school then, and her interest in art died when her father did.

  Linc had had a string of girlfriends, all of whom were ridiculously jealous of his young next-door neighbor. He'd thought they were crazy at the time, but later he wondered if they'd known more of what was in his heart than he did. Back then, though, the age difference had been so great that it never would have occurred to him to think of Susanna as a potential girlfriend. He hadn't even realized how startlingly beautiful she was until a new guy joined the band and was unable to take his eyes off the leggy, long-haired blond idly sketching in the corner of the garage. Linc began thinking about her differently after that, but his fantasies about her had a forbidden quality to them after having treated her like a sister for so long. He wondered if things might be different between them after she graduated from high school, when the difference in their ages would not seem so great.

  But then prison happened to him. And Jim happened to her.

  That little one looks like she'll break in two if you breathe on her. Linc still thought that was an accurate description of Susanna. Maybe that wasn't fair of him. It was true that she would go out of her way to avoid conflict or dissension; she was quick to put her own needs aside if it meant avoiding a fight. Yet, she'd been strong enough to say no to Jim when he wanted her to have an abortion. Strong enough to give birth and to stay by Tyler's side while he suffered through those horrific medical treatments. Yet he worried about how easily Susanna could be broken in two.

  Sam suddenly appeared in the studio. He walked over to the chair and rested his head on Linc's knee, and with a resigned sigh, Linc stood up. "You're right, fella," he said. "It's time for bed."

  He walked toward his bedroom, wishing he could shake the bitterness that threatened to overwhelm him. It wasn't fair. Susanna had been so determined to give Tyler the sort of safe, secure, and happy home she herself had never enjoyed. She was a good mother. The best. The first thing she'd felt truly confident about in a long time. Now she'd been told she wasn't good enough.