The Escape Diaries (22 page)

           
 
I’d first been in this house five years
ago, at a Labor Day barbecue the Brenners had thrown for three hundred of their
closest friends and campaign contributors. This was right after Kip and I had
announced our engagement. Bear was one of the few relatives who’d welcomed me
into the family. I’d adored him on first sight, this big, good-looking guy with
the booming laugh and raunchy sense of humor. Unlike the rest of the
stick-up-the-ass Brenners, who looked like they slept with their wingtips on
and had the servants starch their underpants, Bear was vibrant, outgoing, and
always up for a bit of mischief. We quickly discovered we had a lot in common:
we both had strawberry allergies, we both loved moldy reruns of
Hogan’s
Heroes,
and we both believed that Vanessa ought to have horse tranquilizers
slipped into her morning orange juice.

Okay, full
disclosure here: the truth is I’d always had a crush on Bear Brenner.

           
Kip
and Bear bore a strong physical resemblance. Both had the strong Brenner jaw,
wavy hair that grew off a widow’s peak, and slightly bulging brownish-green
eyes. Studying Bear, you could see what Kip would look like in a few years. It
must have been tough for Kip, always playing second fiddle to his older cousin.

           
Bear
had the cool nickname, bestowed on him during his high school football days as
a defensive tackle.

           
Kip
was the kind of nickname given to guys who wear their backpacks squarely on
their shoulders and letter in golf.

           
Bear
was six-two.

           
Kip
was five-eleven.

           
Bear
had a stock portfolio worth millions.

           
Kip
lived off the remnants of his garnisheed salary.

           
Bear
had a collection of Cézanne nudes.

           
Kip
collected Xeroxed copies of bare female backsides.

           
Bear
was Batman.

           
Kip
was Robin.
    

           
Bear
had shattered the Brenner mold.
Slash, burn, take no prisoners
was his
motto. He’d experimented with every illicit substance that could be smoked or
snorted; he’d driven his motorcycle across the country; he’d been arrested for
public drunkenness during a rock festival. His embarrassed father, tired of
bailing him out, sent Bear to Mexico for a starter job in the family business.
The company had just begun outsourcing its bottle and can production to Janos,
Mexico, and was a good place for Bear to learn the ropes. If he messed up, the
important people back in Milwaukee wouldn’t hear about it.
What happens in
Janos stays in Janos.

To everyone’s
surprise, Bear did an outstanding job during his Mexican tenure. He was brought
back to Milwaukee and promoted to a job with more responsibility. He settled
down, got married, and was groomed for the CEO-ship. But Bear had already
caught the political bug. He’d started out doing organizational work for his
party, but as his leadership capabilities became apparent, he was thrust more
and more to center stage. Five years ago, his party had nominated him to run
for a U.S. Senate seat.

His war chest
plumped with his own private funds, Bear Brenner had swamped the airwaves with
commercials and swept across Wisconsin glad-handing voters, kissing babies,
chomping cheese, and posing for a zillion photos. Despite his wealth and family
background, Bear had a common touch. Voters could imagine sitting down and
hoisting a beer with him. He’d won the election without breaking a sweat.
           
No
thanks to his wife, Charlene. Tall, gaunt, and designer-dressed, she radiated
the warmth of an iceberg and looked like she never unclenched her knobby jaw.
Behind her back, Bear’s staffers called her Cruella DeVille
.

           
“Why
did those two ever get married?” I’d once asked Kip, trying to imagine the
outgoing, backslapping Bear in bed with Charlene, whose most recent facelift
had left her face looking like cellophane stretched over a Tupperware bowl.

           
“Plastics,”
Kip said.

           
“Plastic
surgery?”

           
“No,
plastic
products.
Charlene is the heiress to her family’s plastic
fortune. She’s loaded to the gills.”

           
“Bear
married her for her money? But he’s already a millionaire.”

           
He’d
shrugged. “It’s how rich people stay rich.”

           
As
far as I could tell, Charlene and Bear made their marriage work by staying as
far apart from each other as possible. According to Kip, they didn’t share a
bedroom even on those rare occasions when they were both in the same house.
They had no children.

           
Now,
hiding out in the Brenner cottage, I raided Charlene’s closet. Once I’d gotten
to know Charlene, I discovered that her apparent coldness was a cover for a
shy, introverted nature. At heart she was warm and generous, and I didn’t think
she’d object to my borrowing her clothes in my hour of need.

Charlene was
heavily into swampy colors—mushroom beiges, sludge grays, slime ochres. I
settled on the only thing I could find that didn’t look as though it had been
dyed with week-old nettle leaves: a pale yellow Oscar de la Renta sweater. I
ditched my Jockeys for a pair of Charlene’s underpants and hooked on one of her
bras. Too small. I hauled myself back into Labeck’s undershirt. Why trade
comfort for 32AA underwires? I shoehorned myself into a pair of Charlene’s toothpick
jeans, gratefully ditched Labeck’s clodhoppers, and tugged on a pair of
Charlene’s L.L. Bean sneakers. The shoes were too long and narrow for me but at
least they didn’t make my feet look like gunboats.

           
Sprawled
atop Charlene’s bed, Muffin observed the fashion parade. It’d been hours since
he’d tried to bite me; in fact, having him here was actually kind of sweet. He
hadn’t even snickered when he’d seen me naked. I flumped down on the bed, and
to my surprise Muffin crawled over and nuzzled my neck. Tentatively I extended
a hand and stroked his fuzzy head. He thumped his tail and when I scratched
under his chin, he gave a little grunt of pleasure, rolled over and exposed his
belly, writhing ecstatically as I rubbed it. He wriggled his way onto my lap
and we had a petting fest for a while. I swear he purred.

           
“This
is all the further I’m willing to go until we’re married,” I told him.

Muffin licked my
hand and whined.

           
“Okay.
I get the hint.”

We went to the
kitchen. Muffin waited expectantly while I ran tap water into a shallow bowl
and set it on the floor for him. Raiding the refrigerator, I found a package of
franks that still looked fresh, took one out, and gave it to Muffin. He wolfed
it down in three gulps, licked his chops, and looked at me for more. Maybe it
was the first hot dog he’d ever had. Vanessa probably kept her babies on a diet
of wheat germ dog biscuits.

“They’re not good for you,” I explained
to Muffin. “They’re made of pig snouts and turkey gizzards.”

He looked at me.
Didn’t care.

“You can have a
half,
”
I said.

While Muffin ate,
I gazed around Charlene’s kitchen, admiring the warm, copper- colored walls,
the charcoal granite countertops, the polished eucalyptus cabinets. Rows of
cookbooks marched across built-in shelves, not a single spine spattered with
Kool-Aid or globbed with frosting. And there, nestled between Julia Child and
James Beard, was a shiny black screen.

It was a
wafer-thin stand-alone computer monitor whose hard drive, I discovered, was
hidden in the cabinet beneath. Its keyboard rolled out on a wooden desktop, and
a cute little doctor’s office-type stool wheeled out for sitting.

Of course the
computer would be turned off. It was probably unplugged and even if it was
accessible, it would be swaddled in layers of security.

I jiggled the
mouse, then jumped as the screen flickered to life. It wasn’t dead, just dormant!
Someone must have neglected to turn off the computer when the house had been
shut down. A recipe for avocado soup appeared on the screen.
Welcome, Jelka!
enthused the computer.

Who was Jelka?

Jelka, Jelka,
Jelka . . .
a hazy image of a grandmotherly woman with a heavy Slavic
accent came to me. Jelka Braz, that was it! She was the Brenners’ Serbian cook,
who lavished paprika on every food she served, including French toast and ice
cream. I felt a warm glow of gratitude toward Jelka for forgetting to shut down
her computer, saving me from having to punch through layers of log-on security.

My fingertips
tingled. Information simmered beneath that keyboard, just waiting to divulge
itself.
Magic box, magic box, tell me what I want to know.

Well, what
did
I want to know? Answers to the questions I should have asked four years ago
instead of relying on an overpriced lawyer to do my thinking for me. I needed
to know what had been going on with my husband in the few weeks before his
death, when he was buying Maseratis and luxury suites.

Follow the
money.
I decided to start by checking Kip’s financial records. When we’d
first been married, Kip and I had a joint checking account, but that had ended
in a big blowup when Kip had overdrawn twice in a month and I’d had to beg my
payroll office for an advance on salary. From that point on, we’d each kept
separate accounts. Had that been the beginning of the end, only I’d been too
blind to see it at the time?

Vanessa would
probably have gotten hold of Kip’s bank records after I’d gone to prison, but
there was no way I was ever, ever going back in that house again. Her
do-it-yourself electrocution kit had blown up, but she might have ordered some
new gadgets from the
Torture Unlimited
catalog
—hand-cranked shock machines, giant dental drills, fingernail
extractors . . .

It didn’t matter
anyway; paper statements were practically obsolete. Nowadays everything was
available online. My hands shook as I typed in the name of Kip’s bank,
half-expecting sirens to go off and Treasury Department guys to rappel down
from the ceiling. But all that happened was that Kip’s bank snippily informed
me that his account was no longer available.

Okay, fine.
There’s
more than one way to skim a casino
—one of Liza Loonsfoot’s mottoes,
dating from the time she’d worked at Ho-Chunk Bingo.
 

I went to
Kip’s
online appointment calendar, Byte Me
.

Supply log-in
and password,
ordered the site’s sentry, the cyber equivalent of Freda
Schermerhorn. I didn’t know Kip’s log-in, but figured he would have used some
form of his own name.

KipVonnerjohn.

Access denied.

Kvonnerjohn.

Fuhgeddaboudit.

I thought about
what I knew about my late husband. Well, he
was
late; he operated on Kip
time. He was lazy, wanted everything to be fast and easy.

KVon,
I
typed. It sounded like a rapper.

In like Flynn!

Password,
nagged the computer.

Piece o’ cake.
Kip always used the same log-in: Cassius7,
the name of his golden
retriever, who’d been seven years old when he died.

The calendar
opened to a blast from the Stones’ “Time Is on My Side
.
”
E
verything was jumbled together here:
business meetings, car maintenance dates, client calls, tee times, dentist
appointments . . . weeks and months flew by as I scrolled. In June of the year
he’d been killed,
P.
began appearing. It didn’t require a magic eight
ball to tell me that P. was Prentice Stodgemore.

June 4: River
Hills Squash Club 2 pm P.

June 10: Lunch
with P. 12:30, Yacht Club.

June 13: Pick
P. up at 7 for Jersey Boys

I scrolled on
through the summer, knowing it was ridiculous to feel hurt that I hadn’t rated
a mention, but feeling resentful nonetheless.

August 10: Car
to garage.
The Lexus had developed muffler problems.

August 20:
Wannamaker wedding River Hills Country Club 5 pm. Have Freda order corsage for
P.

Kip’s cousin
Sophie Wannamaker had gotten married that day. I remembered receiving the
invitation, handwritten in flowing calligraphy on expensive parchment paper and
weighing as much as the Pottery Barn catalog. I’d been looking forward to
attending the wedding, and had even considered splurging on a new dress. So why
hadn’t I been at the Wannamaker wedding?

Because that was
the week my mother had come down with a case of the flu severe enough to land
her in the hospital, I remembered. I’d flown down to Florida to stay with my
dad while Mom recovered. Kip had seized the opportunity to take Prentice to the
wedding.
And ordered her a corsage, the scum-sucking weasel!

Something odd here:
Kip’s office entries had dwindled at the beginning of September. No more
meetings, corporate brunches, or other dreary business obligations. What had
been going on in his life the first weeks of September? Well, he’d been playing
hooky from work a lot, sleeping late most days. He’d written me a nasty note
complaining that the clatter I made getting ready for work woke him at the
crack of dawn—seven o’clock in the morning. Even if you were the boss’s
nephew, constantly being AWOL was a bad decision. Kip was behaving as though he
didn’t care if he was fired.