The Escape Diaries (24 page)

           
“Which
station?”

           
“Channel
Six.” I gazed out toward the lake so I didn’t have to look him in the eye.
Why
was I lying?
“I slept in the truck overnight. Someone left the keys in the
ignition, so I stole the truck. I drove it to Vanessa’s house. That’s where I
found the nanny cam video, in Vanessa’s old VCR player.”

           
“And
you stole the video right out from under my aunt’s nose?”

           
“Well,
if you want to get technical about it, the tape was my property in the first
place. But Bear—when you enlarge the film—”

           
“How’d
you do that?”
   

           
“Fiddled
around with some equipment in the TV van.” If I told one more lie my tongue was
going to turn black and fall off.

           
“Come
on, kiddo—you couldn’t have done that by yourself. Who helped you?
Vanessa said some cable guy came to her house with you. Who was he?”

           
“Nobody.
A repair guy. I stowed away in his truck.”

“I thought you
said you drove yourself to Vanessa’s house.”

I didn’t feel
hungry anymore. My heart was fluttering, the kind of weird, shaky rush you get
when the dentist injects epinephrine to numb your gums. “But the canny nam
tape, Bear—I mean the
nanny cam
—stuff jumps out at you. Like
the woman in a nightgown? I don’t think it’s a woman at all. I think it’s a
small
man.
”

           
“Right.
A midget wearing a wig.”

           
I
laughed again. Bear could always crack me up. I was feeling drunk, light-headed,
spaced out. It was the relief of finally feeling safe, I told myself. I’d
fought so hard to get to Bear, and now I could relax. I could dump my burden on
his broad shoulders.

           
“Mazie?
Are you feeling okay?” Bear was staring at me, eyes narrowed.

           
“Gr-r-reat!”
Jeez—why couldn’t I talk straight?
           
Bear
tossed a chunk of chicken to Muffin.

           
“Too
spicy!” I sputtered. Too late. Muffin had already snorked down the chicken.
Instantly his mouth was on fire. He yipped pitifully, racing in circles and
rubbing his muzzle against the linoleum. Bear chuckled.

           
I
found Muffin’s water bowl and made him drink. He lapped greedily, then farted
loudly.

           
“All
better?” Bear asked. He was holding out a chicken wing for Muffin.

           
“He
shount . . . those things got bones.” I was feeling wobbly and sick. Black ants
conga-lined across my vision.

           
“I
know.” Bear held the chicken piece up out of Muffin’s reach. Muffin leaped for
it, but each time Bear snatched it away. “Maybe the little bastard will choke
to death. You know, I don’t think that thing is even a dog. I think it’s a rat
with a bad perm.”

           
Suddenly
tiring of having his food snatched away, Muffin sank his teeth into Bear’s
ankle.

           
“Jesus!
You little bag of shit!” Bear bolted off the stool, shook Muffin off his leg
and snatched the gun out of his pocket. He raised it and aimed it at Muffin.
“I’ve always wanted to shoot that annoying little turd,” he said.

           
“Stoppit.”
My voice came out slow and stupid. He was kidding about Muffin. He wouldn’t actually
shoot a defenseless dog!

           
Bear
aimed at Muffin and pulled the trigger. The shot sounded like an explosion. I
screamed, squeezing my eyes shut. When I opened them Muffin was lying on the
floor, eyes wide and shocked, blood trickling out of his small gray body. I
tried to go to him, but a wave of dizziness suddenly overcame me. I tottered
and would have fallen, but Bear caught me. He tilted my chin so I had to look
up at him.

           
“Where’s
the picture, Mazie?” he asked.

           
“Pitchur?”

           
“The
goddam snapshot.”

“You—you
killed Muffin, you son a bish!” I tried to jerk away from Bear, but he had me
in a hard grip. I’d never noticed before how cold his eyes were, pale
greeny-gold like lizard eyes.

“Where’s the
snapshot?”

“You shot my dog!
You’re a total tool, you know that?”

I may have said
tootal
tole
;
my tongue and brain were
going down different roads.

“Concentrate,
damn it!” Bear shook me, and my head snapped back and forth. “Who’s been
helping you? I want to know!”

“Dirty, stinkin’
coward!”
 

           
Bear
backhanded me. It stung like crazy. Tears sprang to my eyes. My over-stressed
bladder released a squirt of pee.

           
“Wuzzit
. . . the pop?” I was spaghetti. I was a Gummi bear left out in the sun. I was
a Jell-O wiggler, squirting between your fingers when you try to pick it up. I
had no bones; Bear had to carry me. I blinked dazedly up at the kitchen ceiling
. . . the hallway . . . the laundry room . . .

           
“Yeah,
in your drink, you stupid twit.” His voice came from far away.

           
I
was
a stupid twit. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I’d known all along. Known in
my gut. Guts never lie. Only I hadn’t wanted to listen to my guts. “Wuzzit G .
. . H . . . ?” I couldn’t remember what came next. The girls in my cellblock
talked about date rape drugs a lot.
B
—that was it.
GHB
.

Odor of rubber
and oil; we were in the garage.

“
Forget
me
,”
Bear said. He slid something black and crackly over my head.
Instant darkness.

           
“Can’t
. . . breashe,” I muttered.

           
“Mazie,
baby, that is exactly the idea.” His voice came out muffled. “I’m wrapping you
in a garbage bag. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the irony. Vanessa always said you
were trash. And guess what—she was right. You are nothing more than a big
disposal problem.”

Escape tip #19:

There’s always a way out.

You just have to dig for it.

           
A
cold, wet button pressed against my neck. A small, rough tongue flicked my ear.
I opened my eyes to utter blackness, unable to see or move.

           
“Muffin?”
I croaked, feeling the warm, furry body snuggled awkwardly between my shoulder
and chin. “You’re alive, baby?”

As I came more
fully awake, I discovered that I was lying on my right side, one arm pinned
beneath my body, an enormous weight crushing the breath out of me.

           
Why
couldn’t I move? My sluggish brain grappled with the question. As Muffin
squirmed, a stream of something grainy whispered against plastic. Dirt. Dirt as
in
soil
!
Plastic
as in lawn and leaf bag.

 
          
 
Memory returned in a confused jumble.
You
are nothing more than a big disposal problem.
Understanding broke over me
in a great, sickening wave. Bear had solved his disposal problem by burying
Muffin and me. We were underground, maybe buried under tons of soil. My
oxygen-starved brain served up gruesome Edgar Allan Poe visions of people
walled up and buried alive, chewing on their own arms as they slowly starved to
death.

           
But
I knew I wasn’t going to starve. I wasn’t going to live long enough to chomp a
single digit because I was going to suffocate within seconds. I would die in
this dirt tomb and nobody would ever know what happened to me. Years from now
I’d be a Discovery Channel special:
Mazie Maguire: Alive in Argentina?
All
because I’d been so monumentally stupid! I’d violated the most elementary law
of modern-day survival:
Never, ever trust a politician!
 

           
 
Why fight the inevitable? It would only prolong
the suffering. I could just drift back into that drugged sleep. Blackness
reached up for me, ready to carry me down into blissful oblivion. Giving up
would be so easy. It was just a matter of relaxing, of taking baby breaths, and
then forgetting to breathe at all.
Forget me,
Bear had said. Not a
bittersweet elegy, but the street name for the drug he’d used to knock me out.

Okay, so forget
me. Forget everything. Resistance was futile. I was checking out of this rotten
world. I was taking the easy way out. Bear won. I gave up.

My eyes flew open
in the utterly lightless dark. The
Shawshank Redemption
guy hadn’t given
up. He’d escaped through a stinking sewer filled with stuff I didn’t want to
think about. And Richard Kimble had jumped off a five-hundred-foot dam rather
than allow himself to be captured. Martha Stewart had toughed out five months
of prison and emerged wearing a poncho crocheted out of shredded license
plates.

 
          
And
what about Muffin? He’d been burned by Colonel Tso Chicken, shot, and buried
alive, but did you see Muffin giving up? No. Muffin was trying to comfort
me,
wriggling against my body and whining to wake me up, depending on me to
bust us out of here.

           
Coughing,
grinding my teeth with the effort, I moved my unpinned arm and tore feebly at
the bag. At least I think I did; I could barely feel my own numb fingers.
Muffin scratched too, his sharp little claws puncturing the plastic. Bitter
grit sifted into my mouth. I flailed feebly with one foot, breaking through the
tough vinyl. A clod of earth the size of a basketball thumped into the bag. The
disturbed dirt above shifted, pressing down harder. My lungs felt like balloons
being twisted by a birthday party magician.

           
Atticus,
you are going to have to help me here.
I flashed on Atticus Finch, sitting
in a rocker in front of the town jail, facing down the lynch mob. Muffin and I
kept clawing. Enormous clumps of displaced dirt rained down, clogging our
mouths and noses. But it was loose earth, shoveled back hastily and honeycombed
with air pockets. Quite abruptly my scrabbling hand poked through into
nothingness.

           
“Holy
shit!” yelled a man’s voice. A woman screamed.

Moments later
hands were digging down into the soil, heaving me upward, dragging me up into
blessed air, into what I would ever after think of as heaven—a September
night alive with the sound of chirping crickets and so star-spangled that I had
to squeeze my dirt-clogged eyes shut against the blaze of the constellations.

           
I
reached down and hauled out Muffin, who snorted, sneezed, and shook himself. I
horked ten tons of dirt out of my lungs, then looked up at the man and woman
who’d pulled me out. The moon shed enough light for me to see that they were
African-American, although at the moment they were both the color of cornstarch.

 
          
“Sweet
Lord Jesus,” the woman moaned. “I thought for a second—we just buried
Mama yesterday. We stopped by here to check whether they planted the
grass—”

           
“All
of a sudden the ground starts shaking and I say to myself, Bobby Ray, you are
about to experience your first resurrection,” the man said. “Then your hand
comes shooting out of the ground and I about need a Depends.”

           
The
woman was starting to get mad now. “Just what in God’s name did you think you
were doing, laying down there on top of my mama—”

           
“Hush
now, Claudette,” the man said, “This poor girl didn’t wrap herself in a Hefty
and dump dirt on herself.” He ripped the remains of the garbage bag off me.
“What happened to you, honey?”

           
I
couldn’t talk. I spat more dirt and tried to blink the grit out of my eyes as
it slowly dawned on my oxygen-starved brain that we were in a cemetery. Muffin
and I had been buried in a fresh grave with a new tombstone that read
Marabelle
Akin. Rest in Peace
.

           
Where
do you hide a marble? Inside a bag of marbles.

           
Where
do you hide a pesky body? In a pre-dug grave. Bear must have scouted out the
cemetery earlier. I was willing to bet we were within a mile or two of his
house. Moon Lake was visible through a nearby grove of trees. This was a small
rural cemetery, only an acre or two, probably with no caretaker or security
gate. Now I understood why Bear had worn dark clothes—to lessen the
chance of being spotted while he went about his dirty deeds. He’d probably
stolen a shovel from the cemetery’s toolshed and dug down a couple of feet into
the fresh Akin grave. That would explain the grime on his soft, graft-grubbing
politician’s hands.

           
 
When everything was ready, he would have
hurried back to his cottage, where I’d waited, trusting and gullible, a lamb
ready to be slaughtered. He’d crushed a pill into my Coke to knock me out,
tossed Muffin and me into a Hefty, flung us into his car trunk, and driven us
to this cemetery. He’d dumped us into the scooped-out grave, shoveled dirt back
into it, and replaced the netting that held down the newly sown grass seed.
Mission accomplished.