that morning. Now he devoured it with avid interest. While Tony was preoccupied, Angie slipped out of the room and the house. Out in the backyard, disregarding the mid-September chill, she slipped off her robe and eased her body into the pool. For twenty minutes she swam one lap after another in the long, narrow pool. The steady series of measured strokes worked some of the kinks out of both her muscles and her nerves. Physical exercise was the only way she knew to hold the terrible anxiety at bay.
At last, physically and mentally exhausted, she climbed out of the pool and lay in the sun to dry. She was lying there half-asleep when the phone rang. Forbidden to answer it under any circumstances, she fully expected Tony to pick it up, but he must have been in the shower. Instead, the answering machine clicked into action. For some unaccountable mason, Tony had left the speaker option witched on, allowing Angie to hear the tinny voice.
“Tony,” a man said. “I’ve got to see you rightt away. The usual time and place. It’s urgent. I think somebody saw you.” That was all. The man hung up leaving no name or phone number. Obviously Tony would know who it was and how to get back to him.
Pulling on her robe, Angie hurried inside. She squeezed fresh grapefruit and put Tony’s breakfast on the table. By the time he came out of the bedroom, she ducked past him into the bathroom.
“There’s a message on the machine,” she told him. “It must have come in while I was the pool.”
Filled with an uneasy and unexplained dread, Angie showered hurriedly. When she tuned off the water, she could hear him rummaging around in the bedroom. Peering in the mirror, she saw that an open suitcase lay on the bed and he was heaving clothing into it. Her heart constricted. If he was packing up to go, that meant the money would go with him. She had missed her chance.
“Are you going someplace?” she asked innocently.
“We both are,” he said. “I’m going out. While I’m gone, I want you to pack.”
“Pack?” she repeated.
“What are you, stupid? Yes, I said pack.”
“Where are we going?” she asked. “For how long?”
She looked at him, trying to assess his mood without giving away the fact that she knew something she shouldn’t. He glowered at her. “A week. Ten days. Take enough clothes for that and leave the rest.”
She might have believed him, if she hadn’t heard the message, if she hadn’t known some-thing was wrong. No, they were leaving for good. What they left in the house would only delay anyone starting a serious search. It was a time-honored way of skipping town without sounding the alarm for someone who might not want you to leave or, more likely, someone who was hot on your trail. Angie had pulled it a time or two herself.
“How soon will you be back?”
It was an innocuous enough question, but it seemed to drive Tony into a rage. “How the hell should I know? An hour, three? All you have to do is be ready when I get here.”
He stalked from the room without even bothering to hit her on his way past. She followed him, expecting that he’d go by the hall-way closet and pick up the briefcase, but he didn’t. He went out through the door that led to the garage, locking the deadbolt behind him.
With the bath towel still wrapped around her, she hurried on out to the patio and stood listening, straining to hear the garage door open and close and for the tires to crunch down to the end of the gravel driveway. When she was sure he was gone, she raced back into the house and wrenched open the door to the closet. The briefcase was still on the shelf. Hardly daring to hope, she lifted it down. It was still heavy. Maybe she wasn’t too late. With trembling fingers, she worked the lock. It took three or four tries before the lid popped open. The money was still there. She could do it.
She had thought about running away often, fantasized about it for months. If she was ever going to do it, now was the time to put her plan into action. Later she would figure out exactly what to do after she was free of him, but for now, escape was the only issue. If she didn’t get away clean before Tony came back to get her, she never would.
She closed the briefcase and hefted it with one hand. It was heavy, but manageable if she wasn’t carrying much else. On legs frail as toothpicks she raced back down the hallway the bedroom. There, forcing herself to calm down, she went into the bathroom for a self-inflicted make-over. She applied her makeup unerringly and pulled her blonde hair up on top of her head. Then she dressed in a stylish red silk jumpsuit with a matching hat which she wore at a rakish angle.
From the back corner of her closet, she pulled out one of the few possessions that had made the transition from L.A. to Tucson -an old, frayed straw beach bag. She emptied the money into it except for a selection of bills, large and small, which she wadded into her pocket. On top of the money, she loaded in two pairs of shorts and two nondescript shirts as well as her makeup kit and a pair of thongs. She zipped the bulging beach bag shut and placed it inside a medium-sized, tapestry-covered suitcase.
She took the briefcase back to the entryway closet and then walked through the living room. For only a moment, she felt a twinge of regret. Angie Kellogg had been a prisoner here, but it had been a very nice prison, a comfortable one, better than any place she had ever lived. At times, when Tony was out of town, she had almost been able to pretend it belonged to her. Now she found herself dreading leaving it. Prison or not, at least it was familiar. She was plunging off into the unknown.
It wasn’t until then that she ventured into Tony’s office. What she wanted was there, concealed in the top drawer of his locked desk. Using a nail file, she quickly picked the desk lock and removed the little black leather-bound notebook. It seemed like such a small thing, really, hardly worth the trouble, but Angie knew instinctively that the collection of names and addresses and phone numbers contained inside it was her one real insurance policy, her ticket out. She hadn’t quite thought through how she could use such a thing, but she understood beyond a doubt that the note-book was valuable. Somewhere there was a willing buyer for such an item, and once she found him, Angie Kellogg could probably name her own price.
With the book safely in her purse, Angie made one last tour of the house to see if there was anything else she wanted to take. Picking up her worn copy of the
Finally, after checking in the phone book, she called a cab. Taking a deep breath, she gave the dispatcher the address of a neighboring house, one three doors down the street which she had memorized for just such an emergency. When he asked where she was going, she told him the airport.
As Angie put down the phone, wild trembling once more reasserted itself. She had irretrievably set her plan into motion. If Tony came home and caught her now, she was doomed for sure.
Clutching the suitcase, her beach bag, and a pair of three-inch, red high heels, she hurried out of the house and dashed across the back-yard to the place where the dry wash ran under the fence, the place where she had watched the rabbits come and go, and had envied them their freedom. She had measured the opening with her eyes, but she had never dared approach it with a measuring tape for fear Tony might catch her at it and guess her intentions.
Weak with relief, she found it was easy to push the suitcase, hat and high heels through the high spot under the fence. It was much harder to wiggle under it herself. Once, as she squirmed along, she felt the fabric of the pant-suit hang up on the bottom of the fence, but she managed to free herself without tearing the delicate cloth. At last she found herself standing upright outside the fence, brushing sand and gravel from her clothing and hair and laughing uproariously. She had done it. Despite all of Tony’s deadbolts and alarms, despite all his precautions, Angie Kellogg was Out. The funny little rabbits had shown her the Way.
She may have been out, but she wasn’t home free. Even now, Tony might drive up and catch her waiting beside the road. Resolutely, she crammed her feet into the heels and went tripping across the rough terrain that led to the road and to the house where she was supposed to meet the cab. If anyone saw her like this-and she
