The Great Escape

She made her way back around the house looking for a way to get in, but everything was locked. She’d seen a couple of inns while she was driving around, some guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts, so there were plenty of places to stay. But first she wanted to see inside.

She reached through a piece of torn porch screening and unfastened the hook latch on the door. The boards creaked as she wove between some chaise longues with mildewed canvas cushions that had once been a bright marine blue. A broken wind chime made of spoons hung crookedly in one corner, an abandoned cooler sat in another. The door to the house was locked, but that didn’t stop Viper. She broke one of the small glass panes with a rusted garden trowel, reached inside, and opened the lock.

The musty scent of a closed-up house met her as she stepped into an old-fashioned kitchen. At some point, the tall wooden cabinets had been unwisely painted institutional green. They still bore what were surely the original cup handles and matching drawer pulls. An exceptionally ugly fake Victorian table sat in a breakfast nook too small for its size. The scarred white laminate counter held an old microwave, a new coffeemaker, a knife block, and a salt crock stuffed with bent spatulas and scorched plastic spoons. A ceramic pig dressed like a French waiter sat by the sink.

She turned on some lights and explored the downstairs, walking through a living room and a sunroom and sticking her head into a musty den before ending up in a large first-floor bedroom. The queen-size bed had a navy-and-white-patterned spread, end tables shaped like cable spools, a triple dresser, and two unmatched upholstered chairs. A pair of cheaply framed Andrew Wyeth prints hung on the wall. The closet held a windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, and a Detroit Lions ball cap. The sizes seemed about right to belong to Panda, but that was hardly conclusive proof that she’d broken into the right house.

The attached bathroom with its outdated robin’s-egg-blue ceramic tile and fresh white shower curtain was no more revealing. She hesitated, then opened the medicine cabinet. Toothpaste, dental floss, Advil, an Atra razor.

She went back to the kitchen and inspected the one object that was out of place, a state-of-the-art German coffeemaker, exactly the sort of thing a highly paid professional bodyguard who loved good coffee might own. It was what she discovered in the refrigerator, however, that convinced her she’d found the right place. On a nearly empty shelf, she spotted a jar of orange marmalade, exactly the same brand she’d seen Panda slather on her homemade bread.

“Real men eat grape jelly,” she’d said when she’d seen him pick up an identical jar at the grocery near Caddo Lake. “I’m serious, Panda. If you buy orange marmalade, you have to turn in your man card.”

“It’s what I like. Deal with it.”

The refrigerator also held two six-packs of Coke. No beer. She’d spent countless highway miles thinking about that first morning when she’d awakened by the lake and seen the pile of empties from the six-pack Panda had bought the previous night. What kind of bodyguard drank when he was on duty? But try as she might, the only real drinking she’d witnessed involved his taking a few slugs before she’d gone into the trees and the sight of him draining the bottle when she came out. Then there was the six-pack he’d set on the dresser their first night in that motel. How much of it had she really seen him drink? Not more than a couple of sips. As for their time at Caddo Lake … He’d only drunk Coke.

She glanced toward the stairs that led to the second floor but couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for investigating. It was fully dark now, and she still needed to find a place to stay. But she didn’t want to go anywhere. She wanted to sleep right here in this big spooky house with its memories of summers past.

She returned to the main-floor bedroom. Ugly vertical blinds covered sliding doors that led to an open deck, and a sawed-off broomstick resting in the door track provided the only security. After more snooping, she found a stack of the same low-cut boxer briefs he’d bought during their shopping trip, along with a pair of black and white board shorts for swimming. She retrieved her things from the car, locked the bedroom’s outer door to keep the wild things away, and settled in.

Unexplained creaks disturbed her sleep, and toward morning, a troubling dream had her running through a house with too many rooms but no way out. The dream awakened her.

The room was cool, but her T-shirt stuck to her skin. Early morning light trickled through the vertical blinds. She stretched, then shot up in bed as she heard the click of a latch.

A boy came through the door she’d locked before she’d fallen asleep. “Get out,” she gasped.

He seemed as shocked to see her as she was to see him, but he recovered faster. His wide eyes narrowed into a belligerent glare, as if she were the interloper.