The Escape Diaries

Love and Life on the Lam

Juliet Rosetti

Loveswept, New York

The Escape Diaries is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. A Loveswept eBook Original Copyright © 2012 by Patricia Kilday All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. LOVESWEPT and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. Cover illustration: Anne Keenan Higgins Cover design: Derek Walls eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53431-6 www.ReadLoveSwept.com

My mother-in-law sends me poisoned cookies. Occasionally she sends rat pellet pie or

drain cleaner doughnuts, but mostly she sticks with the cookies. I can picture her in her

big, cheery kitchen, wearing a frilly apron and humming as she mixes the ingredients:

flour, sugar, eggs, butter, cyanide . . .

Inmates haven’t been allowed food packages since crystal meth disguised as rock

candy sneaked into the system and everyone’s teeth started falling out. But that doesn’t

discourage my mother-in-law. She keeps cranking out the toxic treats, convinced that one

day the strychnine snickerdoodles or the carbolic caramel bars will make their way to my

digestive tract.

Although I don’t get the goodies, the mailroom staff passes the packing cartons

along to me. This is how they’re addressed:

Mazie Maguire Murdering Scum Inmate #3490082

Wisconsin Correctional Institute 750 County Road K

Taycheedah, Wisconsin 54935

Sometimes they’re addressed to Murdering Bitch, but Vanessa Vonnerjohn has

standards for ladylike speech and usually restricts herself to Trash, Trollop, Jezebel, and

the like. The lah-di-dah standards stretch only so far, however. Given the opportunity, my

mother-in-law would claw my beating heart out of my chest and feed it to her dogs.

Vanessa believes in Family, Church, and Vengeance, not necessarily in that order.

I’m always Mazie Maguire on the care packages, never Mazie Vonnerjohn. Apparently

I’d trashed my good standing in the family when I put a bullet through Kip Vonnerjohn

Junior’s handsome head.

My husband’s murder was captured on nanny cam. The police found the murder

weapon, my blood-spattered nightgown, and a video of me committing the crime. All the

physical evidence rolled up in a tidy package and tied up with a ribbon of motive: I’d

killed my husband because he was going to leave me for his squash-playing, matched-set-

of-pearls–wearing, lockjawed, flat-assed, Junior League girlfriend.

Arrested, tried, found guilty, sentenced to life in Taycheedah.

I’d been terrified the day I arrived. I was small, scrawny, and street-dumb. I knew

how to unjam a copier, tune a piano, and duct tape a sagging skirt hem, but I had no clue

how to survive in a prison full of hard-as-nails women. I’d seen Chicks in Chains; I

imagined tough girls in denims and barbed wire tattoos pinning me up against the bars

and setting to work with a plunger handle.

As it turned out, nobody pinned or plunger-handled me. In fact, I was treated like

a celebrity. Taycheedah’s inmates had watched my trial the way people had once

followed the OJ Simpson proceedings. To the crack dealers, meth chefs, paper hangers,

and stickup artists on my cellblock, I was a star. I was right up there with Hilda

Hoffacker, who’d sliced off her philandering boyfriend’s head with a chain saw. I got

more fan mail than Annie May O’Reilly, who’d brained her battering spouse with a grain

shovel and buried him in a pigpen.

Two-thirds of the women in Taycheedah had been beaten or abused by males, so

if a woman got a little of her own back—well, you go, girl. Forget the Slammer Babe

movies. No frenzied rattling of cage bars—for one thing, there aren’t any bars, just

bulletproof glass. Nobody looks like the hot babes in the reform school movies either,

since inmates aren’t allowed to wear makeup and everyone resembles the before pictures

in the magazine makeovers.

Prison isn’t fun. No pizza, popcorn, or nail polish, and the toilet is right in the

room with you. Whatever secrets you confide in a girlish giggle fest may end up being

whispered in the warden’s ear in exchange for a dime off someone’s time.

I’ve gotten the hang of prison life. I’ve learned how to use margarine for

moisturizer. How to mend ripped denims with Elmer’s glue and pocket lint. How to

survive Christmas by sleeping through it. I’ve become a model prisoner.

I’ve turned twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and twenty-nine in the can. Thirty is

staring me in the face. I’ll go through menopause and Metamucil behind bars. I tell my

counselor I’m resigned to spending my life in prison.

But here’s the truth: I spend a lot of time pondering ways to break out of this

place. And wondering what I’d do if I succeeded.

The Escape Diaries : A Guide to Breaking Out of Prison

Escape tip #1: Be prepared.

Actually I wasn’t prepared at all. I just wanted to go to bed. I was tired and

cranky, sweat was puddling between my boobs, and my armpits smelled like sprouting

onions. Deodorant cost one ninety-five at the prison canteen, well beyond the means of

someone who earned ten cents an hour. Given a choice between M&Ms or Mennen, I’d

pick the sweet and live with the stink. Repulsive, yes—but chocolate is what gets you

through the day, and no one else smells any better.

If I’d stuck to chocolate, things might have turned out differently. But I had a

leftover cough drop from a bout with bronchitis, and when my cellmate, Tina Sanchez,

developed a tickly throat, I gave her the cough drop. Just being a pal, right?

Wrong. You’re supposed to return unused medications to the medical director.

The staff tracks pharmaceuticals the way the CIA tracks yellow cake in the Middle East.

A cellblock officer caught the menthol scent on Tina’s breath and wrote her up for taking

a nonprescription drug. Since I was the one who’d dished out the illicit substance, I was

written up, too. Along with a bunch of other drug offenders—aspirin pushers, Alka-

Seltzer peddlers, and Midol dealers—Tina and I were sentenced to garden detail.

Not exactly the Bataan death march in a suburban peas and petunias plot, but

Taycheedah’s gardens are a whole different chunk of real estate. Looking out over them

is like gazing at the Great Plains; you wouldn’t be surprised to see buffalo and buzzards

roaming around out there.

The first days of September had been sunny and hot, and in the perverse way of

growing things, every tomato on six acres had ripened on the same day. Ten thousand of

the squishy red things, demanding to be handpicked before thunderstorms swept through

and turned them into salsa. We picked. And picked. And picked some more. All morning,

all afternoon, and into early evening. When it got to be five o’clock I thought we’d be

dismissed for dinner. But no-o. You do the crime, you do the time: that was the warden’s

motto. The kitchen staff sent out sandwiches and bottles of water and we ate sitting cross-

legged in the dirt. Then we hauled ourselves to our feet and went back to work.

My spine was an archipelago of ache, my skin felt scalded, and my teeth were

filmed with bugs. The rank, catnippy odor of tomatoes clung to my clothes. I straightened

and stretched at the end of my gazillionth row, rubbing my back and anxiously scanning

the sky to the west, which had turned the pus-yellow of a fading bruise. The air was thick

enough to stir with a spoon. Crickets chirped storm warnings. Lightning flickered in a raft

of distant clouds.

Lightning terrified me. I glanced uneasily at the officer on duty, hoping she’d let

the tomatoes go to mush and order us back inside. She didn’t. She just yawned, leaning

against a tree, staring glassily into space. Obviously, distant lightning wasn’t high on her

list of concerns.

“Did you know that lightning can strike as far as ten miles away?” I said to Tina,

who was picking on the opposite side of my row.

“So what?” Tina scoffed. “Your chances of getting hit by lightning are less than

winning the Powerball.”

“You’ve got it backward.” The heat was making me cranky. It was Tina’s fault I

was on this gulag detail in the first place. “The odds against winning the Powerball are

greater than your chances of being struck by lightning.”

“I ain’t never won the lottery and I ain’t never got hit by lightning neither, so that

proves my point.”

Tina’s logic made my brain hurt. I opened my mouth to explain her faulty

reasoning, which would probably have resulted in Tina’s giving me a mashed tomato

facial, but at that moment a siren began to wail. I nearly jumped out of my sweat-streaked

skin. Dropping my tomatoes, I clapped my hands over my ears.

“Is that the escape siren?” I asked.

“No, you goober. That’s the tornado siren.”

Tornado? My stomach did a roller-coaster dip. Tornadoes scared me even worse

than lightning. What were you supposed to do? In grade school we’d had to practice

tornado drills, crouching under our desks with our arms over our heads and our butts in

the air. By the time the drill ended, our classroom smelled like a cauliflower factory.

The guard snapped out of her heat-induced stupor, blew a whistle, and bellowed,

“All right, everybody, form up in a line. We’re returning to the main unit. Inside, you will

proceed to your designated—”

A galloping wind drowned out her voice, bowled over the tomato plants, and

hurled leaves through the air like green rain. The storm blitzed in faster than anyone

could have expected. Thunder shook the ground and a zag of lightning split the sky. The

mercury vapor lamps that lit the grounds exploded, plunging us into murky gloom.

Disoriented, I grabbed onto Tina and we bumbled around, tripping over vines,

squishing tomato guts underfoot, trying to catch our breaths against the scouring gale.

The air sizzled with electricity and my hair stood on end. The wind worked itself into a

tantrum and slammed us along, Tina’s long braid whipping against my face until she was

whirled one way and I was hurled another. I smacked up against the wall of the

greenhouse and stepped in a load of peat moss from an overturned wheelbarrow.

Lightning flashed again, turning the world muddy purple. The purple goop spat

hail. Split pea hail at first, that sounded like the first faint pops of microwave popcorn,

then fist-sized hail that smashed the greenhouse panes and sent shards of glass geysering

into the air. A 747 revved for takeoff inside my skull. My ears popped, my hair tried to

yank itself out by the follicles, and what felt like a dozen Dustbusters sucked at my

clothes. Tree branches and gutter spouts hurtled through the air, outlined by strobes of

lightning. Something enormous somersaulted toward me, growing bigger and bigger,

blotting out the sky. I stared in disbelief. It was a house! An enormous house was about

to smack down and squash me like the Wicked Witch of the East. When the rescue

workers came around searching for bodies, they’d discover my feet sticking out from

beneath the foundation.

“She really needed a pedicure,” they would say.

I was five years old when I watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time. My

parents were out and my older brothers, who were supposed to be babysitting me, had

abandoned me. Alone in the house, I poured myself a glass of Kool-Aid, dribbled my

way to the TV, and popped a tape into the VCR. I couldn’t read yet, but the video cover

showed a girl in a blue dress, a scarecrow, a lion, and a shiny metal man. I plopped down

on the sofa, my legs so short they stuck straight out over the edge of the cushions, and

watched, entranced, as a girl named Dorothy balanced along a fence, singing a song

about a rainbow.

Then Almira Gulch appeared. Eyes like Raisinettes, chin like an ax blade, mouth

like a rat trap. By the time she was pedaling her bike through the twister, cackling

insanely and transforming into the Wicked Witch of the East, I was petrified, sobbing,

and soaked.

My mother came home, switched off the movie, changed my underpants, and put

me to bed. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Wizard of Oz again until I was nine years old,

presumably old enough to separate fantasy from reality, but even then I had to squeeze

my eyes shut when the winged monkeys flew out of the witch’s castle.

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