Run Away Baby (17 page)

“Abby, I don’t need you up here. You can go,” said Danielle. “And Sharlene, please stop eating my lemon drops. I brought them from home. Just because they’re in the company snack dish doesn’t really mean they’re for everyone.”

“We apologize for being
so
hard to deal with,” Sharlene said to Danielle with an offended sniff. “Don’t we, Abby?”

“For sure,” Abby said, not bothering to move. It was Thursday afternoon. 1:05. Time for her to leave. Only she didn’t feel like going home.

“So, anyhow, Danielle,” Sharlene continued, already unoffended, “I’m up here because I need to pick up my crockpot that was in the break room for the last month. I damn near forgot it and I need it for the beans. Have you seen it?”

Danielle rolled her eyes. “I was
wondering
who left that filthy thing there. Do you know I eventually had to wash it myself to keep the break room from stinking? It’s in the cupboard above the fridge. Why didn’t you respond to the memo I sent out about it?”

“I guess I missed that. Anyhow, I’m about to leave since I’m only working a half day today and I’m out tomorrow, and I’m not coming back until Tuesday. I’m gonna check my email right now, then I’m out of here. We’re going to Dwayne’s family reunion that’s all the way up north in Kentucky. The kids are staying with friends, it’s gonna be a real vacation. We’re leaving as soon as I get home. Woohoo!”

“I really don’t know why you’re giving me all these details,” Danielle said to her.

“Because you’re the frickin’ receptionist. In case someone calls for me. Duh!”

“So this is why you’re standing around talking instead of working?” asked Danielle. “I’m glad to hear you’re not on the clock right now.

“Who’s Dwayne?” Abby asked, making herself comfortable in the middle of Abby’s desk.

“My gay husband. I never mentioned Dwayne to y’all?”

“Does Dwayne have kids?” Abby asked. She shoved Danielle’s keyboard out of her way, trying to really savor these last moments.

“Five. All from different women. It took him
years
to figure out he’s gay. But now that he figured it out, he’s a hundred percent.”

“Seriously. I have
so much work to do,”
Danielle said.

“I’ll tell you about him next time you’re in,” Sharlene said to Abby, ignoring Danielle’s pleas. “He taught me how to make soufflés and he’s the reason I don’t overpluck my eyebrows anymore. You’d love him.”

“I’m warning you both…” Danielle said. Her fists were clenched into tight little balls now.

“Cool, I can’t wait to hear about him. Have a fun weekend,” Abby said, heading back to her office before Danielle had a meltdown.

“You have a good weekend, too,” Sharlene called after her.

Abby stood up and took a good look around her, focusing on the tasks before her, shelving her emotions for another time.

Aside from a cup with pens and pencils and a stapler, this portion of her big, L-shaped desk was completely clear. She wasn’t tempted to take any of the pictures on her desk. They were meaningless props. She took her expensive lip gloss, but left a cheap one in its place. When they checked her desk drawer, all the proper traces of her everyday life would be there.

She wrote
Tuesday
on a sheet of blank paper and wrote
Don’t forget ~ Last day of Clinique Sale!!!!!
beneath it. She set the note where no one could miss it.

She went down the hallway to the supply closet to grab a new box of tissues, stacks of Post-its, and some pens. Someone about to disappear certainly wouldn’t replenish her office supplies.

From the hallway window she saw Sharlene crossing the street, carrying her crockpot. This was when Abby decided that the thing to do was to leave her a goodbye note. She was Abby’s one and only friend. And friends want to be involved. They want to help.

After she got back to her office and conspicuously arranged her fresh selection of office supplies, she took out her personalized, embossed company stationary, delivered along with another ten thousand business cards to her office a week earlier by a sneering Danielle.

“I really don’t know why you’d need this, or why the company spent over a thousand dollars on personalized paper products for
you
, but here you go,” she’d told Abby, dropping everything on the floor just inside her door.

Abby penned her note; it was mainly, but not entirely, about how she had the
funniest
story about Danielle that she
couldn’t wait
to tell Sharlene on Tuesday. She put the note in its matching envelope and sealed it up.
Sharleenie the Weenie
she wrote on the outside, in the bubbliest, happiest cursive she could produce. She drew a heart after her name. It made no sense. That was fine. She walked back to Sharlene’s desk, hidden in its own little corner, set the envelope on her chair, and pushed her chair in. No one back there noticed or cared what Abby was doing. People dropped things off on each other’s desks all the time. Most of the time they were glad it wasn’t something getting dropped off on their own desks, since it usually meant more work. Sure enough, the window was open a crack. Abby took a look down – the ground was about six feet below – and was amused to see cigarette butts scattered all over the pavement.

She went back to her office, grabbed her purse, and took a final last look around. Content with it all, she closed her office door like she did every Thursday afternoon. Sticking with patterns. Being predictable.

“See ya,” she said, sauntering past Danielle on her way out. Danielle was on the phone. In her usual dismissive style she waved, if it could be called that, without looking up. Abby wasn’t going to leave without at least some final eye contact.

“Seeee ya,” she repeated.

Danielle looked up in annoyance and Abby smiled. Waved goodbye. Her fingers were happy sprinkles of friendliness.

Bye
Danielle mouthed to Abby.

Good enough. Abby went out the front door. Out on the hot street, she took one parting look. There was nothing classy about this place. Instead of some nice little sign, or a whole lot of elusive nothingness being on the outside of the building, a maroon and gold awning covered in bird poop broadcasted: Lorbmeer, Messdiem & Miller: Attorneys Who Fight For You!

To her surprise, she felt a little sad. She turned and walked away before that feeling had any room to grow.

As soon as she was done with Krissa’s check-in call, Abby went into the kitchen to find her housekeeper.

“Esmeralda, right?”

“Si. Yes, ma’am.” The housekeeper looked up from unloading the dishwasher and smiled. Since Abby had given her those shoes, Esmeralda had a whole new attitude.

“I need you to do me a super huge favor. Our wine bottles are getting all icky and dusty, and I’d really like you to clean them. Could you do that for me today?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Wonderful. The thing about the wine collection is that Randall is
really
fussy about it. You can’t shake it up, and you can’t break any bottles, and even tilting them too much makes him kind of mad, so you have to be
really
careful. Can you handle that?”

“Yes.”

“Great. I knew you could do it. Have you been in our wine cellar?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay. Follow me. You don’t see a lot of wine cellars in Florida, but you know Randall. He’s quirky. He added this on. It’s not technically a cellar, but he likes to call it that since he’s Mr. Fancy Pants. Yep, right here through this hallway. You’ve probably never even been back here, have you? We don’t use it much. There’s one of our spare powder rooms. Do you need to use it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Call me Abby. This is going to take a few hours. Do you need a snack first?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Okay. So here we are. Come on inside. It’s cold in here, isn’t it? Do you want a sweater?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Here. Take mine. I insist. There’s maybe, I don’t know, a thousand bottles or something like that. I’d like all the bottles carefully removed, the shelves wiped off, the bottles wiped off, and everything put back in its exact place. Use some damp cloths. Not drippy wet. Just a teeny bit damp. Got that? No cleaning products. That powder room we passed, the one we never use? There are plenty of towels and rags in there. You’ll find everything you need. And don’t forget: You’re going to need to keep this door shut the entire time because it’s temperature controlled in here.”

Esmeralda nodded. She looked a little put off by the scope of the project.

“Let’s gather everything you need to do this, so you don’t have to stop and start a hundred times. I really think we should get you a comfy chair to sit in. Do you want some music to listen to? You’re going to be in here for hours. Sorry there are no windows, but sunlight’s bad for wine.”

“I don’t know about this. Mr. Randall asked me to make prime rib for dinner tonight, and I have to leave by seven.”

“If you work from right now until five or five thirty, there will be time to make dinner. This can be a two day project if it needs to be.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Great. This chair will be comfy for you,” Abby said, wheeling an old padded chair from Randall’s life before her into the wine room. “And, how crazy is this, it’s my old stereo from childhood. I’ve been looking for this thing. Now you’ll have something to listen to.”

“Okay.”

“Now that you’re all set, I’m going to lie down. I need to take a little nap. If anyone calls ignore it, or take a message. In fact, just plan to ignore it. No hitting the bottles,” Abby added teasingly as she closed the door behind her. She went down the hallway, past the powder room, past the door to the garage, back into the main part of the house. She listened as Esmeralda went into the powder room, found some rags, ran them beneath some water, and returned to the wine room. She hesitated. She couldn’t hear the music, if Esmeralda was in fact playing any.

Abby drew in a deep breath, weighing her options. If Randall called and she didn’t answer, that could be a problem. He’d let some time go by, figuring she was swimming or something, but if too long went by, he would lose patience.

Ernie Blankenship, she reminded herself. His man crush was still around. She’d be on the backburner for a couple more days. It would be okay.

After a couple of minutes went by and Esmeralda seemed to be committed to the wine room, Abby decided it was time to put her plan into action.

With the curtains pulled and the room as dim as possible, Abby went into her closet and took her manila folder from behind her stack of jeans. She dropped it into a slightly bigger freezer bag she’d found in the break room at work, that someone had discarded after using it to bring in some cookies, and zippered it shut. Then she went into her bathroom and carefully pulled out the four shampoo bottles that held about $10,000 each. She put the bottles and the freezer bag in a large canvas shopping tote. She closed the bathroom door and then the bedroom door as she exited, leaving her muted phone on her bedside table.

She surveyed the house. Esmeralda was still in the wine room, just getting started.

The tote was deep enough that the bottles couldn’t be caught on camera. To Randall, it would seem peculiar for her to choose a canvas tote instead of one of her five hundred dollar designer bags. To back up her new identity as an environmentalist, she’d stuck a
Go Green for the Planet
bumper sticker on her SUV two days earlier. Randall might find it suspicious, but cops would fall for it. If it came to them reviewing everything. And would Randall disclose to them that there were all these cameras? Probably not.

Abby went to the dark, likely camera-free alcove in the hallway by the door to their pool, where Esmeralda kept her purse. She reached inside, grabbed Esmeralda’s car keys, and slipped out the door. It wasn’t uncommon for this door’s alarm to be deactivated all day when she was home. Also, Abby was pretty sure the only camera in this area was one outside, showing the pool area. To anyone reviewing this, it looked like she was taking a walk. Perhaps on her way to the farmer’s market a mile or two from here.

She had sunglasses on and her head down, but there was no mistaking it was her. Esmeralda’s Honda Civic was parked on the side of their hill beneath some avocado trees, obscured from view by a row of flowering hedges. No cameras pointed this far. Just so long as no actual humans were watching. The street looked deserted. The few neighbors nearby were mostly hidden from view behind their walls and trees and shrubs. Abby felt like it was all going as well as it could go.

Only someone with a junky car would park beneath avocado trees. Abby hoped this wasn’t a sign that it was going to break down. She got in, carefully closed the door, and discovered that it was a stick shift. She hadn’t driven a car like this since she was in high school.

Like the time she’d suddenly started ordering her meal in effortless French on her seventh visit to Saint-Tropez, Abby channeled her long-lost Driver’s Ed lessons and got the car going. Before long she was just another driver on the highway, making her way to Grove.

She hadn’t dared to google it. Instead, she’d found it on the map of Florida that hung in her office at work. It was in a remote, inland, probably scary area, exactly as she’d imagined it would be.

It was farther than Charlie had said – over an hour away. She had a small hand spade with her that she’d purchased with cash at a hardware store. Her plan was simple enough in theory: find some little road where she could bury her bottles and IDs, and leave the hand spade hidden nearby. Then fill Esmeralda’s car back up with the right amount of gas, and be home before she ever came out of the wine room.

Abby was about ninety-five percent certain that the camera footage in their house was on a forty-eight hour loop that continually recorded over itself. She thought she’d heard the security guy say something about this to Randall once, not too long ago, when he’d been at their house for a service call. Randall had cut him off, afraid of Abby hearing. As far as she knew, they’d never yet upgraded to different cameras or changed anything since then.

By her calculations, the soonest Randall would notice she was missing would be sometime on Sunday when he was done golfing and hadn’t heard from her in a while. More than forty-eight hours from now, barely.

On the five percent chance that the cameras went back further than that and he was able to review her actions, he’d be suspicious of them, but still have no idea where she had disappeared to today. He’d think she went for a walk with a tote bag, and that she had returned a few hours later with it looking emptier. It would seem very suspicious to him, very out of character for her. If he told the police about it, they probably wouldn’t think it was a big deal, but the mystery of it would haunt Randall forever.

Esmeralda’s car made a gagging lurch and Abby snapped back to the moment.
Please, please don’t do that again
, she prayed, slowing down a little to a pace the car seemed to prefer. It settled back into a comfortable hum and Abby’s pulse began to return to normal.

She looked over at the passenger seat beside her. It was littered with CDs Esmeralda would probably like to be listening to. She prayed for Esmeralda to stay put. For good measure, she threw in a bargaining chip:
If this works out okay, I will make it up to her. I will buy her more shoes or maybe even something really nice.