Run Away Baby

“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.

Chapter 39

“Are you ready for this?” Charlie asked her.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Do you have anything with you?”

“Not really. Lip balm and some money…” She unzipped the flimsy nylon pocket of her shorts and showed him an envelope with $1500 dollars in it. She’d accumulated it over the past several weeks by a mix of asking for money here and there from Randall and returning purchases for cash. “You still have that twelve hundred, right?”

“Right.”

“Good. Where is it?”