The Marsh King's Daughter(24)

It’s a hundred miles from the Marquette Branch Prison to the Luce County courthouse where my father was arraigned, so they logged a lot of driving time. Psychopaths like my father can be very charismatic. I imagine him chatting with the guards, figuring out what interested them, engaging them little by little. Just like he tricked my mother into trusting him by telling her he was looking for his dog. Just like he played on my interests when I was a child to turn me against my mother so subtly and thoroughly, it took years of therapy for me to accept the idea that she cared.

I don’t know how he got the knife out of his cell and into the prison van. He could have hidden it in the seam of his jumpsuit up high near his groin where the officers would be less likely to pat him down. Or he could have concealed it in the spine of a book. This is where a smaller knife would have been considerably more practical. But one thing people have to understand about my father is that he never does anything halfway. Another thing they have to understand is that he’s a patient man. I’m sure he let any number of escape opportunities go by until all of the conditions were right. Maybe one day the weather was bad, or the guards were unusually grouchy or unusually attentive, or the knife wasn’t quite finished to his satisfaction. It’s not like he was in a hurry.

Yesterday, the stars aligned. My father successfully smuggled the knife out of his cell and hid it in the crack of the seat in the back of the prison van. He waited until the return trip to make his move because the guards would be tired from a long day on the road and because it would be harder for searchers to follow if he escaped shortly before sundown. Also because they’d be traveling due west on the way back, and everyone knows how distracting it can be to drive straight into a sunset.

My father slouched in the backseat while he pretended to doze. He knew the route well enough to follow it with his eyes closed, but my father never leaves anything to chance, and so every couple of minutes he cracked open an eye to track their progress. They passed the turnoff to Engadine, drove past Four Corners and up a hill and through the tiny town of McMillan, past a handful of houses and the old McGinnis farm and down the hill to King’s Creek. Up another hill and past the abandoned pottery studio and cabin built by a hippie couple in the 1970s, past the Danaher Road, down one more small hill and up another and then down to the marshy area west of the Fox River Bridge at last. Seeing the marshland made my father’s pulse race, but he was careful to hide it.

They drove through Seney without stopping. Maybe the driver asked the other guard if he needed the bathroom; maybe he kept going assuming his partner would speak up if he did. My father wasn’t granted that luxury. This time he didn’t care. He shifted in the backseat, slid forward ever so slightly, faked a snore to cover his movement. He reached into the crack of the seat and slid the knife from its hiding place. Cupped it between his handcuffed hands with the blade pointing toward him so he could strike from above, and slid forward even farther.

Ten miles west of Seney, right after they passed the Driggs River Road that parallels the river and leads into the heart of the wildlife refuge, my father lunged forward. Possibly he roared like an attacking soldier, possibly he was quiet as an assassin. Either way, he plunged the knife into the passenger guard’s chest, driving the blade deep into his flesh and penetrating the right ventricle and cutting the septum so the guard died not from blood loss but from the blood pooling around his heart, compressing it and causing it to stop.

The guard was too surprised to yell, and by the time he realized he was dying, my father had grabbed his gun and shot the driver. The van veered into the ditch, and that was that. My father confirmed both guards were dead, patted them down for the handcuff key, climbed into the front seat, and clambered out. He looked up and down the highway to be sure there were no witnesses before he stepped out of the cover of the van and headed directly south, trampling the stretch of grass between the road and the trees so the searchers would know which way he was heading.

After a mile or so, he waded into the Driggs River. He walked down the river a short distance and came out again on the same side because the river was too deep to cross without swimming, and because he didn’t want to make it too hard for the searchers to follow until he convinced them the wildlife refuge was his destination. He left a bent fern here, a broken branch there, a partial footprint, laying down a trail that was just challenging enough for the searchers to think they were smarter than he was and they’d catch up to him before nightfall. Then at the moment of his choosing, he evaporated into the marsh like the morning mist and disappeared.

That’s how I figure he did it. Or at least, that’s how I would have done it.

—

WE’RE A MILE from the first cabin I want to check when Rambo whines in the particular way he has that tells me he needs to be let out. I don’t want to stop, but when he starts digging at the armrest and turning circles on the seat I have to pull over. I’ve noticed lately that when he has to go, he really has to go. I don’t know if his problem is age or a lack of exercise. Plotts live between twelve and sixteen years, so at eight, he’s getting up there.

I reach inside the glove box and stick the Magnum in the front of my jeans. As soon as I open the passenger door, Rambo is through it like a shot. I walk the edges of the road more slowly, looking for signs that a person has been through. Nothing as obvious as a piece of orange cloth stuck to a branch. More along the lines of a footprint from a laceless tennis shoe. My father used to tell my mother and me that if anyone ever showed up unexpectedly on our ridge, we should wade out into the marsh grass and roll around in the muck and stay still until he told us it was safe to come back. I’m sure by now my father’s prison jumpsuit is similarly camouflaged.