They hugged each other again.
As Natálie left Lafitte’s, Mary returned to her table and placed Natálie’s number inside one of the outside pockets of her handbag.
Twenty-Nine
After she got back from Lafitte’s, Mary sat alone on the balcony of her third-floor hotel room in the French Quarter. She had a glass of red wine on the coffee table in front of her and what seemed like a carnival of thoughts running rampant inside her head, but one thought was the leader of them all – her relocation to Texas.
The relocation was extremely necessary, that wasn’t what Mary had been debating with herself. What she’d become not so sure about was her city choice, Houston – she wasn’t so sold on the idea of staying inside the ‘Bible Belt’ anymore.
Mary’s plan had always been to follow George Oakfield’s advice of relocating to a different large city every six months and laying low for at least a year. After that, she’d be able to choose a place to be her permanent address and start getting on with her life.
The problem was, the first six months got scrapped because Nelson had, somehow, managed to track her down – and he’d done so inside the ‘Bible Belt’. So maybe staying inside the belt wasn’t such a great idea anymore. True, Houston was the fourth largest and most populated city in the USA, with over seven hundred Mary Smiths listed in the city’s online phone directory, but maybe that was exactly what gangster-suit man and Nelson were expecting her to do – stay where the biggest concentration of Marys resided.
Of the sixteen different cities in the six different states – all of them inside the ‘Bible Belt’ – that she had visited, she had left almost no paper or digital trail in any one of them. She used cash everywhere, and she quickly figured out that, just like in Franklin, getting the hotel clerk at reception to sign her in using an alias instead of her real name wasn’t actually that hard. Mary found out that the same story that she had weaved back at the hotel in Franklin tended to work like a charm. In the past seven weeks, Mary’s name had appeared in none of the registers in any of the many hotels that she had stayed in, and if the voice inside her head wanted to call it ‘paranoia’, fine, but she had also never stopped being cautious. Every time she left her hotel, no matter the city, she would be on high alert, checking the streets for anyone following her… paying attention to strangers in restaurants, bars, hotel lobbies, busses, trams, boats… wherever… looking for gangster-suit man or a face… any face… that she had probably seen before, and in the past seven weeks, she had seen no signs of either.
In that same period of time, Mary had used her credit card only twice – in two different cities, across two separate states – but that had been all planned… just another trick that she had picked up from spy movies.
Mary had no idea if Nelson knew anyone who would be capable of tracking down credit card activities, but that was what they did in films, and if Nelson did know someone, the idea was to purposely leave behind a very thin digital trail, leading to cities that she would never return to.
It was for that reason that for the past hour, Mary had been looking at cities outside the ‘Bible Belt’, and since Massachusetts was all the way on the far east coast of America, she had concentrated her efforts right on the opposite side of the country – America’s west coast – and after several searches and a lot of reading, Mary had decided on another city, which just like NewOrleans, she had always wanted to visit but never really had the chance to – San Francisco, California.
You do remember that we can’t really jump on a plane, right?the voice in her head reminded her.Not for a while. That was how gangster-suit man found us.
‘I know.’
And you do realize that it’s over twenty-two hundred miles from New Orleans to San Francisco, right?
‘I do.’
That’s thirty-something hours in a bus.
‘I know.’ Mary tapped the ‘buy’ button on her cellphone screen. ‘And we leave tomorrow.’
Thirty
Five Months Later
San Francisco, California
Mary poured herself another glass of wine and took a seat on the leather sofa that faced the large floor-to-ceiling window in her living room. The view wasn’t exactly great. All that she could really see was the residential building directly across the road from hers, but the two-bedroom apartment that she had rented was cozy, comfortable and very stylishly decorated… and she absolutely loved the neighborhood that she lived in.
Once she got to San Francisco, Mary decided to stick to the same thought process that had worked so well for her back in Nashville – look for a place in or around the city’s art district. The most that artists would ask anyone about their past would be – ‘so where are you from?’ – and that was it. No FBI-style interrogation about their history, or how a person came to be there. Mary liked that, and the apartment that she had managed to rent was located right at the edge of the Dogpatch – the most artistic neighborhood in San Francisco – just a block away from the famous San Francisco Bay.
Mary checked her watch – 7:42 p.m. on a Thursday evening. She walked back into her kitchen and was just about ready to pour herself another glass of wine, when the voice inside her head interrupted her.
Umm… are we not getting ready?
‘What?’
It took Mary just a split second to see it… right there, pinned to the fridge door by a pineapple-shaped magnet.
‘Oh shit!’ She put down her wine glass and checked the time again – 7:43 p.m. ‘I completely forgot all about this.’ She reached for the flyer that she had pinned to the fridge just over two weeks ago.
Indie art exhibition.
Over twenty emerging artists exhibiting their work for the very first time.
Free entry (donations welcome).
