from Issue 85:

It was just after sunset when they saw the woman walking alongside the road.

At first, Hilde didn’t think anything of it: This was about a rural as Belize got, after all, the sort of place where those who did own cars often wound up walking anyway for how often they broke down in the humid jungle heat. Even the jeep she was riding in, a tax-deductible gift from its third owner in the United States to her research group,  was on its last legs. She’d driven it down herself from Arizona, her teeth chattering as rickety suspension met rough roads all the way through Mexico. Every time she turned off the engine, she wondered if she might just have concluded its final journey.

Ana, however, changed immediately. Her spine straightened and her dark eyes went wide as her fingers tightened around the worn steering wheel. She began first to ease off the accelerator, then to steer the car over toward the right shoulder. “Someone you know?” asked Hilde. Ana had grown up in the area, after all, so it would make sense that she would know some of the people who still lived there. Besides, the woman looked to be wearing a long white dress, which Hilde couldn’t imagine putting on just to go for a walk. Maybe she’d broken down a ways back and they could give her a lift wherever she was headed. It wasn’t as though Hilde had anywhere pressing to be that evening.

“What’s today?” asked Ana, her voice soft.

“The twenty-first,” Hilde said, double-checking her watch out of habit. The small digits on the otherwise analog face read 12/21. David had given her the watch for their second anniversary. She had almost smashed it out of spite when he’d asked for the divorce, but in the end had refrained. Sometimes a woman needed a good watch.

Ana pressed her lips together, then turned to Hilde, her pretty round face as serious as Hilde had ever seen it. “Be polite as hell and do not ask questions,” she said, and before Hilde could defy that order and ask just what on earth she’d meant by that, the jeep had come to a full stop right beside the woman.