Don't Look Back (5 page)

He stopped. His broad back wiggled as he seemed to pry something loose. Then he shifted, a machete swinging at his side. The piece of plywood propped against the tree behind him came into sudden focus and, on it, the spray-painted silhouette of a human. Splintered impact marks from the thrown machete hacked the face and chest.

Target practice.

Sweat filmed Eve’s body—her arms, her neck, beneath the baseball cap—the humidity, condensing as if in a single burst, leaving her skin tingling. And yet her breath had gone cold.

The man pivoted and started back to his mark. Even from this distance through the trees, she made out a stab of color high on the left side of his neck, a burned snarl of hair and angry pink flesh.

Then he paused.

Somehow Eve sensed that his head was going to lift even before it did. Just before his dark eyes reached her, some instinct made her drop behind the fallen log. Her jagged breaths fluttered a green sprig by her face.

No sound from the canyon below.

She flattened to the earth, coming eye to eye with a praying mantis the size of her thumb, clinging to the sodden deadwood and twitching its raptorial legs. Beneath the log a thin silver edge winked at her. Metal? Her hand quaked as she reached into a nest of leaves to unearth it.

Not a piece of trash but a slender digital camera. Someone had dropped it here, probably another rafter—a woman like her who’d hiked up to the royally displayed toilet. Eve swiped her thumb across the dirt-caked backing, and sure enough a neat sticker from a label maker was revealed:
THERESA HAMILTON
.

Eve still heard nothing from the canyon. She tried to slow her breathing, to calm her pulse. Nothing but silence below.

And then the crunch of a footstep.

Eve tensed. The mantid watched her. She realized she was holding her breath, clutching the camera to her chest. Listening.

Another footstep.

Then another.

Though the canyon played games with the sound, it seemed the man was coming toward her. The time between steps shortened. Was he climbing the rise? Speeding up?

Gasping, she shoved the camera into a pocket and slid away from the log, backing up on all fours to remain unseen. A safe distance from the edge, she rose, scaring up flurries of butterflies, and ran across the wildflower clearing that moments ago had been charming. A panicky sprint down the muddy trail and she stumbled back out into the unforgiving sunlight of the shoal.

As she hurried across the sand toward the group clustered around the fire pit, she shot a nervous glance at the trail. No one behind her. Already feeling sheepish, she neared the others.

Gay Jay was standing back, shading his eyes to gaze up the incline. “Before I go home, I’m gonna take the mountain.”

“It’s even denser than it looks,” Lulu said. “You wouldn’t make it all the way up there.”

“I’ve hiked Whitney and Shasta.”

“This is
jungle,
” Lulu said.

Neto saw Eve coming and moved to greet her with a full plate. “Wait till you taste
this.
” His brow furrowed as she drew close. “What’s wrong?”

Eve glanced again over her shoulder. Her Inner Voice piped up,
What
is
wrong, Eve? You saw a guy practicing knife throws?

“What?” Neto said.

Don’t tell him. He’ll think you’re being hysterical.

She kept her voice low. “I saw someone back there. A man with a burn—here. He was throwing a machete at … at a drawn human target.”

Neto gave a faint chuckle and foisted the plate on her, though she’d lost her appetite. “People do all sorts of things in privacy. Now, hurry and eat. We need to clean up.”

With a hint of self-loathing, she asked herself how Rick would handle this. He would be direct, stubborn, persuasive. She cleared her throat. Toed the sand. “It freaked me out a little.”

Starting back for the fire, Neto looked at her across his shoulder. “It is safe here.”

She stood apart for a moment before helping tidy up, shooting occasional glances at the trail. When they finally pushed off in the raft, the sun was no longer at its peak but still klieg-light intense. Her shirt clung to her. The breeze did little to cool her; she was still overheated from the adrenaline rush. She tugged off the Mariners cap, set it on her knee, wiped her forehead. Jay held up his hand as a target, and she flipped him his hat, which he dipped overboard and pulled on.

The others chatted and joked, but she didn’t feel like joining in. The jungle scrolled by, and she drew a deep breath, held it, trying to dissipate the knot in her chest. As they neared the broad bend, she cast a final backward look at the shoal.

Barely visible in the shadows, floating a step back from where the trail buried itself in a tangle of vines, a seam of cheek caught an edge of ambient light. A frayed curve of beard disintegrated into the scrambled flesh of a jawline. Eyes glinted like dimes.

She blinked, and the face was gone.

Chapter 6

Beneath the thatched veranda of the cantina, the light of the tiki torches flickered over picnic tables. As Eve approached, a faint breeze blew through her long, sleeveless dress, making her skin feel bare. The blunt edge of her wet hair lay cool across her neck. She was the last to heed the dinner bell, taking extra time to shower off the fear that had gripped her as she’d crouched behind that fallen log in the jungle. Any threat—imagined or otherwise—seemed distant now in the happy glow of the group.

Baby Boomer Sue was finishing another story: “… so I told her, I don’t care how important you
think
you are—not on
my
shift you don’t. Well, my girlfriend from my women’s group just about
died.
”

Sue’s tales referencing various clubs and societies and leagues painted her as a woman interwoven seamlessly into her community. Eve felt a pang of yearning for the social contentedness that this implied, the sense of belonging that somehow always seemed to evade her. It occurred to her just how out of her element she felt here, crowbarred from her protective shell and plopped onto a new backdrop that seemed to highlight her contrasts and insecurities.

As Eve neared, Sue’s husband looked up, his eyes flashing immediately to her chest. He caught her catching him and colored slightly, his gaze darting away.

How refreshingly simple it must be to look at one readily visible feature and decide whether someone turned you on. When it came to men, Eve found there were so many other things. Their hands. The way their eyes crinkled when they laughed. One boyfriend in college could trickle his fingers along her ribs and it would put a charge through her whole damn spinal cord. But no:
Harry of Omaha, Looking at Boobs.
A still life.

She reached the group, and Will stood up too quickly, knocking his thighs against the table. His T-shirt fitted, his hair mussed just so. He offered her the seat next to him, holding eye contact for an extra beat as she moved past him, and she wondered if her gaydar was broken or just momentarily jammed by his unreasonable good looks. Claire observed them, her own eyes gleaming with dark interest.

Sue kept on, undeterred: “Can we serve?” A loving hand on her husband’s back. “He gets low blood sugar. I have to carry snacks in my purse. I’m married to the Cookie Monster. Who wants to be married to the Cookie Monster?”

Harry laughed and kissed her neck.

The table overflowed with exotic dishes. Halved pineapples stuffed with shrimp and melted gouda. Squid cooked in its own ink. Chicken slathered in red mole sauce. Montejo beer bottles rose from an ice-filled cooler, as well as a plastic two-liter of Mountain Dew. Breathing in the rich scents, Eve sat, setting down by her plate the book she hoped to read in a hammock after dessert.

Gay Jay zeroed in on it right away. “You brought
Moby-Dick
as a vacation read?”

She glanced down at the brick-size paperback, the spine unbroken. “Been meaning to read it since college, but I never get to it.”

Will said, “
Moby-Dick
is your Moby-Dick.”

Up close, she noticed that his nose was a touch off center, his smile slightly crooked, and understood that her attraction to him came less from his actual features and more from the way he carried them off. He had an easy charm, a gift for paying attention while stopping short of unctuousness.

As they all dug in,
indígenos
hustled and plated and cleared in the background. Eve took a pull of
cerveza clara,
which tasted divine against the night heat and the lavishness of a dozen new spices. Will plucked another small fried husk from a bowl. “What am I eating?”

“
Chapulines
,” Neto said.

“What’s that mean?” he asked, chewing.

Eve stifled a laugh. “Grasshoppers.”

Will’s jaw stilled. “You’re joking.” Then, to Neto, “She’s joking.”

At the other end of the table, Sue distributed eyedrops of iodine into her and Harry’s iceless water, drawing a tight smile from Lulu, who said, “The water is all filtered here.”

“Just making sure,” Sue said. “The diet change can be upsetting. At home I make us a power shake every morning with acidophilus. I add lots of berries, kale—”

“Kale?”
Claire asked, packing into the syllable more derision than seemed possible.

“You’d be amazed at the nutritional benefits of kale,” Sue said. “Detoxifying, cholesterol-lowering, antioxidants—”

“I’ve heard there’s a ceremony around here,” Gay Jay said, slicing in mercifully with a topic change, “where the men of a village marry a crocodile. I shit you not. There’s a whole ceremony, something about reaffirming their relationship with nature.”

“
Yes,
it is
true,
” Neto said. “It is to signal a
fresh start.
And the crocodile, she is the mother of the land. She is
fearless.
And so they embrace her.”

“There’s another culture in Oaxaca,” Claire said, “that’s a true matriarchy. The women run
everything.
”

“The village of Juchitán,” Lulu said. “When a male is born, they say, ‘Better luck next time.’ Many boys become transvestites as the next-best thing”—she ran her fingers through Neto’s loose black curls—“to being a woman.”

“I don’t know,” Jay said. “I like my men to be …
men.
”

A wickedly segmented wasp landed on the congealing gouda, and Harry reared back. Neto reached across, pinched it by the head, and tossed it aside. He grinned at Lulu. “Next time I let the matriarch get the wasp.”

“Sorry,” Harry said. “I’m allergic.”

“You’re allergic to bee stings and you came to the
jungle
?” Claire asked.

Sue said, a touch defensively, “We’re armed with Benadryl and EpiPens.”

Harry exhaled. “And undaunted courage.”

“We
all
have conditions we struggle with,” Sue said, still focused on Claire. “Do they know what caused yours?”

Claire offered a dry smile. “Not enough kale,” she said.

A breathless moment ensued in which no one seemed sure whether to laugh. Before anyone could decide, two of the workers burst out from behind the curtain, the younger one bearing a little cake with a candle in it, the other knocking on a pan with a wooden spoon. Eve assumed it was someone’s birthday until they veered toward her and she read, misspelled in icing,
HAPY ANIVERSARI
. Neto was waving off the workers, but they didn’t notice until the cake was displayed before the group. The makeshift kettledrum silenced, Lulu barked something in Spanish, and, confused, the workers whisked the cake out of sight. All focus turned to Eve.

“I’m sorry,” Lulu said. “There was a note in the reservation. We didn’t update it, so the kitchen workers—”

“No problem,” Eve said. “Totally understandable.” She found herself avoiding Will’s stare. “It
was
supposed to be an anniversary trip.…”

“Oh,” Sue said, still a beat behind. “Where’s your husband?”

In Holland screwing his new girlfriend.

“He had other plans,” Eve said.

“Yeah?” Claire said. “What’s her name?”

Chapter 7

Reading
Moby-Dick
in the hammock after dinner proved an unmitigated failure. The hammock was too sway-y, which in fairness was the whole point, but every time Eve shifted to sip her beer, the thing threatened to deposit her in the dirt. Then there were the elusive tiki-torch flames, their light challenging to catch on the page. And the
bugs.
Tiny flies—no-see-ums—that didn’t siphon your blood like mosquitoes but actually bit out small pinches of flesh. Tackling a 1,011-page novel about nineteenth-century whaling seemed onerous enough without a small-scale Inquisition of irritations, so Eve retreated to her hut to finish unpacking.

She lugged her suitcase from the bed to the wardrobe. Within it, the hangers were raked to one side. From the last in the row, a thin white ribbon dangled. Eve reached out, lifted it off. It was a hanger loop, torn from a sleeveless blouse or dress, as if the article of clothing had been ripped free. She dropped the ribbon in the trash basket and then hoisted her suitcase onto a sturdy ledge inside the wardrobe. She set her shirts in the top drawer and moved on. Her pants, neatly folded, went in the middle drawer. She opened the bottom drawer and halted. Wadded in the rear was a single pair of panties.

Someone had packed hastily.

Eve’s eyes tracked back up to those hangers. One of them was distorted, the wire bent out of shape. Those clothes had been pulled off
hard.

A trickle of discomfort moved feather-light between her shoulder blades.

She dumped the left-behind panties into the trash basket as well, then stared down at them. She caught herself fussing with her wedding band unconsciously, a nervous habit she’d made efforts to extinguish.

Move on.

In the bathroom she started to collect her toiletries from where she’d strewn them around the sink. Cradling an armful against her belly, she swung open the medicine cabinet’s door. The plastic shelves were bare.