Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
For the next seven weeks, Mary traveled through the Deep South like a tourist on holiday – sixteen cities across six different states – tangling the trail web behind her so thickly that even a spider wouldn’t be able to properly navigate it.
But before leaving Birmingham, in Alabama, Mary decided to reinvent her look yet again.
If gangster-suit man had managed to track her down, chances were that he had also managed to photograph her, and that would be what he, or whoever else took over from him, would use to try to pick up her trail again.
Mary’s hair stayed the same – short and raven black – but the reason for that was because short hair was easier to manage when wearing a wig.
This time, Mary decided to go with shoulder length, straight brown hair – a look that she could easily pull.
At the opticians, she purchased a whole new batch of daily contact lenses – still brown in color, but a couple of shades lighter than the ones she’d been wearing for the past six months.
She had checked the statistics on the Internet – the probability of a female in the USA being born with brown hair and brown eyes was one in every two – the most common eye/hair color combination in the land.
Mary was also extremely glad that she could now go back into a proper diet and exercise routine and lose all of the weight that she had put on since she’d left Massachusetts, and she couldn’t wait to get rid of her plump cheeks and her muffin top.
‘Goodbye burgers and fried food,’ she told herself, smiling at the mirror, on the same day that she left Birmingham.
The plan was to simply travel around – no specific place in mind… no exact number of days to spend anywhere. All that Mary really wanted to do was put as many cities and states in between her Nashville address and her new one – somewhere in Houston.
There was only one state in the Deep South that Mary had to visit before she settled down in Texas, and that state was Louisiana. The reason why she just couldn’t wait to visit the Pelican State was rather silly, but very personal.
Something that went back to her teenage years.
Something very few people ever knew about her.
What Mary had forgotten was that Nelson Stewart was one of those few.