She had settled down nicely in the new town, albeit in a foreign country.
She soon picked the language up and had made several new friends. The house she had rented was adequate for her immediate purposes and the town had all of the services and shops that you would expect. It was while on one of these regular shopping trips that the incident occurred… yet again. She’d been through the checkout and was loaded up with two full bags. As she came out of the shop, she heard somebody call out.
It was a tourist. He came rushing up to her with a broad smile.
“Well! Look at you,” he said, “it must be fifteen years, at least! Our mystery, disappearing neighbour.”
She frowned heavily. “I have no idea who you are,” she said, in a foreign tongue.
He stood gaping.
She shrugged and hurried off with her shopping. No bus today, two blocks away she hailed a taxi. She got dropped off several streets before her destination. Walking the rest of the way she removed the card from her phone and dropped it down a roadside drain. A short distance further on she found a bin and tossed the phone in. Once she was in the house, she knew the routine. She dumped the shopping bags on the kitchen table, packed a suitcase, opened the metal combination case, removed the leather pouch, selected a passport along with matching currency, used the backup prepaid phone to book a flight and called a taxi.
She would have to vanish again…
