Don't Look Back by Gregg Hurwitz

service.”
    Eve rose. “Guess I’ll try tomorrow.” She stood, pausing behind the desk, trying for casual. “Hey, what do you know about Theresa Hamilton?”
    Neto’s eyes drilled into her as he took a sip of tea. “Theresa…?”
    “A guest here.”
    “Ah, yes. Blond-hair lady. Why do you ask?”
    “She left some things in my room,” Eve said. “I found a prescription pill bottle with her name on it.”
    “The other items? They are valuable?”
    “Nah. Nothing important. It was curious, that’s all. Why she left so much stuff behind…”
    Neto’s finger flicked, and the tea bag rose and dunked. “She was a nervous woman. Loca. She got impatient, ran off early back to Mexico.”
    “Mexico?”
    “That’s what we call Mexico City here.”
    “Why was she crazy?”
    “She was on the medications.”
    Eve felt an instinctive defensiveness for Theresa. Ten milligrams of Lexapro hardly qualified someone for the asylum. The average Calabasas housewife probably downed twice that in her Escalade before morning car pool.
    “Any idea why she ran off?” she asked.
    “Like I said.” Neto gave a dry smile. “She was crazy.”

 
    Chapter 9
    Eve crawled into bed, lowering the mosquito netting around the frame until she felt encased, a zoo animal awaiting display. Reaching through a gap, she turned up the gas lantern on the nightstand and grabbed Moby-Dick. After a ceremonious recracking of the spine, she thumbed through the front matter. List of Plates and Acknowledgements, Biographical Notes, Introduction . Christ, no wonder she’d put this off so long. She had to wade through a Ph.D. just to get to the first chapter.
    Her attention wandered back to the odd standoff she’d just had with Neto in the admin shack, questions leading to more questions. Realizing she was making little literary headway, she thunked the book back onto the nightstand and cranked the old-timey lantern knob down until the wick alone faintly glowed.
    She looked across the expanse of the bed, realizing that she’d kept neatly to her side—the left side—as she did at home. Months since Rick’s departure and still she stayed in her marital lane. She slid a hand across to the unexplored terrain. A strand of hair beneath the pillow caught between her fingers.
    She raised it to the faint light. Long and curly and blond.
    Theresa Hamilton’s.
    She stretched it straight before her face, let it corkscrew back. Then she slipped her hand through the mosquito netting and dropped it onto the floor.
    After a moment’s consideration, she scooted to the center of the bed, reluctant at first, as though she were doing something wrong. Relaxing, she unfurled her limbs. Sprawled. Then thrashed around, mussing the sheets.
    She fell asleep with a contented half grin.
    *   *   *
    A faint cry awakened her.
    Eve froze in the middle of the bed, unsure if she’d dreamed it.
    But no, there it was again, a feminine whimper.
    As her eyes adjusted, she noticed that the mosquito netting seemed to have turned opaque. But then a large moth lifted off with a leathery brush of its wings, letting through a mosaic tile of less pronounced darkness.
    The other tiles, they were squirming.
    Slowly, Eve pushed her fingers through the slit in the netting, feeling the screenlike fabric whisper along her wrist, her forearm. She reached the lantern and cranked it up.
    Clinging to the netting, a living film. Stick bugs and moths and mosquitoes, a few spindly spiders for good measure.
    Another high-pitched moan carried in from outside—a woman crying?
    Eve took a deep breath, lowered the lantern to the floor, and heard the carpet scurry away, hard shells rasping against floorboards.
    She slithered from the embrace of the netting, shook bugs from her sneakers, pulled them on. Her sweat bottoms and T-shirt would suffice in the humid night. Carefully picking her steps, she forced herself across the threshold and onto the bamboo walkway before allowing a convulsive shudder to