The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two by Leonard Foglia, David Richards Page B

together without fail. She’d had an argument with her boyfriend, time had slipped away from her and suddenly she’d thought, “ La comida ! Lunch! Mother’s not going to be happy.”
    She rounded the corner of Cinco de Mayo and Altamirano at a clip, colliding with an older couple.
    “ Perdón !” she mumbled automatically.
    The woman facing her seemed momentarily stupefied. “Hannah? ” she said. “Hannah Manning!”
    No sooner had the name popped out of the woman’s mouth than she blushed with embarrassment. The young girl who had almost bumped into her was a teenager. Hannah Manning would be 39 or 40 now. Still the resemblance was astonishing. Same blonde hair. Same look of innocence around the eyes. For a second, she’d been transported twenty years back in time. Her confusion translated into a flood of words.
    “My mistake. I’m sorry. It’s nothing. Nada . I wasn’t paying attention, that’s all. Excuse me. No hablo español . Come, Eric. We must be going.”
    “Excuse us,” said the man. Then in a scolding tone he said to the woman, “Must be more careful. Not run into people.”
    “Hey, that’s okay,” replied Teresa, taken aback by the woman’s agitated state. “I speak English. Nobody got hurt.”
    But the couple had brushed past was her and was hastening on their way. For older people, Teresa thought, they moved swiftly. Then she thought she had better get going herself, too, or she’d have a scolding in store, by the time she reached home. She unlocked the heavy door on Venustiano Carranza and pushed it open, the moan of the wooden planks announcing her arrival.
    “Teresa?” came her mother’s voice from the dining room. Firm! Not as cheerful, as usual.
    “I know, I know,” the girl said apologetically, as she slipped into her seat next to Little Jimmy. She noticed her older brother’s place was empty. Perhaps she’d get out of a scolding today. “Sorry I’m late. But I almost got run down by some tourists on Altamirano.”
    Her mother considered the explanation and decided to let her daughter squirm. For a minute the silence was broken only by the scraping of knives and forks before she relented. “Tourists? Well, I’m not surprised. There are more and more of them each year. When your father and I first came here, the place was not in any of the guidebooks. Only the rare backpacker came through. If this keeps up, this town will be another San Miguel de Allende before long.”
    An hour away, San Miguel was a picture-postcard magnet for American tourists and retirees, who swarmed the shops and the plazas in such numbers you heard more English in the streets than Spanish. Jimmy called it “the 51 st state” and claimed it had about as much to do with the real Mexico as Palm Beach.
    “When your mother and I bought this house,” he said, “you could pick up property in the Centro Histórico for a song. At night, it was so quiet, you thought you were in the country. Well, those days are gone.”
    “The woman called me ‘Hannah.’ For a moment she thought I was you. I know it. From the look on her face, you’d have thought she’d seen a ghost.”
    Hannah laid down her fork. “Who was it? Anybody we know?”
    “Nobody I’ve never seen her before. But she used your maiden name. She said ‘Hannah Manning .’ She was with some older guy. I almost gave them a heart attack. They got out of there so fast you think they’d robbed a bank.”
    “Did they say anything?”
    “No. Just, ‘Excuse me. I made a mistake.’ That sort of thing. I hardly had the chance to talk with them.”
    “You said the woman was with an older guy? How old?”
    “I don’t know. Late sixties. Seventy. He talked kind of funny. Weird accent. Oh, I remember. The woman called him Eric. She said something like ‘We’ve got to get going, Eric.’”
    Hannah could tell from the look on her husband’s face that he was thinking the same thing as she was. But they tried not to show their agitation in