The road to Wende was dull, and got duller as you got closer to the prison. Squat buildings that housed self-storage units, auto mechanics, a pool supply store. Scrubby woodlots and fields of timothy hay. Blue chicory and goldenrod. Occasional ranch houses, their yards beginning to brown with midsummer, furnished with a rusty swing set or a driveway basketball hoop or an ATV parked out front with a For Sale sign leaned against it. Roadkill, mostly bloated woodchucks and raccoons this time of year, the occasional smeared barn cat.

The house that always had the sign out front saying “Be not deceived, God is not mocked” still did, and the Gator Bar and Grill at the crossroad a little further on was still having a special on wings and pitchers of Labatt.

The car Abby was driving was a rental, her own Miata left behind in her driveway, not up to the job without a few hundred bucks in repairs that she didn’t have time for. Her impulse had been to trade up, go for a Jag or a Mustang convertible, something glamorous, something that would turn heads. Seeking anonymity didn’t come naturally to her. But in the end she’d talked herself into a Jeep Grand Cherokee, dark blue, a model from a couple years back. She hadn’t even bothered figuring out how to plug her iPhone in yet, so she poked at the dashboard until the radio came on.

There was supposed to be Sirius but somehow she’d gotten an old radio instead and it didn’t offer much—Lite 97 and Kiss 98.5, NPR and country and a bunch of religious crap. Why did they even put this shit in newer cars? She hit Scan and let the numbers drift away to the staticky end of the dial while she imagined Martha’s face, the gratitude and wonder.

Like a stab from a knife the static yielded to a clean, clear voice—
a woman accompanied by something folky—a mandolin? A zither? And the singing was just chanting really, a series of nonsense syllables. Seven years a hawk in the woods. All alone and so lonely-o. Some college kids at GC3 pouring authenticity into the air on a weak beam that no one ever listened to. It wasn’t driving music—no beat, and the scattered lyrics she could make out didn’t make her want to fly or run or fuck or anything like that, they didn’t even make her mad. She hit Scan again and got nothing for her trouble but more static, then turned the
radio off.

She was running late, too. Visiting hours would be almost over by the time she got there; the last thing she needed was to get stuck behind some drug addict’s devoted grandma’s half-broken-down Pontiac on the way out of the parking lot. The shortest jailbreak in history. It’d make a good story, but she wouldn’t be tweeting about it. She stepped on the gas.

At the gates, the guard in the little box smiled and she smiled back hard and tangled his thoughts and he waved her in, no checking her ID, no hassles. He was a tall older man with a crew cut and glasses, a little pasty and a little paunchy, maybe a dad or even a grandfather if he or his kids had been a little too precocious. Far too sympathetic-looking for her to get away with running him over
or shooting him with the gun she didn’t have or need. People hated cop-killers, except from time to time when they turned around and loved them. She could pull that off, the folk-hero schtick, Pretty Boy Floyd or Dillinger but as a photogenic woman so even better. Hell, maybe she should have done that. Too late now. Unless she…

There, just outside that door that seemed to be clanging even
when it was shut, stood Martha.

Abby waited for the woman to turn or gesture and be someone else, someone who just happened to resemble the two of them in passing, but she didn’t. It wasn’t possible to mistake her own eyes, even when they were set in the rough un-made-up face of a woman standing alone on the pavement. Abby had never met anyone else out in the world who looked quite like herself and her twin, tall and slightly tan even in winter, pointed noses, pointed chins—striking not cute, queens not princesses.

Martha wasn’t looking very queenly right now though, leaning a little, letting the duffel bag she held rest on the ground even though there was no way it could be heavy; it slumped in on itself, half-empty. Her gaze scanned the parking lot and the fence and the world as a whole without any evidence of either desire or fear. That blank look on Martha’s face always used to annoy Abby, but it wasn’t worth being annoyed about now. It would change soon enough.

An elderly Hispanic woman carrying a thick black book glanced at Martha as she passed, and that evidence that her twin existed to other people too jolted Abby into action. She threw the car into neutral, leaned across to the passenger door. She could barely open it, let alone reach out and gesture, but Martha looked up and noticed her anyhow. Her eyes got a little wider.

Martha didn’t seem to hurry, but in an instant the duffel bag was in the back and she was in the shotgun seat. As soon as Abby heard the door slam she was accelerating, lurching through the parking lot and blasting by the pillbox where the crew-cut guard waved.

The prison receded in the distance and the car reached seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred and three miles an hour. This was the critical moment, the only time she really needed to worry about pursuit; she couldn’t handle too many of them at once, not if they were focused, full of rage and bravado. Abby clutched the wheel, her shoulders up as if she could physically ward off the sirens when they came. She took a corner and felt the Cherokee wobble a little, its center of gravity nosing off the road towards the cornfields like a wayward beagle, but she didn’t touch the brake. They weren’t going to get Martha back, and they sure as shit weren’t going to get Abby.

The sirens didn’t come. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. There was no one behind her. Not a single other vehicle on the road except, in the distance, a lumbering John Deere crossing from one field to another with a wagon-load of hay.

Were they still getting their asses sorted from their elbows back there? Or had they gone ahead to set up a roadblock? If so, where? How many cars, how many men, how many guns? She glanced back again, just to make sure they weren’t gaining on her.

“I knew you’d come,” Martha said softly.

“I’m sorry it took so long,” Abby answered, not taking her eyes off the road. She should have gone for the sports car.

“They offered to put me on a bus, but I said no, my sister will come for me.”

“Of course I came… A bus?”

“When they release you they pay for a bus ticket to somewhere, in case you haven’t got anyone coming for you. A lot of the girls don’t. But I said, my sister will come.”

Abby had the presence of mind to decelerate slowly. “I know math was never my strong subject, but it sure hasn’t been thirty years.”

“They gave me time off for good behavior, I guess.”

“You guess? You haven’t been keeping track?” She locked the rage out of her voice as best she could.

“It all gets to be one big day after a while,” Martha said meekly. And then, some time later, “Can we stop at a Dairy Queen or something? I could kill for a sundae about now.”

Order now!