Did Jack put his coat down in the waiting area? Or in the men’s room? But if that was all it was, a forgotten coat, why didn’t Jack get on the plane?
Was he injured? Ill? Kidnapped, for God’s sake? Every kind of scenario swirled in her head, each worse than the one before. Maybe he was dead.
‘Get it together!’ she said out loud to herself. She did not have the luxury of panicking. She would force herself to breathe slowly, clear her mind. When she got right down to it, she could not fathom what had happened to her husband, and that was the truth. Speculation, she knew, was a wasted enterprise.
The breathing was helping. Years of work experience in handling potentially incendiary issues for Senator Wainwright had schooled her to think clearly under duress. She knew if she pursued the matter further on board they would land the plane and have her arrested. She’d be stuck in some jail and would never find Jack.
The important thing now was to conserve her strength for what lay ahead. On the campaign trail she had become an expert at falling asleep on command.
She checked her watch. Three hours and they’d be on the ground in Puerto Vallarta. She pulled the quilt the airline provided over her shoulders, took a sleeping mask from her bag and pressed the buttons that converted her seat to a bed. She was asleep almost instantly and dreaming about the cruise last year.
The sun on her body was like therapy. Back in Chicago, election night had offered arctic temperatures and winds that could cut through wood. When the last vote had been counted, and her man had won again in a landslide, Margo became obsessed with the idea of sea and sun and warmth. It had taken two weeks to work out and make a plan. But here she was, right where she needed to be. On board a ship heading for warmer climes.
With the help of an accommodating steward, Margo had carved out a secluded spot for herself on the leeward side of the cruise ship. She could not be seen there. More importantly, the sounds of the sea drowned out the chatter of her fellow passengers and the squeals of their children.
She had told the impressionable young steward that she was recovering from a broken heart and couldn’t bear to be disturbed. His romantic nature, plus an overly generous tip, assured her privacy.
It was a fantasy, of course, this broken heart. At this point Margo Dalton wasn’t even sure she had a heart. She had had little time for romance. For the past seven years her sole focus had been getting Kyle Wainwright into the US Senate and keeping him there. She had been campaign manager, press secretary, enforcer, and mother confessor to him.
From the first moment she had heard Kyle speak when he was a fledgling politician, just back from his third tour of duty in Iraq, Margo was a believer. He had intelligence, integrity, and insight.
Those qualities, coupled with that rare ability to see both sides of an issue, made it seem worthwhile to put her life on hold to get him elected to Congress.
Margo had done her part. Kyle Wainwright was now a second-term Senator from the state of Illinois and on his way to becoming a force in government.
She had refused his offer to come to Washington again. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with the rest of her life, but she knew she did not want to be in politics.
The sad thing was she hadn’t even had time to process the death of her father, Will Dalton, the famous international financier and advisor to three presidents. He had been the only family Margo had, except for her childhood friend Billy Berlind.
A largely absentee parent, her father had travelled extensively for business and for his country. Or, perhaps, as Margo had come to believe, he had kept moving to escape the memory of his beloved wife who had died giving birth to their only child. Will had loved Margo, of that she was certain. But he had never quite found a way to show it.
Despite this divide, or maybe because of it, Margo seemed to handle growing up motherless with a certain ease. She was a wild child, a rule breaker, an iconoclast. She searched for answers where there were apparently none to be had. And she usually found them.
Her father had packed her off to one boarding school after another, but she had always found a way to return to their home on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. She had managed to get herself thrown out of some of the finest schools in the country by creating nothing but trouble.
Whether her father had decided to give her a chance, or just gave up, was never really clear. But finally she was allowed to do what she had wanted all along, which was to stay in the big Lake Shore Drive apartment alone with the help. And to hang out with her partner in crime, Billy Berlind, the boy genius from next door, to study what she wanted to study, which was just about everything.
The fact that she had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Chicago at the age of nineteen was purely accidental. It was not something she had intended or planned. She cared nothing for degrees. She just wanted to know everything, experience everything, try everything. There they had let her study what she liked and rewarded her with a degree.
Margo had always believed there would be plenty of time for fence-mending with her father. They’d get to it when they both weren’t so busy. But he had died suddenly when the Senator was in the midst of election debates. She had sleepwalked her way through the elaborate public memorial for her father with Billy at her side. She was bereft, mourning not what had been, but what might have been.
Then she had gone back to the campaign and put that jumble of feelings on a shelf until later. This was the later she had been waiting for. The morning after the Senator’s victory party she had gone to a travel agent and asked to be booked on the next cruise going somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was warm.
Her best friend, Billy, was now a much sought after concept developer for the nation’s finest eateries. He was also a jazz musician of note, a polyglot who spoke eight languages, and master of about ten other disciplines. He had offered, no, insisted on putting his life on hold to come along.
Margo was finally able to convince him that this was something she needed to do alone. But convincing Billy of anything wasn’t easy. ‘If you change your mind, I can be there in twenty-four hours. Twelve if the ship has a helipad.’
‘I appreciate it but I’m going for low profile, Billy. That last thing I need is you arriving by helicopter in the middle of the ocean.’
So while Billy sulked, Margo had secured a last-minute reservation on a small ship sailing out of Florida. It would visit several ports before transiting the Panama Canal, circling Mexico and docking in Los Angeles. Twenty days would be time to figure out the rest of her life.
Although Margo did not know it at the time, it would only take six days.
FIVE
The trip had turned out to be just what Margo was hoping for. Each morning she would put on a bikini, wrap herself in a pareo, and head for her secret space. She had brought a stack of books in her suitcase and there were three more in the big straw bag she had bought on the pier in Aruba. But so far she hadn’t opened one.
It had seemed enough to lie in the sun and sleep and think and dream. She took her meals alone on the balcony of her stateroom, watching the sky show off its multiple colours. The idea of having a conversation of any sort with anyone was just too much for Margo to contemplate.
She had brought several scrapbooks, mementos of life with a father who, despite his long absences, had done his best to understand a daughter who was nothing like himself. Looking through the photographs, remembering, she was finally able to put away regrets over what they hadn’t had, and celebrate the life they did have together.
The fact that he had left her an immensely wealthy woman was of little consequence to Margo. But she was aware that money would give her freedom to choose how to live the next chapter of her life.
On the sixth day out of Miami, the day everything would change, the ship had sailed from Cartagena just before five. The sky that evening was a vivid blue streaked with pink the colour of flamingos. The wind had gone down and a gentle breeze touched the warm air.
Margo had convinced her
steward to set up dinner at her special place on the deck. She had decided on pink champagne to accompany her Dover sole. It felt right, somehow. She felt right too; finally at peace with her memories.
After dinner she lay down on her lounge chair to watch the light leave the sky. She had certainly not intended to fall asleep.
Margo would never be quite sure what had awakened her. Was it the soft ‘clunk’ she heard, or thought she heard? Or was it the rumble of an engine, different, somehow, to the slow thrumming of the cruise ship’s giant turbines? She didn’t move a muscle. Whatever was happening, she sensed she wasn’t supposed to witness it.
Then, suddenly, he was in front of her. It was a toss-up as to which of the two was more startled.
‘Don’t scream!’ he said quietly.
‘I wasn’t going to scream,’ she said indignantly, when she was able to speak.
He smiled at her. ‘You don’t look like the screaming type.’
‘I am, however, thinking of hitting you over the head with this champagne bottle.’
It was hard to sound fierce looking into those intense blue eyes. He was ruggedly handsome and was wearing a very unseasonable trench coat that appeared to have lots of mileage on it.
The man had some hard miles on him as well, she decided.
Also, there was something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Pain? Sadness? She wasn’t sure. But she knew immediately there was more to this man than met the eye.
He eyed the champagne bottle she had threatened him with. ‘Is the bottle full?’ he asked.
‘Half.’
‘Using it as a club would be a terrible waste of good champagne.’ The man’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. ‘At least, I would assume everything on this ship is good, given the price of my ticket.’
‘Your ticket?’ she said, eyeing him.
He took her glass from the table, filled it, and handed it to Margo. He emptied her water glass over the rail and poured some champagne for himself. He raised his glass. ‘Bon voyage.’
She never took her eyes off him. ‘Bon voyage.’
He drank down the glass in one gulp. ‘Warm.’
‘Had I known you were coming I would have ordered more ice.’
For some reason she was not the least bit afraid of this man who appeared out of the night in the middle of the sea. ‘And if you actually did buy a ticket, you got cheated on the embarkation. The rest of us boarded via a wood-panelled gangway rather than scaling the side of the ship on a rope. Plus, there were hors d’oeuvres.’
‘I’ll ask for a refund,’ he said, taking off thin leather gloves and stuffing them into the pocket of his coat. He took a lethal-looking knife from another pocket and cut the rope, which was still hooked over the railing. He let it drop to the sea below. Margo heard the splash when it landed.
‘I guess I should introduce myself since I drank most of your champagne. Jack. Jack McCarthy.’
‘Margo,’ she replied. ‘But I’m not telling you my last name until I find out if you’re some sort of a pirate.’
‘Just a scientist, I’m afraid, a dull man with a dull job. I overslept and missed the sailing, so some friends gave me a lift.’
Margo studied him, wondering how much of what he was saying was true.
‘Now, if you’ll allow it, I’d like to buy you a real drink at a proper temperature. How do you feel about Scotch?’
Margo decided she didn’t care if he was telling the truth about himself or not. ‘Crazy about it,’ she said. ‘Single malt, neat.’
‘Done,’ he said.
He removed his raincoat and stuffed it into a lifeboat suspended nearby. Under the coat he was perfectly dressed for an evening in the Caribbean.
He offered his arm. Margo took it with a grin and they headed across the deck toward the lounge.
Jack McCarthy appeared to be another passenger out for a moonlit stroll, not a mysterious stranger who had just scaled the side of a moving ship in the middle of the night.
SIX
The airplane was in turbulence but to Margo it felt like the gentle rocking of a ship at sea. The sound of the purser’s voice warning the passengers to check their seatbelts awakened her from her dream. Half-awake, she checked her phone again, hoping that she might find an explanation from Jack waiting for her. She tried to hang onto sleep, loath to leave behind that first magical night with him. Their meeting had happened a little over a year ago, exactly the way she had just dreamed it.
She smiled, remembering. The two had been inseparable since the night of his unorthodox arrival on the ship. There was a logical explanation for it, of course. Jack had been in Colombia on an assignment for his company, the Worldwide Water Project. When he missed the ship, one of his friends who owned a cigarette boat had given him a lift. He’d done plenty of rock climbing in the course of his work, he said, so when they caught up with the big lumbering ship, he simply threw a line over the leeward side, shimmied up a rope and met the woman of his dreams.
That’s what Jack had told her, and that’s what Margo decided to believe.
Days later, when the ship docked in Puerto Vallarta, they got off. This time they’d used a gangway to disembark. While the ship departed without them, they sat in a café drinking Carta Blancas and deciding to get married.
Margo pushed the memories away. She sat straight up in her seat and checked her watch. It was less than an hour until the plane was scheduled to land. She refused the food and wine the flight attendant offered; she knew she would need all of her wits about her in the next few hours.
Margo pulled out the photograph she had brought along to surprise Jack. Billy had taken it in Puerto Vallarta on their wedding day, one year ago tomorrow. They had been married by the mayor with only Billy in attendance.
No force on earth could have kept her lifelong friend and champion away from Margo’s wedding, even if it involved chartering a plane, which it did.
Billy and Margo had grown up living next door to one another in two big apartments on Lake Shore Drive. After reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe they had even bribed one of the building’s handymen to open a wall between the two apartments. The passageway was masked by large cupboards on either side. That way, when they were under house arrest, which was a good deal of the time, they were able to move back and forth without even going into the hall.
Except for mostly absent parents and a gaggle of nannies, they were the only family each of them had.
Until Jack. When she called to tell Billy about Jack, he cautioned her that a shipboard romance should be confined to a ship. But when he realized how happy Margo was, he made a decision. While he never quite overcame his scepticism, he kept quiet about it. For Billy, who had an opinion on everything and a burning desire to share it, this was a supreme act of love.
He had appointed himself major domo, attendant, and father of the bride. The couple had planned to wear bathing suits but Billy wasn’t having it. From the plane he had managed to procure a vintage, hand-embroidered Mexican wedding dress that fitted Margo perfectly. For Jack, there were white linen slacks and an impossibly soft linen guayabera, the tropical shirt made popular by Ernest Hemingway.
Billy, of course, wore one of his exquisitely tailored suits, this one made of white linen. He ignored the Sydney Greenstreet jokes and proved to be much too elegant to perspire.
Margo couldn’t help but smile as she studied the photo that Billy had taken. Both she and Jack had a look of total joy on their faces. And that is how they’d been from that day until this.
The sadness in Jack, or whatever it was she had sensed that first night, was still there. But she knew the cause of it now. His childhood friend, Marcus, his ‘brother’, he called him, had died recently. The two had been as close as she and Billy. Margo certainly understood how devastating a loss like that could be. He gave no details and she didn’t ask. She was content to wait until he felt ready to tell her about it.
Jack had moved back to Chicago with her and opened
a non-profit organization that searched the world for untapped water supplies.
‘Oil isn’t the real global problem,’ he had explained to her. ‘There’s plenty of oil. What humanity is going to need in the future is water.’
The PR firm Margo opened was thriving, too. She had a waiting list of people whose reputations needed serious polishing; she worked only for those few she felt were worth salvaging.
They had settled down next door to Billy in the apartment Margo had inherited from her father. She and Jack were even planning to start a family. Life was good. Until this morning.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are on final approach for Gustavo Diaz Ordaz International.’ The purser’s announcement startled Margo out of her reverie. ‘We’ll be on the ground in five minutes.’
Margo got out her passport, tightened her seatbelt and watched as the flight attendant passed out coats, stopping first at the man in 1B. The raincoat was in his lap.
Five minutes more and Margo would have a conversation with that man about the raincoat and what had happened to her husband.
SEVEN
Margo was crouched in her seat like a track star awaiting the starter’s pistol. She had her carry-on in her lap, her handbag on her shoulder, and her winter coat over her arm.
She hadn’t taken her eyes off the man in 1B since the flight attendant handed him the trench coat. She watched as he stuffed it into his carry-on.
She made a move to get up before the plane had come to a complete stop, but the ever-watchful flight attendant motioned to her to sit down.
‘Only a minute or two more, Mrs McCarthy,’ she said. ‘I do hope everything works out.’
‘Thank you,’ Margo answered, still watching 1B.
Finally the chime sounded to signal the passengers they could move around the cabin. The plane’s door slid open and there was the usual scramble to be first out. Everyone was in the aisle at once, gathering books and newspapers, pulling carry-on luggage from the overhead rack. It was an obstacle course.