Marty wiped the bar top. "Sounds like he went a little bit nuts. Maybe he's gonna come back after he gets regrooved and everything will be fine."
"He can't come back now. He forged my name on some real estate papers. He left me with nothing."
Marty wore a mask of outrage. "Oh man, that's the worst thing I ever heard. Don't sign the divorce papers. Nail the asshole. Get your own lawyer."
Hannah wondered why she was sharing this with some woman she would never speak to again, and realized that was the reason. She could hardly talk about this with the women in her limited social circle. She had kept John's disappearance as quiet as possible, telling only Howard and calling the people at John's office trying to find out, without saying she didn't know, if they knew where John was. But no one had had a clue as to his hereabouts. Hannah had even considered calling the police, but Howard had told her to wait a little bit. Howard's position had been that John's sensitive job at the company should be protected.
Hannah watched as Marty returned her thoughts to the bar. Hannah drained the last of the coffee and decided that it was time to go home.
She left the three-dollar bills that were all she had and mumbled some polite words to Marty. She passed through the hotel foyer focused on the green marble floor, ignoring the businessmen of assorted ages checking her out, noting the rings that marked her as taken and bagged by one of their own. They all gave her the soft smile and nod that they expected from other men for their own wives. They didn't expect Hannah to notice them just as they didn't expect their own wives to alert to the nods of other men.
She found the car around the block from Howard's office. The big black BMW that John had loved to drive. It was odd to discover that she didn't own it; that she didn't own anything. She thought about that for a minute, feeling the anxiety that threatened to overwhelm her. She pulled up to the garage attendant and panicked, realizing she had no money to pay the parking fee. She flipped open the console and slid quarters out of their holder. She had to go halfway down the dime column before she had enough. She was relieved when the gate released her and she burned rubber pulling away.
That little incident was more telling than anything Howard had said. Hannah moved some numbers around in her head and knew she needed a plan. The money that John had left would be swallowed by house expenses in no time. Howard was right: she was going to have to sell the house and then turn in the cars. But that left her without a job, home, car, anything. Hannah's mind was churning. She could sell the contents of the house. Maybe she could generate enough to lease an apartment.
She had to get a job. The very thought brought a tightness to her throat. Not because she didn't want to work, but because she felt she had nothing to present a future employer. She had dropped out of college to put John through graduate school, working two jobs, one as a substitute teacher and the other waiting tables. Instead of going back and finishing her degree, she had become a full-time wife. John's career had been so demanding and financially rewarding that she had simply never given a thought that she would need to support herself one day. That was the deal — the word stuck in her consciousness — the deal they had made without even bothering to verbalize it. It had just happened.
CHAPTER 3
"Damn!" Neeley hissed as she walked into the cabin. It was colder inside than it was out. The wet weather of the Green Mountains gnawed into the bone worse than any cold she had ever experienced.
She wondered, not for the first time, why Gant had lived here. He'd hated the cold. A few years back he had insisted that she needed some high altitude training. At the time Neeley was already exhausted. Her days were filled with physical and mental lessons that were threatening to break her. Her nights were filled with Gant's hard body and his soft voice. She gave in when she saw there was no bridling his childish enthusiasm over the new adventure. One of Gant's many contacts in the shadow world had provided the aircraft for transportation.
Neeley and Gant had flown to the Rockies. They had jumped with skis strapped to their sides and one hundred and twenty pounds of gear in their rucksacks onto a small drop zone located at 10,000 feet of altitude. They'd dumped the parachutes and skied further into the mountains, to almost 14,000 feet. The wind chill had hit sixty below, but Gant had sworn it felt better than plus twenty degrees in the Green Mountains of Vermont. The dry cold in the Rockies had hurt on the surface but this wet cold of New England was an inner bone ache.
Neeley looked out the window of the small cabin at the patch of late snow that blanketed Gant's grave. He had known the ground would be frozen now. He had insisted they dig the hole in autumn. They had dug it together, he tiring easily and sitting a lot, sipping a beer and making awful, morbid jokes.
It had been the first time she had allowed herself to contemplate life beyond Gant. She'd asked what she should do once he was gone. His lined face had folded in on itself as he turned to look at her, the setting sun filling it with shadows.
"Do you know what dead time is?" he'd asked her, and when she'd shaken her head, he'd continued. "That's what the past ten years or so have been for us: a condition of balance among various forces. We should have been dead these last ten years, but we’ve managed to keep things in stasis."
"I don't understand," Neeley had replied.
Gant had sighed, rubbing his wasted hand across his face. "There are even parts that I don’t know. That I’m not supposed to know because of the deal I’ve had. And even from what I know, I can only tell you so much without jeopardizing you before you are ready. The rest you are going to have to find out on your own. My dying is going to upset a balance and I don't know what is going to happen. People are going to react to my death and there’s a good chance that will put you in danger.”
She had known from her first meeting with Gant that her life would never be the same, but that had not been his fault. She could remember that day as most women remembered their wedding day or the birth of their first child.
Sitting alone in the cold cabin, she went back to the event that had brought her here, not willing yet to move on with the actions demanded of her for this new phase of her life.
On that day over ten years ago, she had been a teenager and her journey against the flow of the terminal crowd with a large gaily-wrapped package in her hands had been handled well by the locals. Templehoff Airport was in the very center of what had been West Berlin and the few words spoken had the lilting Berliner accent that marked the speakers as natives. Since the end of the Second World War, West Berlin had tolerated the noise and energy of a major airport in its midst as graciously as it tolerated the foreigners who ruled it. Even a half-century later there were still many in the city who remembered when their survival had depended on the goodness of foreigners and the noise of the planes overhead. Those planes had brought the food that had enabled the city to endure the Russian blockade. And for many years afterward this airport had taken them from their small democratic island to the outside world, something their fellow Berliners to the east could only dream about until the Wall came down.
So in Berlin, as nowhere else, Neeley had not been scolded for bumping and pushing, but rather given a wider berth and even a smile by those who had noticed the t-shirt pulled taut across her breasts. A few of the men looked past the shirt and continued to stare downward, taking in her lean, tanned legs that the cut-off Levis exposed. It was the first week in October; too cool for such attire, but Neeley remembered how she hadn't felt the chill. She’d made her way past the waiting line into the center of the terminal.