LITMIR.BIZ

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       FOUR

      There were no answers for Margo in the clouds. Panic had begun to well up inside her once again. How could Jack not have been in the waiting area or at the newspaper stand? His was not a face you forgot. And how in hell did his raincoat get on that man sitting in 1B?

      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

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