Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,71

skin, even his thinning hair, was as colorless as dust. He wasn’t wearing the glasses she’d expected, and he was much taller than she had imagined. Over six feet, but he stooped as if his height pained him. They shook hands, and Abby slid into the booth. Hank folded himself onto the bench opposite her. Even seated, his shoulders slumped forward as if his back were burdened with a sack of rocks. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled the sleeves of his gold shirt into messy cuffs at his elbows. The awful orange-striped tie was loosely knotted at his neck. Everything about him seemed careless and unkempt. Unhappy. Nothing so neat and precise as his handwriting had indicated.

Abby slipped off her own jacket. She glanced around the restaurant full of diners, mostly men, bent over full plates of bacon and eggs. In the booth across the aisle, an older man was speaking intently to a young blond-haired woman as he stroked the inside of her wrist. They looked unnaturally enraptured given the earliness of the hour and the way they were dressed, both of them in business suits.

Not married, she decided. She wondered if they would make it to the office. She wondered if the man’s wife had dropped their kids at school and gone to do the grocery shopping. Had she done the laundry, swept their kitchen floor? Had she planned what she would serve this cheating man for his dinner?

“I can’t believe you called. I’d given up,” Hank said.

“I wasn’t going to,” Abby told him.

“Well, thank God you did.” He sounded fervent, too fervent.

Abby eyed the door, wanting to leave, but when the waitress came, they both ordered coffee.

“So,” Hank said when the waitress was gone, “your husband’s been missing since April?”

Abby nodded. “But your wife’s been gone since February, you said.”

“Late February or sometime in March, near as I can figure.”

Abby frowned.

The waitress reappeared with their order. She set the cream pitcher and sugar shaker on the table. Abby smiled and thanked her, but Hank Kilmer didn’t even glance up. He poured a stream of sugar into his mug, took up his spoon and stirred a series of concentrated circles.

When he lifted his mug to drink, she noticed his knuckles were thick and misshapen. She wondered if it was from slamming his fists into walls. She wondered why he didn’t know when his wife had disappeared.

“We were separated,” he said as if he’d read Abby’s mind. “She’d moved out, but I figured it was temporary, like the other times.”

“You’ve been separated before?”

“Yeah, but she always came back. She doesn’t like being apart from our daughter for too long. Caitlin’s eight. She and Sondra are close.”

“Oh, she must miss her mother.”

“You have no idea.” Hank stabbed the table with his index finger. “No kid should have to go through this. Sondra is Caitlin’s mother, for Christ’s sake. She shouldn’t do this to her own kid. Just disappear without a fucking—aaagh—” He groaned and wiped his face. “I’m sorry. It gets to me sometimes.”

Abby lowered her gaze. She could hear her pulse in her ears.

Hank shoved his spoon around. “I want this nightmare to end. But when you don’t know what the hell it’s about—” He shot her a hard glance. “You understand, right? You’re in the same boat.”

Abby did understand, but she didn’t want to share Hank’s boat or anything else with him. She felt pity for him, this big, moon-faced, homely, infuriated man. She wondered if it was his anger at his wife that had bleached the color from him.

Hank said, “There must be a reason why your husband had Sondra’s fax number.”

“I don’t know of one.”

“Well, is he by any chance an attorney? Is he the same Nick Bennett who represented those kids in the case against Helix Belle?”

Abby said he was, but with reluctance, not liking it.

“I thought so! That’s the connection.” Hank sounded celebratory.

Abby felt her heart stall in her chest. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sondra was a judicial assistant for Judge Payne, Harold Payne?”

“The case was tried in his court,” Abby remembered.

“She went to work for him a couple of months before the Helix lawsuit was filed, worked for him almost two years.”

Abby added more cream to her coffee, even though she hadn’t tasted it.

“Sondra was wound up about that case,” he continued. “She talked about it constantly. She talked about your husband, too, especially after he won. She could practically quote his closing argument from memory. It started to piss