After All These Years, page 1
A Total-E-Bound Publication
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After All These Years
ISBN #978-0-85715-811-6
©Copyright Gwen Masters 2011
Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright November 2011
Edited by Lisa Cox
Total-E-Bound Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Total-E-Bound Publishing.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Total-E-Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2011 by Total-E-Bound Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, United Kingdom.
Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a heat rating of Total-e-burning and a sexometer of 2.
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Gwen Masters
Bobby died over twenty years ago, and Marilyn moved on - but then came William.
When Marilyn first meets William at the train station on a cold December day, she thinks he’s crazy. Soon she realises that he’s not crazy—just quirky—and she is stunned that he recognises her as the wife of Bobby Overmire, a Marine who was killed in the Beirut bombings in 1983.
As time passes, Marilyn becomes much more interested in William than in the husband she lost over two decades ago. But William is harbouring a secret—a secret that could destroy Marilyn’s world all over again.
Dedication
For Patrick Jane…
Your rock-solid faith in us never ceases to amaze me.
Trademarks Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
Timex: Timex Corporation
Zippo: Zippo Manufacturing Co.
Rolex: Rolex Watch Company
Chapter One
“You are a gift,” the stranger murmured.
I didn’t feel like a gift. I was a forty-something mother of three children who hadn’t flown the nest so much as they had fallen from it. I had too much grey in my hair, an aching back and a minimum-wage job at a fast food restaurant that always left me with a rabid distaste for anything fried. It was the dead of winter in Chicago, the snow was piled up in high drifts everywhere and my train was more than fashionably late.
I looked up from my book and wiped the hair from my eyes. My knitted cap was too small—it was something left over from the kids and it must have been from the middle school years considering how old the thing was. I touched it and was suddenly aware of my well-bitten fingernails.
“What did you say?” I was certain I had heard him wrong.
The man was tall. His dark hair was long, curls and waves that fell to his shoulders, greying at the temples. The cold wind picked it up and blew it back from his face. He was dressed in a trench coat, one of those plaid ones that always reminded me of private dicks in old-fashioned movies. He looked like he needed a good shave and a long nap.
“You are a gift,” he said again, and this time I was certain I had heard him correctly. I was also certain he was a little bit nuts. They were everywhere, especially at this time of year.
“I don’t have any change to spare,” I said, and looked back down at my novel.
A laugh rumbled up out of him. It was low and soft and kept going, like a train coming down the tracks. I glanced back up at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. His head was thrown back and he was gazing up at the grey sky, at the clouds that hovered too close. The laughter broke loose. It was loud and full-bodied, the kind of laugh that came from a man who had no worries in the world.
The belt of his trench coat opened a bit and I caught a glimpse of what had to be silk underneath it. That’s when I noticed his shoes, polished to a high shine. On his wrist was a watch that looked expensive.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought—well, you know what I thought.”
He stopped laughing. It seemed to take a massive effort. “It has obviously been a long time since you thought of yourself as a gift.”
“A gift?” I looked at him closely. He could still be one of those nutcases. He might just have a lot of money to take with him while he went down to the funny farm.
“A gift, a present, a Christmas delight,” he said merrily, as if it was the easiest thing in the world to understand.
“You lost me.”
He looked around at the other people nearby. Most of them were sitting on benches and not paying the least bit of attention. This was the part of town where someone could be mugged and nobody would lift a finger to stop it.
“These people sit here among angels, and they haven’t a clue.”
Then I knew he was nuts. I looked back down at my book, hoping he would get the hint. “Thanks for the compliment.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
I nodded and kept reading.
“I don’t blame you for thinking that. It’s not every day that you run into someone like me, Marilyn.”
I slowly looked up. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, grinning at me.
“What did you say?”
“Marilyn,” he said softly, teasingly, like a little kid whispering a secret into a friend’s ear.
A cold chill ran through me, despite the thick hand-me-down coat and the heavy boots I wore. “How do you know my name?”
He ignored my question and looked up at the sky again. “We’re going to have more snow. The forecasters said another five inches, but I’m betting more like ten. The clouds feel generous, don’t they?”
I studied the clouds. They were heavy, pregnant with snow. A few flakes drifted down and melted on my face. I looked back at him, but he was still contentedly scanning the skies.
“How do you know my name? Who are you?”
“You’re full of questions, Marilyn.” That teasing note was back.
The rumble of the train drifted up from down the track, and those around me stood and gathered their belongings. I was already five minutes late for work, and, after the train made its rounds, I would be half an hour late, but I didn’t move. I sat there on the bench while the train stopped. People disembarked in a flurry of discussions and laughter. Others boarded, then it was gone, leaving the smell of oil lingering behind.
“I’m glad you chose not to go,” he said conversationally. “I mean, of course you should have, you have a job and I know that, but I’m just as selfish today as the clouds are generous. Would you walk with me?”
“Tell me how you know my name,” I demanded.
His smile faltered. “You won’t walk with me, will you?”
I glanced at my old Timex and gathered my belongings. I was so late for work it probably wouldn’t matter now if I got there at all. I might even get fired. I stood up and turned away from the man, who still hadn’t moved.
“I guess that means no,” he said.
I glared and flipped him the bird. He raised an eyebrow but didn’t say a word. I put my backpack on my shoulder and stuck my book down in the deep pocket of my carpenter pants.
His calm voice came from behind me. “He told me you were stubborn as hell. That’s one of the things he loved so much about you.”
“Who?”
“Why, Marilyn,” he said with what seemed like genuine puzzlement. “Bobby, that’s who.”
That stopped me.
* * * *
It was April of 1983 and the world was still in the depths of a frigid Cold War. Discontent was rumbling loudly in Lebanon, where the fractured government was fighting over issues that the average American was only beginning to understand. There had been an embassy bombing in West Beirut and sixty-three people had been killed.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “anybody could have seen it coming. Reagan is dragging his feet.”
He blew out a puff of smoke and tried to make a ring of it, failing miserably. He watched the grey cloud rise into the air. The grey T-shirt rode his muscles like the hand of a lover. The crew cut looked good on him.
“When do you go?”
I didn’t care about the politics. All I cared about was the fact that my husband was a military man, our country was on the brink of disaster, and I was six months gone with our third child. Times had been good when we’d been on the base in Germany, and even better when we had been shipped back to Georgia, but now things were different. He wasn’t sitting behind a desk anymore. He was going into a place where the rest of his family wasn’t allowed to go.
“Tuesday,” he said.
It was a Sunday afternoon. I pressed my hands to the mound of my belly and tried not to cry, but it was impossible. Bobby, always the hardened Marine with anyone else, was tender with me. He cradled me in his arms and kissed away every tear. There were plenty of them that day.
“Why are they sending you there, anyway? It’s a civil war,” I said. “They should shoot it out for themselves.”
Bobby must have cringed at my naïvety, but he said nothing. He blew another puff of smoke and this time it made a perfect ring. It disappeared into the azure sky.
“I have a job to do,” he said softly. “And so do you, Marilyn.”
“What? Stay here and wait for you?” I asked with the sudden passion that came from the deepest fear.
Bobby looked at me with wide eyes, as if the answer was completely self-evident. “Why, Marilyn…of course.”
* * * *
“You knew Bobby?” I asked now, standing in a Chicago train station, over two decades removed from that April afternoon.
“Bobbi-Five-O. That’s what everybody called him. He was the funniest guy there. Sometimes he got up on a table in the mess hall and gave us a comedy routine.”
“Bobbi-Five-O.” Suddenly I didn’t know where I was. Was I on a Chicago street or was I in a little house just off the base in Georgia, doing the dishes and listening to Bobby laughing with our son from down the hallway? Bobbi-Five-O was what Bobby Jr used to call his daddy when they played their soldier games with unloaded rifles.
“Yeah, he was funny as hell,” he said.
I came crashing back to the present. “Who are you? And how did you find me?”
“Bobby told me you might go back to Chicago.” He shrugged. “I tried to look you up through the military database, but you moved. You were in Stager last time I looked. Then I got your social security number and one of your credit cards led me to you.”
I stared at him. That he had invaded my privacy so thoroughly was not as important as the fact that he had gone to such lengths over such a period of time to find me. A shiver of fear ran through me, but I was already too curious to pay much attention.
“Why?” I asked.
He looked straight at me with that same broad smile—but now that smile was a little sad. “To tell you, of course.”
“To tell me what?”
The man looked away, as if he were delivering sad news.
“You can stop waiting, Marilyn.”
* * * *
In the early morning hours of October the twenty-third, 1983, a yellow delivery truck drove through Beirut International Airport. It didn’t look out of place until it crashed through a barbed wire fence that surrounded the Marine Headquarters. It barrelled into the lobby, where the suicide bomber detonated over twelve-thousand tons of explosives. The four-storey building was reduced to rubble.
That afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen table in our house in Atlanta, working a crossword puzzle. The children were romping in the living room and the baby was sound asleep in her swing. The knock at the door was cause for excitement, but when the children saw the man in his fine dress uniform they fell silent, as if a trapdoor had closed over their mouths. The Marine removed his hat and I knew. All I would ever clearly remember from the rest of that day was the way the floor felt when I hit my knees and how empty the prayers sounded, knowing I was hoping for something that had no hope left. The Marine—Sanders was his name, Sanders, I would never forget—knelt beside me and held my hand.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, and I didn’t have to look up at him to know that big, strong Marine was crying right along with me. “Ma’am, I’m just so damn sorry.”
* * * *
I looked at this other man now and shook my head, forcing the memories away as I had done countless times in the long years since. My mind felt fuzzy with them, as though they had tried to drag me back into the past. Something nagged at me, something just outside my realm of thinking.
He smiled at me. “You are a gift.”
I remembered. It was a flicker of a memory, something that came from years before Bobby had died—
“What does that mean?” Another train was coming and I listened to the rumble even as my mind was a million miles away. A passerby jostled me, and I took two steps towards the man who had captured my full attention. I was close enough that I could smell his cologne. “What does that mean? There was something Bobby used to say…”
“It was Christmas time and you couldn’t afford gifts for each other. You were crying about it, but he told you that you were a gift. You were the only gift he would ever need.”
The memory slammed into the centre of me with physical force that left me fighting for breath. The old pain rose up from deep within, where it was always patiently waiting for a moment like this to consume me again. My knees gave way, and the man caught me.
“Bobby?” I knew it was insane, even as I said it.
“Walk with me.” This time it was more of an order than a request.
Curious faces stared at us as I picked up my backpack and walked quickly out of the station. My way was blurred by tears, but I stepped out into the full force of the Chicago wind and those tears were gone instantly, swept away to freeze somewhere on the ground.
The man was behind me and holding my elbow.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“William.” The answer was quick, as if he didn’t want to answer at all.
I tried to slow him down but he kept speeding up. We were on the street in front of the train station, heading in the direction of my nearby apartment building. I struggled to keep up with his long strides. The wind cut like a knife—good old Chicago wind that lived up to its reputation every single time.
“I thought you wanted to take a walk,” I shouted above the wail of the wind and the sound of the street—horns, sirens, brakes and the occasional obscene yell. It was rush hour.
“I’m from the south. Walks in the south are pleasant. This is torture.”
I laughed. It was amazing that I could do so, considering all the memories and long-lost dreams that were floating through my head, but the way he talked reminded me so much of Bobby. He had that same sarcastic tone. All Marines seemed to acquire it early in their careers.
When we got to the doorstep of my building, I kept walking, but he stopped. He stepped into the alcove in front of the doors and looked at me with an expectant air.
“Aren’t we going to go in?”
I backed a step away. “You know where I live?”
“I found you, didn’t I? If I knew where you worked, of course I know where you live.”
His head was hunched down into the collar of his trench coat. His eyes were bright with the cold, his nose was red and his hair was flying all over the place. He looked at me blankly, as though I had no reason to fear him, no reason to think it was odd that this stranger knew where I worked and where I lived. I stared back at him and tried to hide the sudden shaft of fear.
”What if you’re a stalker? What if you come in here and kill me?”
William looked at me with amusement. “I’m a Marine, Marilyn. I’m trained to kill a person so quickly and easily it would boggle your mind. If I wanted to kill you, I could easily have done it at the train station.”
What if you want something else, then?
I bit my lip to keep from voicing the question. What was I trying to do? He knew things about Bobby that could only have come from Bobby himself. It was the closest I had been to my husband since the day he’d left, the only news of him since the day he’d died; I had to know more. Everything he had said up to this point made sense. And he was right—if he had wanted to kill me, or worse, he could have done it by now.
I opened the outer doors and he walked in behind me. He sighed gratefully at the warmth but didn’t remove his coat. I unlocked the inner doors and went to the elevator. He stepped in beside me and I waited.
“Which floor?” I finally asked, testing him.
He sighed. “If you are really this worried, then we can stay in the lobby.”
I reached out and punched the number. Neither of us said a word until we landed on floor number ten.
He looked at me with that same smile, the kind that said all was right with the world. “Is this all right with you?”
