Sole Survivor

cold bottle of orange juice. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely pour the ingredients into a glass. She drank the screwdriver straight down, opened another miniature, mixed a second drink, took a swallow of it-then went into the bathroom and threw up.
        She felt unclean. Withdrawn less than an hour away, she took a long shower, scrubbing herself so hard and standing in water so hot that her skin grew red and stung unbearably.
        Although she knew that it was pointless to change hotels, that they could find her again if they wanted her, she couldn't stay any longer in this place. She packed and, an hour after first light, went down to the front desk to pay her bill.
        The ornate lobby was full of San Francisco policemen-uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives.
        From the wide-eyed cashier, Barbara learned that sometime after three o'clock in the morning, a young room-service waiter had been shot to death in a service corridor near the kitchen. Twice in the chest and once in the head.
        The body had not been discovered immediately because, curiously, no one had heard gunfire.
        Harried by fear that seemed to push her forward like a rude hand in the back, she checked out. She took a taxi to another hotel.
        The day was high and blue. The city's famous fog was already pulling back across the bay into a towering palisade beyond the Golden Gate, of which she had a limited view from her new room.
        She was an aeronautical engineer. A pilot. She held a master's degree in business administration from Columbia University. She had worked hard to become the only current female IIC working air crashes for the National Transportation Safety Board. When her husband had walked out on her seventeen years ago, she had raised Denny alone and raised him well. Now all that she had achieved seemed to have been gathered into the hand of the sad-eyed sensualist, wadded with the cellophane and the peels of red wax, and thrown into the trash can.
        After cancelling her appointments for the day, Barbara hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. She closed the draperies and curled on the bed in her new room.
        Quaking fear became quaking grief. She wept uncontrollably for the dead room-service waiter whose name she didn't know, for Denny and Rebekah and unborn Felicia whose lives now seemed perpetually suspended on a slender thread, for her own loss of innocence and self-respect, for the three hundred and twenty people aboard Flight 353, for justice thwarted and hope lost.
        A sudden wind groaned across the meadow, playing with old dry aspen leaves, like the devil counting souls and casting them away.
        “I can't let you do this,” Joe said. “I can't let you tell me what was on the cockpit voice recorder if there's any chance it's going to put your son and his family in the hands of people like that.”
        “It's not for you to decide, Joe.”
        “The hell it's not.”
        “When you called from Los Angeles, I played dumb because I've got to assume my phone is permanently tapped, every word recorded. Actually, I don't think it is. I don't think they feel any need to tap it, because they know by now that they've got me muzzled.”
        “If there's even a chance-”
        “And I know for certain I'm not being watched. My house isn't under observation. I'd have picked up on that long ago. When I walked out on the investigation, took early retirement, sold the house in Bethesda, and came back to Colorado Springs, they wrote me off, Joe. I was broken, and they knew it.”
        “You don't seem broken to me.”
        She patted his shoulder, grateful for the compliment. “I've rebuilt myself some. Anyway, if you weren't followed-”
        “I wasn't. I lost them yesterday. No one could have followed me to LAX this morning.”
        “Then I figure there's no one to know we're here or to know what I tell you. All I ask is you never say you got it from me.”
        “I wouldn't do that to you. But there's still such a risk you'll be taking,” he worried.
        “I've had months to think about it, to live with it, and the way it seems to me is… They probably think I told Denny some of it, so he would know what danger he's in, so he'd be careful, watchful.”
        “Did you?”
        “Not a word. What kind of a life could they have, knowing?”
        “Not a normal one.”
        “But now Denny, Rebekah,