The Widower's Wife: A Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

door, clambering over the snow median and limping through the accumulation on the abandoned railway.
    A bell jangled when he entered the coffee shop. Two women were eyeing a row of pastel macaroons behind a display case. Ryan asked if they were in line. His question wrested the slightly taller woman’s attention from the sweets. Although she wore what appeared to be gym clothes, thick navy eyeliner encircled her dark-blue eyes. Her forehead was near reflective, a sign of too much Botox. She mumbled something affirmative and pulled her companion a few steps closer to the register.
    When it was his turn to order, he requested coffee, skim milk, no sugar, the way Leslie had gotten him to order it after years of nagging. He pushed the thought of his ex-wife out of his head and looked for a spot to sit. The women ahead of him had taken theirdrinks to one of two bistro tables pressed against a picture window. As good a thinking spot as any.
    He paid and brought his drink to the empty table. Silver light struggled through a chalky film covering the glass. It would snow later. He’d need to get back on the road before it started.
    Ryan plopped down on the stool and then pulled his cell from his pants pocket. He opened his e-mail and started a new message. His own address went in the to field. The subject: Ana Bacon.
    Suicide wouldn’t be easy to prove. It was rare for women to take their own lives. Only about five in one hundred thousand American females killed themselves each year, and most of those were either terminally ill or recently divorced. Still, suicide was more likely than the alternative. Of all the unfortunate ways to die, falling off a cruise ship was one of the unluckiest. The odds? Exactly 1 in 2.31 million. A person was twice as apt to be struck by lightning. Plus, nearly all “accidental” falls were due to intoxication. As a pregnant mother, Ana hadn’t been drinking, at least not according to her husband.
    Tom had blamed illness for Ana’s death. He’d told news crews that his wife had suffered from a bad combination of morning and motion sicknesses. On the day that she died, he’d left her sleeping in a lounge chair on their balcony to go to the pool (where he’d been seen by multiple people). She’d been exhausted from vomiting on and off all afternoon, leading Tom to believe that Ana must have gotten sick over the side of the boat and lost her balance. Fellow vacationers had supported his story, claiming that Ana had been ill during dinner. Tom’s alibi and the anecdotal comments from cruise-goers had been all the BMA had needed to claim “no evidence of foul play.”
    Ryan sipped from his coffee cup. He tapped the sides of the cardboard, pounding out the pins and needles from his thawing fingers as he tried to imagine the scenario Tom had envisioned. He pictured the attractive woman in the news photos leaning over the railing, her thin frame, made thinner by the inability to keep down food, extending too far over the side of the boat in avain attempt to avoid splattering the boards beneath her with sick and then, somehow, tumbling over the forty-two-inch railing.
    Ryan pressed his eyes shut. It just didn’t make sense, and it would never fly with his bosses. His job was to get ISI out of paying ten million dollars, not explain how a five-foot-seven woman could, from the force of vomiting alone, propel herself up and over a large wooden bar set just below her sternum.
    He typed “suicide” into his notes. To prove it, he’d need to know more about the Bacons’ finances and marriage—especially their marriage. Men took their lives because of money problems. Women did so because of relationship issues. If he could prove both existed in the Bacon household, even better.
    Where to start? Investigating rule of thumb: people grumbled about work at home and about home at work. He would speak with Ana’s old coworkers at Derivative Capital. If the Bacons’ relationship had been on the rocks, Ana