Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt 4)

d to laugh with every sentence and her face carried a warm, gentle look. She was everyone's idea of a sweet little old snow-haired lady.

"You don't strike me as the Geritol type," he said.

She patted his arm. "If that is meant as flattery, I'll buy it." She motioned him to a chair in a tastefully furnished living room. "Come and sit down. You will stay for lunch, won't you?"

"I'd be honored, if it's no trouble."

"Of course not. Bert is off chasing around the golf course, and I appreciate the company."

Seagram looked up. "Bert?"

"My husband."

"But I was under the impression-"

"I was still Jake Hobart's widow," she finished his sentence, smiling innocently. "The truth of the matter is, I became Mrs. Bertram Austin sixty-two years ago."

"Does the Army know?"

"Oh heavens, yes. 1 wrote letters to the War Department notifying them of my marital status a long time ago, but they simply sent polite, noncommittal replies and kept mailing the checks."

"Even though you'd remarried?"

Adeline shrugged. "I'm only human, Mr. Seagram. Why argue with the government. If they insist on sending money, who's to tell them they're crazy?"

"A lucrative little arrangement."

She nodded. "I won't deny it, particularly when you include the ten thousand dollars I received at Jake's death."

Seagram leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. "The Army paid you a ten-thousand-dollar indemnity? Wasn't that a bit steep for 1912?"

"You couldn't be half as surprised as I was then," she said. "Yes, that amount of money was a small fortune in those days."

"Was there any explanation?"

"None," she replied. "I can still see the check after all these years. All it said was `Widow's Payment' and it was made out to me. That's all there was to it."

"Perhaps we can start at the beginning."

"When I met Jake?"

Seagram nodded.

Her eyes looked beyond him for a few moments. "I met Jake during the terrible winter of 1910. It was in Leadville, Colorado, and I had just turned sixteen. My father was on a business trip to the mining fields to investigate possible investment in several claims, and since it was close to Christmas, and I had a few days vacation from school, he relented and took Mother and me along. The train barely made it into Leadville station when the worst blizzard in forty years struck the high country of Colorado. It lasted for two weeks, and believe me, it was no picnic, especially when you consider that the altitude of Leadville is over ten thousand feet."

"It must have been quite an adventure for a sixteen-year-old girl."

"It was. Dad paced the hotel lobby like a trapped bull while Mother just sat and worried, but I thought it was marvelous."

"And Jake?"

"One day, Mother and I were struggling across the street to the general store-an ordeal when you are lashed by fifty-mile-an-hour winds at twenty degrees below zero when out of nowhere this giant brute of a man picks each of us up under one arm and carries us through the snowdrifts and deposits us on the doorstep of the store, just as sassy as you please."

"It was Jake?"

"Yes," she said distantly, "it was Jake."

"What did he look like?"