No River Too Wide (29 page)

“He fired you?” Adam asked.

“Worse. He took all my best accounts and reassigned them, people I’d brought in myself through my own efforts. He said he couldn’t trust me to do right by them anymore. But that wasn’t all. Things started happening.”

“What things?”

“My husband and I had a little cabin on a lake near the city. The office staff had been there for a party, so Rex knew where it was. The next time we went out to spend the weekend, we found all the windows had been shot out. Rain had leaked inside and ruined the floors and walls. Almost worse, the carcass of a deer had been left to rot on our porch.”

“You know it was him? Not a hunter who’d had too much to drink?”

“It wasn’t hunting season. We went back to Topeka after we did what we could about the mess and found that in the two days we had been away someone had broken into our garage and slashed the tires of our second car. At the office the next week? Rex told me he’d heard I was having a little personal trouble, and he hoped things got better. The thing is, I hadn’t told anybody at the office what had happened, so how did he know?”

“You talked to the police?”

“We did, but they never got any leads.”

“And you told them about Rex?”

“How could I? I didn’t have a bit of proof. Two weeks later my husband got a job offer in Chicago with something of a promotion, so I gave notice. We sold our house and eventually the cabin, and moved here. Topeka was our home, but nothing good was going to come from standing our ground. Maybe the harassment would have stopped, but maybe it would have gotten worse, too.”

Adam finished the phone call and hung up. Not one thing he’d heard in the past week was conclusive by itself, but together a pattern was forming. He knew enough about abusive men to recognize the pathology. Rex Stoddard had an anger problem. He had to be in complete control at all times, and he retaliated if anyone went against him in even the smallest things. Some people saw a thoughtful, conscientious man, but those who had stepped over Rex’s imaginary line saw the real one, paranoid, narcissistic and violent.

That was the Rex who had abused Jan Stoddard, and likely their daughter, too.

Adam had spent a lot of hours investigating, some of which would be impossible to justify. But Jan Stoddard, the abused wife, lent a different character to the family’s story. What would a woman like that do to protect herself?

That was the question he still had to answer.

Since the weather was cool, he changed into jeans and a quarter-zip sweater. He fastened the bike he had rented to a portable rack on the back of his SUV and threw a pair of sneakers onto the passenger’s seat in case he and Taylor really did get out on the road together. Then he set off for the house located between the Madison County townships of Luck and Trust. Since she’d planned to get there early, he had decided to drive alone, but he did some of his best thinking behind a steering wheel, so the time might be helpful.

As he drove he thought about the hours ahead. He was looking forward to spending the day with Taylor, even if it meant he had to relate to all her friends, as well.

He wasn’t looking forward to the day because he was lonely. He was happy with his own company, a gift he’d received during his many moves as a kid. He made friends quickly, enjoyed them, then moved on.

He wasn’t looking forward to this day because he needed a woman. If it was just about need, he would have chosen more wisely. The list of reasons he shouldn’t be romantically involved with Taylor Martin was long and complicated.

He wasn’t looking forward to it because he might find out more about Jan, either. Rarely did somebody blurt out their life story at a picnic table in between the burgers and the homemade ice cream.

No, he was glad to be driving up a steep mountain road because he’d been instantly attracted to Taylor, and the attraction was growing at an alarming rate. He had reached the point where everything she did struck him as either sexy or intriguing, and he wasn’t sure which was worse. This was the time to call a halt, yet being with her was part of his investigation, so that was impractical, even foolish. He could tell himself to see her only when necessary, to stop engaging in what she called flirtation.

The problem? He wasn’t listening.

He was no closer to figuring out how to handle the problem after he turned into the gravel driveway that matched his directions, or a few minutes later when he parked at the end of a line of cars that told him he was undoubtedly in the right place.

Taylor herself was standing under a massive oak up the driveway talking to a dark-haired woman wearing leggings and a purple tunic that reminded him of something he had seen in Pakistan. When she saw him, she started in his direction.

It was the most natural thing in the world to kiss her hello when she reached him. He didn’t even consider. One minute they were just a few feet apart; the next she was leaning toward him and he was gratefully accepting her invitation. The kiss lasted seconds longer than it reasonably should have. He could feel his body stir in familiar ways, and the desire for something more clawing inside him.

“Well,” he said, after she stepped back. “That’s a great start to my day.”

“I’m glad you found us. How was the drive?”

He didn’t tell her that thoughts of her had kept him company the whole way. “Do you climb this mountain often? That’s some road.”

“My mother was born here. When Mom died she left this house and the property to a group of us to use. I’ll explain on the way up to the house.”

He put his arm around her and they walked that way toward a log structure at the top of a series of stone steps. He listened as she told the story of the property and the women who now owned it, strong, powerful women who would rally to protect their own. By the time he reached the house, he knew he was in more trouble than he’d imagined. Not only was he fast becoming infatuated with Taylor Martin; now he knew that she, and the women around her who called themselves the goddesses anonymous, were going to be a force to reckon with as he continued to investigate the lives of Jan and Harmony Stoddard.

Chapter 23

From the audio journal of a forty-five-year-old woman, taped for the files of Moving On, an underground highway for abused women.

I can’t speak for the many other women who allowed or still allow men to beat them, scream at them or systematically destroy their confidence. But even as the Abuser steadily made certain I was completely dependent on him, there were still moments at the beginning when I could have escaped. While most of my friends from college had moved away or lost interest, I still knew people who might help me. I had the phone number of a safe house, a doctor who seemed willing to get involved, neighbors who were close enough to run to if I needed them.

So why didn’t I ask for help right away? Why didn’t I take my newborn son and leave?

Here are some of my reasons.

I believed in the institution of marriage. I believed that good marriages required hard work and compromise as well as patience.

I believed that I was somehow at fault, and if I just tried to be a better wife, the Abuser would never get angry again.

I believed that the stability of a loving home would smooth away my husband’s rough edges. On my most hopeful days, I believed that rough edges were actually the only problems I was dealing with.

I believed that the Abuser loved and needed me, that without me, he would never find happiness.

I believed his happiness mattered.

I believed when he told me how much I meant to him, when he brought me presents or showed me kindness, that we had suddenly, finally, found a new and happier path. Every single time.

I believed that when the violence recurred, it was only a temporary lapse, that Dr. Jekyll was the real man and Mr. Hyde an aberration who would eventually disappear for good.

The story only becomes sadder because eventually I began to believe other things.

I believed I really wouldn’t be able to survive without him.

I believed I couldn’t support myself or my son alone.

I believed that underneath the violence, he had my best welfare in mind.

I believed that the real problem in our marriage was my inability to turn my life over to him, that my lingering desire for independence and the right to make all my own decisions was making us both unhappy.

I believed our marriage was a test I was failing, and if I just studied harder, eventually I would pass.

After several years had gone by, I began to believe that my happiness really didn’t matter at all.

By then the only thing that did matter was protecting my children.

* * *

As a girl and a young woman, Jan had never been afraid of anyone. Only well into her marriage to Rex had she learned real fear. On that day she had realized that her husband, the man in whom she had invested so much devotion and time, was capable of a rage so deep that the lives of those around him would forever be threatened.

And that had changed everything.

How did a woman go back in time to the person she once had been, untouched by knowledge that people were not necessarily good, that some people liked to cause pain and despair, that sometimes those people could hide the blight that stained their souls for months, perhaps even forever?

She supposed a woman didn’t. She just moved forward. The phrase “sadder and wiser” existed for a reason.

“We’ve been assigned to work on these together,” Ethan Martin told Jan with a tentative smile as he placed a bushel basket between them on the metal glider that graced the Goddess House front porch. “What do you think, are we up to snapping a bushel of beans?”

She tried to smile but couldn’t quite. “I’m game if you are.”

“We could work in the kitchen if you’d rather, but it’s sunny enough that it’s not too cold out here. What do you think?”

It wasn’t a simple question, not for her. She wasn’t sure which would be more intimidating, facing a man across the long, narrow table that took up a wide swath of the Goddess House kitchen, or here, where she could look out at the terrace leading down to the parking lot or up to the simple family cemetery that sat on a ridge above.

She realized she hadn’t answered, that Ethan’s question still hung in the air. “We’ll be fine here,” she said. “If we get cold we can move inside.”

“I’ve always thought someday I’d like to come up here and sit on this porch for a week. Just sit here and stare out and think.”

Earlier in the day Taylor had taken Jan to see her mother’s grave in the cemetery, and she wondered now if part of Ethan’s wish was to feel close to the woman he had loved. Or perhaps that hadn’t even been part of their equation. She knew Taylor and her mother had been estranged until right before Charlotte’s death. She also knew that Ethan and Charlotte had been divorced, but that they, too, had reconciled. She just didn’t know details.

“It’s a beautiful spot,” she said for lack of anything better. She reached for a handful of green beans and saw that he’d included a couple of plastic bowls. “Are these for the ends or the beans?”

“I’ll get newspaper for the ends and we can just toss them on the floor.” He left and Jan started to snap, dropping the ends in her lap.

“It was a bumper year for pole beans,” he said when he returned. “Cristy and Sam are going to blanch them and put them in freezer bags. I’m glad we bought the new freezer. It’s nice to have things to eat right here if somebody comes up on a whim.”

He was making conversation, simple conversation for Jan to take part in. Nothing threatening. Nothing profound. She was expected to participate, but for the life of her, she couldn’t. She was bound by fear, by years of inexperience, by an ego that had been so degraded there had been mornings in Topeka when, on waking, she had been afraid she had disappeared completely overnight.

“We don’t have to talk,” he said at last. “It’s enough that we’re sitting here together. We don’t need a sound track.”

“I’m sorry.” She felt her eyes begin to fill.

“Why? You don’t have to get to know me better.”

“It’s just that...”

“That you haven’t had much practice,” he finished for her, although that wasn’t precisely what she had planned to say. “Jan, I know what you’ve been through. Of course you’re not sure about me, even if I am Taylor’s father. When I divorced Charlotte, it took me forever to try conversation with another woman. I was so angry at her, and I was pretty sure every woman I met was exactly like her.”

“But didn’t you...?”

When she didn’t finish, he did. “Get back together? We did at the end of her life. She changed so much, or maybe she just finally got to be the person she’d always wanted to be and couldn’t quite manage.”

She surprised herself. “Rex will never change.” She managed to glance at him, and Ethan was nodding, as if she had said something profound.

“No, he won’t,” he agreed. “Charlotte was driven by the past, but she was never a bad person. Just on the wrong path. From what I know of your husband...” Now
his
voice trailed off.

“Did she enjoy hurting people?”

“Never. Which didn’t mean she
didn’t
hurt them, but she never derived pleasure from it. She just thought she was doing what she needed to for everybody, that she had to forge ahead for the rest of us, and we would all be happier when we realized it.”

“Everything Rex does is for Rex. Nobody else is real to him.”

“I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through this. No one deserves what you’ve lived with.”

“Rex thought I did.” Then she surprised herself again, and most likely poor Ethan, by laughing softly. “But
I
don’t think so anymore, at least not most of the time. And I guess that means I won.”

“Good for you.”

“When did you get over being angry?” she asked, a question that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. “At Charlotte. After the divorce.”

“That’s a good question.” Ethan snapped a handful of beans. She could hear them popping, and she glanced over to see if she had offended him. But he was staring into space, as if thinking about an answer.