No River Too Wide (43 page)

Adam didn’t waste time. “Jan, I’m the one who traced you here, so in a way it’s my fault Rafferty found you, too, but at the time I was looking for your husband, and I thought you might lead us to him. Taylor’s told you who I am and why I’m in Asheville?”

“She has.”

“It’s never been my intention to hurt anybody.” Adam’s gaze flicked to Taylor, then away. “But fraud was committed, and I was being paid to get to the bottom of it. I’ve told my superiors I think you’re a victim, not an embezzler. Will you help me prove I’m right?”

Taylor knew she had to stay silent. No matter what she thought of Adam Pryor—if that was even his name—this was Jan’s decision.

Harmony spoke. “How can we trust you after you lied to everybody?”

“I know it’s going to be tough. But I believed in what I was doing. Insurance fraud isn’t a victimless crime. It’s right between income tax fraud and identity theft in importance, and billions of dollars are lost each year. Every time somebody gets away with the kind of money we’re talking about here, everybody’s premiums go up. Then people who really need it can’t afford insurance anymore. Everybody suffers.”

“How are you going to help me?” Jan asked. “What can
you
do?”

“I can find who did this. I’m going back to Kansas, and I’m not going to stop until I figure out how this whole thing came down. If you let me interview you and dig for anything you might know, then we have a chance of putting this to rest.”

Taylor couldn’t keep silent any longer. “That sounds like what Rafferty just told her.”

Adam angled his body so they were eye to eye. “No, it’s different. Rafferty thinks he knows who killed Rex Stoddard. I don’t. Not yet. But I’m going to find out.”

“Here’s what
I
think. I think there’s nothing you won’t do to get what you want. Just a theory...” She turned to the woman beside her. “Jan?”

“You’ve been good to my daughter and me,” Jan told Adam. “Was that part of your—” she searched for the right word “—cover, too?”

His tone softened. “No. Never. I figured out pretty fast that both of you deserved to have people be good to you. Especially men.”

“You’re right about that.” She was silent a moment. “Taylor, may Adam and I talk here, or would you prefer we do it somewhere else?”

Taylor didn’t know what to say. She was sure Jan was making a mistake, yet could she tell her so, as if Jan wasn’t an adult who understood everything she was risking?

“I have some grocery shopping.” Taylor made a show of looking at the wall clock behind her. “I’ll be back in about an hour.”

“We’ll be finished,” Adam said.

“I’ll get my keys. Jan, I’ll bring dinner home. Harmony, you’re welcome to stay. We’ll eat early. I missed lunch.”

She went to get her purse and her keys, and left the house by the back door to avoid facing Adam again.

Chapter 34

After Taylor left, Adam went out to his car to get a tape recorder and a notepad, and Harmony and Jan were alone.

“I can’t stay,” Harmony said. “I have to be at home when Davis drops off Lottie. I could ask him to bring her here, but she’s going to need dinner and maybe a nap. She’ll be a mess if she doesn’t get both right away.” She searched her mother’s face, as if she expected to see it crumbling feature by feature.

Jan took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m going to be fine. You don’t have to worry. Talk to Rilla when you get home and see if she thinks Brad should be the one to handle the legal end. If I have to talk to the police, I’ll want a lawyer with me.”

“Do you realize that now you can just drive out and visit anytime you want? You could move in with me, Mom. We don’t have to live apart anymore.”

Jan didn’t point out the obvious. If things didn’t go well and she was convicted of Rex’s murder, they would be living apart for a very long time. “It’s too crazy right now to be thinking about a change, but you’re right, we can stop playing hide-and-seek. We can see each other whenever we want.”

“Who killed him?”

Jan slowly shook her head. “It just seems obvious it had to do with whatever was going on at the agency. But I don’t know anybody I can talk to there. Your father told everyone on his staff I was mentally unstable and couldn’t be trusted.” She grimaced. “I’m sure they pictured Mrs. Rochester in
Jane Eyre.
The maniacal wife locked away in the attic, only in my case, it was Pawnee Parkland.”

“At the end didn’t Mrs. Rochester burn down the house?”

Jan and Harmony stared at each other; then Jan began to laugh. She couldn’t help herself, but she knew she was dangerously close to hysteria. “Truth’s stranger than fiction,” she said after a few deep gulps of air and a huge effort of will. “I’m sorry, honey. You probably think I’m mentally unstable, too.”

“I think there was one dangerously unstable person in our home, and it wasn’t you.”

Adam came back inside, and Harmony kissed her mother’s cheek. “Don’t tell him anything you don’t want to, and call my cell if you need me. Nap or not, I’ll bring Lottie, and we’ll come over.”

“I trust Adam.”

Harmony looked less sure, but she held one finger in the air and wagged it at him, as if beginning a lecture. “I have to leave, so you can’t interview us together. But go easy on my mother.”

“Interviewing people together doesn’t work, too easy to get sidetracked. Right now I need everything your mom remembers. You’ve been away from home so long I’m anticipating you won’t have much to add.”

“If I think of anything, I’ll call you.”

He took out his wallet and handed her a card. “Call my cell phone. Anytime.”

Harmony glanced down and read out loud, “Licensed private investigator. You know, if you’d just handed out these cards at the beginning, Taylor wouldn’t be furious with you now.”

“If I had, your mother would have taken off, and I wouldn’t have put two and two together about the kind of man your father was.”

“She’s innocent.”

“Let me get busy proving it.”

Jan watched the byplay. She had protected Harmony to the best of her ability throughout her childhood, and now Harmony was trying to protect her. Would there ever come a time when both of them could think about ordinary things?

“Give Lottie a kiss for me,” she said.

“We’ll just be a phone call away.”

Jan waited until Harmony had closed the door; then she settled herself on the sofa. “We should get moving. You told Taylor you wouldn’t be here when she gets home.”

Adam rarely showed emotion, but she saw something flicker in his eyes. Dealing with the aftermath of his deception was going to be challenging. She wasn’t sure he would ever earn back Taylor’s trust, and she wasn’t sure he would try. Lost causes would not appeal to him.

“When this is over,” she said, “I hope you’ll try to fix things. She’s worth it.”

He didn’t pretend not to understand. “Right now I’m not sure
I
am.”

She knew then that she had been right to trust this man. “Of course you are.”

“Will she think so?”

She leaned forward and put her hand on his. Just for a moment. “She would be a fool to turn away a man whose worst fault is trying too hard to do what’s right and suffering too much every time he fails.”

* * *

Adam set up his tape recorder and got Jan’s name and permission on tape to interview her. Then he took out the legal pad he’d brought from the car and a new pen just to jot down reminders of anything significant.

“I’m going to start with the zinger,” he said. “Jan, did you murder Rex Stoddard?”

She looked surprisingly composed, but then it took a tough lady to survive everything she had. “No.”

“Did you set up false accounts at Stoddard Insurance Agency? Or file false reports? Or in any way try to take money out of the agency by illegal means?”

“I didn’t even take money out of the agency
legally.
I had nothing to do with the agency, and about the only time I had contact with the staff was at the annual New Year’s open house. Even there Rex made it difficult for me to hold a conversation with anyone.”

“Did you want your husband dead?”

Jan drew her lips into a tight line, half concentration, half disgust, he thought. “I wanted him out of my life,” she said. “And God help me, as the years went by I realized that, most likely, the only way that would happen was if Rex died first. So yes, I suppose in that way I did want him dead.”

“Did you ever do anything to hasten his death?”

“No.”

He went on in the same vein for a while. He didn’t expect anyone else would ever hear this tape, but he wanted confirmation of the abuse. He was glad Jan didn’t try to play down her feelings about it or about Rex himself.

“I’m sorry to ask this, but can you tell me the worst example of your husband’s brutality? Just a few sentences?”

Her breath caught, and for a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer. Then she spoke softly, and related a story about her son and a near drowning that made him want to rest his head in his hands.

“God...” Adam thought he had seen everything, but he hadn’t expected anything that horrifying. For just a moment he wished he had been the one to put Stoddard in his grave.

“My daughter doesn’t know,” Jan said. “She probably will someday, but I haven’t told her yet. Of course, Rex excused himself and said he’d been temporarily out of his mind, but he wasn’t. He was calm, so calm and so calculating. If I hadn’t promised I would never leave, he wouldn’t have pulled Buddy out of the water and somehow he would have blamed it on me. I knew then that I could never run, not because I had promised but because a man who would do that...”

Adam knew that kind of evil existed. The suicide bomber in Afghanistan who had carefully planned to kill anybody, women, children, the elderly, who happened to be at the bazaar had probably been a man like Rex Stoddard. Adam would never believe that kind of careless violence was simply about ideology, and certainly it was never about love. It was about power, revenge, control.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he heard the emotion in his own voice.

“Does that help you see why I had to stay?”

“It helps me see why somebody murdered him.”

“Adam, maybe it was somebody who saw that part of Rex. But most people never did. All those years I thought it was just us.”

“That’s not true.” He debated whether to go on, but he chanced it. “Do you remember one of your husband’s employees, a woman named Tami Murgan? She was one of his agents.”

“He talked about a Tami, although I don’t think I met her. He was furious at her.” She paused. “Those were bad weeks for me. When something went wrong at work, home was the place where Rex erupted. I tried to stay away from him as much as I could.”

“Did he say
why
he was furious?”

She closed her eyes, as if she was trying to bring it back. “He was angry so often, Adam. Let me see if I can remember.”

He didn’t care how long it took to get the information he needed, but while he waited he thought about another place to finish the interview if Taylor came back. The hurt in her eyes had been easy to understand. So had the anger. She wouldn’t want to find him here when she returned.

“I just can’t remember specifics,” she said after a few moments. “I tried to tune him out whenever I could, but Rex was no fan of strong women. Which is why he married me.”

“I don’t think that’s true. In your case he saw your strengths and set about defeating them. Men like your husband do that routinely. If you hadn’t been strong to start with, subduing you wouldn’t have had any appeal.”

“I was young when we married. My parents had just died. Rex stepped in to help settle everything. He was there to do anything I needed. I leaned on him. I was weak.”

“A very natural reaction, but it doesn’t mean you were weak. He knew how to manipulate you when you needed somebody to help and comfort, but I bet even then you weren’t a pushover, were you?”

She looked reluctant to be that kind to herself. “When the violence began I made excuses for him. In between those episodes I believed he was a good husband. Until I finally faced how much he controlled my life and how nothing I was doing to fix our marriage was working.”

They were off the subject, and Adam knew it. At the same time he wondered if this glimpse into the Stoddards’ home life might prove valuable.

“When was he angriest at you? What were most of the episodes about?”

“Early on I learned not to argue with him or try to convince him I was right about something, because that always ended badly. Even if I didn’t argue, if I stepped over any of the lines he had drawn in the sand, it was nearly as bad. Even silly things were a test of his authority. Once I bought a blouse because it was on sale. Rex watched every penny I spent, so I thought he would be pleased I’d gotten a bargain. Instead, he blew up because at some time in the past he had told me I didn’t look good in green. I hadn’t remembered, and I couldn’t return it because the sale was final.”

“So there were rules.”

“Ever-changing and inventive.”

“So you couldn’t keep up with them.”

“They were just excuses to attack.”

Adam was impressed that despite everything, Jan had managed to keep perspective. “When you were out with him did he behave this way toward strangers?”

“He was never physically abusive to anybody in my presence. He never got in a fistfight, although he encouraged our son to—as he called it—stand up for himself.” She looked away.

“That was hard for you.”

“Of course.” She sighed. “Rex would bully waiters and salesclerks, always with the excuse he was just trying to help them do their jobs. He could be so cold people always knew if he was displeased. He didn’t have real friends, not even the people on the agency bowling team. They never came to our house, and he made a point of not joining them afterward at a bar.”

“He didn’t drink?”

“Never in my presence.”

“Why did he sponsor a team?”

“He said it was important for office morale.”

Adam tried to imagine how much office morale had been boosted by bowling weekly with a surly, judgmental boss. “Did you watch them play?”