No River Too Wide (44 page)

“No.”

“Was that part of his wanting to isolate you?”

“Of course.” She frowned, as something else occurred to her. “But that wasn’t the only reason. He was unhappy that his office manager was on the team. He thought she was an affront to womanhood and a bad model for me.”

“What?”

“I know how ridiculous that sounds, believe me. I guess my brainwashing didn’t take, not completely.”

“What was her problem?”

“The same problem he had with women in general who didn’t stay home and clean house, raise children and follow orders.”

He thought back to Tami. “Tami thinks your husband tried to get even because she told a client to look elsewhere for a cheaper policy. She thinks Rex vandalized her house, and maybe her car, although she has no proof.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. He would be careful not to get caught, but it’s not hard to imagine him getting even. That was a regular event at our house.”

“But Tami did something your husband perceived as bad for his business....” He let the sentence hang without finishing it.

“That would infuriate him.”

“And that’s the kind of thing you meant when you said he had problems with women in general.”

“Not really. I was talking about more subtle things. Women with loud voices and loud laughs. Too much makeup. Tight jeans. Short skirts. Shirts that exposed their midriffs. He practically foamed at the mouth. Poor Harmony had to pass inspection every morning before she left for school.”

Now Adam understood the piercings, the tattoos and the freewheeling fashion sense of Jan’s daughter a little better.

Jan continued. “Even at church, where he was a deacon, people kept a respectful distance. I guess the best way to say it? Rex simmered, and if you looked closely enough, you could see the steam rising.”

“Can you remember any other reasons he got angry with people at work? Particularly recently?”

“You’re focusing on work.”

“I think that’s where we’ll find our answers.”

“I wish I could help, but he stopped talking about work.”

Adam sat a little straighter. “Did he?”

“As part of getting ready to escape I was trying to sink into the background, become part of the scenery. Droop.”

“Droop?”

“Like a wilting flower. I wanted him to think he’d drained all the spirit that was left in me after the children...” She swallowed and took a moment to compose herself. “After Harmony left. Some of it was real. I was so depressed for a while I didn’t care about anything. Then I started to realize that maybe I could finally get out. He warned me he knew where she was, but I suspected he was on the wrong track. I thought maybe he’d be less vigilant about watching me if I just continued to wilt.”

“You think that’s why he stopped talking about work?”

“I was trying hard to be somebody who wasn’t worth talking to. I thought I was being successful. Don’t tell me I failed there, too?”

He smiled, because she was smiling a little to light the way. “You were probably very good at it. But I suspect he stopped talking about work for another reason.”

“He didn’t want me to know about something that was going on?”

Adam tried to put together a time line. Stoddard had been alerted to problems when Midwest began asking questions, but it was also possible he’d begun to have suspicions of his own before that. The timing would be a good thing to know.

Adam scribbled a reminder to find out exactly when Midwest had approached Rex. Then he looked up. “It would be helpful to know when you think you saw a change.”

“What kind of change? You mean just not talking about work?”

He almost nodded. Then he realized how important her question itself might be. “What changes did you
see?
”

“This probably sounds silly, but he bought a new suit. He’d never worn cheap suits, but this one looked to be twice as expensive, although I never saw our bills.”

“But you know fabric.”

“Cut and style, too, and this wasn’t his usual. He’d lost a little weight, and the suit was tailored to fit.”

“Okay. What else?”

“He changed the way he wore his hair. He’d always gone to the local barber, but somebody new started cutting it, or else his old barber got some training.”

The expensive suit and more expensive haircut could be signs that Stoddard had a sudden influx of cash, but Adam wondered.

“Any signs he was buying himself expensive toys to go along with the suit and haircut?”

“No, he didn’t spend money on himself, unless you count his gun collection. And he never stinted on that.”

“Was he buying new guns about the same time?”

She shook her head. “No, and he would have shown them to me. He knew I was afraid of what they could do, and he liked to show off.”

“No other purchases? Land, car, things for your house?”

“No. In fact, he decided to refinish our stairs just a few weeks before all this happened, and he did the work himself to save money.”

“Was that unusual?”

“Maybe a little. He seemed obsessed with it. And it was hard work. He did it all by hand.”

“Was that how he relieved stress?”

“His second favorite way. The first was to catch me in some mistake and make me pay for it.”

She said that so matter-of-factly that Adam winced. “Was he growing more abusive?”

She studied the question. He could almost see her turning it over in her mind. “He was more abusive when he remembered to be.”

“Remembered to be?”

“Like my mistakes were no longer uppermost in his mind. Again, I thought I was just fading away and he’d stopped noticing me so much.”

“What else changed?”

“Rex always liked to keep me on my toes. One of his rules was that I had to have dinner ready and waiting whenever he got home. He didn’t vary the time by much, just enough to keep me scurrying around. I had to keep things warm or start something new if the old meal dried out.”

Adam knew better than to comment. “That changed?”

“He started coming home later. A couple of times he came home and told me he’d already eaten. But even when he hadn’t, he didn’t seem to care if he had to wait for his dinner to be warmed up again. He didn’t seem to notice it wasn’t fresh and piping hot.”

“So he was preoccupied, stressed, less apt to go after you because his mind was elsewhere. But at the same time he was paying more attention to his appearance.”

“I might be making too much out of it.”

“Can you remember when this started? Think hard. When did you start noticing things were a little different?”

“When we didn’t take a vacation,” she said without hesitation.

“What happened?”

“Every June we rented a little cabin near Council Grove Lake. We’d done it for years. Rex liked the fishing. I liked being close enough to other cabins that he couldn’t risk somebody hearing screams, his or mine. But this year we didn’t go. He said he was too busy.”

“That was all he said?”

“I knew better than to ask.”

“When did you usually go?”

“The first week. We had a standing reservation. Right before we were set to leave, he told me we weren’t going. I’d already started packing food and supplies to take with us.”

“What did you think?”

“Since it had never happened before, I thought it was strange. Then on Friday night of the week we were supposed to be there, he didn’t come home. He came home late on Sunday.”

“You must have wondered about that.”

“If Rex had to be out of town, he rarely told me ahead of time. That way I couldn’t make plans, because I didn’t know where he was or when he was coming back. Sometimes I think he was out there watching the house to see what I would do. Keeping me off-balance was a favorite pastime.”

“And you worried about that the night you left for good?”

“Of course.”

“So you set the fire to cover your tracks?”

“No. I didn’t set the fire.” She was emphatic, and she told him in detail how it had happened. At the end she spread her hands in illustration as she explained how quickly the fire must have caught. “I barely got out in time.”

“Okay.” He mulled over everything she had told him. Nothing stood out by itself, but all together he was beginning to think he might have a lead.

“Let me just ask something right now, Jan. This is a tough one, so don’t reject it out of hand, okay? Just think it over.”

He leaned forward so he could look straight into her eyes. “Is it possible your husband was having an affair?”

Chapter 35

Jan had forgotten so much, or perhaps she had never known it in the first place. During the final six months of her marriage—a way of dating events that she would now have to become accustomed to—she had been solely focused on disappearing into the background or, when she hadn’t been able to, convincing her husband that she lived only to serve him.

On the occasions he hadn’t returned home at his usual times or even at all, she had been grateful, too grateful that he was still absent to spend much time wondering why. Rex had always done as he pleased. By the end of their marriage she hadn’t expected or even wanted to know details. The less he had talked to her the better.

“An affair.” She said the words out loud as she had several times already on the trip to Harmony’s little apartment at the Reynolds Farm. The idea of her husband seducing or being seduced by another woman was so incongruous that even the words sounded foreign when she spoke them.

Her GPS reminded her to turn left, and she did so at the next road, marked by a barn with diagonal siding. She memorized the barn and the pond across the street for the next time.

The next time.

She couldn’t believe she had only been to her daughter’s home once. She remembered so little from that first night. She had been terrified Rex would find them both, unsure whether to stay in Asheville or disappear to New England.

And all along Rex had been dead.

Of course, she didn’t really know if that was true. It just seemed clear to her that Rex must have died the night his home exploded in a fiery ball and lit the sky for miles around, or he would have surfaced immediately. Was he still alive when it happened? Had he seen the explosion and wondered? Or by that time was he already dead?

The new road was gravel, so she took her time. She had no deadline, because she hadn’t called Harmony to tell her she was coming. If her daughter wasn’t home, she could return again whenever she wanted to. The world was a different place than it had been that morning.

At least for a while.

She followed directions, and after a few minutes she pulled into the Reynoldses’ farmyard. The scene was familiar enough that she knew to park beside the garage before she turned off the engine.

There were lights in the apartment, and even with Harmony’s windows closed she heard Lottie screeching.

It had been a long day for the little girl, and for her mother, as well.

Her grandmother knew exactly how they felt.

She got out, and in a minute she was knocking on Harmony’s door. Her daughter opened it, bouncing the unhappy baby on her hip, and Jan held out her arms. Harmony made the transfer and shook out her own arms as if they had fallen asleep while trying to quiet her daughter.

Jan smiled. “I heard her all the way from Taylor’s, so I thought I’d better drive out and see if I could help.”

Harmony burst into tears.

Jan stepped inside and swung the door closed behind her. “Who should I take care of first?”

Harmony disappeared into the bathroom, and Jan danced around the room with Lottie, singing softly as they waltzed together. Quick fix it wasn’t, but the baby did begin to relax against her once she started “The Tennessee Waltz.”

A song about infidelity was an odd choice, she realized, for a woman who’d just discovered her husband might have been having an affair.

Harmony returned, face still damp from a date with a washcloth, and held out her arms tentatively, as if to say she would take Lottie if absolutely required. Jan shook her head and continued their dance. Harmony sighed gratefully and headed into her tiny kitchen, returning with a sandwich leaking alfalfa sprouts and missing one sad little bite.

“Can I make you something?” she asked.

“I’m not hungry,” Jan sang.

Lottie’s eyes were closing. By the time Jan started “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” she was asleep. Jan finished the song; then she pointed to her granddaughter, and Harmony led her to Lottie’s crib in a room that was just large enough for that and a tiny dresser with a changing pad on top.

“‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’?” Harmony asked after they had closed the door and were back in the living room.

“I always thought of that as my personal theme song. Wishful thinking, I guess.”

Harmony sniffed twice and left for the bathroom again.

Jan apologized after her daughter returned to flop down beside her on the sofa, but Harmony shook her head. “You could read me the cash register receipts in your purse and I would cry tonight.”

Jan put her arm around her shoulders. “It’s been that kind of day.”

“Lottie had a great time with Davis and his new girlfriend. She was all smiles until they left. Then she fell apart.”

“Too many new things to absorb.”

“She was absorbing my anger and my stress and my anger....”

“There was a double dose of anger there.”

“He was dead all that time while we were sneaking around trying to hide from him. All that time! And it was just like him to do it on the sly so we would have to keep working around him.”

“I think this is one time we can’t blame your father. I doubt he had much choice in the matter.”

“What did Adam say?”

Jan knew there was no hope of hiding anything from Harmony, and no reason. She had despised her father for almost as long as Jan could remember. At first Jan had tried to prevent it, but at a certain point she had realized that defending a sociopath was the same as excusing his actions.

She condensed the hour with Adam into a few points. “He asked good questions. For obvious reasons he thinks somebody who works in the office was the embezzler, or at least a partner with somebody on the outside. Among other things there were settlements for accidents that never happened. The adjuster who was assigned to those cases can’t be located. Adam’s going to see what more he can discover about the man’s personal life, who his connections in the office might be.”