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It was only steps from the truth and would be completely true if she didn’t leave this house immediately.
She cinched the pants with a belt and pushed the sweater sleeves high. Her coat was downstairs, so for now she slung the backpack over one shoulder.
She was almost ready.
Without a backward glance at the knockoff Louis XV–style bedroom she had always despised, she went into the upstairs hallway and stood quietly to listen. Outside she heard an owl in the woods at the border of their property. While technically the Stoddard house was in a suburb with the unlikely name of Pawnee Parkland, the neighborhood was rural, with houses set acres apart and separated by woods and fields. Rex had chosen the location because of its isolation. Contact with neighbors was limited here, and social events nonexistent. Any friendly overtures had been pleasantly rejected by Rex years ago, and after Buddy’s death, sympathy had been rejected, too. The only communication she had these days was the occasional perfunctory wave as a neighbor’s car sped toward town.
She descended the stairs as quietly as she could, but each footfall sounded like an explosion because there was no longer a runner to muffle her footsteps. Two weeks ago Rex had stripped the carpeting and refinished the pine stairs himself, ever the helpful family man who took great pride in his prison. She was sure he had removed the runner to better hear her as she came and went.
Downstairs in the front hallway she slipped into her coat and settled the backpack into place. The disposable cell phone that Moving On had given her was zipped into an inside pocket. She slipped it out and hit Redial.
“I’m on my way out,” she said softly when a woman answered.
“The meeting place we discussed?”
Janine calculated how long it would take to cross the neighbor’s field, take the back way behind his pond and over to a dirt road that ran about a mile west to meet her contact at a deserted barn she had discovered on one of her rare trips to the grocery store without Rex. After much uncertainty she had decided that sneaking away from the house alone, unseen by anybody, was the safest course. Her contact could have picked her up at the front door, but even if Rex wasn’t watching, someone else might notice a car on the quiet road, someone getting up for a glass of water or a cigarette. Someone who could give Rex a description and a place to start his search.
“Give me forty-five minutes,” Janine said, factoring in the cloudy skies, the absence of stars and the narrow beam of the penlight.
She slipped the phone back into her pocket and buttoned her coat.
She was ready.
Leaving by the front door was too obvious. Instead, she hurried through the expansive country kitchen, took the stairs to the basement and followed a narrow corridor into the storm cellar. The door opened onto what was little more than a hole. She found the steps up after carefully closing the door behind her.
Outside now, she slipped behind the row of trees that separated this section of their yard from a field and the woods beyond. The night was as thickly black as any she could remember. This was the most dangerous moment of her escape, the one she had been dreading. She had to be careful not to make noise or draw attention in any way. Even if Rex was nearby, he couldn’t look everywhere, be everywhere. If she could get to their neighbor’s property without being noticed, she had a fighting chance.
She had almost made her goal when she realized she had forgotten her son’s scrapbook.
“Buddy.” The sound was more of a sigh than a whisper. She had tried so hard to remember everything, but this golden opportunity to leave had presented itself too soon.
Tears filled her eyes. She had carefully, lovingly, assembled scrapbooks for both her children, old-fashioned scrapbooks crammed with photos and report cards and faded ribbons. Harmony had taken hers when she left Topeka for good after high school graduation, but Buddy’s was still packed away in his bedroom. Janine had planned to retrieve the album and take it with her, the last link to the son who hadn’t been able to find his way out of the morass of his childhood.
If she left the album behind, how long would it be before she could no longer remember his face or his sweet little-boy victories?
She had to go back. If she did, she could still make it to the meeting place in time.
Ignoring the sensible voice that told her to keep moving, she retraced her steps, fear expanding with every one. At the house she slipped back through the cellar, the basement and up the steps to the first floor. She was trembling by the time she reached the downstairs hallway.
She paused in the entryway, which was adorned with a dozen or more family photographs in gold leaf frames. Rex had arranged the little shrine himself. He had chosen an Oriental carpet made of the finest silk and placed it under a massive mahogany table that displayed the photos. Each photo had its own special place, and he always checked carefully after she dusted to be sure she hadn’t rearranged them.
Harmony wasn’t in any of the photos, of course, since she had left home without Rex’s permission, and Buddy was only in a few, because this was supposed to be the Rex and Janine Happy Show, visual proof that she had been under her husband’s control for more than two decades. The photos were taunts meant to humiliate and shame, horrifying reminders of the years she had spent in the prison of this house with a man she despised.
Rex was at fault for everything. Rex was the reason she was sneaking back into her own house, trying to recover memories of the child he had destroyed, trying to save something, anything, meaningful from the twenty-five years of hell her husband had put her through.
She was not so beaten down that she couldn’t feel anger. Now the attempted escape set it free. She grabbed the most hateful photograph of all, the one taken by the justice of the peace on the day of their wedding. There in the hallway of the Shawnee County Courthouse she was smiling up at Rex as if he had all the answers to life’s mysteries.
“What a fool.”
Before she realized what she was doing, she stripped away the cardboard at the back of the frame and pulled out the photo. She tore it into four pieces, then eight, and threw the pieces to the table. In moments she’d dispensed with another frame and mutilated another photo, then another.
Elation filled her as she shredded each photograph and each frame landed on the floor. But once she was finished, the pile of scraps didn’t make the statement she wanted. She needed something more, something bigger, something for Rex to find when he returned.
Something that announced Janine was gone forever.
She strode across the room and grabbed his favorite ashtray and lighter; then she took both to the table and piled the fragments inside the ashtray.
The surge of joy she felt as she lit the first corner was like blood returning to an unused limb.
“So goes our life together, Rex.” She watched the photos catch fire, and then she started up the stairs to Buddy’s room.
The scrapbook was in a box in the closet. She had been the one to pack away all their son’s things, since Rex had wanted nothing to do with that final parting. To her knowledge he had never come into Buddy’s room since his death, so she was hopeful nothing had been disturbed.
She thought she remembered which box the book was in, but when she began to dig through it, she realized she was mistaken. Minutes passed and her elation vanished, replaced again by fear. She needed to leave now. This time for good. Forever and ever, world without end.
She was just about to give up when she saw the shiny blue cover at the bottom of the last box. She unearthed the scrapbook, but she knew better than to take the necessary time to make room for it in the backpack. On her way out she stripped a pillowcase off the bed and slipped the scrapbook inside so nothing would fall out. Clutching the pillowcase to her chest, she was ready.
In the hallway outside Buddy’s bedroom she noted a strange smell, then a noise downstairs. She froze, but from here both the smell and the sound were unfamiliar, not the footsteps of a man returning home, but a crackling that seemed to be gaining steadily in volume.
She edged along the wall toward the stairs and paused, afraid of what she might see, but she had already recognized the smell. Her eyes began to burn, and smoke tickled her lungs.
Below her, flames were shooting from the flammable silk carpet under the entry table. A wall of fire separated the two floors.
As she watched, the flames leaped to the stairs and began to lick their way toward her, feeding on the pine boards that had been recently stained and varnished.
She was trapped.
She had done this. For twenty-five years Rex had told her she was worth nothing without him, that her judgment was poor, her abilities second-rate, that every mistake her children had ever made could be lain directly at her feet.
And now, with this blatant act of defiance, she had proved him right.
For twenty-five years she had believed she was going to die in this house. Now she knew it was true. But not by her husband’s hands. Not by Rex’s.
By her own.
Chapter 3
Harmony knew how lucky she was. Life hadn’t been easy, but at almost every turn good people had stepped forward to help her. Right now she was sitting in the home office of one of them, Marilla Reynolds, who had given her a job when Harmony was pregnant with Lottie. Marilla, known as Rilla to her friends, had hired Harmony to be the official Reynolds family “Jill-of-all-trades,” and that was a good description for the way the job had played out.
Rilla, Brad and their two little boys, Cooper and Landon, lived outside Asheville in a lovely old farmhouse they had painstakingly restored and expanded. They had the usual farm animals, including horses and goats, and a kennel where they bred service dogs to be trained, most often to assist people with epilepsy. The organic vegetable garden and orchard totaled nearly an acre, and food was canned, frozen and dried for the winter. In fact, that was how Harmony had spent most of the past week since Davis’s visit. Now that it was early September, harvest was well under way.
Before bringing Harmony on board, Rilla had managed most of the work on her own, until a car accident changed everything. These days she only needed to use a cane if she was on her feet more than an hour or two, but Rilla would never be able to work as many hours as she had before.
During Rilla’s recovery Harmony had proved herself to be invaluable. She loved the Reynolds family, and she was pretty sure they loved her back. The variety of work never failed to delight her, and she was looking forward to a new project. She and Rilla were planning an herb garden for spring, a large one to produce organic herbs for some of Asheville’s finer restaurants.
In preparation the new plot had been spread and tilled with compost and manure, followed by a planting of winter rye that would be mowed and plowed under to further enrich the ground in early spring. They had surveyed the market, and half a dozen chefs had given them wish lists.
Now, late in the afternoon, Harmony was finishing up an internet search to get wholesale prices for plants, so she and Rilla could gauge start-up costs. In a little while she had plans to go to dinner and a movie with her friend Taylor Martin and Taylor’s daughter, Maddie. They were probably on their way to pick her up.
Lottie was napping in her Pack ’n Play in the corner, and Rilla was still down at the kennel with her sons. The internet connection in the farmhouse was better than the one in Harmony’s garage apartment, and as Lottie slept on, Harmony completed her research. The house was unusually quiet, as if taking a quick nap itself before the hectic predinner rush.
Harmony knew what she had to do.
In the months since she had last spoken to her mother, she had fallen into something of a ritual. Every three or four weeks she checked the Topeka Capital-Journal online to see if there was any mention of her parents. She didn’t expect to find them in descriptions of Topeka’s most coveted social events or as participants in a 5K for charity. This was not casual surfing. She was fairly certain that if she discovered anything it would be in the obituaries or the headlines.
“Murdered Wife Wasn’t Missed for Months.”
With those expectations it was always difficult to make herself go to the website. Harmony had considered closing the door to her past and locking it tight. But she still loved her mother, and despite Janine’s plea that Harmony never call again, she believed that her mother still loved her, at least whatever part of Janine Stoddard’s heart and soul were still alive and functioning. Trying to forget her was a betrayal, and Harmony’s mother had already been betrayed much too often.
She wished Lottie would wake up to stop her, or the front door would slam and Rilla and her sons would entice her into the kitchen to chat while Rilla made dinner. But the house remained silent, and with a sigh she typed in the URL and once the right page was on the screen in front of her, she typed “Stoddard” into the search box and waited.
No matter how pessimistic or realistic she was about her mother’s future, the headline that came up in response stole the breath from her lungs.
“House Fire Still Smoldering After Devastating Propane Tank Explosion.”
For a moment she simply stared at the screen as the words she had read out loud blurred. Was this a mistake? Was the name “Stoddard” mentioned elsewhere on the page and that was why she had been led here? Surely that had to be the explanation. There were other stories in the sidebar, advertisements at the top and at the bottom a site menu.
But even while she tried to avoid reading the article, she knew.
Time passed until she realized she was only making things worse by waiting. She steeled herself and read the article out loud, as if pronouncing the words would somehow make sense of them.
“Topeka Fire Department crews were called to the site of a fire in Pawnee Parkland after an underground propane tank exploded on Saturday, about three a.m., rocking the rural neighborhood and triggering more than a dozen phone calls, said fire investigator Randy Blankenship.
“The first crew to arrive at the scene established a safety perimeter that prevented immediate investigation, and only after three hours was the department able to control the blaze. A long-standing drought coupled with the powerful explosion of the tank contributed to the difficulty. By nine a.m., the worst of the fire was extinguished, but by then the house had been destroyed.
“The cause of the blaze is under investigation, and there is no information about the fate of the owners, Rex and Janine Stoddard, who have lived at the address for more than two decades.”
The house Harmony had grown up in. Gone? Just like that? And her parents?
She stared at the screen, and only then did she notice that the article was a week old. A week had passed, a week in which she had spread manure, rocked Lottie to sleep and canned two dozen quarts of apple butter.
A week in which her mother hadn’t been alive in faraway Kansas.
Only then, as tears flooded her eyes, did she realize the article was linked to another more recent one.
She forced herself to click, but she couldn’t look at the screen, not yet. Not when she felt sure she knew what it would say.
The front door slammed, and she heard the shrill voices of little boys heading through the front hall. She had only moments before she was interrupted. She forced her eyes open and stared, scanning the synopsis of information she already knew at the beginning of the article. Then she focused on silently reading the update.
Investigators are still trying to determine if anyone died in the blaze. Cadaver dogs have been brought in and continue to search, but the home’s residents, Rex and Janine Stoddard, remain unaccounted for at this time.
“You doing okay, Harmony?” a voice asked from the doorway. “Taylor’s not here yet?”
Harmony wiped her eyes with the back of her hand before she turned in the desk chair. “Rilla, I think my mother’s dead.”
If someday Hollywood scouted the Asheville countryside for the perfect farm wife, Rilla Reynolds, clothed today in overalls, would easily be chosen. She was stocky but not overweight, easy to look at without being either plain or pretty. Her face was rectangular, her nose snubbed, and her brown eyes searched for answers even when she was engaging in small talk.
This wasn’t small talk.
“Did you get a phone call?” she asked, coming to stand beside Harmony and placing her hand on her younger friend’s shoulder for comfort. Then, before Harmony could answer, she shook her head. “Of course not. Nobody in Topeka knows you’re here.”
“I found this on the internet.” Harmony got up, as much to put distance between herself and the computer screen as to give Rilla a chance to read it.
Rilla took the chair, slowly bending her knees until she was finally sitting. From some distant point in her mind, Harmony realized that Rilla had already been on her feet too long today and would pay the price when she tried to sleep tonight.
Rilla silently read the article. Then she swiveled to face Harmony. “That’s the house you grew up in?”
Harmony nodded, thankful that Rilla hadn’t called it a home.
“They haven’t found a body yet. You saw that part?”
Harmony nodded again.
Rilla never danced around anything. “I guess it’s possible the fire was so extreme they never will, but it’s also possible nobody was home.”
“My parents don’t go anywhere except a cabin up north where my father can fish, and my mother can wait on him. They always do that during the first week in June, not September. If my father has to be away for work, it’s usually only for a night, and he never takes my mother. She’s always in that house unless she’s making a quick trip to the grocery store.”
“You haven’t been home in how long?”
Harmony shrugged, because doing math right now was impossible. “I’m twenty-three. I left right after high school graduation.”
“That’s years, Harmony. And you don’t talk to your parents. Maybe things have changed.”
“Sure, maybe my father found Jesus.” Harmony paused. “Or a different Jesus than the one he claimed he found years ago. You know, the Jesus who insisted that he beat my mother into submission if she planted petunias when he preferred marigolds.”
“People can change.”
Harmony considered that, but not for long. “He likes himself too much to think there might be a reason to.”
“No family they might be visiting?”
“My mother has no family, and my father only has distant cousins. They stay far away from him, which shows there might be good sensible people on the Stoddard side and my genes aren’t complete poison.” She heard the bitterness in her voice, but she didn’t care. She would deal with her father’s death if she had to, but right now her only concern was for her mother.
Rilla was assessing the situation, looking past Harmony’s shoulder as her mind whirled. Harmony could see it in her eyes. Rilla was compassionate and empathetic, but right now Rilla-the-problem-solver was in play.
“I think we ought to call Brad at the office and get him to make inquiries. You don’t want to give yourself away, and Brad will know how to go about doing it so the call isn’t traced back to you.”
Harmony wasn’t sure what to say. Brad Reynolds was a lawyer, and a good one. She needed answers. She just didn’t feel ready for them.
“It will take him some time,” Rilla said, reading her expression. “You’ll have time to prepare.”
“He could have killed her. Finally. He could have set the fire and locked her inside to die, or killed her first and set the fire to cover what he’d done.”
Rilla grimaced. “Don’t jump to conclusions. It’s not going to help if you make up scenarios.”
Harmony knew Rilla was right. And could her father do something that horrible? Abuse was one thing, but murder? Yet wasn’t that the path abusive men took? Especially if they believed their wife or lover was trying to leave them?
Marilla got up a little faster than she’d sat down, and she stepped forward to put her arms around Harmony, although she was the shorter of the two. “Let me call Brad, okay? Not knowing is going to be worse than knowing. If nothing else, the truth will pare down the fantasies.”
But Harmony was already thinking of another. “She could have killed him, Rilla, to protect herself. Finally and forever. Maybe she set the fire and escaped. Or died with him.”
Marilla held her at arm’s length. “You can see this isn’t helpful?”
Harmony realized she had tears running down her cheeks. She reached around Rilla for a tissue from a box on the desk and blew her nose.
“Brad?” Marilla asked.
Harmony nodded. “You’ll ask him to be careful? Not to give me away?”
“I’ll remind him, but he thinks like a lawyer, remember? That’s the first thing he’ll figure out.”
One of Rilla’s sons—they sounded so much alike it was never easy to tell who was calling—began to shout from the family room at the back of the house. Harmony registered something about the television and promises, but her mind was whirling in other directions.
“I’ll get the boys settled. Then I’ll call Brad. He’s got trial tomorrow, so I know he’s still at the office. Why don’t I get you some iced tea while I’m at it?”
Harmony shook her head. Her stomach was roiling. “Taylor and Maddie are probably on their way.”
“Taylor will understand if you don’t want to go out tonight. Try her cell phone.”
“She won’t answer if she’s driving.”
“Good for her. Why don’t I make enough dinner for all of us, then? The boys adore Maddie. She won’t be bored.”
“You’re exhausted. I can see it.”
“Then come help me.”
Harmony knew what Rilla was doing. There were better distractions at the farm than dinner out and a movie would provide. “What do I tell Taylor?”
Rilla looked surprised. “The truth.”
“But it’s not her problem.”
“This is when people rally around you. She’ll consider it her problem, too. We’re here for support.”
Harmony hadn’t experienced much of that as a child. No Stoddard talked about anything that went on at home for fear of retaliation from the master of the house. “Support” was a word best used in conjunction with a mattress or a bra and never for friends. How could anybody support her if they didn’t know she needed it?
Of course, things had changed since she left home. Taylor’s own mother, Charlotte, had been responsible for the difference. She had supported Harmony, a complete stranger, when she most needed it, and before her death she had gathered a group of women around her who continued to support each other.
Sometimes, though, Harmony forgot everything she had learned from Charlotte. The lessons of her childhood were powerful.
“I’ll talk to Taylor if you like,” Rilla said. “But right now I have to talk to Cooper.”
“You don’t mind calling Brad?”
“I never mind calling Brad. He never minds helping.”
Cooper screeched again and Rilla left, closing the door behind her to give Harmony some privacy.
Before Harmony could get back to the computer, Lottie began to stir, jiggling the soft sides of the Pack ’n Play until it was clear that in moments she would sit up and start making demands.
Harmony hurried over to scoop her up and hold her close. She breathed in the sweet fragrance of her daughter’s hair until she realized Lottie was beginning to fuss. While these days she got a healthy portion of her calories from other sources, Lottie still liked the closeness of breast-feeding as she woke up, and Harmony liked providing it.
She took the baby to a chair across the room and settled her, tossing a shawl over her shoulder to wrap around the baby for a little privacy.