No River Too Wide (28 page)

“I want to see you, yes.” He sent her the slight enigmatic smile she found so darned sexy. The same smile he had gifted her with yesterday, right before he kissed her.

She tried to ignore it. “Well, I guess I can put you through your paces.”

“I just bet you could.”

Her heart was fluttering like a moth hopelessly beating its wings against a windowpane. One moment she’d been so wrapped up in Jan’s life she’d found it hard to breathe, and now here she was, for a completely different reason, struggling to breathe again.

In defense she changed the subject. “There’s been a change of plans for Sunday.”

He lifted one eyebrow and waited.

She explained quickly about the harvest celebration. She felt odd explaining about the goddesses in a sentence or two, so she left that part out. “These are my best friends,” she said instead. “I’d like you to meet them. Will you come with us? We can bring bikes and ride once we’re up there. When we get to the top of the mountain, biking’s easy enough, and the road isn’t busy.”

“Will I be the only guy?”

“Most likely my dad’s going to be there, and some of the other women will probably bring guys. Harmony and Jan will be there, so you won’t feel like a stranger.”

“Sounds like fun, but maybe not as much fun as having you to myself.”

Again she wondered how she was going to teach for an hour with Adam watching every move she made. She set the ground rules. “You have to behave in my class, you know.”

“Behave?” That smile reappeared.

“No double entendres, no flirting.”

“Are we flirting?”

“Adam, if I’m imagining that, then I really have been alone too long.”

“I don’t want to throw you off your stride.”

“Even a big guy like you couldn’t do that. I’m good, Adam. You’ll see.”

“I very much look forward to seeing how good you are.”

She threw up her hands in defeat, then started toward the front door. He gave a soft laugh before he followed her inside.

Chapter 22

Harmony had planned to drive to the Goddess House on Sunday with Rilla and her family. That was until Taylor suggested she invite Nate, since Adam was coming, too.

“I didn’t even think about inviting him myself,” Harmony told Rilla as they packed a cooler filled with food. “It just never entered my mind. What’s wrong with me? I have a boyfriend, more or less, and I never think about him.”

Rilla held up a finger as if to say, wait, left for the living room, where she prodded her sons to finish getting dressed for the trip, and came back as if there had been no interruption.

“Can you call the poor guy a boyfriend if you never think about him?”

Brad, Rilla’s husband, wandered into the kitchen and deposited a box of canning jars he’d rescued from the basement just as a door in the next room slammed.

“Are these the ones you meant?”

Rilla checked to be sure. Then she kissed his cheek. “My arms and legs. Thank you.”

“Cooper and Landon just went out the front door.”

“Will you check to be sure they’re actually dressed?”

“I’ll wrestle them into the car if they are.”

Brad left with the canning jars, the door slammed again as he went after his sons and Rilla closed the lid on the cooler. “If you take this, I’ll get the bread and cookies I made.”

Harmony was used to these kinds of distractions midconversation. The Reynolds home was a noisy, boisterous place where laughter was loud, arguments were expected, rules weren’t always obeyed.

It couldn’t be any more different than the house she had grown up in, which made it particularly endearing.

She lifted the cooler, which after carrying Lottie seemed almost light, and nudged the back door with her hip. “I call Nate a boyfriend because I’d like him to be one.”

“Really? You could have fooled me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Unfortunately Harmony did, but she defended herself. “He couldn’t be nicer. Really. He has nice all sewed up. You’ll see today.”

“I met a lot of nice guys in college. I didn’t fall in love with any of them until I met Brad.”

“You’re lucky. I haven’t met that many myself.”

“The world’s actually filled with them. You don’t have to grab the first one you see.”

“If more women used their heads instead of their hormones to choose a man, there’d be a lot more happy marriages.”

“So you’re using your head? Is that fair to him?”

Harmony didn’t know. But so far she’d seen no billboards on the highway announcing that Nate was falling in love, either. Maybe when he looked at her, all he could think about was dirty diapers and spilled milk.

But if they could get past these minor hang-ups, theirs could be one of those rare, logical courtships where two people who liked each other added all the pluses and decided to come together for all the right reasons.

“Easy come, easy go,” Rilla said, limping after her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if you just drift into something because it seems like a good idea, it’ll be a piece of cake to drift out of it again when it no longer does. Is that any way to make a commitment?”

“As long as he’s not falling madly in love with me, too, what can it hurt?”

“But what if he is?”

Harmony didn’t know. She and Nate had never talked about their relationship—if you could call it that. The guy was so perfect she couldn’t believe they weren’t already planning a wedding. No, she was afraid the problem wasn’t Nate’s.

“Maybe I’m only attracted to jerks.” She was sorry she’d said that out loud, but it was the truth, and Rilla was listening.

“Like Davis?”

“What a good example. And in high school I was madly in love with a guy who dumped me fifteen minutes before final exams. There are plenty more war stories, but you get the picture. I worry I’m looking for somebody like my father.”

Rilla didn’t try to reassure her. “And that’s why Nate is so appealing?”

“He’s the polar opposite.”

“Using your head before you fall in love is a good idea. But then the magic has to take over. If it doesn’t? Do you want to nurse a guy with a man cold or the stomach flu if you don’t have any magic to back you up?”

Harmony deposited the cooler in the Reynoldses’ van, told everybody she would see them at the Goddess House and went back inside to wake Lottie, who was napping in the Pack ’n Play.

Half an hour later Nate arrived. He wore khaki pants with enough pockets to stow everything a man needed for fishing, as well as the fish itself, a blinding white preppie sweater and a black baseball cap without a logo.

She wondered if he was afraid he might offend somebody if he took a stand on a team. He was that thoughtful.

Lottie and Nate hadn’t met, and she’d debated how to dress her daughter for the big reveal. But in the end she’d settled on practical. No frilly dresses today. Lottie wore a royal-blue track suit that had once belonged to Cooper. It was warm and soft from wear, and Harmony would never be accused of trying to win points for her daughter.

“Aren’t you a cutey?” Nate took the baby out of Harmony’s arms and bobbed her in the air. He was clearly at ease, and Lottie, who hadn’t quite woken up, seemed to sense it. She giggled with delight, and he laughed right back at her.

“I love babies this age,” he said when Harmony held out her arms to take her back. He turned her expertly to fit Harmony’s grasp. “Sometimes they freak out with strangers, but when they don’t, they’re just so sweet.”

On a scale of one to ten, this guy was an eleven. Harmony made a note to remind herself about that tonight after he was gone and again tomorrow morning.

And on the trip to the Goddess House.

“I have everything together,” she said. “Are you sure you want to drive? We’ll have to put the car seat in your car.”

“No problem. I’m an old hand with car seats. My sister has a baby. I’m her sitter of choice.”

Ten minutes later they were on the road in Nate’s late-model Ford Focus, a predictable, sensible car that suited him. He’d brought Lottie a present, a plastic music box shaped like a caterpillar that played an array of classical tunes every time she hit the button in the middle. He had patiently shown her how to use it before they started off, and now Mozart rang merrily from the backseat.

“How are Karen and Jeff?” she asked.

“Jeff’s got another surgery scheduled next month, but they tell him it might be the last. It’s supposed to relieve a lot of his pain. He can’t wait.”

She was glad and told him so. “I went to Karen’s blog. It’s not what I expected. She’s funny and irreverent—”

“Like you.”

She smiled, pleased with his assessment. “She has a whole section of mistakes she’s made. It’s hysterical. I sent her a photo of the poor tomato plants in Marilla’s garden where I spread fresh horse manure instead of the stuff that had composted. Karen used it yesterday in her gardening section and labeled it ‘a Boo-Boo with Poo-Poo.’”

Nate laughed. He had a nice profile, and she admired it, the way she might admire an actor in a G-rated movie. “I’m glad you’re coming with me,” she said. “You know Taylor, and I think you know Samantha Ferguson and her mother, Georgia?”

“Sam was a year or two ahead of me. Miss Georgia was the best headmistress Covenant Academy ever had.”

“She’s the principal of an alternative school now, and she’s engaged to a great guy named Lucas Ramsey.”

“The mystery author?”

Why was she surprised Nate would know that? He seemed to be on top of everything, alert, aware, interested in everything around him. She lectured her hormones and told them to gear up fast as she caught him up on Georgia’s romance with Lucas.

“When Lottie gets tired of that toy, I know a dozen children’s songs we can sing for her,” Nate said after she finished.

Harmony settled in for the drive. She was surprised they weren’t yet climbing Doggett Mountain. For some reason it seemed as if she had been in Nate’s car for a month.

* * *

Adam knew how to get information. He knew what he was entitled to and what he had to ferret out of the shadows. He liked to stay inside the law, but sometimes the law was a little fuzzy, or so he liked to tell himself. Getting Jan Stoddard’s medical records wasn’t fuzzy at all. It was clearly illegal. Which was why he had resorted to a few shady websites, a few phone calls where he’d pretended to be someone other than who he was, a few compliments in the right places.

Now, after days of work, he knew a lot more about Jan Stoddard and her trips to the local emergency room. It seemed that she had grown increasingly clumsy through the years, or so she and Rex had told physicians and nurses. She had a habit of tumbling down steps or falling off ladders. While most people never fell face-first onto a sidewalk, Jan had managed it twice.

Or perhaps her husband just forgot he’d already used that story when he told it again the second time.

The red flags were waving, and emergency personnel hadn’t missed them. But Jan had insisted the fault was her own and she didn’t need help or counseling. Her husband would take care of her, and she was just going to do a better job of watching where she was going.

The last time she’d been to the local E.R., a doctor, who’d probably hoped to give her time to reconsider without Rex’s hovering, had attempted to hospitalize her overnight for tests. Maybe she had a neurological problem that was causing all the stumbling and falling, multiple sclerosis perhaps, or Parkinson’s. He’d suggested an MRI and maybe a CAT scan and most of all a quiet hospital room, but she had refused and gone home.

If there were more visits, they’d been to a different hospital, but Adam had enough information without looking any further.

Police reports were a different matter. Try as he might, he hadn’t found anything to indicate that the police had ever been called to the Stoddard house. Of course, the house had been so far out in the country that neighbors probably wouldn’t have heard any commotion. Jan herself had never made a complaint, nor had her children. Posing as a journalist, he called all the residents of Pawnee Parkland in a one-mile radius, which weren’t that many. He asked about the Stoddard family and wasn’t surprised to learn that they knew very little. None of them could imagine what had happened in that house the night of the fire or where the owners had disappeared to, but wasn’t the whole thing a mystery and a shame?

Rex’s employees were a different matter. Agents he spoke with were trying to carry on as if their boss would be back momentarily, even though Rex’s absence had triggered a police investigation, and the Kansas Insurance Department investigators were involved, as well. One agent—who used the newer term “producer”—praised everything from Rex’s thoughtful offerings of Starbucks coffee at monthly staff meetings to the extra services he provided their clients. Another had asked him to wait, and Adam had heard an office door close before the man returned. Then he’d given Adam a phone number so he could speak to an ex-employee for a different view.

The former employee, who’d officially quit to take a job with the telephone company, had not been Rex’s fan. He told Adam that Rex was an adequate if not pleasant boss until he felt someone had crossed him. Then he was known to retaliate. The punishment might be light. Someone who didn’t get a report in on time might find he or she had been assigned to monitor telephone messages for the next few weekends instead of being part of the usual rotation. Or the punishment might be considerably heavier. For that Adam was referred to yet another ex-employee.

On Sunday, before he went to meet Taylor, he was finally able to connect with that woman, posing as a journalist again, as he had done with the others. Tami Murgan, who lived in Chicago, would only agree to talk if he promised not to use what she told him in his article. She said that while working for Rex she had advised a trucker with several speeding tickets that a company Rex’s agency didn’t represent might have cheaper rates.

“I felt sorry for the guy,” she told Adam. “He was just a hardworking Joe who got caught doing what a thousand other truckers do. You know how hard truckers are pushed to get wherever they’re going fast. He had a wife in a wheelchair who couldn’t work, and he was afraid he’d have to stop driving and go on welfare if he couldn’t get insurance he could afford. The other company gave him a deal he could manage. When Rex found out what I’d done, he was furious. But cold furious, if you know what I mean? He told me I’d made a bad mistake.”