No River Too Wide (41 page)

Which was an insight that had hit too close to home.

Of course, while all observations held some truth, they were also exaggerations, and eventually he had begun to relax and figure that out. People here were freer with their idiosyncrasies, but they also seemed to suffer less from them. They were generous, funny, friendly, worth getting to know.

Like Taylor.

When his number was finally called he picked up his order and walked home, since parking would have been more of an issue than a three-block stroll. He wondered if Taylor would be awake or if he would have a chance to kiss his Sleeping Beauty.

That, of course, could be dangerous.

At the house he unlocked the door and climbed the stairs, nodding to a second-floor neighbor who passed him going down. On the third floor he set the take-out bag on the floor and opened his door. His apartment was empty. Assuming Taylor was in the bathroom, he crossed to the counter to set down the bag. Only as he went back to close and lock the door did he notice the photograph on his neatly straightened bed.

For a moment he didn’t understand. He moved closer and skimmed it off the covers to take a closer look. He stared at the familiar faces and replayed the circumstances that had probably led to finding it here.

Then he sank to the bed and closed his eyes.

* * *

“You sound upset,” Samantha told Taylor after they’d chatted a moment about Maddie staying at her house for dinner. Sam had promised to drop Maddie at home by eight, since tomorrow was a school day.

Taylor didn’t know what to say. Until she could talk to Jan and Harmony, she wasn’t sure what she could reveal. Of course, this was Sam, who was completely trustworthy, but they were also talking on the telephone.

“I might need to reserve a shoulder to cry on,” she said.

“You always have one. But I’m thinking man trouble.”

“You’re smarter than I am. You must have figured out a long time ago that men are
always
trouble.”

Sam, who had plenty of men to go out with but none to love, made a noise low in her throat that could have meant anything.

“I’ll tell you about it when I can,” Taylor said.

“I’ll be here.”

They hung up, and Taylor stared at the wall wondering how she could bear to tell Jan and Harmony they had been discovered.

A car door slammed near the front of the house, and she guessed she was about to find out. Then somebody pounded on the door, and she realized who, in all likelihood, was standing on her doorstep instead.

This confrontation was inevitable. As she expected, when she opened the door, Adam was on the porch.

“Adam Pryor, minus his long-distance lens.” She didn’t step aside to let him in.

“You need to hear directly from me what this is about.”

“Really? You mean rather than continue to make educated guesses?”

“I think you’ll need a lot more education to get this right.”

“I was thinking along these lines, Adam. You’re working for Rex Stoddard, and you’ve ingratiated yourself with me so you can spy on his family. Now good old Rex can come to Asheville with his arms open wide and tell Jan and Harmony how sorry he is that he ever developed that nasty little habit of beating the crap out of them.”

“I’m not working for Stoddard. I’m trying to find him.”

She sucked in her bottom lip as she rolled his words around in her head. “Have any luck?” she asked at last. “Because you’ve been here long enough to search every house in Asheville.”

“I want to explain everything.”

“I love explanations. It’s just that I like them
before
I sleep with a man, or hire him to work in my studio, or introduce him to my family and closest friends. So you’re a little late.”

His expression didn’t change. “I’ve never spoken to Rex Stoddard or even been on the same street with the man. I work for an insurance company that did business with his agency. Disastrous business, as a matter of fact. Somebody there made off with a boatload of money.”

Of all the excuses Taylor had expected, insurance fraud hadn’t been on the list. She tried to decide whether she should close the door in his face or hear whatever tale he had to tell.

In the end she stepped back to let him inside. Whatever Jan and Harmony were facing, they needed to know what Adam had to say. Whether it was a pack of lies or the absolute truth, they needed to know.

Reluctantly she flipped a hand toward the sofa, then chose a chair where she could watch him.

“Was anything you told me true?” she asked. “Clearly you weren’t in Asheville because you were looking for a place to settle and you liked the mountains.”

“I do like the mountains.”

“Don’t play games, okay? Or this will be finished really fast.”

“I tracked Jan here using phone records. Somebody had called her from a café in town some time ago, and I made an accurate guess it was Harmony. Finding her was easy from there. I was here waiting and watching by the time Jan arrived.”

Taylor knew a chunk of time had passed from the night Jan left Topeka to the evening she’d arrived at the Reynolds Farm. To confuse the trail she had ridden with several truckers going in different directions before she’d finally made the journey to Asheville with Bea. So this much could be true.

“Then I assume you followed her here, to my house,” she said.

He took over again. “Here’s all I knew at the time, Taylor. It looked like a substantial sum of money had been embezzled from Midwest Modern Insurance Company—”

“They employ you?”

“I’m freelance. They’re not the only company I work with, but that’s how I make a living.”

“So when you said you had other income, at least that part of your story was true.”

“Everything I told you was true. I just didn’t tell you everything.”

“Interesting omissions.”

He seemed to choose his words. “Mostly they use me for jobs like this one, where I settle in for a while, watch and wait. It’s cheaper to pay me by the hour for surveillance than to use somebody on staff. And I like moving around and working part-time.”

She didn’t care. “Why don’t you get to the good stuff?”

“Somebody was making what looked like legitimate claims against policies from Midwest Modern sold by Stoddard Insurance Agency. All the paperwork was in order, and there was a lot of paperwork. An independent adjuster in Topeka verified the claims. The money was paid. Only somebody in our fraud division noticed anomalies in the data. There were more claims coming via that route than statistics would dictate. These weren’t huge claims, not each by itself. Nobody needed to replace a whole rig, for instance, which would have sent up a red flag. But sometimes the damages were heavy enough that payments were substantial. And when our folks started going over the claims again, there were other signs, like possibly inflated bills. It’s harder to get away with this kind of thing now.”

“So? How could this have anything to do with Jan?”

“Once Midwest had enough evidence to suspect fraud, Stoddard was asked if they could examine his records and interview his agents. Midwest told him it was routine, but of course, he did everything he could to delay things, because that’s the kind of jerk he is. Midwest lost patience and told him they would pull the plug on his appointment if he didn’t cooperate. That would mean his agency wouldn’t be approved to sell their policies, and they were one of the bigger companies he was affiliated with. So he doled out a little of this and that, and from his attitude and the little they were able to see, they began to suspect the fraud was even more widespread, and Stoddard seemed to be the one who had signed off on a lot of it.”

“And they suspected Jan, as well? She was hardly even allowed out of the house.”

“At that point they were just getting access to the records so they could figure out who was doing what. They decided to keep the investigation in-house until they had enough proof to make a thorough report to the Kansas Insurance Department, so the department could prosecute. They figured the fraud was a coordinated effort, but in theory Stoddard himself was right at the top.”

“So when did you get involved?”

“The adjuster who’d verified all the suspect claims vanished before we could get to him, and nobody was able to locate him, so they hired me to look. I still haven’t been able to trace the guy. In the meantime we learned that the so-called policyholders who received payment weren’t at the addresses where the checks had been sent and nobody remembered them. They probably never existed, and somebody just waited and snatched the checks out of mailboxes. Police reports on the accidents went missing or had never existed in the first place. Anyway, the whole thing was simultaneously sophisticated and unsophisticated. Whoever was in charge varied everything, which made it harder to spot theft, but at the same time he didn’t realize how much can be tracked and flagged at top levels today, and how carefully records can be analyzed.”

She was tired of Insurance Fraud 101. “Jan. This is supposed to be about
Jan.
”

“You have to understand, everything I’ve detailed took place over a fairly short period of time. Then Stoddard disappeared the same day his house exploded. So if there were records in his home office, they’re gone forever, which seems convenient. About the same time Stoddard’s wife escaped to Asheville, a trip we’ve since learned she preplanned very carefully, even to the point of laying a false trail so she would be harder to track. She has no visible source of income, yet she’s living pretty well and not looking for a job. She has a new car, a new sewing machine.” He shrugged.

“And you think what?” Taylor wanted to be sure she understood. “Because I happen to know Jan had some money of her own that her husband never knew about.”

“It’s not what I think that’s important. It’s what the police think, what Midwest Modern thinks.”

“The police?”

“It’s what the police
will
think. Jan hasn’t been charged with a crime, so even though I tracked her here, Midwest didn’t have to notify them right away. A decision was made to keep an eye on her ourselves and see if her husband showed up, or if I saw any proof she was in on the whole thing. We didn’t want more eyes than we needed, because we didn’t want either of the Stoddards to get suspicious or scared away.”

“You think the Stoddards coordinated their escapes? You think they’ve hidden the money somewhere, and when things simmer down they can reunite and take a lifetime Caribbean vacation under assumed identities?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

He leaned forward, but whatever he intended to say was lost when the front door opened, and Jan and Harmony walked in.

Taylor got to her feet and crossed the room. “Listen, before you say a word in front of Adam, a lot has happened that—”

Harmony interrupted. “We know, Taylor. My father’s dead.”

Surprised, Taylor stopped. “What?”

Harmony looked confused. “That’s not what you were going to say?” Her gaze zipped to Adam.

Taylor turned and saw that he’d pulled his cell phone from his pocket and was reading something on the screen. “Adam, I want you to leave. You can do whatever you’re going to do on that phone somewhere else.”

He finished reading what was most likely a text before he stood. “I didn’t get a chance to say what I most needed to. You need me, even if you haven’t figured it out yet.”

For a moment Taylor thought he meant she needed him in her life, in her bed. She started to protest, but he held up his hand.

“The smartest thing I could have done was to let somebody else take over here, but I didn’t, because I became convinced Jan was the victim, not the criminal. I wanted to get to the bottom of this myself because I knew I might be the only one who cared.”

“What is he talking about?” Harmony asked Taylor.

“Taylor will fill you in.” Adam walked past them to the door. Then he turned. “This is going to get worse before it gets better, Taylor. Don’t shut me out. I may be able to help.”

She went to close the door behind him. “How can you possibly believe we could ever trust you again?”

“Because even if you don’t like the way I’ve been forced to do it, my job requires me to use every skill I have to get answers. And I think Jan and Harmony deserve answers.”

He was gone before Jan spoke. “Please tell us what’s going on.”

Taylor saw that both women looked stricken. She ushered them to the sofa and left to put the teakettle on. Harmony had her arm around her mother when she returned.

“Your father’s dead?” She listened as Harmony described what they had learned from Bea.

Jan finished the story. “I’ll be the most likely suspect. I had the best reason to kill Rex. About the time he died I burned our house down and kept right on going. They’ll think I had access to his guns, that it was easy to shoot him.”

“What was Adam talking about?” Harmony asked. “Why does he know anything about us? Did you tell him why Mom is here?”

“He figured it out, because that’s what they pay him to do.” She started at the beginning, took a break to pour the boiling water over teabags in the kitchen and came back to finish her explanation.

There was a silence after she was done, as if the truth about Adam’s job was taking time to sink in. Jan spoke after Taylor came back with a tray holding three cups of tea and set it on the coffee table.

“All this time he knew Harmony was my daughter?” Jan wasn’t really asking; she was thinking out loud. “He tracked me here? He even got here before I did and waited?”

“Apparently Adam’s good at what he does.” Taylor felt a lump forming in her throat. She wasn’t sure if she was furious or devastated. Right now it didn’t even matter, because most of all she had to stay calm so she could help figure out what to do next.

“My father didn’t steal that money,” Harmony said. “I would never defend him if I didn’t have to, but that agency was his pride. Truckers from all over the Midwest and beyond came to his agents for the best deals. He loved being able to tell people he was Rex Stoddard of Stoddard Insurance. The way he looked in the community and industry was more important than anything to him. I think that’s half the reason he didn’t want Mom to leave. He was afraid she might tell somebody what kind of man he really was, and even people who didn’t believe her might look at him differently.”