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.
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
