Emilie Richards - No River Too Wide

“Buddy’s scrapbook?” Harmony seemed surprised.

“It’s all I had left of him.”

Harmony slipped the backpack down Janine’s arm, and Janine gratefully relinquished it. With the loss of twenty pounds had come a significant loss of strength. And the last week had exhausted her.

“Lottie.” Janine managed a smile. “It’s beautiful. I bet she’s beautiful.”

Harmony slung the pack over one shoulder and began walking back the way she’d come. “How did you find me?”

What little energy Janine had was flagging dangerously. She touched her daughter’s hair and catalogued the obvious changes. Harmony had a gold stud in her nose and several piercings in each ear. Her hair was longer. “I need to sit. Can we talk when we’re settled?”

“I’m sorry. Of course. I’ll show you where my place is, and you can wait there. It’s no farther than the house. I’ll get Lottie and join you.” She hesitated. “You won’t leave? You’ll be there waiting?”

“I promise.”

They had reached the farmyard, and Harmony pointed to a building that looked like a garage, tucked not far from the house. “My apartment’s at the top, and the door is never locked. We’ll be right there to join you. I’ll make you hot tea.”

“With lots of milk and sugar?” Janine tried to smile, because whenever she and Harmony had been given the gift of time alone together, that was one of the ways they had celebrated.

“All you want.”

Janine started toward the apartment. Beyond it in a fenced pasture two horses grazed, one lifting a dark head to watch her. In the distance she saw what looked like a garden, although she couldn’t tell for sure because the sky had grown darker in the brief time she’d been here. The garage was painted the same dark spruce as the house, but the stairwell and the garage doors were painted a red so dark it was slowly turning black as twilight descended. Someone, maybe even her daughter, had planted a wide bed of black-eyed Susans and coneflowers along the side of the stairs.

She was so grateful Harmony had landed in this healing place, but she knew so little, not what had brought Harmony here, or how she had coped until she had a job and a place to live. Until now she hadn’t even known her grandchild’s name.

Instead of going upstairs, she sat on the bottom step and listened to the music of crickets as the sky quickly darkened. From the house she thought she heard the voices of children. How old was Lottie? Certainly not old enough to be one of them. Did Harmony help care for the others, too? So many questions, and even if they stayed up talking all night, so little time for answers.

The front door opened, and Harmony came out carrying a child with a blanket thrown around her against the chill of the descending night. As she watched, Harmony turned and spoke to a woman who was now standing in the doorway. Then she started toward her apartment.

Janine stood and waited for them to join her. When Harmony got close enough she pulled back the blanket, and Janine glimpsed her granddaughter for the first time. She immediately saw the resemblance.

“She looks like my baby pictures,” Janine said, reaching out to pull the blanket back a little more. “And she looks so much like you, although her hair’s darker.”

“Rilla warned me the woman waiting for me might be my mother. She said we looked so much alike. All of us. That’s how she knew.”

Janine didn’t ask to hold Lottie, but Lottie held out her arms to her grandmother, and without a word Harmony boosted her closer so Janine could see her better.

“Oh, you are such a beautiful baby,” Janine said, tears filling her eyes again. “And I guess after what I just said about her, that’s bragging, right?”

“She wants you to hold her.”

“May I?”

“Who better?”

Janine took the soft little bundle and placed her on one hip, tucking the blanket securely around her. “How old is she?”

“Nine months. Just.”

“I’ve wondered every single day since you told me you were pregnant.”

“I could have told you myself if I had been allowed to call.”

Janine heard the note of disapproval, but she understood. “Right after you left, your father did everything but hire a detective to find you, Harmony. If you had called while he was there? He would have started searching all over again, beginning with the number you called from. That’s how I found you. The people who helped me get away also helped me trace the last number you used, and eventually they traced you here.”

“I was careful never to call when he was there.”

“You couldn’t know for certain. After you left he took to dropping in on me unannounced during the day, sometimes two or three times, to make sure I was doing what he told me to. I memorized that number, and I was able to delete it from our caller ID that last night we talked. But I might not always have been able to do that before he got to it.”

“Why didn’t you leave him right then? If things were getting worse? If it was possible for things to have gotten worse?”

Too much was at stake. Janine couldn’t hedge the truth. She saw the moon peeking over a stand of trees, between two mountaintops, and she watched it for a moment before she looked back at her daughter.

“Because if I had just walked out the door without a good plan, a foolproof plan, he would have killed me. He still might if he finds me, and that’s why I can’t stay longer than a night. Because if your father traces me here—and he still could, no matter how careful I’ve been—then he might hurt you and the baby, too.”

Chapter 5

Her hands were trembling. Harmony looked down at the spoon grasped in her right hand and watched it wave gently side to side. If she had needed proof she was shaken to the bone by her mother’s arrival, there it was. Of course, Janine’s surprise appearance was especially dramatic, considering that just moments before Harmony had believed she was dead.

In the living room Lottie was laughing as she and Janine played peekaboo. The sound was silvery and unfettered. Harmony loved to make her daughter laugh. She was never sure which of them was the most delighted afterward.

Gripping the spoon tighter, she stirred the milk and sugar she’d managed to get into each mug; then, better safe than sorry, she decided to carry them one at a time.

Despite good intentions, she didn’t move. Her mother was here, but only for the night. And once she left? While she hadn’t said so exactly, Janine had made it clear that once she moved on, she would have little or no contact with her daughter.

All because of the devil who had fathered her.

Harmony caught a glimpse of herself in the glass cabinet front, and for a moment she stared. Did she look anything like Rex Stoddard? She had never seen any outward resemblance, except her coloring. Buddy had looked more like him, a rounder face, one eye that drifted subtly despite two costly surgeries, a high forehead that, at least for Rex, had climbed slowly higher as he began to go bald.

Of course, her brother had died well before he had the chance to lose his hair.

She didn’t want to think about Buddy.

Looks were one thing, but more frightening, did she have any of her father inside her? She had been angry enough at the way he treated his wife and children that she had, as a girl, lain awake at night fantasizing ways to rid the world of Rex Stoddard. They had been childish thoughts, and she had never acted on them, but was that the way her father’s sickness had begun? Had he, too, lain awake at night plotting revenge and destruction?

Rex had never been able to forgive even the smallest slight. A gesture, an offhand remark, an opinion he didn’t share. Rex held on to those things forever and waited. When he finally had the opportunity to get even, he took full advantage of it.