Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(52)

And by allowing Nitz to keep her baby, I thought.

It was an odd conversation. As Shelley spoke, I seemed to be taking mental exception to every word out of her mouth, and that left me somewhat conflicted. Here was a relatively young woman stuck caring for an older husband with what appeared to be some very serious health issues. Rather than feel empathy, however, I couldn’t get beyond the way she’d come to have that older husband in the first place—by screwing around with him while his original wife, and a woman purported to be a friend, lay on her deathbed. Call me judgmental if you like, yet in a way I couldn’t help but feel that Shelley Hollander Adams was getting just what she deserved.

Needing to steer the interview back on track, I moved away from Danitza’s longtime estrangement with her parents.

“You said Roger paid Chris an armload of money to leave town,” I suggested. “Do you happen to know how much?”

“I know exactly how much,” Shelley said at once. “He told me it was ten grand.”

Ten thousand dollars? I wondered. “What did he do, write Chris a check?”

“Good heavens no,” Shelley replied. “Rog paid the kid off in cold, hard cash.”

Piece by piece I’d been putting together a timeline surrounding Chris’s disappearance. I knew from Bill Farmdale and his uncle, Zig Norquist, that Chris had been at the restaurant on Monday night and that he’d left work early. From Nitz I knew that she’d run away from home that same night shortly after the pregnancy-test quarrel with her parents. She had gone to Chris’s place and waited for him. Despite having left work early that night, he never came home. As far as I could tell, all this had taken place in the evening hours—at a time when most banks are locked up tight.

“You're saying Roger Adams just happened to have that kind of cash lying around loose here at the house?”

Shelley laughed aloud at that. “Not loose,” she said. “He always kept money in the safe in his den. Rog has never been particularly trusting as far as banks are concerned. It has a lot to do with things that happened to his father’s family during the Depression. Back when Jack and I started hanging around with Rog and Eileen, he told us that he always kept at least a hundred thousand dollars in cash here at the house just in case. That’s what he called it, in fact, his ‘just in case’ money.”

I wondered if he still did that and if Shelley happened to have access to the safe’s combination, but I didn’t ask. Instead I changed the subject. “When did you first learn about Danitza’s pregnancy?” I asked.

“About the time Rog and Eileen found out, or maybe a little before,” Shelley replied. “Eileen had told me Danitza had been dealing with the flu for several days in a row. Since I wasn’t her mother, it was easier for me to suspect what was really going on well before Eileen did. As a matter of fact, I believe I was the one who actually suggested Eileen pick up an at-home pregnancy test to find out for sure, and we all know how that turned out.”

“Yes, we certainly do,” I agreed. His name is Christopher James Danielson. He’s twelve years old and a hell of a nice kid!

“So Roger handed the money over to Chris in person?” I asked.

“As far as I know,” Shelley replied with a shrug.

“Did Chris give Roger any hints about what his intentions were—about what he planned to do with the money or where he was going?”

“If he did, Roger never mentioned it, at least not to me. As far as I know, once Chris had the money, he was supposed to leave town, and he did. My understanding was that he intended to go visit some of his relatives in Ohio.”

That sounded plausible enough, except I was pretty sure Chris had never left the state of Alaska. With ten thousand bucks in his pocket, he could have purchased a vehicle, but in a post-9/11 world and without a valid passport, he wouldn’t have been able to drive through Canada to reach the Lower Forty-eight. As for leaving by air? With a driver’s license, he could possibly have boarded a plane for U.S. destinations, but had he?

I noted in my mental to-do list to ask Todd if a passport had ever been issued in the name of Christopher Danielson. But my bottom line remained unchanged. I was relatively sure Chris had never set foot outside Alaska, because he’d been murdered and left lying dead along the shoreline of Eklutna Lake. My problem now centered on the fact that Roger Adams, one of the last people to have seen Chris alive, no longer knew up from down. And even if he was arrested and charged with murder, Roger was in no condition to aid in his own defense. There was no way he could be tried, convicted, or held accountable for any crime at all, to say nothing of murder.

In other words, I had just run smack-dab into a dead end.

“I should probably let you get back to your day,” I told Shelley, rising to my feet. “You’ve been most helpful. I trust you’ll forgive me for just barging in the way I did.”

“You’re forgiven,” she said with a smile. “In fact, I’m grateful you stopped by. If you hadn’t, I might never have known that Rog had discovered where I was keeping the key. From now on I’ll have to find another hiding spot.”

I couldn’t help hoping that at some time in the not-so-distant future I wouldn’t end up in the same situation as Roger Adams—in such bad mental shape that Mel would find herself compelled to hold me prisoner in my own home.