No River Too Wide Read Online Free Page A

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 front door slammed, and she heard the shrill voices of little boys heading through the front hall. She had only moments before she was interrupted. She forced her eyes open and stared, scanning the synopsis of information she already knew at the beginning of the article. Then she focused on silently reading the update.
    Investigators are still trying to determine if anyone died in the blaze. Cadaver dogs