“Did they catch her?” Jimmy asked. “His wife, I mean?”
I wasn’t sure how much Jimmy had overheard as Twink drove us to the Driftwood Inn, but obviously he’d been paying attention.
“Yes,” I answered. “She’s been taken into custody.”
“Good,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “Mom’s father was handcuffed to the bed when we found him. Mom said his wife was trying to kill him.”
I nodded. “I believe your mother is right. That’s exactly what Shelley Adams intended.”
At that point Jimmy seemed to be talked out. In the moments of silence that followed, I thought about the house on Diamond Ridge Road. It had looked more like a log-walled fortress than a house. I remembered the heavy oaken door, to say nothing of the dead bolt.
“Was the door locked?” I asked.
He nodded.
“How’d you get inside?” I asked.
“Through the window in what used to be my mom’s bedroom,” Jimmy answered. “There’s a big tree next to the house. We climbed that, and then she used a tool from the car—a putty knife—to jimmy the window. When she said that, I thought she was making fun of me.”
“No,” I told him. “That’s what it’s called—jimmying. It’s when you get into a locked house through a window by messing with the lock rather than breaking the glass.”
“Anyway, that’s how we got in. Mom climbed in first, and then she helped me. She said that’s how she used to sneak in and out of the house when she was a girl.”
“Have you ever snuck in and out of a house like that?” I asked.
In reply Jimmy ducked his head and shrugged his shoulders. In other words, asked and answered.
“If that’s how you and your mother got in, how about the EMTs? Was she able to find the dead-bolt key?”
Jimmy shook his head. “Mom remembered the door code on the garage because it was her mom’s birthday. We were able to let the medics into the garage, but they had to break down the kitchen door to get into the house.”
The old code was probably Roger’s doing. Had Shelley known about that, she would have changed it.
Jimmy paused for a moment before continuing. “Anyway,” he said, “we found Mom’s father in one of the bedrooms. He was asleep with one arm handcuffed to the frame of the bed. Mom tried to wake him up but couldn’t. She tried to call 911 from the bedside table, but the phone didn’t work. It had been unplugged. We had to plug it back in.”
That made sense. Even if Roger Adams had tried to call for help, he wouldn’t have been able to.
The boy shivered, and not from the cold either. “Why would anyone do that, Mr. Beaumont?” he asked.
Because they’re evil, I thought. “Greed,” I answered aloud. “We’ve uncovered evidence that Shelley Adams has been using fake IDs to sell off your grandfather’s properties without his knowledge or consent.”
“She’s been stealing from him, too?”
I nodded.
“Will she go to prison?”
“Ultimately that decision will be up to a judge and jury, but when she goes on trial, it won’t be just for what she did or tried to do to Roger Adams.”
That was the moment when I came to the fork in the road, when I could have wigged out on doing the hard part and left the remainder of the telling to Jimmy’s mother. Instead I forged on.
“There’s a whole lot more to the Shelley Adams story,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like your father,” I answered.
“What do you mean?”
“You know that your parents were very young when they fell in love.”
Jimmy nodded. “She told me her parents didn’t approve of him—like they thought he was some kind of juvenile delinquent.”
“And they were worried about her having a baby when she was still little more than a child herself.”
“Me?” he asked.
“You,” I agreed. “But your mother wanted to keep you. That’s why she ran away and went to live in Anchorage with Aunt Penny and Uncle Wally.”
“But what happened to my father?” Jimmy insisted. “Mom said he just left, went home to Ohio, and never came back.”
I was relieved to hear that at least the boy knew that much—the broad outline of the story if not all the gory details. In reality it was as much as anyone in officialdom had known until today, until the moment Gretchen Walther had forwarded Jared Danielson’s DNA profile to Harriet Raines. Now it was time to do Chris’s next-of-kin notification. I’d never done one of those with a twelve-year-old survivor, but I had traveled too far down this path to back off now. Jimmy Danielson was Christopher Danielson’s son—and he had a right to be told.