I knew from Todd’s dossiers that the house on Diamond Ridge Road had belonged to Roger and Eileen Adams long before Shelley had officially entered the picture, but clearly it belonged to Shelley now—lock, stock, and barrel. She was in charge, and I suspected Roger had very little say in how things were managed, one way or the other.
“Now, where were we?” Shelley asked.
“We were talking about Danitza and Chris,” I prompted.
“Oh, yes,” Shelley said. “Roger believed that if Chris was out of the picture, Nitz would see the error of her ways and come home.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
“No, it’s not,” Shelley agreed. “No matter how much Eileen and Roger disapproved, she was hell-bent on keeping that baby, and that’s what she did.”
“So what do you think happened to Chris Danielson?” I asked.
“I don’t have to think about what happened to him because I know what happened,” Shelley asserted. “Roger offered him an armload of money in order to convince him to get lost, and that’s what he did. That no-good worm of a kid took the money and ran, just like the scumbag everyone always said he was. But even with him out of the picture, Danitza never came back home. Apparently she’s every bit as stubborn as her father. I don’t believe she and her father have exchanged a word since.”
For good reason, I thought. Being barred from my mother’s funeral would have done it for me.
“What about Eileen?” I asked. “Did she ever reach out to her daughter in hopes of a reconciliation?”
“Not as far as I know,” Shelley replied. “Part of her problem was disappointment with her sister, Penny. Eileen felt that Penny and her husband, Wally, enabled Danitza’s bad behavior by giving the girl a refuge when she ran away from home.”
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.”