Mystery Dance: Three Novels (8 page)

Jacob’s voice grew fainter. “Special delivery.”

He added something she couldn’t hear because a car with a busted muffler roared through the parking lot outside.

“Jake, we need some counseling. We need to work things out. About the money and about us.”

“Mattie,” he said.

“Yes, that, too. We need to return her to the dirt. It’s something we should do together, no matter how you feel about me.”

“My daughter.”

“Mine, too.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Jake, are you okay? Please don’t tell me you’re still drinking. You know what stress does to you.”

“The door,” he said, and the line went dead.

Was he the one who’d been outside her door? The phone signal had been clear and steady, not fluctuating the way most wireless signals did in the mountains. There was a pay phone in the apartment’s laundry room, but whoever was at the door wouldn’t have reached it in the interim between her seeing the shadow and answering the phone.

Renee brushed her hair and grabbed her purse. After what Kim had said about Joshua Wells, she planned to go to the Kingsboro police department and check on his criminal record. She’d heard long-time residents mention him once in a while, but she knew little about him other than that he’d moved out of town shortly after his mother’s death. Joshua hadn’t even shown up at the reading of Warren Wells’ will. Of course, Jacob had already been guaranteed the money, so she couldn’t blame him.

She opened the door and was reaching for her sunglasses when the package flopped at her feet. It must have been leaning against the door. It was in plain cardboard about the size of a saltines box. She went to the edge of the deck and peered over the side, expecting to see a UPS or FedEx van. The parking lot was nearly empty, the tenants off to day jobs and errands.

She picked up the package. It bore no label. The box was light, and might even have been empty. She carried it inside to the narrow table in the kitchenette, got a butcher knife, and slit the tape between the top two folds of cardboard.

As she peeled the flaps back, the odor of stale charcoal assailed her. Inside was a stained bundle of white cloth. She touched it, and then recognized the lace brocade around the small collar. It was the dress Mattie had worn at her First Communion.

She pulled the dress out, knocking the box to the floor with the motion. The dress was silk, and the bottom half of it had burned away. One sleeve had been torn off, and a black rip ran the length of the abbreviated back. Despite the ruin of the dress, it evoked an image of a beatific Mattie bowing before Father Rose, accepting the round wafer from the priest and putting it between her lips.

“Matilda Suzanne,” Renee whispered, pressing the garment to her cheek. “Oh, my baby.”

They had picked out the dress together, Mattie insisting on a “grown-up girl’s dress,” not one of the plain ones with a bow tied in the rear. She’d worn white socks and black shoes with single straps and the slightest rise in the heels. Her hair had been pinned back with lacquered white barrettes in the shape of doves. Though this was her big sister’s day, Christine had also worn a tiny white dress, adorned with some milk spit-up on the front.

The memory so overwhelmed Renee that she wasn’t aware how long she stood there, rocking back and forth, the cloying stench of scorched fabric in her nostrils. After a time, the dress grew heavy in her hands, a relic that was both treasured and despised. It should have burned up in the fire. She had prayed for understanding, she had accepted the loss as one of God’s mysterious workings, and she had wiped clean the slate of her soul. Yet here came this piece of a miserable past back into her life.

No, God hadn’t delivered this. Jacob had.

The phone call, his cryptic phrases, the mocking voice, almost as if he were blaming her. Taunting her. Torturing her.

He wasn’t himself. The realization broke her heart all over again. She had promised to be strong for him, to bring him back from whatever abyss failure had pushed him into. But how could she rescue him when she didn’t know who he was? How could she save him when it took all her energy to save herself?

Jacob must have visited the charred wreckage of the house. Maybe Mattie’s dress had been caught in some strange backdraft and wafted away from the flames into the surrounding woods. With all the commotion and activity, no one would have noticed, nor recognized its significance. But Jacob knew. He’d attended the communion, one of his rare visits to St. Mary’s.

The dress had leaked bits of charred cloth onto the floor. Renee spread the garment across the table, then knelt and collected the pieces. As she touched the black scraps, they broke into smaller pieces. They were disintegrating even as she tried to collect them, and her desperation to save the scraps only made them crumble faster.

She gave up and washed her hands in the kitchen sink. The black specks swirled down the drain, lost to her forever, gone to some lightless place of decomposition and decay.

Maybe Jacob was breaking down in the same way. She couldn’t let that happen. She dried her hands, grabbed her purse, and went outside into the sunlight. The wind off the white pines swept away the charred smell, and her head was clear by the time she reached her car.

The police department lay behind the Fuller County courthouse in Kingsboro, in the old part of downtown that had thrived before chain restaurants and big-box retailers pulled most shoppers to the main thoroughfares. The records office was headed by a stern woman with glasses as thick as Renee’s whose steel-gray hair suggested she had been employed there long before the advent of computers. Renee tapped at the bulletproof window until the woman looked up from her desk, lips pursed as if she had just eaten the lemon wedge from the iced tea in front of her. The woman pushed back her chair with a complaint of springs and sauntered over to the service window.

Renee pushed a button and spoke into a microphone mounted on the window ledge. “Yes, ma’am, I’m looking for any records you have on Joshua Wells.”

“Joshua Wells?” The woman tilted her head back and peered at Renee as if studying an insect. The speaker made her sound as if she were asking for an order at a drive-through window.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Renee thought the woman was going to ask her why she wanted the records, but she said, “Do you have a middle name?”

For an instant, Renee thought she meant her own name, then realized that even a town as small as Kingsboro might have had several Joshua Wellses. “No, sorry. Can I just have them all?”

The woman made a chewing motion, then said, “It’s public record. All you have to do is pay the fees.”

The woman pointed to a sign on the wall that was lost amid the clutter of “Most Wanted” posters, meeting reminders, and communication codes. Searches were five dollars and copies were fifty cents each.

“That’s fine,” Renee said.

“It’ll be a minute. That’s Wells, W-E-L-L-S, right?”

“Yes. Like Warren Wells.”

“Oh, yeah. ‘Joshua’ was his kid’s name, wasn’t it? One of them, anyway.”

Renee nodded. The woman went to a computer and typed in the name without sitting down. She frowned at the screen, and soon came back to the window. “There’s not any.”

“That has to be a mistake. I understand he had been charged with several crimes.”

“Could be a couple of things,” the woman said. “Maybe the records were ordered expunged by a judge, or they could have been sealed if he was a juvenile at the time of the offense.”

“What’s the age for being tried as an adult?”

“Depends. For most crimes, it’s sixteen.”

“Okay, sorry to trouble you.”

So either Kim had been wrong, or Joshua’s crimes had occurred during his early teens. Renee paid with a twenty and declined a receipt. While the woman made change, Renee pressed the button and asked, “Did you know Joshua Wells personally?”

The woman shook her head, experienced at deflecting any probe for off-limits information. “No. He made the papers once in a while, for sports and things. He was an all-star pitcher before he dropped out of high school. I heard he moved after that.”

Newspaper. She decided her next stop was the library, where she could go through the microfiche files of the
Kingsboro Times-Herald
. At least she’d be able to put a face with a name and start filling in the puzzle. She’d seen his picture in the Wells house when she’d had dinner there before her marriage, but both the boys had been adolescents then. Identical twins often developed different facial features over time.

She was nearly to the door when another thought occurred to her. She knew little about Jacob’s past. Her probing had met a sullen wall that had no chinks. Sure, she knew Warren Wells had made millions in real estate, that his mother had died in a tragic fall, and that Jacob had disliked his parents. But he hadn’t opened up about his past and had left no paper trail. He didn’t even own a high school yearbook.

She returned to the service window. The records officer was just settling back into her desk. Instead of waiting for the woman to return to the window, Renee pressed the button and asked for a search on Jacob Wells.

The clerk’s eyes narrowed. “You with the newspaper?”

“No, just a citizen.”

“He’s done a lot for this town. Just remember that.”

How could Renee forget?

The woman sipped her tea as she operated the keyboard. She squinted at her computer screen and the printer on a filing cabinet beside her desk began scrolling out papers. She brought the stack of papers back to the window and slid them through the slot. “That will be eight more dollars.”

Renee paid and flipped through the papers, her heart pounding. The names in the “suspect” line of the reports read “Jacob Warren Wells.”
Her
Jacob.

Vandalism in the high school parking lot, suspect allegedly gouged the paint on a number of vehicles with a set of keys. Arson, suspect allegedly set some boxes on fire inside a hotel during a Christmas tree growers’ convention. Misdemeanor shoplifting and underage possession of alcohol, suspect allegedly stole two bottles of wine from a convenience store. Misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance, suspect allegedly caught smoking marijuana under the high school stadium bleachers. Obstructing and delaying a police officer, suspect allegedly gave his brother’s driver license during a traffic stop in an attempt at deception.

Arson again, this time at the construction site of a building under development by Warren Wells. Charges were later dropped when the fire was attributed to “accidental causes.”

The last arrest report was the most incredible, the most difficult to imagine. Cruelty to animals, suspect allegedly suffocated a cat by sealing it inside a plastic bag.

“Is that the one you were looking for?” the woman said, watching her.

Renee shook her head. This must be another Jacob Warren Wells. But the address listed on the reports was 121 White River Road, the same one Jacob had used the few times he’d mailed postcards home during college.

“That was the other Wells twin, wasn’t it?” the records officer said. “The one who lost the child in the fire?”

“It must be a mistake.” She didn’t push the microphone button, but the woman was close enough to hear her through the slot.

The woman drew back from the glass as if offended. “We’re not perfect around here, but we can’t be wrong that many times.”

“Jacob and Joshua,” Renee said, the papers like toxic freight in her hands.

“You know what they say about twins,” the woman said, speaking off the record for the first time, eyes like wet beetles behind her glasses. “One of them always turns out bad.”

Renee took her change and went outside, into a world whose sun was too brilliant to allow dark things to hide.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I sympathize with you, Jacob. Really, I do. If I could bend on this, you know I’d do it for you in a heartbeat.”

The words were spoken with a practiced precision. Rayburn Jones tented his fingers and leaned back in his leather chair, his eyes like oil drops, bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lamps. The computer monitor to Jones’s left had an aquarium screen saver across which sedate and colorful fish drifted without fear of predators. The maple top of the desk was like the surface of a still, dark lake. The office could have served as a museum set for the subspecies known as “insurance adjuster.”

“I don’t understand.” Jacob wiped at the stubble on his chin. He could smell the stink of his own sweat.

“I’m afraid we can’t pay out any more money until the case is settled. You know how it is. These things go back to the underwriters, they smell something funny, and they clamp down on the money flow.”

“That damned fire chief–”

“I’m sure you’re aware anytime there’s even the smallest doubt, we have to be a little more careful.” Jones leaned forward. “Please don’t take it personally, Jacob. Nobody’s saying the fire was deliberately set. But the paperwork has to go through clean.”

Jacob’s breath was rapid, the air in the room suddenly too thin. Blood rushed to his face. His side ached. He spoke through clenched teeth. “My daughter died in that fire.”

Jones glanced at a framed family portrait that showed his own three daughters wearing curls, ribbons, and smiles. “I appreciate the depth of your tragedy, Jacob. My Anne was on Mattie’s soccer team, remember? I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re going through.”

Jones’s steady tone was infuriating. Jacob slipped a trembling hand into his pocket, touched the cool metal flask. If only he could take a drink, he’d be able to handle this. “I’ve talked with the fire chief. She said there were some loose ends but nothing that would lead her to call in the State Bureau of Investigation.”

“She still hasn’t filed a final report and it’s been nearly three months. I’m afraid I can’t make any more disbursements until the official determination is made. Your wife received the short-term settlement to cover temporary living expenses, but that’s all we can do right now. Believe me, as soon as I get the nod from corporate, I’ll deliver the check to you personally.”

Jacob didn’t tell Jones he’d only seen Renee once since his release from the hospital. That encounter had been an accident. He was at the bank withdrawing a hundred dollars from their joint savings account when the teller signaled the manager. Renee was in an upstairs office that overlooked the bank’s lobby, talking to someone whose suit looked as crisp as new bills. She saw Jacob through the glass walls and mouthed his name, then ran for the office door and downstairs.