Disintegration Part 6

"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 sungla.s.ses 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 a.s.sailed 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 G.o.d'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, G.o.d 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 sc.r.a.ps, they broke into smaller pieces. They were disintegrating even as she tried to collect them, and her desperation to save the sc.r.a.ps 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 gla.s.ses 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 b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.ton 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 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 c.h.i.n.ks. 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 b.u.t.ton 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 Her Jacob. 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 b.u.t.ton, but the woman was close enough to hear her through the slot.

The woman drew back from the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses. "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." 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 d.a.m.ned 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. n.o.body'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 disburs.e.m.e.nts 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 gla.s.s walls and mouthed his name, then ran for the office door and downstairs.

He ducked outside before she could catch him. The hedges and shrubs had become his ally, his natural environment, and he'd moved among them until he was several businesses away from the bank. She finally gave up the search. He waited until she finished her dealings and watched her drive away. Jacob had put that day's expenses, for liquor and a motel room, on his credit card instead of paying cash. Prior success had given him one clear benefit in his new life: he had a $50,000 limit on his platinum VISA.

"The house was valued at three quarters of a million," Jacob said. "A lot of custom woodwork. And contents were insured for another quarter million."

"Please, Jacob. We go way back. Don't make this more difficult than it already is."

"It's not difficult at all. You bury your kids and that's that. No more crying over spilled milk. Fold the tent and move on."

"Jacob."

Jacob pressed the bottoms of his fists against the top of Jones's polished desk. "You shook my hand at those Chamber dinners, pushed through the paperwork so my developments were covered, cashed my premiums like clockwork. Now when I need you, you've turned into a G.o.dd.a.m.ned machine."

"Check your policy. No one's accusing you of negligence, but the fire could have had any number of causes, some that might not be covered. And, if you don't mind a little advice from a friend, clean up the drinking. That's not helping. If corporate sends in some investigators, that's the first thing they'll jump on."

Jacob stood and reached for the ornately carved business card dispenser that had two bra.s.s pens protruding from it. He yanked one of the pens from its sheath and pointed it at Jones. "See if I ever write you another G.o.dd.a.m.ned check."

Jones stood, too, six feet three and outweighing Jacob by fifty pounds. "I knew your daddy, Jacob. A fine man. I see some of him in you. I watched you come along and get your foot in the door, and you were ready to really make something of yourself. You don't know how proud he was when he learned you wanted to take up the business. But it's getting lost in this mess you're making."

Daddy. That was the last person Jacob wanted to think about. Daddy had been cut from solid Republican cloth, as sentimental as a brick. Jacob always wanted to be better than him in some way, whether it was spiritual or psychological, but instead had ended up competing with the old man's memory on the playing field of commerce, where the game always favored the unimaginative and the sociopathic. Whenever Jacob looked in the mirror, he saw some of the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d looking back at him.

And Joshua. Except Joshua was always smirking.

But he could muster no more rage, not at Daddy, not at Joshua, and not at Rayburn Jones. His heart, the last little bit that wasn't completely dead, was still full of Mattie. He cherished the pain and let it nourish him in the dark hollow of his soul. The pain was a furnace that consumed the alcohol and ambition and even the anger. The pain was his comfort, the suffering a twisted blessing that dragged him through the days, his closest companion.

He felt a hundred years old. He'd lost everything and only money could make it better. Only money could make the problem go away. "Sorry, Ray. I just can't think straight anymore."

Jones moved around the desk and put a hand on Jacob's shoulder. It was a condescending gesture, but was also Jacob's first human contact since leaving the hospital, not counting the bartender's touching his palm while returning change.

"Do yourself a favor, Jacob. Get some help. See somebody." Jones looked through the office door to make sure none of the other agents were eavesdropping. "It's hard as h.e.l.l when you're a man. n.o.body will let you cry, and you can't let yourself do it even when you're alone."

"She was all I had left, Ray." Jacob choked down a sob, knew he would sound like a blubbering drunk if he let himself slip and break.

Rayburn Jones patted him on the back, cool and manly. "No. You've got Renee, and you've got the rest of your life. What would Mattie think if she saw you like this?"

Jacob rolled his eyes heavenward. In the blur of tears, the ceiling tiles could have been the thick, white cotton of holy clouds. But he couldn't see Mattie's face. If she were up there, she was just as far from him as ever.

She couldn't forgive him because she wasn't here anymore.

Anger drove the moistness from his eyes. "Sorry I lost my temper, Ray. I know it's not your fault. You've got procedures to follow."

Jones gave a grim smile. "Hang in there. You've got some savings, don't you?"

"Yeah. Thanks, Ray. I'll check back soon." Jacob wasn't going to tell him about the million-dollar policy on Mattie, eight hundred thousand of that for accidental death. The policy was made under Renee's name through another insurance agent. He didn't know if she'd filed the claim yet. The Wells financial philosophy had been to have all developments and properties appraised for as large an amount as possible, borrow as much against them as the banks allowed, and over-insure everything.

As Rayburn Jones had once told Jacob, you didn't buy insurance because you expected to collect. You certainly didn't bet the life of your loved ones. But in the final amortization of things, tragedy was just another wise investment. The safe play.

Insurance agents and undertakers took their pounds of flesh. The cops and firefighters and ambulance drivers cashed their paychecks whether you lived or died. Hospitals stayed open by overcharging those with major medical coverage, even the patients on deathbeds, so the poor could die alongside the rich. Churches collected the wages of sin, at least from those whose guilt compelled them to t.i.the. The system worked.

Jacob turned to leave, bracing himself for the exposed walk back through the main office. Before the fire, he had moved between those desks with his head high and shoulders square, a smile for the ladies and a handshake for the men. He had been a Wells, a Somebody, a pillar of the community. Now he was just another object of pity. They avoided each other's eyes.

And they didn't even know the worst of it. They hadn't seen him huddled in the Ivy Terrace laurel thicket, a sheet of construction plastic tied overhead for a roof, a bundle of blankets for a bed. He took his liquor a bottle at a time, so the litter hadn't piled up, but the Beanie Weenies, sardines, and Pop-Tarts had left their silver bones around him and wrecked his digestion. His view of the world was not from a panoramic ivory-tower turret, but rather a narrow gap in the waxy leaves that allowed him to watch his wife's apartment door.

It was not just a matter of perspective. It was point of view. He was at the wrong point.