Disintegration

by Nicholson, Scott

  Jacob pushed past Joshua into the house. The house that should have been his.

  He headed up the darkened stairs, each thump and clatter of his mother's falling body echoing in his head. There among the shadows, in the alcove just at the end of hall, he saw a pale face. A child's face, floating, ethereal, shaped by the distant mist of a memory. He brushed the memory away, because memories couldn't be trusted, especially those born in this house.

  Joshua shouted from below, but Jacob couldn't make out the words. Their childhood room was just ahead. He flung the door open and burst inside. The sun poured through the open window, the curtains golden and soft. His bed was still rumpled and the ropes that Joshua had used weeks before to tie him down were still attached to the bedstead. Joshua's bed looked as if it had been unused, and he wondered if Joshua and Carlita had taken over the master bedroom.

  Jacob opened the closet. No Sock Monster, no bloodied chicken heads, no broken toys. The closet was empty, except for the upper shelf above the rod. He pulled out the broken cane with its yellowed ivory handle that was carved in the shape of an eagle head. He ran his hand over the splintered edges, feeling the grain where he had worked the knife fifteen years before. He hadn't known it would break. He hadn't wanted to kill his mother, no matter how much she hated him.

  "Two million is a suitable bargain," Joshua said from the doorway, all trace of his rural Southern accent gone. Joshua the actor, the pleaser, the manipulator. The one who had fooled their parents with a pretense of devotion.

  "I have to know it's going to end."

  "Guilt is a currency one borrows from the soul," Joshua said. "And only one person can meet that debt."

  "I think Dad might have suspected something. Maybe that's why he left me the money. As a kind of payoff."

  "He knew about Carlita, that's why." Joshua's redneck accent returned, as if he were speaking in tongues. "He didn't want no son of his shacking up with a Mexican."

  "He didn't like Renee, either."

  "You know the Old Man. He figured out her value. Simple as that."

  "I love her."

  "Sure you do. A Wells always loves his woman until she stands in the way of what you really want."

  "I don't want this."

  "You shoulda thought of that back when you were spying on me and Carlita."

  "I never saw nothing like that before."

  "Your accent, Jake. It's coming back."

  "I can't help it." And he couldn't. This room, the ghosts in the walls, the pasts both real and imagined, all shifted in and out of substance. The floor seemed to move beneath his feet, and he reached for the closet door to steady himself.

  "Why do you think I married her, Jake?"

  "So she could get her green card."

  "That didn't matter back then. That was before they got so crazy about terrorists. Illegals could hang around a few years and sneak into the system sideways. There's only one reason I married her."

  Jacob held onto the closet door, the one on which his childhood nightmares had been projected. His stomach fluttered, his heart pumped ground glass through his vascular system. This room, the bed that had soaked up his wet dreams and urine, the space beneath the bed where Joshua had staged his best games, the window through which the world had grown smaller and uglier. The walls closed in and he could barely breathe.

  "I married her because you wanted her," Joshua said. "It was the only thing I could take from you."

  "No," he said, but the lie tasted like closet dust.

  "And you only wanted her because she was mine."

  He shook his head and sweat and misery fell from his scalp.

  "Because you saw what it was like to be close to someone," Joshua said. "It wasn't just the screwing, though that sure enough drove you crazy. You think I didn't know you were watching? Why do you reckon I took you to the work camp that night? I wanted you to see what you were missing. I wanted you to see that you'd never be me, no matter how goddamned hard you tried."

  "I never wanted to be you."

  "That ain't what those shrinks said. And Dad was sure pissed off, having one of his sons turn out to be a skullfuck."

  "Those were... emotional difficulties... adjustment disorders."

  "Twenty-dollar words for 'skullfucked.'"

  Jacob felt as if the closet door were squeezing closed with half of him caught in the middle. He blinked and the room stopped moving. "One of the doctors said it might be genetic."

  "Still passing the blame, huh? Why can't you just accept that you were fucked from your first breath. That you should have died inside Mom's nasty belly and left everything to me like it was supposed to be."

  Jacob slipped to his knees, and he felt weak, eleven years old again, then nine, then seven. Joshua reached out his left hand and there was the Sock Monster, bloody and pointy and gray. Joshua worked the filthy sock like a puppet, using his "Wish Me" voice.

  "Wish me to make you go away," said the sock, and Joshua's stage voice echoed through the tunnel of years, chasing him, grabbing at him, scratching him.

  He kicked out and crawled backwards into the safety of the closet. The door slammed and the dark dropped over him, but in his mind the Sock Monster still reached, reached, reached.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The fire chief, Davidson, was waiting in the M & W office when Renee arrived twenty minutes late. The door to Donald Meekins' office was closed. He must have been in a meeting or he would have locked the outer office door.

  Davidson stood as rigid as a soldier. "Where is your husband?"

  "That's what I want to know." Renee's eyes were puffy and dewy. Having a cheating husband tended to do that to a woman. But she was well aware of his ability to keep secrets. Their deepest bond was their mutual dishonesty.

  "I'm sorry to do this here, but I need to talk to both of you. Together."

  "There's not a 'together' anymore."

  "Sorry, Mrs. Wells. I don't mean to pry in personal business. But after the fire at your husband's construction site, I had to go back and look at the evidence collected when your house burned down."

  "You said the SBI ruled it accidental."

  "Not exactly. What they ruled was 'undetermined cause.'"

  Renee wiped her nose with a ragged Kleenex she pulled from her pocket. She hated to be seen like this. Her hair was tangled and sweaty, her cheeks bright with shock and sorrow. She wouldn't have come to the office after her encounter with Carlita, but she was hoping to confront Jacob.

  And to get a look at the fine print on the company life-insurance policy.

  "We've had a couple of recent arson cases, so I had to go back and look at all of this year's suspicious fires. There was one out at the cemetery, and the groundskeeper said he saw a woman near the woods where it started. An attorney's office caught six weeks ago, took out the back of the building before we got it under control. Started inside, with what looked like a short where a computer was plugged in. The office belonged to Herbert Isaacs. Is that name familiar?"

  "No, unless he rented from M & W. Then I might have seen his name on a statement or something." Renee couldn't think straight. She had to get rid of Davidson until she could sort things out with Jacob. She shouldn't be talking before she knew which story they were going to use.

  "Herbert Isaacs was the attorney for Jacob's father, who was the developer of the office building. So I figured maybe there was an extra key around here and somebody had access without breaking and entering."

  "That's quite a leap."

  "Usually, arsonists have a modus operandi, a way of working that's as distinctive as fingerprints, and that gives them away. But this time, four different fires, four different causes."

  "Sounds like random accidents to me. That would account for the difference."

  "Three of them have the Wells name in common. Four, if you count the fact that a Wells is buried in the cemetery."

  Renee tossed the moist tissue in the garbage can and tried to smile. Something had broken insid
e her, and her gut ached from the forearm blow that Carlita had given her. She rubbed her stomach. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Mrs. Wells, I'm starting to believe you were the woman the groundskeeper saw."

  "Is it a crime for a woman to visit her daughter's grave?" Renee channeled the anger she felt toward Carlita and Jacob and focused it on Davidson. "If I'm under suspicion, perhaps I should talk to a lawyer before I answer any more questions. But since I don't see the police with you, then I'm starting to believe you're blowing smoke."

  Davidson pursed her thin lips, her eyes narrowed to slits. She pulled a plastic baggie from the back of her trousers. In it lay a rumpled piece of paper. "I found this at the scene when I went back for another look at your house. It was in the basement, laying there in the chunks of charcoal. Somebody must have left it there to be found, otherwise it would have burned. And it's fairly recent or the weather would have made the ink fade."

  Renee couldn't help reaching for the baggie, but Davidson pulled it away. "Let me read it to you," the fire chief said. "'Hope you like the housewarming present. J.'"

  Davidson observed Renee as if she were a germ on a microscope slide, but Renee's face had turned to stone.

  "Pretty strange, huh? Fingerprints match Jacob's. He had a record as a teen, some minor vandalism at school, and he set fire to a bridge though no charges were filed. He was also arrested for assault, but the victim was a Mexican and didn't want to press charges. Your fingerprints aren't on file, but you've touched this before, haven't you?"

  Renee let her face bend enough for a smile. "If you think Jacob burned down his own house, he'd be pretty stupid to leave something like that at the scene."

  "I don't think your husband is stupid. But I can count two million reasons for him to cover it up."

  "The house was only insured for a million."

  Davidson's eyes grew grim, her short-cropped hair making her look like a severe monk who frowned on joy in others. "Your daughter was worth another million."

  "That wasn't supposed to happen," Renee said, eyes roaming to the framed Rembrandt print on the wall, a Flemish village locked in time, a place where no children burned. She wouldn't face it. It was inside, hidden away, entombed. Nothing but ash. "That was an accident."

  "You didn't know, did you? About the insurance on your daughter?"

  "Of course I did," she said. A million per child. She accepted it because she had remade that person she used to be, shaped her past until she could live with the consequences. She had simply changed what she believed. That wasn't wrong, was it? Not with her soul and sanity at stake.

  "Here's what I think happened," Davidson said. "Your husband had some money troubles. We don't know how deep he was under, but the detectives will have plenty of time to sort that out once we get this arson charge to stick. So he needed money fast, and here was this nice, new house worth maybe $300,000 but insured with contents for a million. All it takes is one electrical short and your husband turns a huge overnight profit. If not for one little mistake, he probably would have got away clean."

  One little mistake.

  The fire chief had reduced Mattie's life to three words. Davidson would never know how Mattie's little foot had kicked in the womb, high up under the rib, so powerfully that she and Jacob had joked about their future soccer star. Davidson hadn't sat Mattie in her lap and read "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," hadn't watched Strawberry Shortcake videos and made Rice Krispies treats, hadn't seen Mattie in ballerina's tights skipping across a gym floor, hadn't brushed Mattie's luxuriant hair and shared purple fingernail polish and silly necklaces. Davidson didn't know about their daughter's sixteen million heartbeats, each one a blessing beyond measure, or the remaining millions of which God had cheated them.

  "Jacob didn't do it," Renee blurted out, wanting to convince herself. "I think it was Joshua who started the fire."

  "Joshua?"

  "His twin brother. He's always been jealous because Jacob is successful. He wants to destroy Jacob, bring him down to his level, drag him down to hell."

  Davidson tapped the baggie against her thick thigh. "Joshua Wells, huh? He hasn't been around here in years."

  "You know him?"

  "Knew of him. I went to the high school at the other end of the county, but everybody knew about the Wells boys, their dad being rich and all. Funny, but Jacob was always the troublemaker, the boy with his name in the newspaper, not the other one."

  "You've got it wrong." Renee remembered what Carlita had told her about Jacob's mysterious twin. Desperation gripped her guts. "Joshua--he did all those bad things and blamed them on Jacob. I know Jacob. He's honest and kind."

  "The evil twin did it, huh?" Davidson didn't appear as if she relished her sardonic joke. "Are you trying to sell your story to the 'Lifetime Channel' or something?"

  "Jacob didn't start the fire at our house. I was there, remember?"

  "Nothing personal, Mrs. Wells, but I don't believe you. Either of you. And when I take another look at these four fires, I'm going to find something. Then it will be the police knocking on your door, not me."

  A well of spite rose in Renee. "Fine. At least I won't have to smell your sweat anymore."

  At the end of the hall, the door to Donald Meekins' office opened. A redheaded woman with freckles came out, straightening her natural-fiber blouse. Renee recognized her as one of the company's tenants, a massage therapist who rented an office downtown. Donald followed her, his laughter ceasing when he saw Renee with a woman in a uniform.

  The redhead raised her eyebrows, but Donald said, "Come back next week and we'll work out that lease extension, Miss Adamson. Just call Renee to set up the appointment."

  "Thank you, sir," Miss Adamson said, fortunate to have made her living in alternative health rather than acting. "I look forward to doing business with you."

  Donald reached up to adjust his tie then must have realized how that would look. "Yes. Thank you. Well, see you next week."

  Miss Adamson smiled on her way past Renee to the exit, wobbling like a foal on her four-inch heels. After she was gone, Donald asked Davidson, "Can I help you?"

  "I just needed to fill out some forms to do fire inspections at some of your apartments. Mrs. Wells here helped me out."

  Donald squinted at her brass nameplate and nodded in his haste to duck back inside his office. "Well, after all the fires we've been having, I guess that's a good thing."

  "Stop, drop, and roll and all that," Davidson said. "I'd better get back to my truck. Somebody might be trying to steal a fire hydrant."

  "Okay, thank you," he said, overusing the phrase, grateful for everything today. Miss Adamson had a rare talent for emotional healing, it seemed. Donald went into his office and closed the door.

  "He thinks Jacob has had a run of bad luck," Renee said.

  "Sometimes people make their luck," Davidson said. She slipped the baggie with the note into her pocket.

  "You should check that for Joshua's fingerprints," Renee said. "Or do identical twins have the same fingerprints?"

  "No, their fingerprints are different. It's the DNA that's the same."

  "It wasn't Jacob."

  "You seem like a nice woman. You just married the wrong man, that's all. I wish I didn't have to nail you."

  Davidson left without a backward glance. Renee sat at her desk and picked up the phone and tried Jacob's cell number. The signal was too weak.

  She remembered showing Jacob the note while he was in the hospital, but she thought it was still in her purse. Maybe she'd dropped it when she went back to the ruins, the night she'd found the mirror. The night she'd followed the stranger into the woods. She should have burned it.

  At least now she knew who the stranger was. The arsonist.

  Joshua.

  A man she'd never met, but one who must harbor as much hatred for her as he did his twin brother. Enough hatred to want to kill them both. But only Mattie had paid.

  But why? If he wanted revenge, why
had he waited so many years? What did he have against Jacob? There was a German word "Doppelganger," which meant a spiritual double. If Jacob's dissociative disorder was genetic, then maybe Joshua suffered delusions, too.

  Unless Carlita was telling the truth, and Jacob was really in love with her. That would make Joshua jealous, wouldn't it? The brothers had been competitive, and Joshua had always come up short.

  She couldn't make that final leap. She knew Jacob. They were closer than twins could ever be. They had survived two major tragedies together, they had pulled each other back from the mortgage of despair. They were developing themselves, building a new and brighter future on the ashes of the past. Two Wells were better than one.

  Renee sat at her desk and tried to concentrate on her work, running a database of water bills. The numbers on the computer screen fuzzed before her eyes. The clock moved in a slow crawl, but Jacob didn't walk through the door. She tried the phone again.

  He answered on the second ring. "Hello?"

  "Jake! Where are you?"

  "Where the door swings both ways."

  "No, Jake, don't play games. We need to--"

  "Finish it. Good-bye."

  She pushed herself away from the desk and went out, not bothering to tell Donald she was leaving. She would find Jacob and confront him about Carlita. Jacob might be an arsonist and an insurance fraud but he wasn't a cheater. But if he'd gone home again, the place he despised, then Joshua's blackmail must have taken a darker turn.

  Though she hadn't traveled that end of the county much, she was familiar with the two-lane highway that ran west along the river. Beyond the valley of Kingsboro, the road was twisty and the houses more sparse across the slopes. The forests were lush with pine, oak, and hickory. Much of the bottomland along the river held rows of yellowing tobacco or corn, and cattle grazed while serving out their sentences in idyllic, barbed-wire death camps.

  The bridge came into view, and she recognized its wooden rails that peeled gray paint. Beneath that bridge, according to Carlita, Jacob had spied on his brother making love. Except Carlita didn't regard Joshua's affections as love. She spoke of it as a mutual addiction, a degrading need, a bond of desperation. Apparently only Jacob was capable of loving Carlita, in whatever form the woman imagined it. An image flashed through her mind of Jacob on top of Carlita, his pale sweating skin against her muscular dark body, her thighs straddling his hips, their limbs tangled in profane passion.