by Lee Goldberg, Scott Nicholson, J A Konrath, J Carson Black,
She glanced between the curtains and saw Jacob in his truck.
Renee checked the dining room. She could almost see the ghost of Warren Wells sitting at the table, lording over his family, demanding clean fingernails and perfect place settings and food of the proper temperature. She could understand his desire for perfection. She shared it. Perhaps that was what Jacob had seen in her, what he had fallen in love with. It was something Carlita or no other woman could give him.
A drive to be absolute.
She had dared him to be a Wells, and he became one. She was the success story as much as her husband was. Others might measure success by acres developed, income realized, charities supported, or community awards received. But her success was internal, eternal, spiritual. She had saved him from himself.
But at such a great cost. Still, sacrifices were necessary.
And she couldn’t lose now. Not when the payoff was so close.
A Wells never fails.
She entered a room that appeared to have been Warren Wells’ study. It was dark, with heavy curtains blocking the one slim window. A desk sat in the middle of the floor, a lone piece of paper on it.
She picked it up, carried it to the window and read it through the slit of leaking light: “IOU eight million dollars for pain and suffering.” The “eight” had been crossed out, and beneath it “two” had been scrawled in pencil.
It was signed “J.” Just like note she’d shown Jacob in the hospital, the same one Davidson found at the scene of their burned-down house. The letters slanted to the left.
Eight million. That was roughly the value of Jacob’s inheritance, including the Wells share of M & W Ventures.
“I don’t reckon we’ve met. At least not formal-like.”
She spun, crinkling the paper. He stood in the doorway, in silhouette, with the living room window at his back. She recognized the voice. The one from the woods behind her destroyed home, from the thicket in the cemetery, the one she’d heard on the phone. Even though it had been disguised before, the timbre of the words were plain, close enough to Jacob’s to be startling, yet in a flatter, lazier accent.
“Joshua?”
He stepped into the room, and it had to be Joshua, because he resembled Jacob so much that she had to look twice to note the differences. The main one was the gash above his right eye, raw and wet, needing stitches. His grin was harder, more cynical, and his teeth were chipped and stained yellow. His hair was oily, slicked back and uneven. This was her brother-in-law, the man who bore the same blood and had sprung from the same seed as her husband.
This was family.
Joshua wiped at his eyebrow then cleaned his hand on his trousers. “Your husband got a mean streak in him,” he said, in an exaggerated drawl. “I don’t know where in the world he got it from.”
“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but we’re calling the police.”
“That’d be just fine with me, ma’am. Then I can tell them all about what Jacob done.”
“He hasn’t done anything.”
Joshua limped forward. “He done plenty.”
Now the light caught his face, and his eyes were moss brown and somber like Jacob’s, his chin and cheeks in the same geometric proportions, his build of the same angular strength. Except for the cruelty in his eyes, he was as handsome as her husband.
“Stay away from me, or I’ll yell for Jacob.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. ‘Cause you might need me to save you from him.”
“You’re crazy. Jacob told me about you.”
“Not nearly enough, I’ll bet. Did he tell you about when we were kids? About how he managed to blame everything on me, how he’d steal all my toys? How he turned Dad against me until they drove me out of the family?”
Renee maneuvered so the desk was between her and Joshua. She didn’t like the crease of his smile, the mad sparks in his pupils. Jacob must still be sitting in the truck, waiting for her.
“What about the eight million dollars?” she said.
“Fair’s fair,” he said. “That’s what Jake stole from me, and that’s what he’s going to give me back.”
“He didn’t steal anything. I saw your father’s will. Jake got the money and you got the house and land.”
“It shoulda been mine. Jacob got it all turned around.”
“We can’t give you any more money.”
“That ain’t the way this works. Two million more or I tell all of it.”
“You’re the one who started the fires. They’re talking a murder charge now.”
He moved forward, winced, and supported himself by leaning against the desk. His breath reeked of stale beer and smoke, and the odor of perspiration rose from his clothes. He was feral, desperate, beyond law and order.
Boom-boom-boom. The hollow echo of fists pounding on the back door. Jacob’s unintelligible, muffled voice came from outside.
“Two million,” Joshua said to her. “Ain’t you got any more people to kill? Ask him about his mother.”
He turned and limped out of the study, pausing once, stained teeth gritted. The wound over his eye had broken open again and a large red tear rolled down his cheek. “And ask him about my kid.”
Then Joshua was gone, leaving Renee looking from the paper in her hand to the Wells family portrait on the wall. After a moment, she slipped the paper in the pocket of her pants suit and ran through the house, her heels clattering on the hardwood floor. The front door slammed, and the deadbolt was locked by the time she reached it. Through a glass pane in the door she could see Jacob’s truck and her car, both with their hoods up.
She ran through the living room and kitchen and fumbled with the old-fashioned lock on the back door, throwing the door open. Jacob stood on the back step, his arms apart. From each of his hands, a nest of wires dangled like dead snakes.
“He cut our ignition wires,” Jacob said. “This is just like him.”
“I saw him, Jake.”
Jacob’s eyes narrowed and shifted back and forth in their sockets. “Where?”
“Inside. He wants more money. I thought we were done with him.”
“I told you he was crazy. Gets it from his daddy.”
“He said to ask you about your mother. And his kid.”
Jacob flung the wires to the ground and pushed past her into the house. His feet rumbled up the stairs, then he shouted Joshua’s name. She followed him, afraid that Joshua would jump out of the shadows and hold a knife to her throat. She should have known they couldn’t buy their way back to a perfect world, especially after what had happened to Mattie and Christine.
Renee had entered the Wells world, had been seduced by the promise of power. But she thought she could change him, salvage him. Even after the accidents.
Love could work miracles. Love could heal all wounds. Love could patch the broken places inside Jacob. But, first, she had to get him far away from Joshua, at whatever price.
She had reached the foot of the stairs when Jacob appeared on the top landing, his face nearly unrecognizable in the darkness. His hands twitched at his sides. “He’s not here,” he said.
“I told you, he ran out the front. He was bleeding, Jake. Did you beat him up?”
“How could I ever hurt my dear brother?” Jacob descended, taking one slow step after another. “My own flesh and blood. I’d just as soon kill myself.”
“Jake?”
He continued his descent, steady, sure, retracing the path down which his mother had fallen to her death. Fallen, or pushed? What if Joshua were telling the truth? How much could she trust Jacob?
A test. Love passed all its tests in a perfect world.
“I know about Carlita.”
Jacob stopped and hovered above her, close enough that she could see the corners of his lips curl upward. “You wouldn’t understand. They never do.”
“Jake?”
He continued down the stairs, a funeral march, eyes vacant. “He’s at the camp. With her.�
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Renee grabbed his sleeve as he passed. “Let’s just go. We can walk if we have to. It’s only a mile to the highway.”
His words shifted into an accent she’d never heard him use before. “What’s owed got to be paid. It’s the Wells way.”
“He told me to ask you about his kid. But Carlita told me she couldn’t have kids.”
“She don’t know nothing. A dumbfuck beaner who spreads her legs for any gringo with a grin and a dollar.”
“Do you love her?” She tugged at his arm, but his gaze was fixed out the door, beyond the world outside, staring into a land that no one else was allowed to visit.
“Joshua don’t,” Jacob said. “He loves himself. That’s just the way he is.”
“I don’t give a damn about Joshua. All I care about is us.”
“There ain’t no ‘us,’ honey. There’s only you and me and him and her.”
He shoved away from her grasp and headed out of the dank house into the sunshine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The cemetery on the ridge was thick with weeds and briars, the graves untended, the markers askew. It was fenced with locust posts, and guinea hens had scratched in the dirt around the stones. A few sprigs of honey locust rose along the fence line, old field succession that would one day reclaim this neglected ground. Jacob’s grandmother and grandfather had been buried there, along with his father’s only brother. The Wells family hadn’t owned this land long enough to lay out a decent array of corpses. The ones under this soil were linked only by DNA, with dust and decay their common denominator.
Jacob stopped by the fence to catch his breath. He read the names of the two largest stones, which stood side by side in the center of the plot. Warren Harding Wells and Nancy Elizabeth Wells. He had rarely thought of his mother as someone with a name. Having a name might have made her more human and real to him. Maybe Joshua wouldn’t have killed her if she had been “Nancy Wells” instead of “Mother.”
He was glad that Christine and Mattie weren’t buried here. Bad enough to be polluted by Wells blood without having to spend eternity among them. The cemetery had enough room for a dozen more, and no doubt Warren Wells had harbored dreams of his sons one day resting together at his feet. The deviant division of Nancy’s egg would have come full circle and made its final reunion.
Jacob looked back at the house. Renee was trying to start her car, the engine turning over with dry disinterest. She’d probably look for the cell phone, too. They never understood, and they never took your word for it, either.
He looked at the barn, where Joshua might be laying in ambush. The barn door hung askew, one of the rollers broken, and the hayloft opening was as black as winter sin. Joshua might be able to secure a weapon, a hatchet or scythe, some rusted remnant of the Christmas tree enterprise. Joshua might get weak and kill him, just when Jacob was about to give him back his birthright.
No, Joshua was as desperate for resolution as Jacob was, and the deal could only go down in one place—the shabby camp where it had begun.
The guinea hens emerged from the trees at the edge of the pasture, expecting to be fed. They were striped like granite, with rippling bands of dark blue and light gray. Some ancestral memory kept them lingering around the barn, raising their broods, fleeing the occasional fox or red-tailed hawk. They had staked out their territory, and not even the scent of the man who had once slaughtered their kind would roust them.
Guineas were stupid, and Jacob hated all stupid creatures. He knew he should get to the camp, because Carlita would be waiting.
Renee was now hurrying toward him, coming up the rise, her dress shoes slowing her down. He waited until she was close enough so that he could hear her shouts, then he turned from the cemetery. She had never been to this part of the farm, and he didn’t want to lose her. Joshua would never forgive him if Renee missed all the fun.
The slope grew uneven beneath his feet, the trail eroded since the days when cattle had made their way to the barn from far pastures. The sun was heading down toward the tops of the mountains, over where Tennessee and North Carolina collided in monstrous, rocky waves and the autumn trees screamed red and yellow as if on fire. Jacob could smell his own sweat, the crisp acid of dying oak leaves, and rabbit tobacco. Joshua didn’t deserve this place.
He turned once to see Renee cresting the hill behind him, now rid of her shoes. Her hair trailed behind her, golden in the late-afternoon sun. No wonder Joshua loved her so. She was an ideal, a floating dream image of womanhood, someone who was loyal and stable and strong. A woman who could build a better man. She understood what it meant to be a Wells.
Well, most of it.
He reached the first of the Fraser firs, Christmas trees that were too deformed for market and had been left to grow wild. They threw long shadows as he ran between the rows, stumps of harvested trees dotting the hillside. Briars tore at his pants legs, and he knew Renee would have trouble following with her bare feet. He considered stopping, letting her catch up, but the roofs of the migrant camp were below him now, the tottering shed from where he’d first watched Carlita and Joshua, the land giving way to a sheer drop behind the mobile homes, falling away to the river. The blackened ruins of two fire-gutted trailers stood near the ledge, shards of ragged alloy spiking toward the sky.
The road to the camp ran parallel to the river, twin tracks of brown dirt bounded by oaks and white pines. A narrow, wobbly bridge spanned the river, leading to the tree fields and upper pastures. Jacob had driven the road many times, and had walked it many more, the long way home. All those nights spent following Joshua, watching as Carlita surrendered herself, wrapped her brown limbs around him and shouted his name.
Joshua.
That had been the problem. She’d always called out “Joshua.”
He picked up the pace, excited now. Soon she wouldn’t call him “Joshua” any more.
The rusty, green Chevy was parked in front of the last mobile home. No doubt, Carlita was cleaning the cut on Joshua’s face, kissing his brow and telling him it would soon be over. His loco brother would bother him no more. They would be away from this place, wealthy, and then they could live as they were meant.
The grin felt like it was splitting his face. It wasn’t easy being a Wells, becoming a Wells. But the end was near. He would get all the good things he deserved.
Jacob gained speed as he ran down the slope, his legs rejuvenated. Time seemed to fall away, and he was sixteen again, the hills lush with trees, a thread of campfire smoke rising from the migrant camp, bacon in the wind. It was the day after their birthday, and both of the boys had taken their driver’s tests and gotten their licenses. Joshua said they should celebrate, said he had a special present for his favorite brother. He told Jacob to come by the camp that afternoon. There was a green bow on the shed door, and when he opened the door, heart like a jackhammer in his chest, he heard the grunting in the shadows, the frantic whisper of his brother’s name, then laughter. Joshua lay on top of Carlita, his skin pale against her brownness, the hay strewn around them as they wallowed, the air thick with dust. Joshua groaned and pushed himself to his knees, looked at his brother in the doorway.
“Happy birthday to us,” he said.
And sixteen-year-old Jacob took a step inside, fumbling for the buttons on his shirt. Carlita didn’t rise, just lay on her back and smiled, her breasts lifting with her breath, the dark patch between her spread legs glistening in the half-light. Jacob’s trembling fingers finally managed to free the shirt, and he shucked his shoes, and he was approaching her, unbuckling his belt, wondering if he could do it with his little brother watching, when the back of his head erupted in a thunderclap of red agony.
The thirty-three-year-old Jacob rubbed his head now, remembering the dull throb, the rising from the gray mist to find himself on his stomach on the dirt floor of the shed. An ax handle lay beside him. His clothes were scattered, his pants around his knees, his wallet gone. Joshua had stolen his driver’s license, and Jacob
had never gotten it back.
He now reached the camp and moved past the Chevy, peering through the tinted window to make sure the key was in the ignition. Carlita would want to make a fast getaway. That’s the way women were, especially when they wanted to rip out a man’s heart and show it to him while it was still beating, laughing all the while.
They would be in the last mobile home, the one with the faded silver stripe down the side and translucent polyvinyl taped over the windows.
The door was unlocked. He looked back up the hill and saw Renee’s silhouette against the sundown. If she didn’t fall, she’d be right on time. He yanked open the door. “Joshua!”
Joshua and Carlita sat on a couch in the dark living room. The couch looked to have been inhabited by rats, with cotton dribbling from its stitches. A brick propped up one corner. Carlita was leaning into Joshua, and he had his arm around her.
“Let’s go, Carlita,” Jacob said. “He’s got his.”
“Not so fast,” Joshua said. “Two more million.”
“You can get it from Renee.”
“You ain’t much of a horse trader, are you?”
“I just want it over with.”
Carlita looked at him with those maddening brown eyes. “Why do you bring that crazy woman into this, Joshua?”
“Nothing for you to worry about. We’re just giving you what you wanted all these years.”
“I want to go back to Tennessee.”
“Get in the car, then,” Jacob said.
Carlita looked at Joshua, who squeezed her shoulder and lifted his arm from her body. He gave her a little shove. “You heard your husband. You promised to honor and obey, till death do us part.”