Mystery Dance: Three Novels

by Scott Nicholson

  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 pa
st. 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.

  The Wells house stood on the hill, as stark as she remembered it, and through the trees she saw Jacob’s new pickup. But the rusty green Chevrolet wasn’t there. Jacob was alone in the house.

  She slowed as she crossed the bridge, her hands so tight on the steering wheel that her knuckles were white. She looked over the rail at the water racing below, the currents sweeping around boulders and spilling over little falls, fueled by a hundred springs that welled from the mountains beyond. Jacob had told her a story once about a sailboat he’d had as a child, and how it had been smashed in the river. She wondered if Joshua had received a sailboat just like it, since twins often got the same presents.

  The house was quiet as she parked. No one came out on the porch. Up close, the house had a shabby look, as if it hadn’t been tended, with dusty windows and a few siding boards buckled out. The old barn stood on a nearby rise of meadow, and blue-gray hens worried the grass in the structure’s shade. Jacob had tried to take her inside the barn during their engagement visit, but the thought of dust, manure, and vermin had repelled her. She shivered as she recalled Jacob’s story of the animal torture.

  Renee knocked. “Jacob?”

  Maybe Joshua had never been here, and the blackmail had been a ruse. Perhaps Jacob had come here to wait for Carlita. A perfect little love nest. Maybe he was waiting in bed right now, with some candles and mineral oil and imported beer. She tried the knob. Locked.

  She walked around the house, pulling herself up by the ledge of the big mullioned windows on the first floor, digging the toes of her pumps into the siding. The dining room was empty except for an oval wooden table coated with dust. On that long-ago night, Warren Wells had sat there at the head, with Renee seated between him and Jacob. Beyond the table was a fireplace, with small figurines lined along the mantel, their order apparently unchanged since her first visit. She dropped back to the ground and continued around the house. The back door was open.

  “Jacob?”

  The doorway led into the kitchen, which was spacious but dark despite the sunny day. She tried the light switch. Nothing. As her eyes adjusted, she made out a metal card table near the refrigerator that was covered in pizza boxes, empty beer bottles, and opened tin cans of food. Under the table sat a white Styrofoam cooler. Someone had been staying here.

  She tried to count all those times Jacob had been out late, running errands or visiting a job site after hours. After he left the hospital, he’d disappeared for a few weeks. He’d claimed he’d been sleeping in the woods, but his memory had been damaged by the drinking. Maybe his fugue states were the ultimate cover story. After all, you couldn’t be caught in a lie if you didn’t remember where you had been. Or whom you were with.

  Maybe Jacob had taken up smoking again.

  She went through the hall to the stairs. The daylight was weaker here, the surrounding rooms walled off from the sun by thick drapes. The house smelled of must, stale smoke, and old cooking grease. Cigarette ash dotted some of the tin cans and butts lay scattered on the tiled floor. She paused and listened, wondering if Jacob had heard her arrival and was now hiding.

  Renee started up the steps. She watched where she placed her foot, careful not to make the wood creak. If Jacob were up to something, better to catch him in the act. She took two steps, and then grabbed the railing to distribute her weight more easily. Her hand touched something slick and moist.

  She pulled her hand back and put it near her face. Even in the bad light, there was no mistake.

  Blood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Dark.

  Where the Sock Monster lived.

  And all the other beasts, the hundreds of creatures that had once crawled from beneath the bed and clutched at him, digging into his flesh, pulling him to pieces.

  That’s what Jacob had told the first doctor, shortly after his mother died.

  No, not “died,” came the Sock Monster’s voice from an unseen corner of the closet. She was killed.

  The original diagnosis had been an identity disorder, attendant paranoia with an underlying persecution complex. But the doctor consulted with Warren Wells and agreed to change the diagnosis to “adjustment disorder,” a temporary failure in the coping mechanism. That way, Jacob could recover and go about his business of becoming a Wells.

  Two years later, on the lost Saturday, Warren Wells had found his son unconscious in the barn, surrounded by the headless corpses of two dozen guinea hens, a bloody hatchet by his side. That time, the doctor had suggested a borderline personality disorder with sociopathic tendencies. Warren Wells had trumped it with his own diagnosis: “Boys will be boys.”

  And that was the last doctor, until Rheinsfeldt.

  A couple of the trailers in the migrant camp had burned down the next year, but that was in the late winter, when most of the Mexicans had gone to the coast to work soybeans and cotton. The only family living in the camp had been Carlita’s, but she and Joshua had recently married and moved to Tennessee. Jacob slipped out of the big, frigid house that night, tired of the brooding air that surrounded his father after his “only son” had married outside his own ethnic group. Jacob had spent the evening with a stolen bottle of tequila, sipping in the shed and staring at the blank, black window of one of the trailers.

  The fire wasn’t his fault. It was like anger, or seeing red, something that burned so hot inside that it caught fire to things on the outside, too. A match that lit itself.

  Then off to college, where excessive drinking brought endless rounds of fugue states. Except those were easily explainable, and as far as Jacob knew, he never committed any violent acts during them. Sure, sometimes he’d wake up with blood in his mouth, or bits of broken glass in the creases of his clothes, but he’d never been arrested. Then he’d met Renee and the rage dissolved.

  But she didn’t know Joshua.

  The half of him that could be neither restored nor excised.

  In the dark, Joshua was always with him, whispering, taunting, tempting.

  Jacob had never been able to explain it to the doctors. Even shrinks like Rheinsfeldt were too smart for their own good, thumbing through their thick manuals looking for Latin words to describ
e him. If they had only listened, they would have known it wasn’t his words he spoke. He only said what Joshua would say.

  Carlita understood that part. Carlita was primal, carnal, an animal spirit. She saw that Jacob and Joshua were the same, and could love them both. Not even their mother and father could do that. Where everyone else tried to pull them apart, make them separate beings, Carlita accepted them the way they were.

  She was the only person Jacob could ever trust, the only person who seduced him into letting down his guard.

  And, like all mistakes of love, this one carried a deep price.

  Now, curled in the darkness, his nose in the dust and mildew, he knew he was foolish to ever think he could escape Joshua. Even if he killed his brother, the voice wouldn’t go away. Even if he paid him millions of dollars, and Joshua moved to Mexico, Jacob would still be wed to his twin. Joshua was part of him. Sometimes he even thought he was more Joshua than he was himself, because only Joshua would be afraid of the dark like this.

  Not Jacob.

  Because Jacob was brave, wasn’t he? Jacob took care of business. Jacob did the dirty work for both of them.

  Had he really hit Joshua, just before the closet door had slammed shut? He spread his fingers and moved them slowly across the floor. He touched the heavy eagle head of the cane. The hooked beak was slick and wet. He lifted the cane and smiled.

  You didn’t have to be afraid just because you were in the dark.

  When there were two of you, you were never alone.

  Right, Joshua?

  Footsteps.

  Coming up the stairs.

  Mother. You’ve had a terrible fall. Why don’t you lie down and rest?

  He giggled in the dark, the sound swallowed by the dead air of the closet. Your imagination could get the better of you if you weren’t careful. As Dad always said, “Dreams are for dreamers, but the rest of us have to live in the real world.”

  The footsteps came closer.

  It must be Joshua, that other one that lived outside his head, coming to taunt him some more. Or demand more money.