Disintegration: A Mystery Thriller Read online

  For the first time, Jacob saw the beauty of the broken glass that sparkled in the dying sun. The ragweed that grew in clumps along the leaning chain-link fence had outlasted the concrete. The stinking brown creek, marred by oil runoff, carried away the dregs of growth. Here and there between the buildings, a honey locust made a reach for the sky, bristling with thorns and defiance.

  Smalley shifted gears and turned up the hill onto a private drive. A wooden sign with a fieldstone base heralded “Ivy Terrace.” The sign was landscaped, ringed with pine straw and non-native pansies. Nestled among the hardwood trees on the ridge were the apartments that Jacob had helped develop. More of his false ego, a mock testament to the ephemeral nature of ambition.

  And behind one of those doors was Renee. Another mock testament.

  “Stop,” Jacob said.

  Smalley glanced at him and eased in the clutch. When the truck slowed, Jacob pushed open the passenger door and eased to the ground. He reached in and pulled the bottle of liquor from its hiding place.

  “A small blessing,” Jacob said.

  “Don’t blame you none. Give me a holler if you got any work for me.”

  “I’ll do that, Chick.”

  “I’ll be praying for you.”

  “It can’t hurt none.”

  Nothing could hurt, not anymore. Smalley turned the truck around and headed back toward town. Jacob tucked the bottle inside his coat and headed for the shrubs that had been part of a landscaping scheme he had once designed, never realizing until now the type of concealment it provided. He found a gap in the rhododendrons and crawled among the twisted branches. The space had been used before. Empty beer bottles, a condom wrapper, a mottled, crushed French fries container, and a sprinkling of cigarette butts marked it as the territory of the transient. Jacob instantly felt at home.

  He twisted the metal cap from the liquor bottle and toasted the distant sky, which was barely visible through the thick, waxy leaves. “To our mutual suffering,” he said.

  The first taste was harsh and welcoming. The second was merely welcoming.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Renee cradled the phone against her ear. She’d chipped her fingernail polish opening a can of Tab. Sitting in an apartment she wasn’t paying for, talking of money, made her lightheaded. Despite the wealth Jacob had accumulated early in their marriage, this money seemed unreal, almost sickening. “It’s two million dollars, Kim.”

  “Holy crud,” came her best friend’s voice from the speaker. Kim worked as a technician at the hospital, testing blood samples. The sound of hospital business occasionally came through in the background, doctors being paged, carts rattling by, the ringing of nurses’ bells.

  “That doesn’t make up for it. Not a bit.”

  “I know, honey. We’ve been through that. You don’t have any more tears left to cry.”

  “I was the beneficiary. Jacob set it up that way. After Christine died, he insured the three of us for a million dollars each. Said that’s how his father always did it.”

  “And you let him?”

  “Well, it’s the kind of thing you don’t think about much. You can’t let it weigh on you, that tragedy might strike again. I figured we’d used up more than our share with Christine.”

  “I know you guys are movers and shakers, but a million is a million, even with inflation. What are you guys going to do with the money?”

  “That’s just it. He’s hiding from all this.”

  “Forget about him for a minute. What do you want?”

  Renee looked at the urn on the mantel. She didn’t want the ashes around as a constant reminder of The Tragedy. She carried around enough reminders inside her.

  She’d hoped Jacob would pull himself together and get through his grieving process, decide with her what they should do with the ashes. It had been over two months and he still refused to have any contact with her. “I want Jake to be happy. That’s all that’s left for me, Kim.”

  “Your parents gone?”

  “Yeah, they left last week. Dad’s not doing too well. Said now he didn’t have any grandchildren to spoil. Mom helped, but I can’t talk to her about the heavy stuff.”

  “Well, I’m here whenever you need me.”

  Renee’s throat caught and the tears welled up without warning. She stuck a finger behind her glasses and brushed at her eyelashes. “I can’t do this much longer. I want Jake.”

  “Didn’t he get weird after Christine?”

  Renee’s chest clenched around her heart. “Yeah. He went AWOL, but I was so focused on Mattie that I hardly noticed.”

  “He’ll work it out in time. He’ll see how much he needs you. You know what I’ve always said about men.”

  Renee barked a half-sob, half-laugh. “‘They can’t see the light because their heads are up their butts.’”

  “In the meantime, you need to invest that money. What’s done is done but you still have to live.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s what Mattie would want.”

  “Sure.”

  “And, if worse comes to worse, you can always ditch Jacob and move in with me.”

  “You’re not my type. You’re too emotionally stable and your place is too messy.”

  “Yeah, that’s always been my problem.”

  A shadow broke the sunlight that slanted through the curtains. Someone was outside her door. Her apartment, like all the others at Ivy Terrace, had a private entrance. The top stories were accessed by a shared set of stairs, but each had its own deck. She waited for a knock but none came. It must have been an errant courier.

  “I’d better be getting back to work,” Kim said, tugging Renee back to the phone.

  “Things crazy at the lab?”

  “You know how blood is. People just can’t seem to live without it.”

  “Okay, thanks for letting me whine.”

  “Renee?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I hate to say this, but you made a million the hard way.”

  “I’d pay a hundred times that to have Mattie back.”

  “I know. It just seems a little strange, that’s all. Like a silver lining in a black-as-hell cloud.”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t want to start crying again. “Oh, there was one thing I wanted to ask you, since you’ve been here awhile. Do you know anything about Joshua Wells?”

  “Jacob’s brother? I’ve only been here a few years longer than you. I heard some stories, but apparently he left town years ago.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “The usual, troubled-rich-kid stuff. Vandalism, shoplifting, drugs, soliciting hookers. What, Jacob never told you?”

  “I guess he was ashamed. He’s always going on about living up to the Wells name.”

  “Get that man some help. Get both of you some help. Now I’ve really got to run. I have some Type O that’s just crying out to be HIV-negative.”

  “Bye, Kim.” She hung up and looked at the window again.

  The shadow was back. The deck planking squeaked with footsteps. She wondered if Davidson was snooping around. She was about to go to the door when the phone rang.

  She looked from the door to the phone. Ivy Terrace was upscale, safe. And she had locked the door. She always locked the door. It was Jake who was careless about such things, like leaving the sliding glass door open on the night of the fire—

  She picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  The line hissed with empty electronics. Four seconds passed.

  “Kim?” she said.

  “It’s me.”

  “Jake! I’ve been worried sick. Where are you?”

  “The place I said I’d never go.”

  “What? You sound terrible. Do you have a cold?”

  “I got another present for you.”

  “I don’t want a present. I want you to talk to me.”

  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.