But Jacob would be ready this time.
He gripped the cane.
Kill him then burn the house down.
Closer footsteps.
Then her voice. “Jacob?”
His stomach clenched.
Her. Did she know?
He’d kept Joshua a secret because she wouldn’t understand. They never did.
And he had sacrificed everything for her, hadn’t he? Moved back to Kingsboro, took over the Wells holdings, tried to build up some momentum in a tough market. All so she could say she had made him successful. Gave her children so she would find the ultimate female fulfillment, the most obvious and unbreakable sign of commitment.
But even those commitments could be broken.
He loved her, and when you loved somebody, you owed them everything.
Carlita understood that, but Renee never would.
“Jacob?” She was across the room now, probably near the window. Or the bed.
He raised himself onto his hands and knees. He heard the swick of fabric as she parted the curtains, and a sword of light appeared at the base of the closet door. How long had he been here? Days?
No. The blood would have dried. He hadn’t forgotten anything. This wasn’t a fugue state.
He was…confused, that was all.
That silly Joshua stuff was the kind of thing a scared kid would dream up. He was a grown man, his own man. He called softly through the door. “Carlita?”
The sword of light was broken by her shadow. “Jacob? Are you in there? Are you okay?”
“Yes. Joshua locked me in here. Let me out.”
“There’s blood everywhere.”
How many times had he hit Joshua? He couldn’t remember. Obviously not enough, or Joshua’s body would be lying in the room.
The door handle turned then the door rattled in its frame. “It’s locked.”
Jacob stood the cane in the corner. No need for her to see it, or the blood that spattered the eagle head of the handle. She wouldn’t understand. They never did.
He raised himself on his knees and fumbled for the eye-hook he’d installed as a teenager, so he’d have a place to hide from his family when the barn was too cold. Nobody ever expected a closet to be locked from the inside. Joshua had found out, though, and had installed a latch on the outside, too.
“The door swings both ways,” Joshua had said. “You can lock me out, but I can also lock you in.”
Jacob pushed the metal latch up and it fell against wood. As the door opened and the sudden daylight blinded him, he stared up at the figure before him. Blinking, he said, “I did it for you.”
“What, Jake? What did you do?”
Not her. It was the other one.
Renee.
Blood dotted the floor like the footprints of a rabid animal. The sunlight made crazy rainbow diamonds on the window glass. The sky was a mirror, the sky was a mirror, the sky was a mirror.
“I did it for us,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“What’s going on, Jake?” Renee asked, patting Jacob’s shoulder. Her husband was wild-eyed and pale, on his knees, clothes wrinkled. Why had he locked himself in the closet?
“It’s Joshua,” Jacob said. “He’s the one who burned the house down. He’s the one who killed Mattie.”
She tried to comprehend the words but couldn’t. Mattie died in an accident. Even Davidson had said so. If you repeated the story often enough, it became true.
She looked around the room, saw the twin beds, their blankets tangled. One of the sheets was stained with rust-brown circles.
She drew back, but he reached and grabbed her hands and looked up at her, a bizarre mockery of the moment when he’d asked for her hand in marriage. “He took the insurance money,” Jacob said. “He said Dad cheated him out of his inheritance.”
“Jacob, we’d better get you to a doctor.”
“We have to find him, or he’ll tell.”
The trail of blood spots that led out of the room and downstairs. Jacob didn’t appear to be wounded. “No. We can call the police on your cell phone. If your brother’s hurt, we can get help for him.”
Lord, Jakie, what did you do to him? Are you so obsessed with Carlita that you’ll assault your own brother?
She needed time to figure things out. If Jacob was in trouble, they’d get through it together, just like they always had. She pulled Jacob to his feet.
“Come on,” she said. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” He looked past her through the window, and she turned to see the afternoon sun bathing the family cemetery and the barn beyond that. “The camp. That’s where he went.”
“Did you hurt him?”
“We should call the police.”
“No police. We’ll take care of it ourselves, the way we always have.” She took his hand and led him into the hallway, listening for footsteps. If Joshua was in the house, he would have heard her calling. Unless he was unconscious. Or dead.
Her hand went cold at the thought that she might be touching a murderer.
No. This was no murderer. This was her husband.
Wasn’t it? Because this was the real world and Jacob loved only her. Sure, they’d had their tragedies, but everyone did. It came with the territory of breathing. Things would make sense once they got away from this place. She wondered if Joshua had insured the Wells home and how briskly it might burn with all that woodwork.
As they descended the stairs, Jacob said, “He would have killed her.”
“Killed who?”
“Mother. That’s just the way he is.”
“She died in an accident, Jacob,” she said, then realized this was where it happened. She had slipped on the stairs and tumbled down, her brittle bones clattering against the railing. A broken neck. Nobody’s fault.
“Yeah,” Jacob said, though his eyes gazed down the flight of stairs as if the body were still sprawled there. “That’s just what Joshua said. An accident.”
When they reached the landing, she told Jacob to wait for her in the truck.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to look for Joshua.”
“I told you, he’s gone to the camp.”
“I know, honey. But you’re confused right now.”
It’s for his own good. He’s safer that way. And it’s my job to protect him. For the family.
She waited for Jacob to pass through the kitchen and into the sunshine. After he was around the corner, she closed and latched the door, then entered the living room. Books were askew on the shelves, some of them lying open and face down on the floor. Figurines, many of them now reduced to shards of plaster and ceramic, were scattered across the stone hearth. A beer bottle lay on its side by one of the chairs, a pool of dried amber surrounding it. The fireplace contained layers of fine black ash, as if someone had burned stacks of paper. Jacob’s cell phone was a melted pile of slag in the center.
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 cu
rtains 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.”
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 wa
s 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.
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