Disintegration: A Mystery Thriller

by Scott Nicholson

  “They’ll sniff around and try to scare you, but in the end they’ll pay. And then you can pay me.”

  “I’ll pay. Just leave my wife out of it.”

  “Oh, Jakie Boy. The game don’t play that way. She’s in way too deep to be left out. She’s family.”

  “Damn it, we’re trying to make it work. I don’t want to lose her.”

  “You mean you can’t afford to lose her yet.”

  Jacob looked off the porch to the rise of hills, the meadow sloping away to the river, the long sandy drive, the distant bridge. “I’ve kept my part of the bargain,” Jacob said. “Now get your ass back to Tennessee.”

  “I kinda like it here now.”

  “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

  “Seeing Carlita got you fired up.”

  “You told her, didn’t you? About Mom?”

  “Family secrets stay in the family,” Joshua said. “Ain’t that what you always said?”

  “Does she know you poisoned your own dad?”

  “Why don’t you come on in, have a cold one? I’m drinking Corona today. A little taste of Mexico while Carlita’s away.”

  “Is she back in Tennessee?”

  “Hell if I know. She took the keys and left before I got up. You know how women are. You know how she is.”

  “You should keep her out of it.”

  “Oh, but she’s right smack between us, ain’t she?” Joshua jerked his head toward the inside of the house. “She ought to be in them family portraits, arms around you and me, Mom and Dad in the back row grinning like a couple of skulls.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Like a couple of skulls.”

  “I didn’t kill them.”

  “No. Dad was all me.”

  “You didn’t have to. The cancer had already reached his liver. He wouldn’t have lived more than six months.”

  “I wasn’t going to let the bastard cheat me out of the fun.”

  “I didn’t know he’d changed the will.”

  “Sure.” Joshua pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, stabbed it between his chapped lips, and mopped the sweat from his greasy forehead with the back of his hand. “We thought it was fifty-fifty. But he played us to the end, just like he did our whole lives.”

  “Once in a while I’d catch him looking at that broken cane, at the splinters in the wood. Like he knew.”

  “No damned wonder,” Joshua said around the cigarette. “The only reason he didn’t kill her is you beat him to it.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Cut the shit, Jake. It’s in your blood. It’s what we do.” He fired the cigarette, holding the Bic aloft, the flame’s reflection bobbing in each of his dark pupils. He rattled the shrinking ice cubes in his jar of tea, the noise like bones shaken in a glass coffin. The lighter disappeared into his pocket, easy to retrieve in case arson was required.

  And it often was, Jacob knew. “Nobody would believe you if you told them.”

  “Does it matter? A small town like this, the newspaper would be on it like green flies on sugar shit. They’d drag you through the mud until you were so dirty it wouldn’t matter what the truth was. It’s not every day that a boy kills his Momma. Then they’d start connecting the dots on the other stuff.”

  “You’d go to jail, too.”

  Joshua inhaled the tobacco as if it were his last gasp of oxygen, then pushed it out of his lungs. “I got nothing to lose. Ain’t no prison worse than waking up pissed off and poor every day. Besides, I didn’t leave no evidence. Dad was eating those pills anyway. A little digitalis and cyanide wasn’t nothing.”

  Warren Wells’ friends had heaped sympathy on the twins. People like Rayburn Jones and the family attorney, Herbert Isaacs, talked about how the sons had been so noble, coming back to the farm to help their ailing father get out a final tree crop. The funeral was held at Three Springs Baptist Church, where Warren Wells had served as a deacon in his middle age, before his fervor shifted toward hoarding treasures of the Earth rather than of the spirit. During the memorial service, Joshua had disguised his giggles as sobs. Jacob felt no emotion at all.

  The day after the burial in the family cemetery, Herbert Isaacs gathered the family in the study of the Wells house and read them the will. That’s when Joshua learned he’d received the property instead of the running money he’d yearned for. Jacob received a lion’s share of the eight million dollars in other assets, some real estate holdings, and various stocks and bonds, while five more distant relatives had each received title to business properties in downtown Kingsboro. Warren Wells’ final laugh had been to place a covenant on Joshua’s bequest that prevented him from selling it, and the taxes on the hundred-and-forty-acre estate all but assured that Joshua would have to keep a job to pay them. Otherwise, the county could put a lien on the property and leave Joshua with nothing but an unprofitable patricide.

  In that one desperate act, Joshua had failed to live up to a family legacy that required all dark deeds to pay dividends.

  “Can’t sell it, and you can’t make a nickel on farming. Even the Christmas trees have gone to hell, nobody set out seedlings and the rest got too big and scruffy for market.”

  “A million can last a long time in Tennessee, though.”

  Joshua grinned, showing his uneven, opossum’s teeth. “Like I said, Kingsboro ain’t so bad if you got money.”

  “Get out of my town.”

  “Now, now, Jacob. We’re just now getting used to each other. Kind of brings back the early days, when we were two of a kind.”

  “We were opposites.”

  Transverse twins, their doctor had called them. Developing in the womb face-to-face, mirror images of each other. Joshua born left-handed, with his heart shifted to the right side of his chest, and in the mysterious properties of the brain’s hemispheres, more prone to mechanical and mathematical skills yet lacking a deep emotional pool. Jacob had been the left-brained one, the sensitive and reclusive child, easily dominated. Desperate for his parents’ love but always failing to win it, while Joshua had extracted it from them like a butcher taking hearts in a slaughterhouse.

  “We’re alike,” Joshua said, then added with an ugly wink, “We want the same things.”

  “You’re wrong. I’ve changed.”

  “I saw how you looked at Carlita. She’s put in a few hard years, but she’s still a saucy little taco, ain’t she?”

  “I’m done. Like I said, I’m going to work it out with Renee. After all the hard times, I owe it to her.”

  “Sure.” Joshua flipped his spent cigarette into the grass at the fringe of the porch, and a thin thread of its smoke curled to the sky. “Come on in, sit a spell. Act like folks.”

  Jacob stared at the dying, orange end of the cigarette. If Jacob burned down the house that Wells built, then Joshua would have to go home. Not this home, but to his real home, a dirty trailer across the state line, where Confederate flags flew from ATV’s and waffle houses and pawn shops filled what passed for a business district.

  “You deserve this place,” Jacob heard himself saying, though in his mind, yellow fingers of flames groped their way up the wooden walls, clutched at the eaves and fascia, scratched the shingles.

  Joshua grunted. “I’ll bet you got to shitbag shyster Isaacs when you found out Dad had cancer, played him like a fiddle. Got him to change the will while I was poisoning the old rat. I wonder how much he bagged out of the deal.”

  “You were Dad’s favorite, remember?”

  “Only when he couldn’t tell us apart.”

  Jacob took another look at the barn, remembering the bloody carnage of Joshua’s chicken-slaughtering spree. Forensic psychologists said many serial killers served their internship by practicing on animals. According to the profile, many were also late bed wetters. But Jacob, not Joshua, was the one who had awakened to damp sheets at the age of seven, who sneaked out of bed and bundled up the offending linen before his twin brother woke across the room. He was never
clever enough, because Mother wouldn’t let anyone else do laundry. And she always took glee in hanging his yellowed sheets out on the line, knowing the farmhands and their father would see them.

  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 wor
king 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 inside 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.”