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 working 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.”
“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.”