“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 curtains 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.