Disintegration (6 page)

"I found it in my car. I guess you figured it wouldn't burn since I was parked on the street that night."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"It's your handwriting, Jake. Don't play any more games. Please." A solitary tear slid from beneath the black curve of one plastic lens.

"I still don't know what you're talking about."

"The fire, Jake. The investigators think it might have been arson."

"I know. They talked to me about it last week. I told them I don't know why anybody would want to set fire to our house. There's nothing special about it. It's not even the best one on the block."

"But this note--" Her voice broke and all she could do was hold the beige paper in the air before her face.

"--is nothing," Jake said, his pulse like a frantic clock ticking against his eardrums, a timer for an explosion. "Throw it away."

"It's your handwriting. And the insurance--"

"Don't talk crazy, honey."

"I'm just confused. None of it makes sense. And Mattie...
Oh, Jake
." She squeezed the paper into a ball, stood so fast that her purse fell and scattered its contents across the antiseptic floor. She leaned over him and put her head gently on his chest.

He reached out a wounded hand and stroked her hair. "Shh. It's going to be okay. I promise."

"Please don't let it end like this," she said, her sobs making the narrow hospital bed shake.

"Everything's going to be good as new," he said, his heart jumping so much he was sure she could feel it through the thin cotton of his hospital gown. "Trust me. I'm not going to let anyone take you away from me."

Especially Joshua. No, he wouldn't let Joshua win this time. Not again. Not like always.

As he spoke soothing words and petted her with one hand, his other hand eased across her body to the paper in her fist. He tugged gently and she let go. He glanced at it, saw the cursive letters leaning to the left. Familiar handwriting. He tucked the paper underneath his sheet, secretly, and let her finish crying.

J
acob Wells was released from the hospital on May twenty-ninth.

Steve Poccora wheeled him from his room to the elevator on the day of his release. Jacob insisted he was fine, but Poccora said it was hospital policy to treat everybody like infirms until they reached the door.

"After that, it's your business," Poccora said. "Trip and break your leg, for all I care. But we can't have you suing us for something that happens on the inside."

Jacob couldn't tell if the nurse was joking. So he sat in the wheelchair and watched the elevator lights blink as they passed each floor down to ground level. The elevator opened and a man Jacob recognized from the Chamber of Commerce stepped on with a bouquet of pink roses, tulips, and Queen Anne's lace. Jacob couldn't recall the man's name, though he had the thick neck and jowly, red complexion of a former football player. Probably someone in masonry supplies.

"Jacob," the man said, flashing his money smile. "How's it going? You doing okay?"

"Never been better."

The smile faded. "Listen, sorry to hear about... you know."

"Don't mention it."

"I've been praying for you."

"That helps. Thanks."

The man pointed to the flowers. "For my wife. She's in maternity. We just had our third."

Jacob nodded, staring past him at the hospital lobby, the wax sheen of the industrial tiles, the patient information desk staffed by an old lady with pince-nez glasses. Poccora wheeled him out of the elevator and the doors closed with a soft hiss, cutting off the smell of the flowers.

"Dawson," Jacob said.

"Huh?" Poccora said.

"The man's name was Dawson. You ever do that, draw a blank when you're talking to somebody, then it pops right into your head later?"

"No, man. I think you've been in here too long."

They reached the glass entrance and Poccora stopped the wheelchair. Jacob sat looking at the world outside, a changed world, a lesser world.

"End of the ride," Poccora said.

"Yeah," Jacob said.

"Your wife picking you up?"

"Yeah. She's right outside. I phoned her from the room."

"Good. You two ought to work things out. Take care of each other. Maybe you can have another kid someday."

Jacob stood. Though he had been walking the halls for the last few days, his legs were cotton candy. He waved to Poccora and went through the exit, wondering how much of himself he'd left in the hospital. The outdoors was welcome after the stale, recycled indoor air, but it somehow left an aftertaste of smoke on his tongue.

The mountains were thick and bright green with new growth and a late spring rain had washed the dust from the streets. Kingsboro had only two cab companies, each of those operated by solitary drivers who kept their own hours. Jacob could have called Donald, or any one of half a dozen friends and business associates, but the walk seemed a worthwhile challenge after the weeks spent in the hospital bed. Besides, a borrowed ride might corner him into conversation.

The talk would go to banal matters such as whether the Atlanta Braves would finally do it this year or how the late snows had affected the golf course at the country club. Anything except what Renee had called "the eighty-ton elephant in the living room." Jacob's loss. Or plural
losses
, depending on how deep into personal history the friend was willing to go. He never wanted to hear the words "I'm sorry" again.

The burns had healed better than he deserved. The skin was still a little shiny and tight, but with no permanent scarring. Dr. Masutu said he was lucky. If the house hadn't collapsed and spat him out when it did, the carbon monoxide might have finished him off. The doctor had tried to convince him that his daughter had been doomed no matter what Jacob had done, but Jacob didn't believe it.

He'd originally considered going by the office, sitting behind his desk and seeing if M & W Ventures still held any appeal at all. But there were too many reminders, too many photographs. His desk was just another piece of a broken past. He headed down the sidewalk, away from downtown. He had no more destinations, only a long journey away from places he had known.

On the eastern side of town, Kingsboro was a schizophrenic mix of land uses. Medical offices were clustered around the hospital like brick vultures around carrion, while some old farmhouses sat back from the road behind them, their gardens showing the first green shoots of corn and potatoes. A nearby gas station had pumps that didn't accept credit cards and its lot was a black crumble of concrete, yet a glossy sign heralded the modern British energy conglomerate that had taken over. A row of faded apartments slewed up a slight rise of earth beyond the hospital, some of the windows held together with masking tape. Soaring above those flat rooftops was a glistening, seven-story Holiday Inn.

His father had built the Holiday Inn. It was Warren Wells' last attempt at an Appalachian Tower of Babel before his death. Jacob averted his eyes from the inn, the tallest building on the landscape. But his father touched something on every horizon, from the community arts center along the highway to the recreation fields in the plains along the river that bore the Wells name. Warren Wells had built too much of this town, his civic stench lingering in a hundred corridors. Jacob had succumbed to the allure of following in those loud footsteps.

Being born here was enough of a mistake, and being born who he was made it even worse. But he'd compounded it by returning. He had once thought his escape was complete. Then along came Renee with her drive for him to succeed, and she pushed him to the only territory where victories mattered, where his accomplishments had a measuring stick. Victory from the ground up.

Now Kingsboro was where he buried his dead.

After a mile, the sidewalk ended and he walked along the clumped grass that edged the road. His breath was hard and cold and his heart beat too rapidly, but he forced his feet forward. Cars roared past, pickup trucks loaded with lumber and sewer pipes, soccer dads in SUV's, little old ladies on their way to the hairdresser, cable television techs in their long vans. Something purred in Jacob's jacket pocket. He stuck his hand in the pocket, pulled out the cell phone, and stared at it as if it were an alien artifact. Renee must have brought the jacket to the hospital, the phone planted as a ploy to bring him back around to his old self.

Jacob the developer, the builder, the one who carried the bloodline. Jacob the upstanding citizen and loving husband. Jacob, father of two--

He turned and hurled the phone as far as he could, wrenching his shoulder with the effort. The small, silver rectangle spun end over end, disappearing into a tall thicket of briars and scrub hemlock. A warped wall made of wooden slats marked the edge of a mobile home park behind the weeds. A hand-painted sign in English and Spanish offered weekly rentals, cash only. Crumpled beer cans and cellophane food wrappers clung to the weeds. This place was in dire need of a bulldozer, a cosmic clean sweep.

He walked on, the traffic thinning, his head throbbing under the midmorning sun. The birds had started their journey north, and species the likes of which he'd rarely seen passed overhead or twittered from pine branches. The land gave way to clusters of small houses, old but neatly kept, owned by people whose ancestors had bartered away the property that had made outsiders wealthy. Jacob was tired and his legs weak from lack of use, but he kept moving in a pitiful yearning for escape.

But he knew that, no matter how fast or how far he fled, he couldn't outrun himself.

A car came growling up behind him, slowed, passed. He glanced at its dented green flanks and immediately assigned its driver to the lower class. It was a 1970s family car, a gas-swigging chunk of Chevrolet steel that only a rural American could drive without shame. The windows were tinted so he couldn't match a face to such a metal monstrosity.

The car slowed again, its brake lights blinking twenty feet ahead of Jacob. The car idled in a throaty rasp of rusted muffler. Jacob kept walking. He moved past the car, looking up the road, wondering where all the traffic had gone. Even along this residential stretch beyond the town limits, there were too few roads to avoid a steady stream of vehicles.

The Chevy's engine accelerated and its exhaust hung on the damp air. The car eased up alongside Jacob again, and sweat crept beneath his eyes and scalp line. He glanced toward the car, not turning his head, and saw only his own reflection in the tinted passenger window. The car kept pace with Jacob, and he fought the urge to break into a run.

Maybe this was a robbery set-up. The crime rate was low in Kingsboro, but people were people everywhere and occasionally someone grew desperate. Jacob was dressed in a tailor-cut suit, not the kind of person usually seen on the side of a road. He was out of his element, in a place he didn't belong, pale and trembling due to his long recovery. The predators of every species had a knack for culling the weak, picking out the perfect victims.

He walked faster, eyes shifting over to the Chevy. Its engine was the only sound in that tight stretch of valley. Even the birds had vanished. The road curved out of sight in both directions, behind hills turning green with spring. The trailer park was around the bend in its own clutter. One lone farmhouse was visible in a carved pocket of the woods, but it appeared uninhabited, shutters drawn and driveway empty, the doors of its adjacent barn bolted and locked. A hand-painted "For Sale" sign was staked in the scraggly yard.

The car scooted ahead, then paused and idled until he caught up to it.

If only he had the cell phone. Even if he called for help, though, what would he tell the police? He was being stalked by a car? They couldn't arrive in time to help him anyway. He could leave the side of the road, cut over the ditch, and head between the trees. But the car had issued no overt threat, the driver holding a steady course, not veering from between the lines. The only menace was in its slow crawl, though its motor grumbled in an imagined hunger.

A robber, that's all. Nothing worse.

Jacob increased his pace to just short of a jog. Still the car remained alongside him. He didn't have a watch, but the car must have followed him for at least thirty seconds. Surely another car would have come by during that time. It was as if the road had been blocked off at each end of the mountain valley so this showdown could be staged in private.

His lungs were taut and aching, his legs about to collapse and fold. He was too out of shape. Even if he ran, the driver would have no trouble chasing him down. Fighting was out of the question. How do you fight four tons of blind steel?

You know it's him
.

Maybe someone was only trying to scare him. Some of his business competitors accused him of dirty tricks, such as planting money among members of the county planning board whenever he had a variance request coming up. He'd had disputes with a few contractors, and a couple of times he had refused to pay when work wasn't done to specifications. He had an inside track on property that had been foreclosed through mortgage defaults or tax liens, and his deals had put more than one family out on the street, though they always had it coming. Was it his fault that some people didn't pay their bills on time?

Just being a Wells was plenty enough reason to be a target. These mountain people had long memories, and Warren Wells had shafted a dozen men. In some cases, he'd also shafted their wives, in a crueler but less economically damaging way. Jacob had inherited miles of built-up resentment along with the numerous tracts of commercial property.

The driver of the green car could be anybody. Someone he knew in high school? Or someone who knew Joshua? Some people still confused him with his brother, and Joshua had made plenty of enemies. Joshua, though, had been smart enough to leave town and never look back.

It's anybody. Not him
.

Jacob's legs refused his command for them to move faster, and he could hardly muster the energy for another step. So he stopped, bent over slightly to catch his breath, and turned to the passenger side of the car. He reached out as if to open the door.