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.”
“You’ve got it wrong.” Renee remembered what Carlita had told her about Jacob’s mysterious twin. Desperation gripped her guts. “Joshua—he did all those bad things and blamed them on Jacob. I know Jacob. He’s honest and kind.”
“The evil twin did it, huh?” Davidson didn’t appear as if she relished her sardonic joke. “Are you trying to sell your story to the ‘Lifetime Channel’ or something?”
“Jacob didn’t start the fire at our house. I was there, remember?”
“Nothing personal, Mrs. Wells, but I don’t believe you. Either of you. And when I take another look at these four fires, I’m going to find something. Then it will be the police knocking on your door, not me.”
A well of spite rose in Renee. “Fine. At least I won’t have to smell your sweat anymore.”
At the end of the hall, the door to Donald Meekins’ office opened. A redheaded woman with freckles came out, straightening her natural-fiber blouse. Renee recognized her as one of the company’s tenants, a massage therapist who rented an office downtown. Donald followed her, his laughter ceasing when he saw Renee with a woman in a uniform.
The redhead raised her eyebrows, but Donald said, “Come back next week and we’ll work out that lease extension, Miss Adamson. Just call Renee to set up the appointment.”
“Thank you, sir,” Miss Adamson said, fortunate to have made her living in alternative health rather than acting. “I look forward to doing business with you.”
Donald reached up to adjust his tie then must have realized how that would look. “Yes. Thank you. Well, see you next week.”
Miss Adamson smiled on her way past Renee to the exit, wobbling like a foal on her four-inch heels. After she was gone, Donald asked Davidson, “Can I help you?”
“I just needed to fill out some forms to do fire inspections at some of your apartments. Mrs. Wells here helped me out.”
Donald squinted at her brass nameplate and nodded in his haste to duck back inside his office. “Well, after all the fires we’ve been having, I guess that’s a good thing.”
“Stop, drop, and roll and all that,” Davidson said. “I’d better get back to my truck. Somebody might be trying to steal a fire hydrant.”
“Okay, thank you,” he said, overusing the phrase, grateful for everything today. Miss Adamson had a rare talent for emotional healing, it seemed. Donald went into his office and closed the door.
“He thinks Jacob has had a run of bad luck,” Renee said.
“Sometimes people make their luck,” Davidson said. She slipped the baggie with the note into her pocket.
“You should check that for Joshua’s fingerprints,” Renee said. “Or do identical twins have the same fingerprints?”
“No, their fingerprints are different. It’s the DNA that’s the same.”
“It wasn’t Jacob.”
“You seem like a nice woman. You just married the wrong man, that’s all. I wish I didn’t have to nail you.”
Davidson left without a backward glance. Renee sat at her desk and picked up the phone and tried Jacob’s cell number. The signal was too weak.
She remembered showing Jacob the note while he was in the hospital, but she thought it was still in her purse. Maybe she’d dropped it when she went back to the ruins, the night she’d found the mirror. The night she’d followed the stranger into the woods. She should have burned it.
At least now she knew who the stranger was. The arsonist.
Joshua.
A man she’d never met, but one who must harbor as much hatred for her as he did his twin brother. Enough hatred to want to kill them both. But only Mattie had paid.
But why? If he wanted revenge, why had he waited so many years? What did he have against Jacob? There was a German word “Doppelganger,” which meant a spiritual double. If Jacob’s dissociative disorder was genetic, then maybe Joshua suffered delusions, too.
Unless Carlita was telling the truth, and Jacob was really in love with her. That would make Joshua jealous, wouldn’t it? The brothers had been competitive, and Joshua had always come up short.
She couldn’t make that final leap. She knew Jacob. They were closer than twins could ever be. They had survived two major tragedies together, they had pulled each other back from the mortgage of despair. They were developing themselves, building a new and brighter future on the ashes of the past. Two Wells were better than one.
Renee sat at her desk and tried to concentrate on her work, running a database of water bills. The numbers on the computer screen fuzzed before her eyes. The clock moved in a slow crawl, but Jacob didn’t walk through the door. She tried the phone again.
He answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Jake! Where are you?”
“Where the door swings both ways.”
“No, Jake, don’t play games. We need to—”
“Finish it. Good-bye.”
She pushed herself away from the desk and went out, not bothering to tell Donald she was leaving. She would find Jacob and confront him about Carlita. Jacob might be an arsonist and an insurance fraud but he wasn’t a cheater. But if he’d gone home again, the place he despised, then Joshua’s blackmail must have taken a darker turn.
Though she hadn’t traveled that end of the county much, she was familiar with the two-lane highway that ran west along the river. Beyond the valley of Kingsboro, the road was twisty and the houses more sparse across the slopes. The forests were lush with pine, oak, and hickory. Much of the bottomland along the river held rows of yellowing tobacco or corn, and cattle grazed while serving out their sentences in idyllic, barbed-wire death camps.
The bridge came into view, and she recognized its wooden rails that peeled gray paint. Beneath that bridge, according to Carlita, Jacob had spied on his brother making love. Except Carlita didn’t regard Joshua’s affections as love. She spoke of it as a mutual addiction, a degrading need, a bond of desperation. Apparently only Jacob was capable of loving Carlita, in whatever form the woman imagined it. An image flashed through her mind of Jacob on top of Carlita, his pale sweating skin against her muscular dark body, her thighs straddling his hips, their limbs tangled in profane passion.
The Wells house stood on the hill, as stark as she remembered it, and through the trees she saw Jacob’s new pickup. But the rusty green Chevrolet wasn’t there. Jacob was alone in the house.
She slowed as she crossed the bridge, her hands so tight on the steering wheel that her knuckles were white. She looked over the rail at the water racing below, the currents sweeping around boulders and spilling over little falls, fueled by a hundred springs that welled from the mountains beyond. Jacob had told her a story once about a sailboat he’d had as a child, and how it had been smashed in the river. She wondered if Joshua had received a sailboat just like it, since twins often got the same presents.