The house was quiet as she parked. No one came out on the porch. Up close, the house had a shabby look, as if it hadn’t been tended, with dusty windows and a few siding boards buckled out. The old barn stood on a nearby rise of meadow, and blue-gray hens worried the grass in the structure’s shade. Jacob had tried to take her inside the barn during their engagement visit, but the thought of dust, manure, and vermin had repelled her. She shivered as she recalled Jacob’s story of the animal torture.
Renee knocked. “Jacob?”
Maybe Joshua had never been here, and the blackmail had been a ruse. Perhaps Jacob had come here to wait for Carlita. A perfect little love nest. Maybe he was waiting in bed right now, with some candles and mineral oil and imported beer. She tried the knob. Locked.
She walked around the house, pulling herself up by the ledge of the big mullioned windows on the first floor, digging the toes of her pumps into the siding. The dining room was empty except for an oval wooden table coated with dust. On that long-ago night, Warren Wells had sat there at the head, with Renee seated between him and Jacob. Beyond the table was a fireplace, with small figurines lined along the mantel, their order apparently unchanged since her first visit. She dropped back to the ground and continued around the house. The back door was open.
“Jacob?”
The doorway led into the kitchen, which was spacious but dark despite the sunny day. She tried the light switch. Nothing. As her eyes adjusted, she made out a metal card table near the refrigerator that was covered in pizza boxes, empty beer bottles, and opened tin cans of food. Under the table sat a white Styrofoam cooler. Someone had been staying here.
She tried to count all those times Jacob had been out late, running errands or visiting a job site after hours. After he left the hospital, he’d disappeared for a few weeks. He’d claimed he’d been sleeping in the woods, but his memory had been damaged by the drinking. Maybe his fugue states were the ultimate cover story. After all, you couldn’t be caught in a lie if you didn’t remember where you had been. Or whom you were with.
Maybe Jacob had taken up smoking again.
She went through the hall to the stairs. The daylight was weaker here, the surrounding rooms walled off from the sun by thick drapes. The house smelled of must, stale smoke, and old cooking grease. Cigarette ash dotted some of the tin cans and butts lay scattered on the tiled floor. She paused and listened, wondering if Jacob had heard her arrival and was now hiding.
Renee started up the steps. She watched where she placed her foot, careful not to make the wood creak. If Jacob were up to something, better to catch him in the act. She took two steps, and then grabbed the railing to distribute her weight more easily. Her hand touched something slick and moist.
She pulled her hand back and put it near her face. Even in the bad light, there was no mistake.
Blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dark.
Where the Sock Monster lived.
And all the other beasts, the hundreds of creatures that had once crawled from beneath the bed and clutched at him, digging into his flesh, pulling him to pieces.
That’s what Jacob had told the first doctor, shortly after his mother died.
No, not “died,” came the Sock Monster’s voice from an unseen corner of the closet. She was killed.
The original diagnosis had been an identity disorder, attendant paranoia with an underlying persecution complex. But the doctor consulted with Warren Wells and agreed to change the diagnosis to “adjustment disorder,” a temporary failure in the coping mechanism. That way, Jacob could recover and go about his business of becoming a Wells.
Two years later, on the lost Saturday, Warren Wells had found his son unconscious in the barn, surrounded by the headless corpses of two dozen guinea hens, a bloody hatchet by his side. That time, the doctor had suggested a borderline personality disorder with sociopathic tendencies. Warren Wells had trumped it with his own diagnosis: “Boys will be boys.”
And that was the last doctor, until Rheinsfeldt.
A couple of the trailers in the migrant camp had burned down the next year, but that was in the late winter, when most of the Mexicans had gone to the coast to work soybeans and cotton. The only family living in the camp had been Carlita’s, but she and Joshua had recently married and moved to Tennessee. Jacob slipped out of the big, frigid house that night, tired of the brooding air that surrounded his father after his “only son” had married outside his own ethnic group. Jacob had spent the evening with a stolen bottle of tequila, sipping in the shed and staring at the blank, black window of one of the trailers.
The fire wasn’t his fault. It was like anger, or seeing red, something that burned so hot inside that it caught fire to things on the outside, too. A match that lit itself.
Then off to college, where excessive drinking brought endless rounds of fugue states. Except those were easily explainable, and as far as Jacob knew, he never committed any violent acts during them. Sure, sometimes he’d wake up with blood in his mouth, or bits of broken glass in the creases of his clothes, but he’d never been arrested. Then he’d met Renee and the rage dissolved.
But she didn’t know Joshua.
The half of him that could be neither restored nor excised.
In the dark, Joshua was always with him, whispering, taunting, tempting.
Jacob had never been able to explain it to the doctors. Even shrinks like Rheinsfeldt were too smart for their own good, thumbing through their thick manuals looking for Latin words to describe him. If they had only listened, they would have known it wasn’t his words he spoke. He only said what Joshua would say.
Carlita understood that part. Carlita was primal, carnal, an animal spirit. She saw that Jacob and Joshua were the same, and could love them both. Not even their mother and father could do that. Where everyone else tried to pull them apart, make them separate beings, Carlita accepted them the way they were.
She was the only person Jacob could ever trust, the only person who seduced him into letting down his guard.
And, like all mistakes of love, this one carried a deep price.
Now, curled in the darkness, his nose in the dust and mildew, he knew he was foolish to ever think he could escape Joshua. Even if he killed his brother, the voice wouldn’t go away. Even if he paid him millions of dollars, and Joshua moved to Mexico, Jacob would still be wed to his twin. Joshua was part of him. Sometimes he even thought he was more Joshua than he was himself, because only Joshua would be afraid of the dark like this.
Not Jacob.
Because Jacob was brave, wasn’t he? Jacob took care of business. Jacob did the dirty work for both of them.
Had he really hit Joshua, just before the closet door had slammed shut? He spread his fingers and moved them slowly across the floor. He touched the heavy eagle head of the cane. The hooked beak was slick and wet. He lifted the cane and smiled.
You didn’t have to be afraid just because you were in the dark.
When there were two of you, you were never alone.
Right, Joshua?
Footsteps.
Coming up the stairs.
Mother. You’ve had a terrible fall. Why don’t you lie down and rest?
He giggled in the dark, the sound swallowed by the dead air of the closet. Your imagination could get the better of you if you weren’t careful. As Dad always said, “Dreams are for dreamers, but the rest of us have to live in the real world.”
The footsteps came closer.
It must be Joshua, that other one that lived outside his head, coming to taunt him some more. Or demand more money.
But Jacob would be ready this time.
He gripped the cane.
Kill him then burn the house down.
Closer footsteps.
Then her voice. “Jacob?”
His stomach clenched.