Free Mystery Dance: Three Novels by Scott Nicholson

you’re still drinking. You know what stress does to you.”
    “The door,” he said, and the line went dead.
    Was he the one who’d been outside her door? The phone signal had been clear and steady, not fluctuating the way most wireless signals did in the mountains. There was a pay phone in the apartment’s laundry room, but whoever was at the door wouldn’t have reached it in the interim between her seeing the shadow and answering the phone.
    Renee brushed her hair and grabbed her purse. After what Kim had said about Joshua Wells, she planned to go to the Kingsboro police department and check on his criminal record. She’d heard long-time residents mention him once in a while, but she knew little about him other than that he’d moved out of town shortly after his mother’s death. Joshua hadn’t even shown up at the reading of Warren Wells’ will. Of course, Jacob had already been guaranteed the money, so she couldn’t blame him.
    She opened the door and was reaching for her sunglasses when the package flopped at her feet. It must have been leaning against the door. It was in plain cardboard about the size of a saltines box. She went to the edge of the deck and peered over the side, expecting to see a UPS or FedEx van. The parking lot was nearly empty, the tenants off to day jobs and errands.
    She picked up the package. It bore no label. The box was light, and might even have been empty. She carried it inside to the narrow table in the kitchenette, got a butcher knife, and slit the tape between the top two folds of cardboard.
    As she peeled the flaps back, the odor of stale charcoal assailed her. Inside was a stained bundle of white cloth. She touched it, and then recognized the lace brocade around the small collar. It was the dress Mattie had worn at her First Communion.
    She pulled the dress out, knocking the box to the floor with the motion. The dress was silk, and the bottom half of it had burned away. One sleeve had been torn off, and a black rip ran the length of the abbreviated back. Despite the ruin of the dress, it evoked an image of a beatific Mattie bowing before Father Rose, accepting the round wafer from the priest and putting it between her lips.
    “Matilda Suzanne,” Renee whispered, pressing the garment to her cheek. “Oh, my baby.”
    They had picked out the dress together, Mattie insisting on a “grown-up girl’s dress,” not one of the plain ones with a bow tied in the rear. She’d worn white socks and black shoes with single straps and the slightest rise in the heels. Her hair had been pinned back with lacquered white barrettes in the shape of doves. Though this was her big sister’s day, Christine had also worn a tiny white dress, adorned with some milk spit-up on the front.
    The memory so overwhelmed Renee that she wasn’t aware how long she stood there, rocking back and forth, the cloying stench of scorched fabric in her nostrils. After a time, the dress grew heavy in her hands, a relic that was both treasured and despised. It should have burned up in the fire. She had prayed for understanding, she had accepted the loss as one of God’s mysterious workings, and she had wiped clean the slate of her soul. Yet here came this piece of a miserable past back into her life.
    No, God hadn’t delivered this. Jacob had.
    The phone call, his cryptic phrases, the mocking voice, almost as if he were blaming her. Taunting her. Torturing her.
    He wasn’t himself. The realization broke her heart all over again. She had promised to be strong for him, to bring him back from whatever abyss failure had pushed him into. But how could she rescue him when she didn’t know who he was? How could she save him when it took all her energy to save herself?
    Jacob must have visited the charred wreckage of the house. Maybe Mattie’s dress had been caught in some strange backdraft and wafted away from the flames into the surrounding woods. With all the commotion and activity, no one would have noticed, nor