Free Mystery Dance: Three Novels by Scott Nicholson Page A

recognized its significance. But Jacob knew. He’d attended the communion, one of his rare visits to St. Mary’s.
    The dress had leaked bits of charred cloth onto the floor. Renee spread the garment across the table, then knelt and collected the pieces. As she touched the black scraps, they broke into smaller pieces. They were disintegrating even as she tried to collect them, and her desperation to save the scraps only made them crumble faster.
    She gave up and washed her hands in the kitchen sink. The black specks swirled down the drain, lost to her forever, gone to some lightless place of decomposition and decay.
    Maybe Jacob was breaking down in the same way. She couldn’t let that happen. She dried her hands, grabbed her purse, and went outside into the sunlight. The wind off the white pines swept away the charred smell, and her head was clear by the time she reached her car.
    The police department lay behind the Fuller County courthouse in Kingsboro, in the old part of downtown that had thrived before chain restaurants and big-box retailers pulled most shoppers to the main thoroughfares. The records office was headed by a stern woman with glasses as thick as Renee’s whose steel-gray hair suggested she had been employed there long before the advent of computers. Renee tapped at the bulletproof window until the woman looked up from her desk, lips pursed as if she had just eaten the lemon wedge from the iced tea in front of her. The woman pushed back her chair with a complaint of springs and sauntered over to the service window.
    Renee pushed a button and spoke into a microphone mounted on the window ledge. “Yes, ma’am, I’m looking for any records you have on Joshua Wells.”
    “Joshua Wells?” The woman tilted her head back and peered at Renee as if studying an insect. The speaker made her sound as if she were asking for an order at a drive-through window.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    Renee thought the woman was going to ask her why she wanted the records, but she said, “Do you have a middle name?”
    For an instant, Renee thought she meant her own name, then realized that even a town as small as Kingsboro might have had several Joshua Wellses. “No, sorry. Can I just have them all?”
    The woman made a chewing motion, then said, “It’s public record. All you have to do is pay the fees.”
    The woman pointed to a sign on the wall that was lost amid the clutter of “Most Wanted” posters, meeting reminders, and communication codes. Searches were five dollars and copies were fifty cents each.
    “That’s fine,” Renee said.
    “It’ll be a minute. That’s Wells, W-E-L-L-S, right?”
    “Yes. Like Warren Wells.”
    “Oh, yeah. ‘Joshua’ was his kid’s name, wasn’t it? One of them, anyway.”
    Renee nodded. The woman went to a computer and typed in the name without sitting down. She frowned at the screen, and soon came back to the window. “There’s not any.”
    “That has to be a mistake. I understand he had been charged with several crimes.”
    “Could be a couple of things,” the woman said. “Maybe the records were ordered expunged by a judge, or they could have been sealed if he was a juvenile at the time of the offense.”
    “What’s the age for being tried as an adult?”
    “Depends. For most crimes, it’s sixteen.”
    “Okay, sorry to trouble you.”
    So either Kim had been wrong, or Joshua’s crimes had occurred during his early teens. Renee paid with a twenty and declined a receipt. While the woman made change, Renee pressed the button and asked, “Did you know Joshua Wells personally?”
    The woman shook her head, experienced at deflecting any probe for off-limits information. “No. He made the papers once in a while, for sports and things. He was an all-star pitcher before he dropped out of high school. I heard he moved after that.”
    Newspaper. She decided her next stop was the library, where she could go through the microfiche files of the Kingsboro Times-Herald . At least