Free Disintegration by Scott Nicholson

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 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