The More They Disappear (3 page)

Harlan marked off the area around Lew with caution tape and radioed Holly from the sheriff's cruiser, explained to her what had happened, and asked her to send someone out from the state police, the crime lab in Frankfort, and the coroner's office. Then he pulled out a textbook on criminal investigations from the toolbox of his truck. He hadn't worked but a couple of murders, and Lew had always been there to guide him. The textbook was left over from a correspondence course he'd taken years before, and the mere fact that he kept it made him the best deputy in an otherwise apathetic department. He flipped to the chapter on murder investigations, found the gunshot section, and started making checkmarks as he completed each step. He started by removing the blazer from Lew's face and snapping photographs with a point-and-click. Then he drew badly scaled sketches of the scene with a shaky hand and redrew them to keep from examining Lew up close. He wrote his account of the murder, trying to recall the details. He waited for help.

The witnesses came out of Josephine's one by one, hurried to their cars, and sped away, as if putting distance between themselves and Lew's corpse would help them forget. But it wouldn't. They would talk about it at dinner and dream about it at night and even people who hadn't been there would claim to be haunted by the sight of Lew Mattock's dead body.

Harlan stared at Lew as if he might provide some guidance, and when a burly hand touched down on his shoulder, he jumped. “Jesus,” Frank said. “Relax.”

“What are you doing?”

Frank pinched a load of snuff and showed his bean teeth. “I'm finished.”

“Already?”

Frank tapped his notebook. “I talked to every last person.” A thin man wearing a fleece jacket stood behind Frank with a pen and paper. Harlan looked to Frank for an explanation. “This guy's with the newspaper,” Frank explained. “I told him you're in charge.”

“Stuart Simon,” the man said. “I edit the
Registrar
.”

Harlan shook his head. “Not now.”

“Just a couple questions, Deputy.… It's Dupee, isn't it?”

“Frank, can you escort Mr. Simon to his vehicle?”

“I just want to know—”

“Now,” Harlan yelled.

Frank took Simon's arm. “Come on, Stu,” he said.

Simon started to wage a halfhearted protest but stopped as the dispatch from Lew's cruiser crackled with Holly's voice. Harlan couldn't make out what she said and asked her to repeat herself. “Fire,” she said. “Over at the Spanish Manor. The volunteers are on their way. Want me to do anything else?”

Harlan looked at Frank. “Head over there, but on your way pull over every car with a busted taillight or expired registration. Look for guns.”

“I don't think hoping the shooter has a busted taillight is much of a plan,” Frank said.

The editor slipped Frank's grasp and started writing in his notebook.

“Just do it,” Harlan snapped. He radioed back to Holly that Frank was on his way. He was thankful the textbook had been safely hidden in the cab of his truck. He didn't need Frank or the other deputies doubting him. And he definitely didn't need some reporter doing the same. Harlan had grown soft since he joined the department. They all had. You kept your job by avoiding any police work that might cause extra paperwork. Harlan had been promoted because of those through-the-mail criminology courses, but whatever policing knowledge he'd learned was rarely put to use. Now was his chance to prove himself. He'd always wanted the sheriff's badge on his chest—not like this, of course—but you didn't get to choose what life threw your way. Or when.

Along the river road an ambulance-style hearse pulled up with the coroner who serviced Finley and the neighboring counties. Behind him came a state police cruiser with lights flashing. The state policeman came down first, took a look around, and said, “Damn shame.” He put out a thick hand and introduced himself. His eyes were almost all pupils and he wore a gray-flecked mustache. “You want me to take samples from the body?” he asked. “I didn't know the man, so it won't affect me the same.”

“I'd appreciate that,” Harlan replied.

The coroner joined them a minute later. He was new—a kid with a two-year degree, fresh pimples, and a talkative manner. The sun started to set as they worked and the sound of crickets chirping rose from the woods. Harlan held a flashlight while the coroner labeled plastic bags the Statie handed him. At some point, he looked up to watch a sports car speeding along the river road before it disappeared into the coming dark. He realized, perhaps for the first time, that his life of writing traffic tickets was over.

“I can't believe someone shot Lew,” the kid coroner said, trying to sound like some wizened old-timer. “He seemed invincible.”

“No one's invincible,” the Statie replied.

The crime lab investigator from Frankfort showed up just in time to say “nice work” and collect the samples. He told Harlan to develop and send him the pictures. The sooner the better. They bagged Lew and the Statie helped lift him onto a gurney while the kid coroner struggled with his end; meanwhile, the investigator and Harlan loaded the grill into a van. Harlan closed the lid so as to not see the burnt flesh along the grates.

He examined the crime scene one last time, and just as he was ready to call it, he noticed a small depression that had been beneath the body. It led to a fragment of bullet buried four inches into hardpack.

“That's good police work,” the Statie said as Harlan sealed and marked the evidence.

“More like good luck.”

The kid coroner had lit a cigarette by the side of the road, and Harlan walked up to join him, rolled a smoke of his own, and listened to the Ohio murmur its song—a gurgling chorus of choking mud.

*   *   *

Mary Jane chewed her last bite of Big Mac and searched along the bag's bottom for stray fries. Tara Koehler had been working the drive-thru, and as she handed the order over, Mary Jane mentioned she was going to see a movie to set up an alibi. Tara had added a fried apple pie on the house, so Mary Jane finished off her meal with dessert, licking the last bits of sugary glaze from her fingers.

It had been a long time since she'd seen another car, which should have been comforting, but the emptiness made her nervous. She kept checking the rearview mirror expecting to see flashing lights where there was only blackness. After her dinner, she lit a Marlboro Light and one cigarette turned into two turned into a quarter pack and soon enough she felt nauseous again. The burger and fries sat heavy in her stomach and Mary Jane stifled the urge to pull over and jam a finger down her throat.

Mark had told her to drive out to the West Virginia border and toss the rifle into a wide branch of the Big Sandy, but Mary Jane couldn't make it that far. In the darkness, she had trouble figuring out how far she'd traveled. The names of the small towns she passed weren't written on any map, and even though the rifle was stowed safely in the trunk of the car, she felt like it was sitting beside her—chatting away. When the stereo began losing its station, she snapped it off and heard nothing save the wind rushing through a seam in the window. She downed another dose of nerve pills but it didn't work.
Lose the gun,
she told herself over and over.
Lose the gun
.

A sign marking a one-lane bridge flashed in her headlights, and Mary Jane banked onto the road paralleling the water. Her wheels caught a pothole in the dark and the wind snatched the cigarette from her hand and flung it to the backseat. Flustered, she hit the gas, cursed, hit the brake, and pulled sharply to the side of the road before rescuing the still-burning Marlboro and bringing it to her lips. Crickets whirred and animals scurried in the woods. A small hole had burned where the cigarette came to rest and she fingered its scorched edges. Through a cut of trees, the river muttered. It wasn't wide like the Big Sandy but in the scant moonlight it looked deep enough, and if she couldn't return to find this place, how could anyone else?

She stuffed every last trace of the crime in the backpack and hiked to the river before swinging it two-handed into the dark. After the bag plopped in the water, she lit one last Marlboro. A ceremony of sorts. It had been that way ever since she took up smoking. A cigarette for making it to school, for making it to lunch, for making it through the final bell. A cigarette while driving, while walking, while staring out the window and thinking important thoughts. A cigarette to celebrate the arrival and a cigarette to celebrate the leaving behind.

On the road home, Mary Jane could almost trick herself into believing she was returning from some innocent adventure—that she'd been lost but found her way. After an hour, she passed the sign that marked twenty-six miles to Marathon. There were three such signs on the roads that led east, west, and south from town. The road north lacked one despite the mayor's best attempts to weasel himself a square of Ohio dirt. Mary Jane offered the sign her middle finger, a rite of passage Marathoners learned as soon as they were old enough to drive and had the good sense to head someplace else.

Her father was sitting alone on the porch when she returned. The lit end of his cigar pulsed and Jackson tilted his head to blow smoke toward the stars. In his other hand he swirled a highball glass that Mary Jane guessed was more gin than tonic. “I'm afraid you're on your own for dinner,” he said as she climbed the stairs. “I haven't heard from your mother. Do you think you can manage?” Jackson tried to pass this last bit off as a joke, but Mary Jane knew it was a barb meant to draw blood. Ever since she'd been rejected from colleges six months before, her father couldn't help reminding Mary Jane that she was a disappointment.

“I already ate,” she said.

“What did you have?”

“McDonald's.”

Jackson laughed. “Your mother would love that.”

“You know she wouldn't.”

“On that matter, at least, I agree with her. Do you know what that trash does to your body?”

Mary Jane opened the front door. “Yeah,” she said. “It makes you fat.” She let the door slam and ran upstairs to her room where she opened the window and screamed into the night. Her room looked onto the street and she could hear the groans of the porch swing echoing as Jackson rocked back and forth, could smell the smoke of his cigar rising. If he had more commentary, he kept it to himself. Mary Jane fingered a hole she'd cut in the window screen for her hash pipe. For years she'd worried her parents would ask about it, but they either didn't realize what the hole meant or didn't care.

She stepped back from the window and grabbed a teddy bear off the bed. It had been a present from her father when she was nine. The bear had come with a name—Teddy Ruxpin—and a tape deck so he could tell stories. In a way the bear was a substitute for Jackson himself, who rarely told Mary Jane stories or tucked her in at night. She opened the tape deck and removed a bag of pills. Pills were her ticket out of Marathon. Mark called Oxy a “miracle” drug, and the first time he gave Mary Jane one and taught her to grind it to dust, she came to understand the meaning of the word. Oxy wasn't like pot, which made her paranoid, or booze, which made her sloppy. It didn't skew the world or make things funny; it offered separation. Separation from her father's passive-aggressive insults and her mother's chain-smoking sadness. Separation from the fat girl in the mirror. Separation from a life that stalled out in high school. Oxy offered oblivion.

She crushed a blue pill between two spoons and snorted the dust. “I love you,” she said to the bear, pretending it was Mark. She understood why Mark wasn't there, why it was smarter for them to stay apart, but that didn't make her feel any less alone, and for a brief moment her doubts about Mark, about his love or his capacity to love, reared their ugly heads before skittering away on a sea of painkiller. Mary Jane stretched herself like taffy over the bed; her head lolled over and her mouth hung slack as she stared out the window at a starless sky. The house and the street outside fell asleep.

When she came to, it was to the sound of her parents yelling, their voices snaking through the empty halls and up to her room. Mary Jane heard her name bandied about but drowned out the specifics. The specifics didn't matter. Her parents fought because they knew no other way, had lost whatever drew them together in the first place. The older she became, the more Mary Jane understood her parents' marriage was based on something other than love, that they stayed together because neither was strong or merciful enough to walk out the door. And Mary Jane was just another part of the problem, fuel to toss on a fire. It seemed her parents were forever blaming each other for whatever deficiencies they saw in their only child.

Mary Jane put on her headphones to drown out the noise, lit a candle, and pulled the atlas from her bedside table. Pencil lines connected Marathon to Montreal. As she read the names on the map, she savored the way the vowels formed on her tongue. She'd taken French in high school at her mother's insistence and it turned out to be the one class she enjoyed. She imagined herself speaking French at the grocery store, ordering wine at a restaurant. She imagined her and Mark starting a family there, a better family than the one she'd grown up in—because their kids would never be Finleys in Finley County. She knew a couple of girls who already had rings on their fingers and husbands who bought them pretty things and sometimes she doubted she'd ever have that life for herself. Now, for the first time, it seemed within reach.

Mark had been indifferent to Montreal when she came up with the idea, but the more Mary Jane told him about the city, the more she repeated things she'd learned from high school textbooks, the more excited he became. Montreal was across the border and far away from his father and that was a good start. There was even a university where he could study once they got settled. McGill. The Harvard of Canada. Mark said they needed to stay in Kentucky a little while before leaving, just to play it cool, though Mary Jane would have left that moment if he were willing. She didn't care who might chase them. She knew how to press the gas.