The More They Disappear

by Jesse Donaldson

  “That’s a good story,” Harlan said. “But I’m not sure I get the point.”

  “In a marriage you’ll do just about anything to prove you’re right. You’ll carry a dog’s corpse past your wife while she sleeps. You’ll do this as if it’s normal. You get so accustomed to the lies you don’t even realize they’re lies anymore. I knew Lyda and Lew had a history, and maybe I learned to look the other way so long as she was kind enough to be discreet. I didn’t know she was back together with him before he died, but I’m not surprised. And maybe she and I will have a talk about it, but I doubt it will change whatever understanding we have of our marriage. These are complicated matters and best dealt with in private. Of course, I’m hoping this helps put your mind at ease regarding my involvement in Lew’s death. I will do what I can to help you, Sheriff, so long as you keep my private business private. Tact is the hallmark I value above all others.”

  Harlan risked putting a hand to Jackson’s shoulder, a soft pat to let him know he was sorry for having to ask in the first place. “One last question,” he said.

  “Shoot.”

  “I remember a few years ago Lew tried to join Idle Haven. The mayor sponsored him, I think. Did you have anything to do with his being denied?”

  Jackson smiled for the first time since Harlan had sat next to him at the bar. “I believe the decision to deny Lew membership was unanimous, though I’m not ashamed to say I was among the nays. He didn’t fit the Idle Haven mold.”

  six

  Mary Jane woke to the sound of Mark munching dry cereal in front of an early-morning action flick on TNT. She was sprawled on the couch, still wearing her clothes from the day before. Mark must’ve thrown a blanket over her, though she couldn’t remember when. She’d returned from True Blue with a bottle of peach schnapps she convinced some creep outside the liquor store to buy, rifled through the apartment for loose pills, and proceeded to drink and snort away the pain. She remembered worrying when Mark didn’t return but her concern lessened the more she drank. At some point, she must’ve fallen asleep. Mark must’ve returned.

  As she sat up, her feet kicked over the empty bottle of schnapps.

  “You sure tied one on,” Mark said. “You were passed the fuck out when I came back. I tried to wake you up and you just went limp.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. Not late.”

  Mary Jane’s head felt like it had been rattled by a paint mixer. Each shudder of her eyelids pierced like a needle. “You had cereal here?” she said.

  “In the cabinet. But no milk.”

  “I don’t think I ate dinner.” Mark held the bowl in her direction but she closed her eyes and cradled her head in her hands. “Can you not chew so loud?”

  “I’m having breakfast.” He turned the volume down a notch on the TV, continued to talk with his mouth full. “Why’d you get so drunk?”

  “I got a tattoo,” she said, as if it was no news at all.

  On the television a man with wavy hair praised his shampoo. “What’s that?”

  She unbuttoned her shirt and showed him. “A tattoo,” she lisped. She winced as she spoke; her tongue felt like an overgrown slug. “And a piercing.”

  Mark shook his head. “Of all the things. Why would you get a tattoo?”

  “Because I wanted to,” she said, and something in the way the words formed snagged the stud and broke loose the scab. She rushed to the kitchen sink to spit out a pink mass. When she closed her mouth, it felt like she was choking.

  “Good God,” Mark said. “You’re a mess.” He stepped into the bathroom and came out with a hand towel and hydrogen peroxide. The peroxide fizzed as it touched raw skin but Mark blew to cool the pain. “It’s a woman in the woods,” he said. “And what’s that French?”

  She shrugged.

  “Tattoos aren’t really my thing but…” Mark’s voice trailed off. Mary Jane’s mind sharpened with each burning flash of peroxide. She didn’t feel guilty about the tattoo. What had Mark been doing the day before that was so important? Where was the money he was supposed to collect? He owed her answers; she didn’t owe him anything.

  She reached up and grabbed his hand. “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  She turned to face him. “When are we leaving?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Complicated how?”

  Mark put his hands on the counter, locked his elbows, and leaned into them. “There are a lot of loose ends to tie up, and…” He started drumming his fingers. “I didn’t get the money.”

  “Why not?”

  Mark mumbled something she couldn’t hear and she told him to speak up.

  “He refused,” Mark said, his voice whiny with despair. “He said I still owed him.”

  “Fuck,” Mary Jane said. “Fucker. You don’t owe him anything.”

  Mark nodded. “I know.” He seemed less like a man than a little boy.

  Mary Jane punched him in the shoulder. Hard. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m figuring that out.”

  The sounds of gunfire rang out from the television and she looked over to watch the Terminator lay waste to a police force. She found the remote and snapped off the television as the Terminator cocked his shotgun. She remembered the pressure of the trigger, the butt of the rifle kicking her shoulder. “Let me deal with your dad if you can’t.”

  Mark shook his head. “You don’t know what he’s like.”

  “We killed someone,” Mary Jane said. The words were blunt and to the point and saying them out loud felt good. “I pulled the trigger but you aren’t innocent.”

  Mark couldn’t look at her. “I know,” he said. “I set the fire to help you escape, remember? I helped.”

  “But you weren’t there,” she said. “You didn’t see. There was blood everywhere. On people we know.” And even though what she said wasn’t exactly true, it felt true. “His wife was there, screaming. I swear I wanted to die, Mark. Right then and there. But I did it. For you. For us.” Mary Jane’s mouth burned and she swallowed a syrupy gob of blood. She ached in a way she’d never ached before and she could no longer hold it inside—the blood, the fear, the tears—and there wasn’t a pill strong enough to heal her. She grabbed Mark and turned him to face her. She needed him to stand up and take responsibility. “We did that,” she said, her breath ragged and loud, like a train stuttering up a mountain.

  Mark tried to pull her into his arms. “I didn’t realize what we were getting into.”

  “It was your idea,” she cried. And it was true. Mostly it was true.

  It had been a couple of weeks after the incident with Lew at the docks. Mark took Mary Jane on a long drive, gunning his Mustang through hairpin turns as they smoked dope and soaked in the summer sun. They tried to forget that if he wasn’t arrested first, Mark would be returning to school and Mary Jane would be left behind. Again.

  In the middle of Nowhere, Kentucky, Mark pulled into an abandoned farm and bounced over unpaved roads until they were all alone in the world. At first she thought he wanted to get high and play the game where they pretended to die, but then Mark said he had something he wanted to show her and a small part of Mary Jane thought he’d drop down on one knee and pull out a ring. Instead he popped the trunk and showed her the rifle, asked Mary Jane if she would teach him to shoot.

  She tried to convince Mark he was overreacting. If reasoning with Lew didn’t work, he could run away. They could run away together. Mark said she didn’t understand. There was evidence that could put him away for a long time and Lew wouldn’t just let him go. “You have to cut off the head of the snake,” Mark said, as if he were some wizened master.

  Mary Jane didn’t want to imagine her life without Mark. Mark seemed destined for bigger things and she seemed destined to be with him. And so Mary Jane picked up the rifle and tried to remember what her grandfather taught her all those years ago. “Never assume a gun is unloaded,” she sa
id. “This is a bolt action, so you rotate this handle up and pull it back to make sure the chamber is empty.…”

  Of course she had regrets. She’d taken a man’s life, but as Mark held her and promised he’d be there for her, she trusted that it had been for a reason. She reminded herself that Lew Mattock was no innocent. Mark had failed to deliver the future he’d promised and Mary Jane was afraid, but together they could muddle through. Mark was there to catch her tears, and for the moment, that was enough.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as he rubbed his hands up and down her back. “I’ll fix it.”

  “How?”

  “Just trust me, MJ. I’ll fix it.”

  She wanted to believe him so badly she said, “Okay.” Because okay was better than nothing at all.

  “I mean it. We’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” She dried her eyes on his shirt and pressed her lips into his. “No regrets.”

  “No regrets.”

  She felt the beginning of his erection press against her thigh and moved her hand beneath Mark’s shirt and kissed him despite the flashing pain in her mouth. His hand scraped against her tattoo and she gasped. “Be careful,” she whispered and taught him to touch her new skin.

  She took off his clothes and pushed him down on the couch and rode him to keep the tattoo in the open air. She felt triumphant. And when she closed her eyes, she focused on her own pleasure. And when the boy beneath her didn’t do the trick, she imagined he was someone else. And after she came and came, she took Mark’s cock in her hand and helped him along. One day he might grow into the sort of man who took charge, but he wasn’t that man yet. She’d need to teach him. Because when they stopped talking, when all that mattered were their bodies, she spoke the language fluently and he just stuttered. And as they lay on the couch naked, the dull pain of her body throbbed like a heartbeat. And there was no pill for that.

  * * *

  Harlan received word from the crime lab that none of the Finley rifles were a ballistic match with the crime scene bullet and put a question mark next to Jackson’s name on his yellow pad. Later, Del knocked on his door and handed over a list of names compiled from the gun sales at Walmart, few of which were promising. Frank followed Del in and said, “You ask him about Cynthiana?”

  “Not yet,” Del mumbled in his soft drawl.

  “What about Cynthiana?” Harlan said.

  “Frank’s buddy is a cop down there. Says they booked an illegal last night who shot a local outside a bar. The vic’s on life support at Chandler, but the bigger news is they impounded an unregistered Camry from the parking lot with a brick of marijuana, a bag of MDMA, and a couple guns in the trunk.”

  “MDMA?”

  “Ecstasy,” Frank said. “People take it and fuck like bunnies.” He grinned wide, happy to have come up with a lead he could rub in Harlan’s face, but Harlan didn’t mind giving credit when it was due. “That’s good work,” he said. “Why don’t you two go down and check it out.”

  Harlan copied Del’s list of names onto his yellow pad, added a note about the unidentified perp in Cynthiana, then flipped it closed. On the front of the pad was a to-do list he’d made the day after Lew died, including a reminder to visit Mabel Mattock. Harlan told himself he’d been giving Mabel time to grieve. The truth was he didn’t want to look her in the eye after finding out about Lew’s affair, but the time for dawdling was over.

  Mabel stood outside her house, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and staring at some needy-looking shrubs. “I saw that car coming up the road and it gave me déjà vu,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Harlan said. “I wasn’t thinking about how strange that might be.”

  “Oh, be quiet. I’m just making small talk. Come on inside.”

  Where other people found Mabel awkward and aloof, Harlan found her honest and humble. A welcome contrast to her husband. “I should have stopped by sooner,” he said. “At least said hello at the funeral.”

  “I figure you’ve been busy.” Mabel led him into the kitchen and poured them two glasses of milk. “I need to make a run to the store. This is all I’ve got.”

  “I could use the vitamins,” Harlan said. “I haven’t exactly been taking care of myself.”

  “It’s been a rough week,” Mabel admitted. She pointed him to a Formica table and vinyl-cushioned chairs above which a calendar from the year before dangled by a nail.

  “I have to admit this isn’t entirely a social call.”

  Mabel sat down across from him. “You’re here to ask about Lew?”

  He nodded. “We’ve checked in on plenty of people he locked up and we’re still tracking leads, but there comes a time when you have to start finding out more about the victim—”

  “You don’t have to beat around the bush, Harlan. I was married to a lawman for nearly thirty years.”

  Harlan grinned tightly; maybe it was a wince. “Was Lew acting strange in the weeks before he died? Did he meet with anyone out of the ordinary? It doesn’t have to be a big thing, any small change you may have noticed.”

  Mabel laughed a little. “Gosh, Harlan. I’m about the worst person you could ask. Turns out I wasn’t very good at knowing what Lew was up to.”

  Harlan wondered if Mabel knew about the affair. “What do you mean?”

  “We went over Lew’s will yesterday, and I learned that he was in debt and left me with a list of creditors.”

  Mabel started to sniffle, and Harlan reached over and took her hand. With his other he pulled the bandanna from his back pocket and handed it over. He hated that he’d need to keep asking questions, that his job was to make people talk about their sorrows.

  “How did he— Where’d the money go?”

  “Cards,” she said. “He lost it playing cards.” She dabbed the creases below her eyes and handed the bandanna back. “I knew Lew liked to gamble but nothing like this. Poor Lewis. He was shocked. He idolized his father. No matter how poorly Lew treated that boy, Lewis came back to him like a lost puppy dog.” She looked around the kitchen. “You know I might have to sell the house.”

  Harlan shook his head. “I’m sure that there are steps you can take—legal and whatnot.”

  “I should have known. I would overhear Lew on the phone. He was always promising the person on the other end of the line that ‘they’d be fine’ and ‘not to worry.’ That’s how most of his conversations ended. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ And you know if you’re always telling people not to worry, they are, and things aren’t going to be fine.”

  “You can’t blame yourself, Mabel. None of this is your doing.”

  “People keep calling to offer condolences, and I keep accepting them, but what I really want to say is that my husband was a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound burden that pushed me onto a sliver of bed each night and kept me awake with his snoring. He bullied me and I let him.” She started to cry again, and Harlan offered the handkerchief once more, but she shook her head. “When we moved here, he was so full of … enthusiasm. He was just a deputy but he wanted to make a difference. And he was a good husband, too. When the doctor put me on bed rest with Lewis, Lew would come back on his lunch break to pour me a lemonade and dab my head with a cool towel. And at night he’d sing to Lewis in the womb. I don’t know when it all changed. Pretty early on, I suppose. But it wasn’t always bad.”

  Harlan nodded. He knew better than to respond, to make light of her words by telling her marriages are tough or that men contain multitudes or some other false truism.

  He sipped his milk in silence while Mabel stared off into space and waited a good long while before asking if she had a copy of the will. She shook her head. “I threw it in the trash.” A smile crossed her face. “Where it belongs.”

  “Where it belongs,” Harlan repeated.

  “I can get another from Jim Gardner for you, but the gist is that Lew owes a lot of money to the Silver Spoon.”

  “The gambling boat?”

  She nodded.

  “How much?”

>   “Fifty thousand.”

  “You know, Mabel. If there’s anything I can do—”

  She cut him off. “You’re a good man, Harlan. Don’t worry about me.” She stood up and refilled his glass from the fridge. “Now sit here and let’s talk about better things. I was thinking it might be nice to plant a garden. What do you know about roses?”

  * * *

  On the door to Riverside Security, Lewis taped up a computer-printed piece of paper that announced: CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS. A minute later John Tyler came outside clapping a slow, sarcastic applause. “What the fuck am I supposed to do when someone calls here asking political shit?”