thirteen
The gray-haired woman who ran the sheriff’s department came into Mark’s cell with a bedroll and a blanket. Mark was curled on the ground, his arm pinned beneath his head to keep it from pressing against the concrete. He opened his eyes as she set the bedding down. This was his best chance to make a run for it. He could get past the woman. After that it was a short run down the hall and out the front door. It wasn’t exactly Alcatraz, though Mark couldn’t be certain there wasn’t someone else in the office, and by the time he was done debating whether or not he could make it, the woman was crouched beside him and running her fingers through the hair above his temple. “Honey, you should sleep on this mattress,” she said. “It isn’t much but it’s better than the floor.” She had an airy touch that put Mark at ease and his dreams of escape vanished. He just wanted her to stay with him. “Come on,” she said. Mark sat up and scooted onto the bedroll. “Isn’t that better?” He nodded. “Do you need anything else?” He shook his head. “Don’t hesitate to ask. I’m just down that hall. You call out if you need anything.” Mark managed to say thank you softly. The woman frowned as if she were sad. “I can’t turn off all the lights but I’ll make it less bright in here.” She stepped out and locked the cell door again. A minute later every harsh fluorescent save one flickered and went dark. Mark closed his eyes.
He wished he could sleep but his mind raced with thoughts too frantic to capture. Every time he shifted, part of him came off the bedroll, and in the middle of the night just as he started to nod off, the female deputy came back full of energy, talking about how shocked Trip Gaines was when she arrested him and how he started demanding a phone call like it was a movie. Mark wondered if he should have asked for a phone call, too.
His entire life Mark had been a follower. He did what his father asked, believed his sister when she told him he was worthless, tried to make Mary Jane’s pipe dreams reality. And all because he didn’t have an opinion of his own. That need to please, more than anything, was why he found himself in a box that echoed when he rustled the blanket or coughed or started to cry. It wasn’t dealing drugs that had doomed Mark; his lot was cast by the boy who too often said, Hey, Dad, watch this. Who pleaded, Hey, Dad, look at me. Who whispered, Look … If he could go back in time to change things, he would … but how far back would he need to go?
Mark’s stomach thundered and the stench inside him roiled as he clambered across the floor to sit on the aluminum toilet. He stifled his sobs with the blanket as his guts clenched and unclenched again and again. He heard the steps of the gray-haired woman come down the hall. She called out, “Are you okay?” And then, “Can I get you anything?”
Mark cried out, “Just leave me alone,” as the toilet filled with the muck inside him. And when he didn’t hear her walk away, he yelled, “Leave me the fuck alone,” which did the trick. About ten minutes later, after he’d emptied his stomach and flushed, she returned without a word and slipped a plastic cup of ginger ale and another blanket into the cell. And even though Mark wanted to tell her he didn’t need her pity, he was overcome by her kindness, and thankful that anyone might think he was still worth helping.
He sipped the soda and chewed on the ice, started to feel human again. He decided that when his father came marching in with bail money and a lawyer, he would turn them away. He had nothing to offer now but the truth. He was guilty. His father was guilty. The truth might not fix the situation but it was as close to redemption as he’d ever come.
* * *
Harlan wanted to check on Mark but Holly, who was on the phone, pointed him to his office instead. She cupped the mouthpiece and said, “It’s Tom Gabel. He needs to talk with you.” Gabel was the two-term sheriff of Brown County across the river in Ohio. As she removed her hand, Holly said, “I know, Tom. Anything in the river is our responsibility. We’ve done this before. Harlan just walked in. You can talk him through it.” Holly shook her head. “Good luck,” she said.
As soon as Harlan picked up, Gabel said, “I think we have a body in the river.”
“Why do you think that?” Harlan asked.
Gabel launched into a story about a couple of teenage lovebirds who’d seen a person jump from the bridge the day before. Apparently, the kids hadn’t planned on telling the authorities—because they were scared or they didn’t want their parents to know they’d snuck out—but they told some friends and those friends told other friends and eventually a concerned parent caught wind and called him.
“So it’s been what,” Harlan said, “twenty-four hours?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Have you talked with the witnesses?”
“They say the person was alone, couldn’t tell male or female, and they didn’t see the body surface.” Gabel explained that he didn’t want to add to Harlan’s troubles, but technically the river was Kentucky’s jurisdiction as determined by the Supreme Court in 1793 and upheld in 1966—the gist being the body was Harlan’s responsibility and not his.
Holly appeared in the doorway and said, “I’ve got the crime lab on line two.”
Harlan cut Gabel off. “I’m aware of the legal precedent, Tom. I’ll get our Staties to search the riverbank. And I’ll want to talk with the witnesses myself. I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’ve got to take another call. Let me know if you get a notion of who I might find in the river.”
Harlan switched lines to the crime lab and asked for news.
“Sheriff, you’ve got a match,” the tech said.
“You’re sure?”
“Yep. We couldn’t pull any prints but after a little TLC, we were able to fire the gun. We matched test bullets to the one you pulled. I’ll be faxing the report over in a minute.”
Harlan thanked the woman and grabbed the keys to his cruiser. “We found the murder weapon,” he told Holly on his way out the door. “I’m heading to the Finleys. Get me a warrant as soon as the fax comes through. Oh, and a state police boat to search the river.”
“Are you bringing the girl back here?”
“Yeah. We can put her in the box. That’ll let Mark get a good glimpse of her.”
Jackson Finley answered the door and asked Harlan what he wanted. There were deep bags under Jackson’s eyes that matched his jowls.
“I’d like to talk with Mary Jane.”
“Wouldn’t we all.”
“What’s that mean?”
“She’s gone. Again.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Mary Jane likes to make us worry. It’s her preferred form of rebellion. I’d wager she’s out blowing off steam.”
“Last time she did that she ended up in a hospital.”
Jackson shrugged.
“I think we should talk,” Harlan said. “You, me, and Lyda. See if we can figure out where she might have gone.”
Jackson pointed him up the stairs. “My wife’s asleep in Mary Jane’s room. I think she stayed up all night worrying.”
Harlan took the stairs in pairs as Jackson trundled up behind him. Lyda was curled on top of her daughter’s bed, clutching a pillow. Harlan waited for Jackson to wake her, which he did by rubbing her arm softly. She muttered nonsense and Jackson took a moment to explain the sheriff was looking for Mary Jane. Lyda sat up and yawned. “Wait, what? Did you call him?”
“No. He just showed up.”
Lyda turned to Harlan, rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “How did you know she was missing?”
“I didn’t. I just found out.” Harlan wondered how much of the truth he should tell. He didn’t want Jackson or Lyda getting defensive. He thought about Mark curled up in the drunk tank and said, “Mary Jane is friends with someone who’s in trouble. I came to see if she could help me help them.”
“Do you think this friend has something to do with why she ran off?”
“Could be.”
“Who is it?”
“That I can’t tell you, Mrs. Finley.” He hadn’t consciously reverted back to using her formal name,
but he was aware of the change in his behavior. Call it professional distance. “We all have the same goal,” he said. “And that’s to find Mary Jane.”
Lyda nodded and Jackson did the same.
“So how long has she been gone?”
“Since yesterday morning.”
“It’s like I told you,” Jackson said. “Mary Jane taking off isn’t a surprise.”
“Did you look for her?”
“I called everyone I could think of. I even drove to Lexington to see if I could find her car.”
“And no luck?”
She shook her head.
“Can you get me the information on the car? Make, model, plates? VIN if you have it?”
“Sure,” Jackson said. “I have the title in my office. But honestly, Sheriff, I think we’re overreacting.”
“Better safe than sorry, right?”
“She didn’t leave a note,” Lyda mumbled.
“What’s that, Mrs. Finley?”
“A note. Mary Jane usually leaves a note on the kitchen table. This time there wasn’t a note.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Jackson said. “It’s not like she’s otherwise dependable.”
“I know my daughter,” Lyda said. “Something’s wrong.”
“We’ll need you to get us in contact with friends and acquaintances, give us as much information as possible.” He scanned the bedroom. “And I’d like to examine Mary Jane’s room, see if I can find anything to help us track her down. Is that okay?”
“Whatever you need,” Lyda said.
Jackson shrugged. “Sure.” He stood up from the bed, anxious to leave. Harlan shook his hand, went to do the same with Lyda, but as she stood, she fell forward and started to cry into his chest. Harlan draped an arm around her and they stayed that way until Jackson took her by the shoulders. “It’s your fault,” she said as Jackson led her away.
As he searched the room, Harlan tried to divorce himself from the proceedings, tried to pretend this was just a missing persons, tried to forget that he’d been here days before, tried to forget about the body in the river and whether it might be Mary Jane. For now the two were separate. There was a girl, wanted by the law, on the run. There was a body in the river.
The room’s décor was a contradictory mix of girlish sentiment and punk rock, the Disney of yesteryear giving way to the grunge girl of today, though neither dominated the other. It was as if Mary Jane was caught between two versions of herself—the dutiful daughter and the rebellious woman. Along the doorframe of her closet there were hash marks to track how tall she’d grown and when. Harlan followed her rise from toddler to adult, from just over three feet to her full five seven. Then he examined the picture frames atop the desk. Every single photo was from when Mary Jane was a child, smiling wide despite a slight gap in her front teeth.
On top of her nightstand, Harlan found his card in the exact spot he’d left it. Mary Jane hadn’t even picked it up out of curiosity. In the drawer of the nightstand he found a road atlas of the fifty states and opened it to Kentucky. A blunt pencil had traced a line over the bridge into Ohio, so he flipped to Ohio and found the path again, followed it north into Pennsylvania, New York, and finally Ontario, which he found in an addendum. As he flipped to Ontario, an unsealed envelope with the words to whom it may concern fell to the ground.
Harlan pulled the paper from the envelope, a piece of pink-bordered stationery of the sort used to write thank-yous. There were only five words, a single line written just above the center of the stationery. “Never lived up to potential.”
He read it once to himself, then out loud, tasted the words on his tongue. There was something ominous about the past tense, the terseness. She’d signed her full name in cursive below the line and the year, a final flourish. Harlan turned the paper over in his hands, looked for more. If it was a suicide note, it wasn’t exactly straightforward. It could just be a goodbye, an explanation for why she left. The atlas itself gave Harlan hope that Mary Jane was still out there—running.
He went to the window as if by some magic he’d see her on the horizon. It was open and he examined a hole cut in the screen. He wondered where she hid the pipe and searched the room some more, rummaged through piles of dirty clothes, looked behind books on the shelves. In the closet he found a stack of shoeboxes, each one with the word memories written in permanent marker on top. The boxes were filled with keepsakes from Mary Jane’s youth—Valentine’s cards from every kid in class, drawings she’d pulled from school notebooks, seashells and arrowheads. He hoped for a diary or some other tangible evidence, but it wasn’t until he reached the last box that he found anything recent. Inside were doodles making fun of teachers, pages of Mary Jane trying different signatures, an attempt to write Mark to tell him she loved him.
He tucked the unsent love letter and five-word note into the atlas. It was hard for Harlan to look around the room and think of Mary Jane as anything more than a lost girl, easy to forget she was a murder suspect. He’d need to put out an APB and alert the authorities along her route north, get in touch with border control. And if she didn’t turn up, well then he’d need to search the river.
He walked down the stairs and found the front door open. Lyda was waiting for him on the porch, smoking a cigarette. Harlan held up the atlas. “I found this in her drawer. It’s probably nothing but I’d like to study it some more.”
“Of course,” Lyda said. “Anything that helps.”
“A recent photo would be good. For the missing persons.”
“Give me a minute.” She stabbed out her cigarette and disappeared inside, came back with her pocketbook and pulled a small photo from a plastic shield.
“What’s this?” Harlan asked, pointing to a number along the photo’s bottom.
“It’s a school photo. That’s so you can place an order, which I would have done had Mary Jane shown me it. I found the picture in a pile of her things months after it was taken.” Lyda took the photo back and studied it. “I can’t believe the photographer got her to smile.”
* * *
Sophie called Lewis and asked if he could look after the girls. At first she lied and said she needed to run errands, but then, without him prodding, she came clean and told the story of her father being led away in a squad car. “Arthur Blakeslee is driving in from Cincinnati and I need to go with him to bail Dad out.”
“That’s crazy,” Lewis said, trying his best to sound surprised. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.”
Sophie sounded lost and Lewis felt a pang of guilt for not warning her, for not reaching out.
“I’m sorry, Sophe,” he said. “Bring the girls. I’ll watch them for as long as you need.”
She pulled into the driveway twenty minutes later. Ginny and Stella jumped out and started playing tag in the yard. Lewis risked a kiss on Sophie’s cheek. “Thanks for taking the girls,” she said.
“I’m happy to.”
“I won’t be long.”
Ginny and Stella were circling a tree. He couldn’t tell who was chasing whom.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No. Not really. Everything is falling apart.”
Lewis nodded. “I know.”
“First your dad and then us fighting. And now whatever’s going on with my dad. And my brother. I didn’t mention that. Arthur called me on the phone right after I hung up to tell me Mark was arrested, too.”
“Is it related?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just want life to go back to normal.”
There were tears in Sophie’s eyes, and Lewis wrapped his arms around her. She shook against him like water lapping to shore. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “We’ll get back to normal. Whatever that is.”
The girls stopped playing tag and watched them. Lewis wondered what was going on in their minds, wondered how much they understood. Sophie stilled and he dropped his arms to his sides. “Thank you,” she said under her breath.
Lewis crouched down like a catcher and called to Ginny and Stella, but each girl hesitated. “Did they see what happened with your father?”
Sophie shook her head. “They were asleep.”
Lewis stayed in his crouch, kept looking up at Sophie. The gray sky loomed stark and close behind her. “And you still think they’re fine?”
“Fine, yes. But not good. You were right about that.”
Lewis shrugged. “Maybe having to be right or wrong is what caused our problems in the first place.” He shredded a rust-colored maple leaf in his hands, twirled its veiny remains. “Right now, I’d settle for fine.” He called the girls again, clapped his hands together. Ginny came first and Stella followed. It was always Ginny first. Lewis needed to work on that; he needed to earn Stella’s trust as well.
“Do you girls want to see Grandma’s new garden?” he asked as he hugged them. They each nodded. Sophie helped him settle the girls in the Explorer, and after she closed the back door, he wished her luck and asked her to call him with news. She waved at them as he backed away, and Lewis watched her and wondered what his life would be like if he hadn’t married Sophie, if he’d be happier or sadder, if she was someone he’d remember fondly. The high school girlfriend. The first girl he’d ever loved. Maybe he’d have led the same life but with a different person. Or maybe he’d be lonely. And what about Sophie? Would she have been better off without him?
“What are you doing, Daddy?” Ginny asked.
Lewis looked in the rearview mirror. Both girls sat shock still. He’d almost forgotten they were there. “Oh, nothing much.” He’d only spent a couple of days apart from his daughters, but it wasn’t until that moment, that glance in the mirror, that he realized how much he’d missed them. Maybe a better father wouldn’t have needed the time apart. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he wanted to be with them now.
The More They Disappear Page 28