The More They Disappear (32 page)

“Nothing. It's just … that's a Stones song.” He half-sung it for her. “‘You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes … you get what you need.'”

Sophie looked at him as though he were speaking another language.

“Sorry,” he said. “It was just a—”

“Grow up, Lewis,” she said and turned away.

“Sophie, hold on—”

He reached out, but she didn't hesitate, and the door slammed. It felt like the end to a fight over some minor misunderstanding, not the life they'd built together.

*   *   *

Lyda Finley marched out of the house and up to Harlan's cruiser before he had a chance to step out. “What do you want now?” she asked, unable to hide her annoyance. Harlan couldn't blame her. Even he was starting to feel like a nuisance.

“I came by to see if Mary Jane has been in touch.”

“She's upstairs in her room.”

“I'd like to ask her about a friend of hers.”

“Is this about what happened in Lexington?”

“I'm sorry?”

“The police in Lexington talked to her after she had her stomach pumped. I didn't know they'd contact you.”

Harlan feigned awareness. “It's just a formality,” he said. “What did they find in her system again?”

“What didn't they find? Booze. Something called Ecstasy. A prescription drug. She's lucky to be alive. Oh, and she got a tattoo.”

Harlan smiled at this last detail. “A lot of kids overdo it once and learn their lesson.”

Lyda glanced up to the top floor. “Jackson won't be happy you're here.”

“I'll be quick.”

“Give me a minute to check on Mary Jane. She's still not feeling well.”

Harlan watched Lyda steal back to the house, the pep gone from her step. He turned the rearview mirror on himself and rubbed the exhaustion from his face. His eyes were sunken and his skin brackish. He'd ditched his crumpled uniform in favor of a simple T-shirt that made him look less official, less scary.

He didn't know how to best approach the girl or where to begin. He wasn't even certain the gun from Deerhorn was the murder weapon or that Mary Jane had been the one to toss it in the creek, but she was his best lead. The fact Tara had mentioned Mark Gaines piqued his interest even more. The investigation kept circling back to the Gaines family but he didn't know why. It was a tangled web and the tangles had to mean something.

Lyda led him up the wide staircase with its beautiful oak banister and pointed him down the hall. He knocked softly on the door and it inched open. “Mary Jane,” he said, poking his head in. She looked sick—her skin melted like a wax doll's, with a bruise along the cheek. Under different circumstances, Harlan could see that she'd be pretty. Hers wasn't the sharp beauty of her mother but something more natural. He said her name again and she looked up. She seemed fragile, soon-to-break, and he felt cruel before he even asked a question. “I was told to check in on you,” he said.

Mary Jane didn't respond.

“I heard you had a pretty wild night.”

“Not that wild.”

Harlan nodded. “And you're doing better now?”

She tilted her head to take in the room. “Yeah. I'm great.”

Harlan sat along the bottom of her bed.

“What were you doing in Lexington?”

“Visiting friends.”

“Friends who got you pretty messed up.”

“I went to the party alone.”

“Oh. Where were your friends?”

“I don't know.”

“You sound a little confused.”

“I'm not confused.” A touch of anger crept into her voice.

Harlan needed her to relax. “You mind if I set here a spell?” he asked. Mary Jane shrugged and he prattled on about whatever came into his head—the weather, his neglected house, growing up in Marathon, his lackluster parents, anything to keep the conversation from stalling out. “I guess I'm the one who's confused. And I'm a lot older than you, so I should have my shit together.” His hands fidgeted. “Hell, I'm wanting a cigarette right now even though I know they'll kill me.”

“You wouldn't want to smoke if you'd had your stomach pumped.”

“Probably not. But I'm fairly addicted, so you never know.” He stood up from the bed and walked to the window, looked outside to where a neighbor was putting up Halloween decorations—plastic pumpkins, a store-bought scarecrow. “So I heard you got a tattoo.”

Mary Jane muttered something he couldn't make out as he rolled up his sleeve and showed her the mess of ink he'd gotten from a cousin with a guitar-string gun.

“What is
that
?” she said.

“It was supposed to be the logo of this band I loved. Led Zeppelin. For a while it might have looked that way but not anymore. I'm sure yours is better.”

“It's a woman hiking in the woods.”

“That's cool. So no regrets?”

She hesitated. “No regrets.”

Harlan rolled his sleeve back down. “Do you mind if I level with you, Mary Jane?”

She shrugged.

He hoped that if he danced around the subject of Lew, she might fill in the gaps, give him something to work with. “I've had a tough couple weeks. The previous sheriff got shot, which I'm sure you heard about, and I keep hitting dead ends. See, there were a lot of people mad at Lew when he died. And they all had their reasons, but no one wants to talk about it. And I just want to know
why
he died. I don't even care who did it.” Mary Jane faked disinterest but her pupils tightened. “Do you know what I'm talking about? Did you know Lew?”

“No. I mean I heard he was … you know.”

“Yeah, well, I figure maybe if I can't solve this Lew thing, I can help you. 'Cause I'm worried about you. I see you leaving the dirt track, where I know bad things happen to good people. Then your mother tells me you've run off. And now you've gotten your stomach pumped. Tell me how I can help.”

“I don't need help,” she said, but her heart wasn't in the lie.

Harlan stifled the impulse to reach out and stroke the stray hairs from her sweaty face. She wasn't much older than Angeline had been when they'd met—just a girl doing her best impression of a woman. Angeline. If she'd lived, she'd be twenty-six and maybe she and Harlan would have made a life together. Pets. Children. Dinner parties. The whole ever-loving bit. And she would have done it all with grace. She did everything with grace. He'd loved watching her navigate the world.

Harlan closed his eyes and pressed his palms against his eyelids. “I'm so tired,” he said. “When you sign up to enforce the law, you're supposed to do what the books say. When a law is broken, you arrest the person who broke it. But it's more complicated than that.” He paused, backed into the question he'd wanted to ask all along. “I was at that barbeque when Lew was shot. Do you remember where you were?”

She answered without hesitation. “A movie.” It was a practiced response but she'd been too nervous to play it cool. Her eyes darted around the room, settled on anything but him.

“What movie?”

“That Will Smith one. With the aliens.”

“You like it?”

“It was okay.”

“Was anyone else with you?”

“I went alone.”

“Really?” Harlan said. “Me, I like going to the movies alone. But I'm a loner. That's a rare quality in someone your age.”

“I guess.”

“Did you do anything else? See any friends?”

“I saw my friend Tara.”

Harlan nodded. “Was this at her house or at work or—?”

“I'm really tired.”

“I know,” Harlan said. “Just humor me a bit longer.”

“At work.”

He nodded. “And no one else was with you? A boyfriend, maybe?”

“I don't have a boyfriend.”

“What about Mark?”

Mary Jane lost a beat, tried to recover. “Mark?”

“Gaines,” Harlan said. She froze, blinked at him, said nothing. He'd hit the magic words. “What did Mark do to you in Lexington?”

“Nothing. We had a fight.”

“Did he hurt you?”

She hesitated. “No.”

“Tell me about him.”

“What do you want to know? He's a jerk.”

“Why?”

“He just is.”

“Was Mark the one who gave you the drugs? Is he the reason they pumped your stomach?”

Mary Jane looked away.

“You don't want to tell me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because there's nothing to tell.”

“You can talk to me, Mary Jane. I won't let Mark or your parents or anyone else hurt you.”

She shook her head. “I don't know what you're talking about.” Then she said it again, softer. “I don't know.” She pulled the covers up over her head. “Please, just leave me alone.”

He'd lost her.

Harlan touched her shoulder beneath the sheets, pulled them down slightly, and made her look at him. “I'm gonna leave, Mary Jane, just like you asked, but promise me you'll call if you need anything.” He placed a card on the bedside table, wrote his home number on the back. “I don't care what you want to talk about. Could be Mark, could be your parents, could be the weather. It doesn't matter. I'll listen.”

She lay there, still as a corpse, so Harlan shut the lights on the way out and let her rest. Then he left the house without a word to Jackson or Lyda.

He felt himself getting closer to solving the case, but he couldn't quite make himself believe that Mary Jane pulled the trigger. And he didn't want to trade her life for Lew's. Lew had been corrupt. A cheat. Mary Jane was confused. Young. Maybe Holly was right and it had become personal for him, maybe he wanted revenge for what Lew had done to Angeline, but it wasn't that exactly. It was about right and wrong and Harlan's mistake had been believing the law had something to say about that.

Even if he brought Mary Jane in on suspicion, without stronger evidence, he wouldn't be able to charge her. And if the gun wasn't a match, if he was wrong, all hell would break loose. In the end, all he really had was a bag of McDonald's trash, a Winchester, and a hunch. It wasn't enough. Not yet.

*   *   *

After the sheriff left, Mary Jane heard her mother climbing the stairs to her room. Her hands clenched into fists. She'd tricked the cops in Lexington but this one knew something, and he wasn't visiting because she'd gotten her stomach pumped. He'd known about Mark. But how? And he talked about Lew, but what was he hinting? If he knew something, why didn't he just arrest her? Lyda looked in and said her name softly, but Mary Jane played dead. When the door closed, her fingers relaxed. There were four pink grooves on each palm where her nails had burrowed into the skin.

Lyda continued up the stairs to the third floor office. If ever there was a time to run, it had come, but as she rolled out of bed, the world around Mary Jane swirled and in the hallway she had to drop to her knees. She heard voices and thought she was hallucinating, but they kept on—became familiar—until gradually she made sense of them. Her parents. Arguing. She crawled to a vent along the floor and a memory clicked. As a child, she'd listened to her parents argue through the same heating vent.

Jackson was complaining about the sheriff. He said that it was all Lyda's fault, which didn't make sense to Mary Jane. The sheriff had been there to see
her
. But her mother kept apologizing, as if it were true. “For twenty years you've made me look like a fool,” Jackson said. “And now he knows. And who knows how many other people will find out.” Something slammed and her father's voice started to rasp as it rose. “And for what? For fat Lew Mattock?”

Mary Jane craned closer, unsure of whether or not to believe what she'd heard. Her father knew about the affair, and her mother kept apologizing in starts and stops as she sobbed, a language more utterance than word.

“It's my fault for marrying you,” Jackson said. “I knew better. But Dad wouldn't allow it. What would people say if I left my pregnant girlfriend to fend for herself?” His voice weakened. He was trying not to cry himself. “And I wanted to believe, Lyda. Really, I wanted to believe that it was over with him. That you loved me. That she was mine. But she isn't. She isn't mine.”

“You don't know that.”

“I do. It's written on her face. Every time I look at her, I see him looking back at me. It's easy to delude yourself when they're young. Babies look like babies. Little girls aren't much different. But she's older now. And I see it.”

It took a moment for Mary Jane to realize they were talking about her. She was the reason her father had proposed to her mother. She caused their terrible sham of a marriage. Her heart dropped into her stomach and she opened her mouth to vomit but all that came out was a dying noise. She curled into a ball and plugged her ears because she couldn't bear another word, rocked back and forth and choked on her tears. Suddenly, the great sadness of her life seemed to have reason. She'd never been wanted.

Her father—no, Jackson Finley—was telling the truth. It was written on the wall in his office. Generations of Finleys. None of them like her. All her failures, her blemishes, her heavy skin, her inability to fit in, all of it had been there from the moment she was born. All of it had been fated. She was the daughter of a bastard, a man she'd hated so much that she'd … Mary Jane tried to shut the memory out—the trigger, her breath, him standing in the crosshairs—all the images running together to make a muddy world.

She stood on shaky legs and banged against the wall, reached the stairs and clutched onto the banister for support. She scrambled down but her legs couldn't carry her, not all the way, and the base of the stairs came careening toward her before it all went black.