The More They Disappear (4 page)

*   *   *

Lewis Mattock answered the knock at the door, which turned out to be the pizza delivery guy. He'd ordered a large cheese because, despite everything, the girls still needed to eat. Lewis tried to talk to the guy about sports, the weather—anything other than his father—then handed over a too-generous tip. The phone continued to ring nonstop, streaming a steady diet of calls from people asking for news. Each time Lewis told the caller his father had passed on, they offered the same canned condolences and he offered the same canned responses. An assembly line of conversation.

Sophie followed him into the kitchen as Lewis got plates ready for Ginny and Stella. She opened a bottle of Merlot and popped a Xanax from her stash, but still she talked and talked. “Give your mother one of these,” she said, cupping a pill. “She's in shock.”

Lewis looked out to the living room, where his mother was sitting statue-like on the couch watching a movie with the girls. “We're all in shock,” he said. “I think she just wants to be left alone.”

Lewis let the girls eat in front of the television to distract them, not that they weren't used to eating in front of the TV. His mother liked to tell him that his daughters would rot their brains away but tonight she kept her opinions to herself. Mabel Mattock was always wrinkling her nose at Lewis and Sophie's parenting. She disliked the mess of toys that dotted the living room like land mines, the gaudy oil paintings of Ginny and Stella that hung over the fireplace, the general lack of discipline.

Once the girls were fed, Lewis turned off the phone's ringer and poured himself a bourbon and Coke. He offered his mother a slice of pizza and a glass of wine, but she politely declined. None of the adults ate. Sophie wanted to leave the ringer on in case her father called with news, but Lewis was done with the phone. He was tipsy by the time Sophie's father came back from the morgue. Trip talked as men do in times of crisis, told Lewis that his father didn't suffer, that he was in a better place, that there would be justice. Sophie prodded her dad with questions and the doctor continued to fill the air with words as the girls sang along to some Disney song on the TV. Lewis drowned out the noise with booze.

His mother came and hugged him good-night and told the girls to sleep tight before retreating to the guest bedroom. A digital clock on the wall flashed half past nine but it was an hour off from the time change in the spring. Not much longer and it would be right again. “I should put the girls to bed,” Lewis said, more to himself than anyone else. Sophie took a break from the conversation with her father to tell Lewis that was a good idea.

He turned off the television over the girls' weary and halfhearted protests, guided them to their room. Ginny asked about Grandpa. Again. Neither girl understood what was going on, but Lewis didn't know how to explain. They were just five, mature enough to think for themselves but naïve about the world and the people in it. He told Ginny they'd talk in the morning. Earlier he'd said they'd talk after dinner. He found that parenting was often just stalling on the questions you didn't want to answer and hoping your kids forgot to ask again, but Ginny and Stella never seemed to forget. Stella asked why his breath stank and he said he didn't know. One day he'd answer their questions.
I'm drunk,
he'd say.
Grandpa's dead
. But for now he said, “I love you” and waited for the girls to repeat it back to him, their voices rote and robotic but comforting nonetheless.

*   *   *

It was near midnight by the time Harlan left the office with the paperwork for Lew's murder in hand. He stopped by the ruins of the trailer park fire, which was just down the road from his place before going home. The town's volunteer crew had managed to keep the fire from turning the whole place to ash. The trailer's bent and scorched frame prevailed against the night sky even though the windows and doors had blown out and broken glass littered the grass. Harlan's flashlight revealed a couch reduced to coils and a stovepipe that leaned at an unholy angle, its sheet metal no longer moored to the remains of the roof. Other than the couch, the home looked empty. A few discernible odds and ends were buried among the debris—mugs, the blade of a kitchen knife whose handle had burned away. Frank's report claimed the place had been abandoned and that the fire was likely started by faulty wiring. Given what else the day had wrought, Harlan was inclined to go along with Frank's assumption and leave good enough alone. He doubted anyone would come asking the sheriff's department to do a thorough investigation, and it didn't make sense to bring an arson investigator out for a fire that no one cared about.

He called it a night and headed home, but as he pulled into the dirt drive of his property, his headlights hit upon two specters in the grass—a rail of a girl working herself atop a fat boy whose body writhed beneath her. The girl moved in slow circles, hips falling from the side, taking whatever the boy had to give. The boy's pants were clasped around ankles, and when the girl let gravity carry her, his legs kicked and made to rip them in two. She wore a long white T-shirt that he kept lifting to reach for her breasts, but she pushed him down easily, her palms burying into his fleshy, hairless chest. A quarter moon dangled low in the sky behind them like a lure at the end of its line. The boy pointed toward Harlan's truck and the girl turned to stare into the headlights, never stopping her up and down.

Harlan had caught prowlers before—dope-smoking refugees from the Spanish Manor—but nothing like this. He honked and the horn tinned into the lonesome, quiet night. Spurred to action, the boy rolled the girl over, slipped out, and ran buckshot for the woods, hitching up his pants as he went, his pale ass flashing like some prehistoric firefly through the cypress trees. Harlan cut the lights and let the girl get decent, a process she took her time doing.

“I was almost finished,” she yelled when he stepped out. “That tubby was gonna come. I could see it in his eyes.”

“Guess he should've stuck around,” Harlan said.

She buttoned the waistband of her cutoffs and stuck out her hand, straight ahead and rigid like a man. Harlan ignored it. He knew her from the backs of cars he'd pulled over, had seen her running from house parties and caught her getting drunk in places she shouldn't. She was a tough case—a mother absent, a mean streak of a father. “You're trespassing, Matilda,” he said.

“If you want to arrest me, go ahead. And call me Mattie.” The girl's lips quivered and her belly heaved. Her eyes darted all over and beyond. She was high on something.

“All right, Mattie. I'm too tired to arrest you, so why don't you head on home.”

The girl put a hand to her hip, shifted her weight, and jutted out the bone on the other side. “That's it?”

“What more do you want?”

“I don't know. Yell at me. Give me a lecture. Call me names or something.”

Harlan started for his porch. “Next time,” he said.

When he heard her feet moving, Harlan turned to watch the girl lope into the woods, her fingers hooking a bare belt loop to keep her shorts from falling. The quiet returned and he slumped onto a rain-soaked couch that barely fit his porch. The house was a shotgun, a glorified shack, but it faced the river—the view the sole reason Harlan had bought it. Graying clouds pulled themselves across the sky and stretched over the moon and stars. Headlights glinted through the cables of the suspension bridge connecting Kentucky to Ohio and the orange globes atop it gave off a soft glow. Harlan could hear the whir of a riverboat casino chugging along the water. He pictured desperate gamblers throwing their last dimes and found himself wishing he possessed even an ounce of their faith.

He scanned the write-up on Lew's murder. The dogs had found the shooter's spot along a ridge overlooking Josephine's, even turned up a small bit of bilious spit, but by the time Harlan reached the clearing, it had been dark and pretty much combed over. He and Del walked the woods with the dogs but came up empty. Frank and Paige spent the evening visiting a few of the county's most frequent offenders, taking their pulse, and Holly was coming up with a list of hard cases and inmates Lew had locked away that were recently released. Harlan and Lew had never seen eye to eye when it came to running the department, but no one deserved to go out like that—face disfigured and scorched. It made Harlan's stomach twist like a quirt.

The barbeque was meant to be a celebration of Lew, one in a series of campaign events leading up to his coronation as Finley County's first-ever four-term sheriff. Now the election was a month away and the lone candidate was an end-of-days crazy who headed up a militia of one. People would expect Harlan to run. Before Lew came along, Finley sheriffs and their chief deputies had carried on a tradition of trading terms back and forth like dueling banjos. At one point Harlan suggested he and Lew might do the same, but Lew didn't care much for tradition. He preferred being the boss. He kept the politicians happy and avoided bad press, and most people in Finley County had forgotten that anyone else had ever enforced the law.

A decade spent observing Lew taught Harlan that being sheriff was more about politics than policing anyway, and Harlan wasn't much of a bullshitter. But now the job was his, and there was a good chance it would be after the election, and if that happened, Harlan would change things. Lew had catered to Finley County's rich and powerful, but Harlan cared more about the people eking out a living along the fringes, the unfortunates whose drunken fights ended in assault charges and whose kids died of drug overdoses. He'd grown up watching his dad beat his mom and his mom threaten his dad, stood by while both of them drank away any semblance of their lingering humanity. In his early twenties, during his first years as a deputy, he'd pushed Lew to do outreach in the worst parts of the county, had lauded the benefits of preventive policing—a term he'd learned through his schooling. But Lew didn't care for newfangled ideas. Eventually Harlan stopped trying so hard. His ambitions were back-burnered and then one day they were forgotten. Lost, really. The only woman he'd ever loved died, and that took something out of him. Ever since he'd laid Angeline to rest, each successive sunup to sundown seemed a sort of accomplishment.

Marathon was the only place he'd ever called home, but Harlan had never fit in. He'd been too raggedy, too scatterbrained, too much a loner. He'd grown up poor, wore oversize, hand-me-down clothes patched with iron-ons, spent his weekends by the side of the highway selling junk his father salvaged and quilts his mother sewed. Every now and then, when he booked a former schoolyard bully, they would retell jokes from that long-ago past.
Harlan the dupe. Harlan smells like poop.

Something had kept Harlan in Marathon and maybe this was it: he was
meant
to be sheriff. It wasn't happiness that kept him. Nor obligation. His father had drowned in the river. His mother followed not long after, her last days spent in a mental hospital. But if Harlan found Lew's killer, things would change. The other deputies would start to respect him and the town would do the same and his name might become as synonymous with “sheriff” as Lew's had been.

Harlan put the paperwork for the murder back in its folder and rolled a joint from a plastic bag hidden in the couch cushions. Cave crickets hopped across his lap, but he paid them no mind. He'd come to terms with the crickets, the snakes in the grass, the den of opossums burrowed beneath the house. There'd been a raccoon one summer that squatted on its hind legs and stared at Harlan while he smoked and to whom Harlan spoke when he was lonely. Then one day it stopped showing up. That loss felt like any number of losses Harlan had experienced—random and raw. He mouthed her name—Angeline—and toked the joint as he sunk deeper into the couch. She would have been proud of him.

“Sheriff Harlan Dupee,” he said to the crickets. He said it again, changing the cadence of his delivery, pausing to accentuate the word
sheriff,
speaking through clenched teeth, offering up a quick grin or handshake. He said it over and over, like a mantra, repeated it aloud until sleep overwhelmed him.

 

two

Harlan woke to the ringing of the phone and stretched his long limbs. He couldn't remember the last time someone other than a telemarketer had called him, so he let it cry out until it was obvious the person on the other end of the line wouldn't take no for an answer. “Good morning,” Holly said as he picked up. “Making sure you were up.”

“I am.”

“So I'll see you soon.”

“Are you at the office?” Harlan asked. “What time is it?”

“Time to get moving.”

Holly hung up and Harlan staggered to the porch for the day's first cigarette. A heavy damp hung in the air and bursts of wind shook the trees and knocked river birds from their paths. In the east a rolling mass of reddish clouds danced with the rising sun. Harlan wanted to walk the ridge where they'd found the shooter's spit-up in the light of day but the rain was coming to wash it clean.

Holly, who tended to ignore him when he walked in, pushed a stack of folders into Harlan's arms before he could say hello. The phone was ringing but she didn't answer. “Judge Craycraft is going to be in soon, so go over there and get sworn in. Also, the coroner needs you to fill out the forms in this top folder. The second is the write-up on what we sent to the crime lab. And the third is empty. That's for your investigation.”

Harlan shuffled through the paperwork as the phone continued to ring. “Are you gonna answer that?” he asked.

“Jesus Christ,” Holly said. “I just told you what all that crap is. And leave the phone to me. You need a coffee?”

“You got an Ale-8?”

“Real men drink coffee in the morning,” Holly said before making a big show of grabbing a soft drink from the fridge. “Listen, we're gonna be working like dogs until you find out who shot Lew. The phone is ringing off the hook. Parents are scared to send their kids to school. We've got bum tips from every jackass in the county who hates his neighbor. All anyone knows is that Lew was the law and Lew's dead, so get yourself looking presentable and go see the judge. You can't be sheriff until he goes through the anointing ceremony or whatever the hell it is. In the meantime, I'll put these folders in your new office.”