The More They Disappear (13 page)

“Yes. Lew Mattock.”

“I don't know what I could tell you.” Inside there was a loud whistle and Lyda stood up. “I was making tea,” she said. “Wait here.”

Harlan relaxed his legs and the chains holding the porch swing cried out. The neighboring houses were masterpieces of construction—worn brick exteriors, bay windows, wraparound porches. They were nothing like the shoddy craftsmanship of Harlan's home. A place like the Finleys' could be passed down through generations. The only drawback was the view. Neighbors everywhere. Neighbors watching you come and go. Neighbors judging you. The trailer park next to Harlan's place could be a headache, but better trashy neighbors on the other side of some woods than nosy housewives steps away. Harlan had the crickets and the opossums and the deer and that was enough. In the winter, when everything but the cedar and pine died back, there was a clear view to the river, and up until a coal barge or gambling boat went by, he could almost believe the world was his alone.

Lyda walked out with two steaming mugs. She'd changed into jeans and a sweater. “I felt so dreary in that dress,” she said. She was the sort of woman who looked fashionable no matter what she wore. Harlan had seen the catalogues that clothes like hers came from, their pages covered with models who looked like younger versions of Lyda herself. “Where were we?”

“Lew,” Harlan said.

Lyda cupped her mug in both hands as though to warm them. “Right,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

“Did you know Lew?”

She shook her head. “I voted for him but that's about it. I guess we saw him at the occasional social event.”

“You were at the funeral today.”

“Jackson felt we should go.” She relaxed and her shoulders dropped slightly. “He has this sense that people expect the Finleys to show up at such things, as if our mere presence gives the town succor. It's ridiculous, of course, but I find it best to let Jackson have his delusions.”

“So Jackson and Lew were close?”

“No, I don't believe so. Not unless Lew spent time at Idle Haven. My husband practically lives at the country club.”

Harlan knew Lew wasn't a member at Idle Haven, though it wasn't from lack of effort. The Haven was famous for its exclusivity. Newcomers needed to be sponsored by current members and even then the board rarely voted in their favor. Lew had wrangled a sponsorship but been denied by the board. Harlan remembered because Lew retaliated by setting up a speed trap down the road from the club. Harlan sipped his tea in silence and waited for Lyda to say more.

“I don't know what to tell you, Mr. Dupee. I didn't know Lew that well.”

“The day after he died, I found a cell phone in Lew's cruiser.” Harlan pulled the phone from his pocket. “Looks like this.” If he'd surprised her, Lyda hid it well. She blew over the rim of her mug, took a sip, and waited for him to continue. “Does it look familiar?”

“I have one that looks like that.”

“I know. We subpoenaed the records. This phone's registered to you.”

Lyda rubbed her nose. “That's strange,” she said. “I don't know why Lew would have it. Maybe I dropped it and he picked it up.” She put out her hand.

“You want to know the strangest thing,” Harlan said. Lyda stared at him, not blinking. She couldn't be bothered to ash her cigarette and its dead end grew silently. “This phone—
your
phone—dialed one number over and over, so I called it and got a recorded message of your voice. Strange, right? That you'd be calling yourself?” A neighbor walked by with a little boutique dog—a fluffy mess of a thing. Lyda turned and waved hello as the dog paused to pee on a shrub. Harlan let the neighbor continue down the block before getting to his real question. “Were you and Lew having an affair, Mrs. Finley?”

She smiled tightly. “Please, Mr. Dupee. Call me Lyda.”

“Lyda.”

She tapped out another long, white cigarette from her pack and offered it to him. Harlan put it to his lips and let her light it, took a drag. “Lew gave me something my husband couldn't. He was a respite from reality.”

“How long did it last?”

“Not long.”

“But you had phones to reach each other. This wasn't a one-night fling.”

“A year. Maybe less. Maybe more. I bought the cell phones so I wouldn't have to call his office or home. Lew didn't know how it worked, but once he figured it out, the bill became sky-high. He loved gadgets. Sometimes he'd get on the phone right after we slept together. The reception barely works out here, but he didn't care. I had to lie to Jackson about taking French classes to help pay for it.”

“Who did he talk to? What did he talk about?”

“I don't know. Nothing important. He called people to say hello, to tell them he was on a cell phone. He had nicknames for everyone. It was Big Boy this, Billy Goat that. I told Lew if he didn't stop calling other people, I'd take the phone away.” She smiled. “Like he was a child.” Her voice started to waver and she sniffled once before rescuing the cigarette for a final drag.

“And he stopped calling other people?”

“He did. He turned it into a game, like what would I do for him in return. Though I'm sure you don't need those details.”

“Do you know anyone Lew might have had a disagreement with? Someone who would have wanted to harm him?”

She shook her head.

“What about Jackson? Did he know about the affair?”

She kept shaking her head, looked down as if she'd been chastised. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“Where is Jackson now?”

She raised her head to look at Harlan again. “We had brunch at the club. He wanted to stay. I'll pick him up when he's good and liquored.”

“Does he own any guns?”

“Jackson? Obviously, you haven't met my husband. He prefers cooking to hunting.”

“There aren't any guns in the house?”

“His father's are in the basement gathering dust. Jackson wouldn't even know how to load a bullet.”

“Can I borrow them?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not unless you want me to get a warrant, in which case I tell the judge about the affair to justify probable cause. Either way, I get the guns.”

“Whatever you want,” she said. “But I didn't have anything to do with Lew's death, Mr. Dupee. And neither did my husband. Part of me wanted out of the affair, and I'm sure part of Lew felt the same. The problem was we fit well together, so it was hard to end. I hope that makes sense.”

She opened the front door and led him through a dining room with glass-fronted shelves to show off silver and china. A chandelier loomed above a long mahogany table. In the kitchen she paused and picked up an envelope. “Do you have children, Mr. Dupee?”

“No.”

“My daughter left a note today that said, ‘Gone to Lexington.' That's it. No ‘Dear Mom and Dad.' No ‘Love, Mary Jane.'”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“You try not to mess them up but sometimes you can't help it.” She sighed and dropped the envelope back on the table before leading him into a dimly lit basement.

He stood at the base of the stairs while Lyda searched through boxes. The mounted head of a four-point buck stared at him from a perch on the wall. Spiderwebs stretched across the rafters where the house's plumbing and electric snaked. A brown spider was hard at work and Harlan thought he could make out his initials in its nascent web. “Your daughter who ran off,” he said. “Any chance she knew about the affair?”

Lyda pushed a plastic bin out of the way. “Mary Jane barely knows I exist.”

“And you're not worried about her having up and left?”

“I'm not asking you to find her, if that's what you're asking. She'll come home when she needs money or a warm meal. This is nothing new.” Lyda stopped and opened a wooden chest. “Here we are,” she said. “It's heavy.”

Harlan came over to help, and as he grabbed the chest by its leather straps, Lyda put her hand atop his. “Will you be talking to Jackson about this?” she asked.

Harlan pulled his hand away and handed her a card. “Call me if you think of anything else that might help, Mrs. Finley.” Then he lifted the gun chest and hiked up the stairs.

When he passed through the dining room a second time, it didn't leave the same grand impression. The heavy wood and delicate glass made Harlan feel like he was in a museum, like nothing was meant to be touched, and he thought he could understand why a woman like Lyda might be so terribly bored, why she might have found something in Lew.

By the time he'd hefted the chest into the bed of his truck, Lyda had stepped back outside. He watched her pick up the hedge clippers and start back on the boxwoods, one of those thin cigarettes dangling from her lips as she opened and closed the blades.

*   *   *

As Mary Jane headed south for Lexington, weather-beaten fences gave way to the bright white planks and low stone walls of horse farms with elegant names. Denali and Claiborne, Gainesway and Calumet. The black eye of an occasional thoroughbred flashed in her headlights, and she wondered each time if it was a million-dollar runner or a broken-down nag. She never understood how someone could tell the difference. The highway's shoulder reappeared as the first hint of the city—the Big Blue Building—flashed on the horizon. Mary Jane passed a Travelodge and Shell station that bordered the crossroads at I-64 and I-75, passed a strip mall empty save a Chinese buffet, a fenced-in mental hospital that divided historic Victorians from public housing. Downtown boasted a smattering of office buildings surrounded by empty sidewalks and fountains no one was around to appreciate. On the other side, the suburbs began—two-story homes with clipped lawns and circular drives.

She turned down Euclid, a mix of boutique stores and college-town standards—a pub, a record store, a skate shop. Closer to campus the houses turned modest. In the front yards students had slung couches, bleached and blotchy from sun and rain. Beer cans littered the grass like shell casings. At a stoplight Mary Jane watched a couple of girls in skirts too short for the cold stumble arm in arm down the sidewalk while the rolling bass of a stereo shook her coupe—a tricked-out truck with two pasty white boys in backward hats. They lowered their music and hollered at the girls, who ignored them, then turned their attention to Mary Jane and said something crass. Mary Jane stared straight ahead until the light turned green. When she glanced over, the passenger mouthed “Bitch” as the driver spun his tires.

A few blocks down, she turned onto Mark's street and parked in front of his fourplex. The windows of his apartment were dark. On the porch of the unit below, two girls sat drinking a bottle of wine. Mary Jane considered driving to the library and looking for Mark there but the scratching pens and clicking keyboards always made her feel like a failure.

One of the neighbors came over and knocked on the passenger-side window. “What's up?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Are you spying on us?”

Mary Jane wished that were the case, wished she were doing something more interesting than waiting for a boy. She flipped off her headlights. “I'm a friend of Mark's.”

“Who?”

“He lives upstairs.”

“Oh.”

“We grew up together.”

“Oh.”

Mary Jane didn't add any more.

“He comes home late,” the girl said, checking a silver watch clasped loosely around her bony wrist. “Later than this.” She put her thin arm through the window, extended her hand. “I'm Audra.”

“Mary Jane.”

“I think he keeps a spare key beneath that empty planter outside his door.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but I didn't tell you that. Especially if you
are
casing the joint.”

“I was waiting for Mark, but now…” Mary Jane let her voice trail off as if she was up to mischief. Audra gave a throaty laugh and asked if she wanted a glass of wine.

The porch was lit by flashing Christmas lights, and every few seconds Mary Jane could make out the color in Audra and her roommate Megan's faces before they faded back to gray. The wine stained their teeth purple, and Megan dribbled some onto her sweater. Mary Jane watched the stain spread along the fabric like blood in the flash, flash, flash. She wanted a cigarette, but neither Audra nor Megan seemed to smoke, so she made do without. Audra asked what she studied and where she lived. Mary Jane lied and said she was taking acting classes and looking for a place of her own. “You should join our sorority,” Audra said. She alternated between twirling her wristwatch and twirling her hair.

Megan started singing. “High, low, everywhere we go, on Kappa Gamma we'll depend! We are Kappa Kappa Gammas; we're sisters 'till the end!” She swung her arm with a final flourish and knocked her glass onto the porch, where it shattered. Everyone laughed.

Mary Jane watched her feet appear and disappear in the flashing lights, the reflection of broken glass. She was still wearing her heels and black dress from the funeral. “Maybe I'll check it out,” she said, and for a moment she believed the lie, believed she actually was a student.

Audra unscrewed the top off another bottle and they passed it around as if in ceremony. The conversation turned to sex, each girl sharing her disappointments and lies, each girl slurring her words ever so lightly.

By the time Mark showed up, Mary Jane was giddy drunk. “Hey baaaby,” she called out. Mark hesitated and walked toward her. She stumbled along the ledge of the porch, fell into his stiff arms. “My hero,” she said in a breathy voice.

“MJ, what are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.”

Mary Jane tried to make introductions, but Mark barely said hello before starting up the stairs to his apartment. “I better go,” she said. “He doesn't like surprises.”