The More They Disappear Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For my family

  This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with life outside us.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE COMMON READER

  You can forget everything. The least little thing bothers you, you run to them.

  —DANNY SHELLEY, INMATE

  prologue

  OCTOBER 1998

  The sheriff’s cruiser swung onto Highway 68, a winding track of asphalt laid over a centuries-old buffalo trace that had been carved from salt lick to water’s edge. Its driver headed north toward eight turn-of-the-century city blocks wedged between limestone cliff and muddy river. People had taken to calling these blocks “downtown” Marathon ever since the county seat began its expansion out from the shores of the Ohio. Behind the cruiser, strip malls and neon signs advertising gas prices and fast-food specials lined the highway until you reached the Walmart on the edge of town. Suburbs had formed along the newly paved roads that crisscrossed the highway, and attached to those roads were lanes that snaked into the hills and led to neighborhoods with names like Redwood Estates and Thousand Lakes, names that had nothing to do with their surroundings. It was this part of Marathon where most people lived and they simply called it Marathon.

  Sheriff Lew Mattock crested one final rise before the river, dropped into third gear, and revved his engine. He believed this was how a competent man kept his valves clean. Ahead of him lay a quarter mile of open space and sky—the distance between two Marathons. The sheriff had been one of the first to buy property atop the hill, so he considered himself a trailblazer of sorts. Over three consecutive terms his acre of land had doubled in value and the best place to drum up votes had become the Walmart on a weekend. Downtown was dead. A few stodgy holdovers who romanticized the town’s pioneer past kept calling for its restoration but they were outnumbered and unpopular.

  The steering wheel ran loose and easy in Lew’s right hand as he watched a window-tinted Camaro cross the double line to pass a lumbering dually. He could have issued a citation but he didn’t particularly care to put on his flashers and go through the headache. Instead, he rolled the window down and sucked the crisp fall air like it belonged to him alone. At some point, he placed his hand atop a manila envelope sitting passenger-side to keep it from fluttering away in the breeze. Inside was a grant check from the DEA to help wage the federal government’s never-ending war on drugs.

  Lew had time to kill before a campaign fundraiser, and at the T-junction by the river, he parked along a scenic overlook the highway department had cleared a month or so before. He snapped off the dispatch and turned on the radio—the talking guitar of Peter Frampton following him as he stepped out and spit a stream of tobacco juice. Lew put one foot atop the guardrail and stretched his thick thighs. A cobalt sky extended above him, banded by the golden light of a waning sun. In the valley below a thicket of trees lined a creek that splintered out from the Ohio. The birches and maples and sycamores had turned golden and ochre and crimson. A bronze historical marker pointing out the remains of a log cabin told the story of the McGoverns, a husband and wife with four kids who’d moved to Kentucky from Boston for the abundant lande and clean aire. Apparently, they’d headed west again ten years later, fearing Kantacke awash with new blood. Lew read the placard and imagined McGovern as a hippie with shaggy hair and necklaces, his wife in long, fluttering dresses. He knew the type. Living off the grid, they called it, but it was more like death than living. A man made his mark on the world through other people. Lew kicked a chunk of gravel over the edge, pulled his sagging pants to a point just below his ample stomach, and offered McGovern his middle finger. Then he laughed at himself for gesturing to a dead man.

  As he pulled a handful of index cards from his pocket, Lew started addressing the air, ad-libbing off his stump speech every now and again, letting his voice echo over the stereo. He was guaranteed four more years. He’d won the Democratic primary unopposed and Marathon was Democrat country. The only person stupid enough to run against him was a nut-job anarchist who looked homeless and spoke nonsense. Not a single Republican had stepped up to challenge him despite a lefty president who couldn’t keep it in his pants. Lew considered adding a couple Clinton jokes just to let people know how goddamn independent he was—things he’d heard about cigars and what you could do with them. Lew was Marathon’s president. Four more years. And who knew how many after that? He was fifty-two years old, and he had at least three more terms in him if the voters did their job.

  As he gestured toward the sky, Lew imagined he was being watched and he wanted to make sure his audience knew that before them stood a man who commanded respect. By the time he finished, ending in a flourish of “God bless this” and “God bless that,” spittle was raining from his gummy maw onto the valley below.

  Satisfied with his performance, Lew continued along the river road. At a four-way, he flipped his flashers to run the stop. It was a habit the mayor had fielded complaints about but Lew did little to change. A quirk of mine, he said.

  Downtown had been built atop the footprint of the original settlement and was still laid out like a western outpost. Main Street included a clapboard-church-cum-perpetually-closed-visitor’s-center, a diner wedged between vacant storefronts, and various county offices. The side streets were filled with row houses, but unlike a western outpost, Marathon had been built with brick—its houses modeled on those the town’s founders had left behind in Philadelphia and Boston and New York. Across the street from the stone courthouse, the sheriff’s department sat in shame. It was the ugliest building in town—a concrete box built in the 1950s with little regard for windows. An ancient, dying beech towered over the building and killed the grass. Lew had petitioned the mayor to chop the tree down, but the city council landmarked it instead. An arborist from Lexington had even come out to cable its heaviest branches.

  Lew parked in his usual spot. Every day he imagined men in suits walking down the courthouse steps, belittling his ugly little piece of the pie, and as if on cue, the county’s newest public defender walked by and waved. Lew barely returned the gesture. He didn’t like lawyers. He believed justice could best be served by a single, exceptional man. Lawyers were on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand men, could convince themselves of damn near anything if they thought long and hard enough about it.

  Lew cut a straight line across the sheriff’s department’s dirt in short, determined steps. “Did Harlan get me a grill?” he asked his secretary as he plowed into the office.

  Holly finished stuffing an envelope before answering. “I believe so,” she said.

  Lew smiled. What his chief deputy lacked in brains, he made up for in stick-to-it-iveness. “Is it a good one?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Holly said. “I don’t ask questions about the important stuff.”

  “I intend to grill fifty pounds of prime Kentucky beef, so I consider this pretty damn important.”

  “
If you’re worried, drive on over to see Harlan and get out of my hair.”

  Lew strode up to Holly’s desk and rested his substantial heft against the small section free of paperwork. Holly was proof a person could age with grace. The wrinkles on her skin didn’t make her look old so much as skeptical. Near seventy, she dressed in the fashion of a bygone era—square, gold-rimmed glasses, monochrome ladies’ jackets, skirts that fell below the knee. On her left hand she still wore the ring of a husband who’d died young. Lew knew she didn’t like his demanding nature or crude jokes, but together they helped an undermanned department keep the relative peace. Occasionally Holly annoyed him with her insistence on dotted i’s and crossed t’s, but given their lackluster deputies, hers was the only opinion besides his own that Lew respected.

  “Will I see you at the barbeque later?” he asked.

  “Social functions and I don’t mix.”

  “But I can still count on your vote?”

  Holly gave him a thin smile. “I have to think on it.”

  Lew slid the envelope with the DEA check onto her desk. “Does this change your mind?”

  Holly removed and studied the check. “Depends on whether this goes to giving me a raise.”

  Lew grabbed the check back. “That sounds like extortion, Ms. Dilts. But maybe if you nice up a little, I’ll consider it.”

  Holly rolled her eyes as Lew continued on to his office, where he pressed Play on his voicemail and listened to people spout various forms of recorded bullshit. He fixed his thirst with a pull from his desk flask as he hit Delete over and over.

  Soon enough he was back in his cruiser and heading down the river road to Josephine Entwhistle’s waterfront spread. As he pulled onto her pea gravel drive, Lew spotted Harlan crouched with a tent stake in one hand and a hammer in the other. Josie was squawking at Harlan about something or other. The rotted lean-to that Josie’s ancestors had built stood behind them in a nest of hackberry and scrub oak. Josie liked to remind people that she descended from Marathon’s founders, that her land had been passed down for over two hundred years. Lew couldn’t stand when she started regaling people with her history, couldn’t stand any of the families who thought their last names still mattered in Marathon. Lew didn’t live in the past. He’d escaped his own, which began in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, and started anew along the banks of the Ohio, succeeding on his own intelligence and fortitude, not some passed-down privilege.

  Josie claimed not to care much for politics, but she’d been more than happy to loan Lew her patch of riverside. In Marathon you couldn’t refuse Lew Mattock a favor regardless of your last name. Josie had a dope-smoking grandson with a girlfriend he’d knocked up, and the last thing she needed was for Lew to make a point of arresting said grandson when he inevitably fucked up.

  “What’re y’all screaming about?” Lew asked as he stepped from the cruiser.

  Josie pointed at Harlan. “He’s ruining my lawn.”

  “Well, why would he do a thing like that?” Lew turned to Harlan. He couldn’t help smiling as Harlan stood up from his crouch, his gangly limbs slow to straighten. Harlan’s every movement seemed strained by his height. Physically he was everything Lew wasn’t and this made Lew think less of him. Harlan was a head-in-the-clouds kind of man, figuratively and literally; Lew was a feet-on-the-earth man.

  Harlan didn’t answer Lew’s question; he just fidgeted with the hammer, letting it smack an awkward rhythm against his thigh. “Harlan,” Lew cooed. “Earth to Harlan.”

  “There’re gonna be kids around,” Harlan said, “running barefoot and all, so I figured I’d set up in this grass.”

  “What do you think of that, Josie?”

  “I’d say that’s a damn shame reason to tear up my lawn.”

  Lew cocked his head, as if considering the issue. “I have to agree with Josie on this one, Harlan. Now I know you’re a bachelor, so I’m touched you were thinking of the kiddies and all, but kiddies are resilient. Don’t matter if they’re playing on grass or dirt or rocks. Hell, a kid can run over broken glass if they’re having enough fun. Besides, Josie here has a vote in the election and kiddies don’t, so move everything where she tells you, okay?”

  Harlan nodded and followed Josie to a weed-strewn patch of dirt.

  “Crisis averted,” Lew mumbled to himself before going to inspect the stainless steel grill in the bed of Harlan’s pickup. Harlan’s truck was so old it had been his daddy’s when his daddy was a young man. Lew had driven by a broken-down-on-the-side-of-the-road Harlan countless times, but he always sped by to avoid commiserating about what had broke and why. Harlan was oblivious anyway, the curved bill of his sweaty ball cap pulled low while he tunnel-vision-tinkered.

  Lew ran his hand over a slipshod patch of welding along the truck’s gate and shook his head. Flecks of rusted metal broke off where his fingers pressed. The grill put the truck to shame. Its cooking surface boasted a second level for toasting buns and there was an extra burner on each side. Harlan had done good. Lew even considered lowering the grill from the truck to help, but when it came time to hammer a stake or set up chairs in the grass, Lew became bored. He believed fervently in the separation of tasks. Harlan’s time was best spent preparing for the fundraiser while his was best spent looking at a freshly inked government check and ruminating on the future.

  A couple of early birds parked on the shoulder of the river road, and when Lew noticed a familiar white SUV, he grabbed a bottle of Basil Hayden’s from the trunk of his cruiser. The bourbon was left over from the bust of a truck loaded with stolen booze and cigarettes. Lew had kept a couple of crates as a finder’s fee, and since it was election season, he’d hand delivered most to wealthy farmers and difference makers. There’d been a time in Finley County when the man who distilled the best moonshine won the election, and Lew figured that time wasn’t so far removed as people liked to believe.

  He made straight for Stuart Simon, the editor of the Marathon Registrar. “Gonna make a fortune on parking tickets today,” he said, his right hand extended. Stuart had moved from Chicago and liked the folksy quality of Marathoners, the one-line jokes and thick accents, so Lew hammed it up.

  “Is that what this shindig is all about?”

  “Ever lil’ bit helps.”

  “It can’t be ’cause you’re worried about losing the election.”

  “Not a thing in this world is set in stone but the Lord’s commandments.” Lew handed the bottle over. “Kentucky’s finest,” he said. “I figure you mightn’t’ve had the pleasure.”

  “I’ve been here three years.” Stuart studied the bottle.

  “Has it been that long?” Lew excused himself. Brevity was key in his dealings with other men. He couldn’t abide a lagging conversation, considered pointless chatter a weakness.

  While he looked for someone else worth talking to, Lew’s son pulled up with his armpiece of a wife and their twin daughters. Lew’s own wife was conspicuously absent. He hadn’t expected Mabel to show up and it was just as well. He felt uncomfortable whenever he saw her moping along the edges of a party. Lew crouched down and beckoned his granddaughters, who ran and jumped into his arms. He lifted them up and spun a circle, smiling wide for anyone who might be looking. As he set the girls down, a claw of a hand gripped him by the shoulder; Lew turned to find Trip Gaines’s smug face. Trip was family by way of his son’s marriage—the armpiece’s father—but Lew didn’t feel like listening to his long-winded bullshit, so used their granddaughters as buffers and said, “Hug your Pappy Gaines now,” winking at Trip as the girls reached up their arms.

  The guests kept trickling in and Lew kept busy pumping hands and telling jokes until it was time for him to man the grill. Someone started playing music, a rocking bit of country that had him shuffling his feet as he slapped steaks onto the fire. It was going to be a bash of a party—the best yet.

  one

  Mary Jane Finley was late. She’d changed her outfit three times but nothing seemed to fit. It w
as the mirror’s fault, the way it reflected her body lumpen and plain. She had new curves, new skin—had for a while now—and no amount of makeup could bring back the face that had twice been Finley County’s Junior Miss Harvest. Those years, from twelve to fourteen, had been her best. After that her body ran its own course, and no diet, fast, or finger down the throat could help her regain the promise she’d shown. There always remained twenty pounds she couldn’t shed. After futilely changing her clothes one last time, Mary Jane scowled at the mirror and said, “Fuck you.”

  She drove her red coupe past the house where her boyfriend, Mark, had lived before he left for college. She knew Mark was back in town, waiting by the window for that moment she drove by, and she resisted the urge to honk hello. The finished homes started to thin out as she rolled down the street at a steady twenty-five. In countless plots there lay only the expectation of a house—floor plans staked with wooden boards, electric boxes rising from the emptiness, scraggly seedlings of trees. Mary Jane parked in a deserted cul-de-sac next to the bones of a two-story and slipped on a backpack before hiking into the woods.

  It was bow season but the trails were quiet. Most hunters waited for gun season to bag their bucks. The occasional bird flitted from branch to branch and called out, but Mary Jane paid them no mind. She adjusted the backpack, which held a broken-down rifle that weighted itself awkwardly against her shoulders. Her impulse was to step into the thickest woods and move under the cover of brush, but she knew her feet would kick up leaves that way and a stray limb might scratch her face. No. It was better to stay on the worn paths.

  She moved with a certain grace through the woods, though that grace wasn’t the result of years spent hiking so much as years spent walking down the hallway in heels. “Down and back,” her mother would say until blisters formed on Mary Jane’s feet, Mary Jane refusing to show pain. Down and back. Mary Jane a plaything to order around. Down and back. A mindless animal.