Ghosts of the Missing Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1 Adair

  2 Cassius Moye

  3 Adair

  4 Edward Adair

  5 Adair

  6 Elspeth & Bevin

  7 Adair

  8 Jorie Pearse

  9 Adair

  10 Adair

  11 Adair

  12 Adair

  13

  14 Adair

  15 Adair

  16 Adair

  17 Adair

  18 Janus

  19 Adair

  20 Adair

  21 Adair

  22 Adair

  23 Adair

  24 Adair

  25 Adair

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2020 by Kathleen Donohoe

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Donohoe, Kathleen, author.

  Title: Ghosts of the missing / Kathleen Donohoe.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019023912 (print) | LCCN 2019023913 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544557178 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780544557185 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Missing children—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. |Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3604.O5646 G48 2020 (print) | LCC PS3604.O5646 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023912

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023913

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

  Cover illustration by Carly Miller

  Author photograph © Beowulf Sheehan

  v1.0120

  To Travis and Liam

  And for Jennifer

  Prologue

  The woman was no one, until the bell began to ring.

  The boy first saw her at the mountain ash, picking the berries, he believed, that were red and ripe in midautumn, too bitter for any creature but a bird. He was eleven then, and she was grown, near twenty at least. By her clothes and her red hair, unbraided, Cassius Moye placed her as an Irish girl, a servant. Within ten steps, he had forgotten her.

  Yet when he passed near the tree again, hurrying to leave the woods before full dark, he heard a bell ringing. Looking up, he saw only a gathering of October stars. The sound persisted. Had he been younger, he might have run. Older, he’d have scoffed. But as it was, he listened carefully, aware that this was a story he would tell forever. As he neared the mountain ash, the sound grew stronger. It was coming from the tree, but he could see no other source.

  The next morning at breakfast, Cassius told his mother. His father was already gone to work at Moye Foundry and Ironworks, the business he’d begun with his wife’s inheritance, and which had become as prosperous as he’d promised her. Cassius knew his father would not tolerate the story, but he was disappointed when his mother dismissed it as a trick of the darkness. He should not be in the woods at all, and most certainly not at night. Though neither the boy nor his mother knew what it meant, the girl carefully setting the plates on the breakfront understood what Cassius had seen and heard. Back in the kitchen, she repeated what he had said.

  One year later, on the twenty-seventh of October 1855, in the big houses along the Hudson River, Irish girls slipped down the narrow staircases that took them from their attic rooms to the plain servants’ doors that freed them in the gardens. They met at the front gate of Moye House, and when complete, the gathering walked into the woods. Each held a lit candle in one hand and a small bell in the other, a thumb on the clapper to keep it silent.

  The oldest of the servant girls was twenty-two and the youngest no more than twelve. For their first years in America, all they remembered of home was hunger like a claw and their escape on the sea. Often they dreamed that there had been no ship, that they’d crawled across the rough waves of the Atlantic. Cassius’s story made them remember Ireland, the feast day of Saint Maren, and how they had petitioned the saint with their prayers when they were children.

  After entering the woods, they called up a song in Irish, the first language, the one they rarely spoke. They tied the bells to the branches of the mountain ash, which they called the crainn níos gasta, the quicken tree. Four days later, the girls returned. Untied the ribbon. Caught the bell in one hand. In Ireland, the bell had been meant to carry a prayer to the saint. In America, it was a wish.

  The woman the boy had seen walked with them. They knew it, though none of them saw her, or knew who she was, or who among them she belonged to. They only sensed the extra footfall, the voice that was not a voice but an echo.

  To this day, the woman and the bell haunt the woods. On nights when the wind is not too rough, the chime of the bell can be heard. In bell-speak, it is saying, Who looks for you?

  1

  Adair

  March 2010

  The children are untethered.

  Their parents glide over the frozen surface of Prospect Park Lake, holding kite strings taut from the wind or simple magic. They are writing the names of the children into the ice with the blades of their skates. But the boys and girls, six in all, are drifting up into the storm, their arms outstretched. The sky awaits.

  A summer ago, I was sketching this scene on a bench in Prospect Park, the third day of a heat wave that made descending into the subway a trip to a circle of hell. Always, I liked to draw out of the current season, but this, visiting winter in August, had been a deliberate diversion.

  A woman parked her stroller and sat beside me as her daughter took off on a scooter. We recognized each other at the same time, and when she smiled and said hello, I returned her greeting through a grimace. A year ago, I had temped at Emily’s office.

  When I was introduced to her, she said, “Nice to meet you, Adair.”

  Not “Claire” or “Blair” or “I’m sorry, what?”

  Indeed, the whole three months I’d been there, she’d greeted me every morning as she passed by the front desk, where I sat waiting for the phone to ring. When she went out to lunch, she’d ask if I wanted anything. I always declined, not wanting to burden her with an extra cup of coffee, though it was hard to cross the long hours of the afternoon on only the weak coffee in the office kitchen.

  This friendliness, intermittent as it was, meant we couldn’t politely ignore each other, not while sitting on the same bench. As though it were a chore on a list, Emily initiated small talk.

  “You know, I wasn’t sure that was you for a minute. I didn’t remember your hair as red. Well, reddish, I should say.” She smiled. “Did you get highlights? I like it.”

  I answered slowly, out of practice. It was Sunday afternoon and I hadn’t spoken to another person since Friday afternoon when I left work.

  “It’s brown, really. The red only shows in the sun,” I said, reaching up self-consciously to touch the ends. It was getting long again, nearly to my shoulders.

  The baby, Hazel, was about to turn one, she told me. Soon she would go back to work full time, and God, was she looking forward to it. I recalled the office with its hospital-green walls and the droning meetings I transcribed, where every voice sounded like a housefly butting against a windowpane.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  Emily laughed, and before she could co
ntinue her obligatory update, she caught sight of the sketchpad in my lap.

  “That’s very good,” she said.

  Her obvious surprise qualified as a backhanded compliment. You can draw? You’re an artist? The girl who answered our phones? The girl who spent an entire eight-hour workday shredding our old files? But I was used to the amazement when my temporary coworkers saw me in a new context. It was as if they’d learned the Xerox machine had a lovely singing voice.

  “Really, Adair. These are fantastic. Can I—?”

  I hesitated before handing my book to her. She studied the sketch and asked if I drew portraits of children. Say yes, she added, because then she would pay me to draw her oldest.

  Yes, I answered.

  She smiled. Come up with a price, she told me. Then double it.

  I saw her only twice more, when I drew her daughter and when I delivered the final portrait. But she emailed me frequently, mostly introductions to this mom or that one, all of whom hired me.

  Once Emily was back at work, she had no time for side projects like mentoring talented but rudderless young women she came across in city parks. Her emails grew so brief they were the snail mail equivalent of a postcard (“great!”), and I chided myself for believing that she’d become a friend.

  But my business had gotten its start. After a week of trying to think of a clever name, I went with the simple Portraits by Adair. They became a must-have in the neighborhood. A Maclaren stroller. A McCrohan portrait. My surname, easy to spell but tricky out loud, had finally proved an asset. (Crow-what? Hand?)

  Then, a year after our meeting in the park, Emily emailed and asked me to draw Hazel, who was now two. Emily and her husband lived in Cobble Hill, four stops on the F train from me. It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when I arrived at the door beneath the stoop, as instructed. I rang the doorbell.

  Emily answered as I was about to pull my glove off and knock. Her hair was a lighter shade of blond than I remembered, and it was pulled back in a messy bun that on Emily looked stylish. She was tall, too, and I straightened my shoulders as I went into the hallway.

  She leaned in as if to hug me, but I put my hand out before she could. Unfazed, she took my hand and squeezed it gently.

  “Thank you for coming on short notice. I figured I’d better let you draw Hazel while you still can.”

  Emily led me into the living room. Hazel was in an armchair, an iPad in her lap. She didn’t look up as we came in. When I took a seat on the black couch, Emily offered me tea or coffee and then hesitated.

  “I have wine as well?”

  When I said wine would be great, she looked so happy that I was glad I hadn’t opted for caffeine.

  Before departing for the kitchen, she knelt in front of Hazel and gathered the toddler’s feet in her hands. “Hazel, love? Adair is here to draw your picture. Remember, like we talked about?”

  The little girl glanced up briefly. Emily squeezed her feet and stood up.

  “We don’t usually allow screen time during the day,” she said, “but James had her today and they were at the park for two hours, so she’s tired. Willow’s on a playdate.”

  I wanted to tell Emily that I didn’t care if Hazel watched cartoons for twelve hours straight, but instead I said, “It’s better if she ignores me anyway.”

  “Hazel is excellent at ignoring adults,” Emily said, apparently cheered by the realization that she was not going to have to coax her child into responsiveness. “I told the pediatrician I was worried about her hearing and he laughed at me.”

  Drawing Willow had set the template for how I worked. I always asked to sketch in person, but not so the children could pose for me. I liked to see what toys they chose and how they looked when they changed expression and what made them do so. This helped me decide where to settle a child. A train or a castle? In the sky or at sea or in space or in the woods or a garden?

  Sometimes parents wanted one picture of all their children together, and I obliged, but I did prefer to draw them alone. Collective dreams were more difficult to capture.

  On one of my earliest jobs, a four-year-old boy asked me to draw his imaginary friend beside him. No, his mother said wearily. Only you, Max.

  When she left the room for a moment, I asked Max what his friend looked like. He whispered the answer, a child who’d always have secrets. When you get the picture back, I told him, look at the moon. I made a shadow of the craters, as though the old man, slightly bent, were standing just out of sight.

  “Hazel, do you have any imaginary friends?”

  Hazel glanced at me with her lips pursed, shook her head and turned back to the screen. She was more solid than Willow and brown-haired. Had their parents somehow foreseen this, or had the girls simply become their names? I would not have guessed the two were sisters.

  Emily came back with a bottle of wine, already opened, and two glasses. She poured, then handed me a glass and set the bottle on the coffee table. It was, I noticed, already half empty. Emily took the iPad and I waited for Hazel to protest, but she stood up, resigned, and meandered over to a basket of toys.

  I set the glass down and opened my sketchpad, angling it slightly for privacy. I didn’t voluntarily show parents the sketches when I was done, but if asked, I’d acquiesce. The page did unsettle some, since it wasn’t a capture of a whole child but drawings of eyes, a hand, a foot, a nose, a smile. The rough drafts of children.

  “Why am I drawing her while I can?” I asked. “Are you moving?”

  “Maybe. It’s not definite yet.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Two kids in an apartment. They were probably overdue to move to Long Island or Westchester.

  Emily asked how long I’d lived in Brooklyn, and I told her absently that I’d moved here right after college, almost four years ago. I’d had a roommate until recently but now I lived alone, and it was better.

  Lots of the mothers talked to me as I worked, either because they felt they had to be good hostesses or because they were uneasy with silence. Maybe it was because they’d spent the day with toddlers and were happy to talk to anyone who could answer in full sentences. When I’d drawn Willow, Emily had sat at her laptop for most of the session, glancing up occasionally to watch.

  “How the hell can you afford your own place? No offense,” Emily said, “but is it a walk-in closet in somebody’s house?”

  I smiled. “My landlady’s owned her house since the fifties, and she could get a lot more than what she’s charging me.”

  I deliberately let her stand as an elderly widow (she was) who either didn’t realize she could easily charge $2,000 a month for the four rooms on the top floor of her brownstone, or refused to, on moral grounds.

  I was quite practiced in this sleight of hand, where I left out the parts of the story that would lead to questions. Like that it was my uncle who knew Sarah, and it was he who had called her to see if she would rent to me when I suddenly found myself with no roommate and not nearly enough money to live on my own.

  Sarah was a poet who had taught school for twenty-five years, writing when she could find the time. Long ago, she’d decided tenants were too much trouble, but for me she made an exception, as a favor to my uncle but also to support an artist in a city that had turned from haven to burden.

  “You studied art in school, right?” Emily asked. “I think I remember you telling me this.”

  “I did. Art with a minor in art history. I thought maybe I’d work in a museum. I mean, I still might,” I said, though it had been almost two years since I’d sent out a résumé.

  “An art major,” Emily said, amused. “How did your parents feel about it? Willow keeps saying she wants to be an actress, and James keeps telling her that’s fine as long as she learns to code.”

  My pencil faltered on the page but I didn’t look up. “My mother was a photographer and my father was an artist too, so—” I stopped, as ever unsure how to describe two careers that had never been realized.

  “So you come by it
naturally. Well, neither of us has an artistic bone in our body, so I don’t know where Willow gets it. I mean, if she has it. She hasn’t tried acting yet. We were going to start lessons or one of those theater summer camps, to see if she likes it, but money’s going to be tight for a while.”

  “Because of moving?” I asked.

  Emily lifted her wine glass in a toast. “James and I are separating.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said after a startled minute. I looked at Hazel, but she didn’t appear to be listening.

  Emily shrugged, avoiding my eyes. “James can’t pay half the rent here and on a place of his own. We’ve been talking about it for a month—we’re being very civil—but it’s about logistics. Nobody tells you that organizing a divorce is like planning a wedding. You know how weddings are supposed to be about beginning a life together but they’re really about where you stick the cousins you never see?” Emily said. “It’s also plain embarrassing. None of the books say that either. I haven’t told any of my friends yet.”

  I understood then. The wine was prodding her to rehearse the news, and I was the audience.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  Emily sighed. “Are your parents still together?”

  I nodded, cursing myself for mentioning photographer, artist. This had made them real.

  “How long have they been married? Mine celebrated their thirty-ninth few months ago.”

  For a moment, I panicked. Did everybody have this information at hand?

  “They got married, I think, almost two years before I was born,” I said.

  “James says the girls will be fine. Every kid goes through some childhood trauma. If it’s something as normal as divorce, you’re lucky. He might be right. For me, it was my brother when he was in high school. Drugs, stealing. He’s fine now, but I do have something. You must have something. Everybody does, right?”

  She said it absently, not really a question, but I felt claustrophobic. It was like my first weeks of college, with my newly made friends sharing confidences, and me avoiding the personal by directing a question back to them.