Ghosts of the Missing Page 12

  Under that was her address, and beside the zip code was a smear of blue, a blurred fingerprint. I touched it carefully, as if I might erase it, though the ink had set long ago.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  Ciaran looked, for a moment, like he wasn’t sure. “I’m her brother.”

  My blood jumped. But instead of pressing two fingers to my hammering pulse, I smoothed the envelope over my lap and studied Ciaran’s face anew.

  The chin, its cleft slightly off-center, the thick, dark brows that Rowan hated, though I believe she might have grown to like them as a teenager for the dramatic way they framed her eyes. Those eyes, the tell. Ciaran’s were the same light blue that I guessed also turned silvery in certain light.

  “Half brother,” I said.

  “Half, yes,” Ciaran said. “We have the same father. He and Evelyn never married. Kinnane is Evelyn’s maiden name.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “My father was a resident here a long time ago.”

  “I know,” I said, raising my voice slightly. “It’s where he met Evelyn. She worked in the office then.”

  “I’m almost three years older,” Ciaran said. “I don’t want to make excuses for my father, but there are reasons—” He shook his head. “Ballyineen and Culleton, you know the connection?”

  Ballyineen, where so many of the foundrymen had emigrated from. The relationship between Culleton and Ballyineen had been formalized decades ago by pronouncing the two sister towns.

  “My parents were separated. That was the reason he’d come to the States. He wanted to get away.”

  “They were getting divorced?” I asked, glad for Rowan. Neither parent was quite an adulterer.

  Ciaran shook his head. “There was no divorce in Ireland back then. You could live apart for the rest of your lives, but there was no legal way to end a marriage.”

  I was silent for a moment, absorbing that. In 1982? No divorce?

  “When did you find out about Rowan?” I asked.

  “When she was born,” Ciaran said defensively. “My father never lied about Evelyn, or her. He wasn’t coming back. He’d made that plain.”

  “But he did,” I said. “He did go back.”

  “Yes, when he and Evelyn broke up.” Ciaran smiled bitterly. “Rowan was about two. It fell apart quick, after she was born.”

  “You met her,” I said, as if to prove that we had been close, even though, moments earlier, I’d been pretending we’d only been fellow citizens of Culleton.

  To twelve-year-old girls, something that was simply not discussed had the gravity of an actual secret. Because my friendship with Rowan had not aged, I remained in the place where the whisper in which a thing was told had more weight than the words themselves. I met my brother, she’d said.

  “Once,” Ciaran said quietly, “Evelyn brought her to Ireland, the week after Christmas. She’d just turned four.”

  And I saw them, the dark-haired boy and the smaller girl, sitting side by side on a blue couch. They were neither looking at each other nor touching.

  “That visit was the last time my father saw her and the only time I ever did.” Ciaran looked down at his hands. “Then one day I get a letter from America, from Rowan. I wrote her back, but all I could think was, What do I have to say to an eleven-year-old girl? I was fourteen.”

  I stared at the envelope in my lap and turned it over again.

  “Adair? There’s this, too.” Ciaran reached into the folder and withdrew a greeting card.

  I looked at it without touching it. It was a pumpkin patch beneath a full moon. Halloween Greetings, it said.

  “It came the first week of November.”

  I looked up. “If there’s proof Rowan mailed a letter the day she disappeared—”

  “I didn’t save the envelope. I don’t have the postmark. I tossed that one in a drawer to save for the address. There’s no way of knowing when she mailed the card.”

  “The police should still know.”

  “They do,” Ciaran said. “The police have had my letters from the beginning.”

  “You don’t remember if the envelope the card came in—” I stopped.

  “If it was red?” he asked. “She was holding a red envelope. That’s what you’d told them.”

  “Red, yes,” I said. “Red.”

  Me in an aisle of Byrd’s New & Used Books. Those disorganized shelves. The piles of books on the floor that Charley Byrd never bothered shelving. Rowan, appearing at the end of the aisle, then vanishing. In her hand, a flash of red.

  “I don’t remember. I tossed the card on my bed with my schoolbooks and then ran back down the stairs.”

  The envelope for a Halloween card might be orange or black or even white, but certainly not red.

  I tried to remember, to focus on Rowan’s hand, but the image in my mind flickered like a reflection in water. I breathed through my nose. With a panic attack, there was time to stave it off, but usually only seconds, to retreat from the cliff’s edge.

  “Are the other cases you’re looking at like Rowan’s?” I asked.

  “They are.” Ciaran gave a trace of a smile. “Narrow windows of time. A lot of theories but no solid evidence pointing at a suspect. ‘Vanished into Thin Air.’ Nearly every article about a missing person’s got that headline.”

  I knew what he meant. The sentence was constructed as though thin air itself were responsible, like quicksand.

  “But in Rowan’s case, and the others I’m writing about, it’s nearly true,” Ciaran said. “Their shoes being left behind like they walked out of them would be less mysterious. We’d know exactly where it happened at least.”

  “I don’t know how I can help you,” I said.

  “You knew her,” Ciaran said. “And I didn’t.”

  Together we went back to the house, slowly retracing our path in the dark. Ciaran didn’t speak, and I was grateful. We walked beside each other, and I turned to look over my shoulder so often that he began to do it too. But there was nothing behind us but the woods, beginning to fill with darkness. His words played over and over in my mind. You knew her, you knew her. But if it had not been her mother, and I never believed it was Evelyn, then it was a lightning strike under circumstances I couldn’t put together. I didn’t even have the pieces. Nobody did. But if the crime had been random, then it had not been about Rowan, only where she was standing, when. It would have been some other girl. Knowing her, having known her, was useless.

  12

  Adair

  2010

  Quiet hours were due to start in five minutes, but mostly everyone had already finished breakfast and retreated to their rooms to begin the workday.

  Mornings, after I helped load the dishwasher, I took the dog for a walk off the grounds, across the road. Poe kept glancing behind him to make sure I was there. I was glad to see him too, though I knew that Michan took good care of him and he had company from the staff and the residents who were dog people. Poe’s existence was addressed upon acceptance, and notations were made as to residents’ allergies and fears. If certain residents couldn’t abide him in any common areas, we accommodated them.

  Still, Poe was a Moye House fixture. Poe at the feet of a writer sitting on the back terrace. Poe waiting at the foot of the stairs for the residents to come down for dinner. Poe at evening drinks, nudging hands to pet him.

  After touring his usual spots, we went back home. I settled down on the steps to the side door, the old servants’ entrance, and produced a tennis ball from my jacket pocket. Poe chased it and brought it happily back. We wrestled for the ball for a minute, until he released it and waited for the next throw. He was far slower than he used to be, I noticed with dismay, but that was only to be expected.

  The dog and I had been playing for ten minutes, no more, when Ciaran came around the side of the house, holding a mug of coffee. He might have been out for a walk on the grounds, but from how slowly he approached, I assumed he’d come looking for me.

/>   Two days had passed since he told me of his connection to Rowan, and we had not run into each other since, for which I was grateful. I needed time to process who he was and what he’d come here for.

  Talking to him had been like watching lights going on in dark rooms, one by one. Part of it might have been that I was still recovering. I had been sick often enough in childhood to recall the strangeness of being well. It’s how keenly you feel the absence of labored breathing, or the confusion of a fever when you are burning up but cannot stop shivering. It’s having a night’s sleep work and not wear off in hours, like aspirin.

  The day before, I’d learned that my viral load had risen but was not dangerously high. My doctor didn’t believe I had developed a resistance to the medication. She also lectured me:

  2010 is not 1985

  We will never go back to 1985

  But you are not cured

  There is no cure

  There will someday be a cure

  Probably in your lifetime

  This is not someday

  But my clear-sightedness was more than a return to health. It wasn’t until this morning, after I took my meds and began brushing my teeth, that I was able to place it. I felt the way I had when I went into Byrd’s Books for the first time after Rowan disappeared. I walked down every cluttered aisle and saw that she was not there. I realized then that no answer was imminent. Rowan had not been the victim of some inexpert magician who would soon figure out how to reverse his trick. She was gone.

  Now, I didn’t want a return to hope, and I didn’t want to talk about Rowan using the comfortable crutch of grief. I didn’t want to assume she was dead. I wanted a return to urgency.

  I pictured Rowan: the sly grin and the silver-eyed glance over her thin shoulder to make sure no grown-ups were watching. Anger replaced acceptance. What happened? Who took her? Where was she?

  Ciaran sat on the step beside me. He’d cut himself shaving. There was a small spot of dried blood near his ear. Poe bounded over, dropped the ball at Ciaran’s feet and ran a few steps before he turned around, tensed, waiting.

  “Traitor,” I said mildly. “He makes me fight for it.”

  Ciaran threw the ball much farther than I had managed to, and we watched Poe scramble after it.

  “Who do you need to talk to?” I asked.

  “Rowan’s mother, of course. Her stepfather.”

  “They’ve been divorced a long time.”

  “I know,” Ciaran said. “Evelyn and my father talk sometimes on Rowan’s birthday. The anniversary. If something comes up with the investigation.”

  “Do things come up?” I asked, surprised.

  “Sometimes the police show Evelyn a picture of some man who’s been arrested for some kind of sex crime. They’ll say take a look, have you ever seen him before? Nothing’s happened for a long time, though,” Ciaran said. “I already talked to the boy who said he didn’t see Rowan get in the car with her mother that day.”

  “Brian Kelly,” I said.

  “Brian, yes. I spoke to him. He didn’t have anything new to say. He was playing basketball in front of his house. Evelyn came outside and put the baby in the car seat. She went straight to the driver’s side, got in the front and drove off.”

  “And there you go. Rowan was never in town that day.”

  “You saw her,” he said.

  “I was wrong.”

  “What if you weren’t?” Ciaran asked. “What if the police decided to believe the wrong kid?”

  Ciaran was frowning, his slightly furrowed brow unnervingly like Rowan’s. It felt as if she were speaking through him. That the detectives had made choices was not something I had ever considered. Instead of the traumatized orphan, they’d picked the one with the stable home life, calm and confident. Instead of the girl, they chose the boy.

  As if to escape the thought, I stood up. “Have you seen the rec room yet?”

  “In the carriage house? No.”

  After I put Poe in the house, we walked over. Like the tour guide I supposed I was, I explained that the carriage house was not where the horses had once been kept, only the buggy. The truly wealthy might have had carriage houses big enough for two or three carriages, but this one was single. The structure was two stories tall and made of brick. The large double doors were painted red with black trim. I went to the small black door beside them and unlocked it with my key.

  In the main room there were several colorful throw rugs on the wooden floor and a sectional sofa facing a flat-screen television. A small bar stood in one corner with four stools in front of it. In another room there was a combination pool table–air hockey table.

  “Some writers never set foot in here. They’re afraid that if they do it once, they won’t stop,” I said. “This used to be used for storage.”

  “Let’s put the TV outside of the house, make the writers hike to it,” Ciaran said.

  “That was the idea.”

  Ciaran stepped further into the room. He looked up at the beamed ceiling. “Procrastination Station. I heard that’s what it’s called.”

  “Gabby Lundy is the one who first called it that. Her books are over there.” I pointed to the wall of built-in bookshelves. “This is known as the residents’ library.”

  Ciaran moved to look at the bookshelf. He crouched down to search, but after a moment stood.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “My father published a short story in an anthology of stories that were written here,” he said. “His story was called ‘The Quicken Tree.’”

  “Rowan looked for it too. Michan said we must have had it at some point. Somebody probably took off with it.”

  “She looked for it?” he said, stricken. “I promised to send her a copy. I never did it, though. I brought one with me, for all the good it’ll do now.”

  I sat down on the edge of the couch. Saying her name out loud, and casually, felt strange.

  “Did you tell them on your application who you were?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” Ciaran said. “You’re supposed to come here to write. To say that I came here to do research, I wasn’t sure how that would have been looked at.”

  “Research is part of writing,” I said, though I wasn’t sure either.

  “But going out in the day, interviewing people.” He shrugged uncomfortably.

  Why are you here, I wanted to ask, but I decided to put it differently.

  “Did you consider renting a place in Culleton?” I asked.

  “If I hadn’t been accepted, I would have,” he said. “But six weeks where it happened, without having to pay rent or buy meals? I had to try.”

  “But nothing happened here,” I said.

  “This is where Evelyn was that afternoon.”

  The last happy hours of her life. Or hours of suspense, waiting for the proper time to begin her lie. Depending on what you believed.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” Ciaran asked.

  I tensed, but nodded.

  “Was there ever any thought of you and your uncle taking this place for yourselves? You’d have had your own house but still on the grounds.”

  I wanted to laugh at his idea of a personal question when I’d been asked so much worse: HIV? How did you get it? Is HIV in your tears? Is it in, you know, all your blood?

  “Jorie wanted him to do exactly that,” I said. “She told me once.”

  “He didn’t want to?” Ciaran asked. “It had to be hard, being a child here.”

  “It’s not a hotel,” I said.

  “It is a public place, though. This would have been private.”

  “Up on the third floor, you can’t hear a thing going on even one floor below. He can lock himself in his office for hours. Sometimes I’d think he was in there working, and he’d walk in the back door. Just went down another set of stairs, out another door. If we’d lived here, we’d never have been able to get away from each other,” I said.

  No one could fault Michan for needin
g some distance from the child he’d been left.

  I didn’t know how to explain that Michan had, at least in part, given me over to the house to raise. On my way to bed, I would pause to rest my cheek against the banister. I’d open the back door slowly to draw out the syllables of the creak, my home-from-school greeting.

  “I think Jorie hoped that he’d eventually get married and we’d move to our own place.”

  “No, though. Committed bachelor?” Ciaran asked.

  I hesitated. Michan considered himself a private person. He sometimes seemed not to remember that he’d put his life into writing. When residents mentioned some personal episode, he often seemed surprised. Your brother, your poor parents.

  “He’s never wanted kids,” I said.

  “Because of hemophilia?” Ciaran asked. “He’d pass it on?”

  “His sons would be fine. His daughters would be carriers. Because they would get his X with the hemophilia gene on it,” I said. I waited for him to realize the significance of that, what it meant for me, the daughter of a hemophiliac.

  But he said, “You can choose the gender of a baby nowadays.”

  “I’ll be sure and tell him,” I said, and Ciaran laughed.

  I wasn’t going to explain. Though a fluke of genetics had spared Michan from HIV, I believed he was afraid of what else might lurk in his cells, that he might pass on something that was no saving grace.

  Late the next afternoon, near the end of quiet hours, Ciaran found me again outside the servants’ door with the dog. He tossed Poe the ball a few times and then asked if I wanted to come with him to Deering Road, where Rowan had lived. I said that I would. I opened the door and brought Poe up to the third floor by way of the servants’ stairs. I kissed the top of his head and promised to be back later.

  When I returned, Ciaran and I walked to my car. I saw several gardeners turn their heads to watch us as we passed by. I looked away. The house itself seemed to be watching us, resident and resident. There was no rule against the staff and the writers socializing, but it rarely happened on more than a casual level. The writers cocooned themselves in their time here, bonded by their purpose. The last two people to bend this unwritten rule in the way Ciaran and I were may well have been Evelyn and his own father.