Ghosts of the Missing Read online

  “That kind of thing, yes.”

  Ciaran took out his phone and typed quickly. “The full moon had already passed, but on October 24, 1995, there was a new moon. Does a new moon have some kind of meaning?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  Ciaran started to type again and then stopped. “What was the name of the book?”

  “It had ‘Irish’ or ‘Ireland’ in the title, and the word ‘charm.’ The cover was sort of Book of Kells–ish.”

  Ciaran sighed and put his phone in his pocket. “At least it wasn’t a leprechaun.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. It was almost Halloween.”

  Ciaran nodded, an acknowledgment.

  After a brief silence, I said, only because I’d been wondering, “Have you told the other writers here what you’re working on?”

  “Not specifically. A couple of them keep asking me, and I give out my answer that gives away nothing, and we don’t get much further.”

  “You’re talking to me,” I said.

  “You know who I am.”

  I didn’t care for how he made it sound, like I’d found him out. As though I’d gone through his things when he wasn’t in his room.

  “Because you told me,” I said.

  “Because I didn’t want to lie to you,” Ciaran said.

  Because you think I might know something, I thought.

  14

  Adair

  December 1994

  Rowan and I sat on our sleeping bags, which were spread out beneath the Christmas tree in the front parlor. The tree, a concolor fir, was so tall that the wings of its angel brushed the ceiling. The room’s only illumination were the tree’s clear, unblinking lights. The ornaments—red, silver, green bells and stars, spheres and spirals—swung gently in the draft seeping in around the windowpane. The curtain was left open to display the tree, a tradition meant to welcome lost travelers, though certainly there would be no one on the road by Moye House at close to midnight.

  In the near-dark I could almost see a hand from another era rising to wind the ancient clock on the mantel, as ever two hours behind. No one living could fix it, not even my grandfather Darragh, who had often tried.

  The sleepover was to mark my twelfth birthday. Michan had bought the sleeping bags especially (one of my gifts, I thought) because he had somehow realized it would be more fun for us to sleep beneath the Christmas tree. But then Rowan told me that it was the only way her stepfather would agree to let her stay over. My double bed was more than big enough for the both of us, and this was the problem. Twin beds or bunk beds might have been deemed fine. “I keep telling him there’s nothing wrong with you,” Rowan had said, disgusted. “There is,” I’d argued, but she shook her head.

  I held the cards, a deck abandoned by a writer from years ago, who had sat at the dining room table long after breakfast was over, dealing himself hand after hand of solitaire. When he took off only halfway through his residency, he left the cards behind.

  “Hit me,” Rowan said.

  “King plus nine equals nineteen,” I said, exasperated. “You’ll go over.”

  She grinned. “Hit me!”

  I tossed down the jack of hearts. “See?”

  Rowan laughed and sat back on her hands. “My mom once won money at blackjack in Las Vegas.”

  “When did she go to Las Vegas?” I asked. Rowan, and sometimes Evelyn herself, revealed interesting fragments of Evelyn’s life, the years between high school and Rowan’s own birth. I pictured Evelyn as she must have been then, her smile not the polite work-smile but an expression she never used anymore.

  Rowan shrugged. “Twenty? I forget. This woman told her she should stay and work in the casinos because she could make a fortune, even as a cocktail waitress. Mom said she thought about it for half a second, but it was so hot out there that raindrops would evaporate before they hit the ground.”

  I nodded, a yawn pressing at the back of my throat. It was too early for bed, though. Sleepovers, I’d heard, went on until dawn. They were wild. I didn’t want to disappoint Rowan.

  One day, home from school with a fever, I was sitting in Evelyn’s office as she worked, something Michan allowed because Evelyn said she didn’t mind. I sat on the loveseat by the window with a book. After a morning of listening to her field phone calls and watching her type letters, her fingers flying over the keyboard as if she were playing a piece of music, Michan came to see if I was hungry, and Evelyn asked what the plan was for my birthday, which was in a week.

  “Plan?” Michan said with that touch of panic he always tried to pass off as a joke.

  Evelyn suggested the sleepover. She probably hoped that if she arranged this for Rowan, Rowan would leave her be about letting me stay over at their house.

  Now Rowan stood, apparently not at all tired, and pointed at two open boxes in a corner of the parlor. “Are those more Christmas decorations?”

  “Those are books,” I told Rowan, “for the residents’ library.”

  “The what?” she asked.

  I explained that it was going to be built in the old carriage house, and it would be far less formal than the one in the house. At least one section would be books that had been written in Moye House, and another would be other books by authors who had been residents.

  Rowan looked at me quickly. “The book my father’s in could be there,” she said, and I realized this was probably why her mother had not mentioned it to her. Evelyn didn’t want to talk about Jamie Riordan.

  Rowan went over to the boxes and dropped to her knees.

  For all the stories I’d heard about sleepovers, none of them included sorting through old books.

  “So?” I said.

  “So I’ve never even seen it,” Rowan said. “My mom doesn’t have a copy. I always look in bookstores but it’s never there.” She leaned over so that her hair hid her face.

  Rowan began taking books out, glancing at the titles and then setting them aside.

  “You have to put those back,” I said.

  “I will,” she said. “Help me. I’ll get done faster.”

  I stepped off my sleeping bag and went to kneel beside her.

  “Will he ever come back to America?” I asked.

  “He can’t,” Rowan said. She sat back on her heels and, with a book in her lap, explained that her father was locked out. When he first came over, it was supposed to be for only a few months. But he’d met her mother and overstayed his visa, Rowan said, repeating the words as though translating them from a foreign language. He could not work legally in the United States. If he’d been pulled over for a speeding ticket, he might have been taken straight to jail. Then, when Rowan was two, he’d gone back to Ireland, and this made returning to New York almost impossible. Whatever list they kept of those who overstayed their visas, Jamie Riordan was on it. And once you’d been in America illegally and were caught, you were banned for ten years. He could hardly go to the airport and buy a ticket to come back.

  In that case, I asked, why had he taken such a risk? Rowan turned away and explained that by then, Jamie and her mother had broken up, and he hadn’t seen his son, her brother Ciaran, in almost four years. She said no more, but I understood. With children in two different countries, her father had to choose between them. “But if you were two,” I said, “that means it’s been ten years. He can come back.”

  Rowan set aside the book she was holding and took another one from the box. “Well, sure. But he has a job and everything now. He can’t leave.”

  I started to ask why not, just for a visit, but Rowan spoke first.

  “Somebody stole a library book.” Rowan put the book close to her face to read the title: A History of Culleton, New York.

  I leaned over.

  The plastic cover crinkled as Rowan opened the book to flip through it. She stopped abruptly and tapped the page.

  Rowan tossed the book aside and continued searching. I went back to my own hunt. After several minutes of silence, she held
up another, slimmer book with a green cover edged with Celtic knotwork: A Charm for Lasting Love: Spells and Cures from Ireland.

  I shifted close to Rowan as she opened the book to the middle. She read, “‘This beauty spell will make you think you’re more beautiful than you are.’”

  “That’s a dumb idea,” I said.

  “Really. Walking around ugly and thinking you’re not? At least I know.”

  “You’re not ugly, Rowan,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I’m not you.”

  It was too close to a thought I’d had, staring in the mirror—that I did indeed resemble my grandmother Cecelia, who had been so pretty.

  I pretended not to understand. “With this spell, a girl wouldn’t know, though,” I said. “Even if everybody told her, she’d think they were wrong.”

  “I guess,” Rowan said, already moving on. She turned the pages, skimming them. “Too bad we don’t have a rooster,” she said, and, “Is it a full moon?”

  When I had gone to the window and reported that the moon was only half lit, she flipped a page, annoyed.

  “You can make a bracelet out of your hair and give it to a man, and if he takes it, he’s your true love,” she said and grinned. “You should give one to Leo. See what happens.”

  “That’s a stupid thing to say. I don’t like Leo.” I was grateful for the darkness, because she couldn’t see me blushing.

  “I don’t care if you do. It’s better than liking any of the idiots in our class.”

  I didn’t like any of the boys in our class either, but Leo was unthinkable. He was in high school, as out of reach as a movie star.

  “I don’t like anybody,” I said.

  She laughed as she bent her head back over the book. “Whatever.”

  Rowan read quietly for a moment and then stood, stomping her foot to wake it.

  “We need matches.”

  “We can’t use the fireplace. Jorie would kill us.”

  “We don’t need a whole fire,” Rowan said impatiently. “We need a candle.”

  I followed her into the hallway and through the dark to the dining room, where she plucked a red Christmas candle from the holder on the table. Those candles were never lit. When it was time to set the table, they were carefully moved to the sideboard.

  Rowan rolled the candle between her palms. “Matches.”

  That was easy. The top drawer of her mother’s desk. I eased it open, as though afraid of tripping an alarm. I slid my hand inside, and there among the rubber bands and paper clips, I found a matchbook.

  Rowan laughed when I held it up. “She smokes?”

  “Sometimes,” I admitted.

  She snorted. “So much for ‘I quit for you and Libby.’”

  I started to defend Evelyn. I was going to say it was only occasionally, sometimes after lunch, but Rowan was already heading back to the hallway and I quickly followed.

  Back beneath the Christmas tree, we sat cross-legged on our sleeping bags, which had grown cold in our absence.

  Rowan held the candle and I struck the match. The flame arrived with a hiss. She tilted the candle and the wick caught. I blew out the match as she recited the spell.

  We sat in the small light, listening for the sound of the stairs creaking or a door opening, some sign of the house accommodating the dead. I turned and looked at the round Christmas ornaments to see if the same room was reflected back. Red wax dripped over Rowan’s fingers.

  I jumped when she abruptly blew the candle out. The smoke drifted between us.

  “Oh,” she said acidly. “I should have told you to make a wish for your birthday.”

  Rowan set the candle on the mantel. She climbed inside her sleeping bag and I did the same, relieved to tuck myself away, to be cocooned.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “We wait,” she said.

  But it wasn’t long before her breathing slowed and deepened, and I closed my own eyes.

  “Do you hear that?”

  I turned my head away from whomever I was with in my dream, and the dream retreated as if I were walking backward, toward the whisper above me, which turned from the question to my name.

  “Adair? Adair?”

  I opened my eyes to see Rowan hovering above me, propped up on one elbow.

  “What?” I asked, instinctively whispering as well.

  “Listen,” Rowan said.

  I heard the bell then. One bell, ringing faintly, as though it were not the ring itself but an echo.

  She said, “It’s the servants’ bell.”

  “The servants’ bells are disconnected,” I whispered.

  With one hand, she groped behind her and came up with her glasses. She slipped them on and said, “It’s saying our names.”

  Fear pushed against my rib cage like two hands. I did hear it.

  RowanAdair.

  Four quick syllables in a voice like light, calling us both.

  Rowan rolled away and I grabbed for her, but she was already on her feet. She reached down and I gripped her hand and she pulled me up. I was holding her so tightly that when she released me I nearly fell, but she was already walking to the door.

  “Rowan!” I called, but she didn’t look back, and I followed her into the hallway. The temperature dropped, and it seemed like we’d stepped outside. Her red pajamas nearly glowed. They were new, bought for this occasion. I’d heard Evelyn tell Michan this, and I’d felt a kind of pity for Rowan to think she put this much importance on me, only me. All the way down the hallway, I stayed behind her as the bell continued to ring our names.

  Rowan opened the kitchen door slowly, as if afraid of striking someone hiding behind it. The room was dark and felt the way a kitchen did outside of mealtimes, like a museum. The stove an artifact, the kettle quaint, the toaster a strange, useless thing. Only the refrigerator lived, as told by its steady hum.

  Though the ringing was clearly coming from the kitchen, a detail we’d always agreed on, the sound got no louder when we were in the room. As one, we looked up at the bell line near the ceiling, something the girls who had made their living in Moye House a century ago must have done a hundred times a day. The old bells were still. The ringing continued.

  “It’s not outside?” Rowan asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s too loud.”

  The windows were shut tight.

  She opened the door to the servants’ staircase, and with that, the ringing ceased.

  Rowan extended a hand into the dark of the stairwell, palm up, pressing against the dark.

  The grief of the house pressed back like a sigh. She stepped back and closed the door. I tugged her sleeve.

  We didn’t speak the name out loud. Helen. Helen, grandmother, skipping over the four “greats” that lay between her and us and then passing by our mothers, the one who was living and the one who was dead, and then moving further back until she was only a girl herself, not much older than we were when she first came to live here. We had, all three of us, perhaps traversed all the eras between us, landing in one that none of us had ever seen.

  Rowan and I did not have a holding-hands kind of friendship, but we hitched closer to each other inside our sleeping bags until our foreheads touched. Like that, we slept.

  15

  Adair

  2010

  The residents’ dining room was furnished with one long table, not original to the house but bought at an estate sale years ago. Above the three tall windows there was a stained-glass window, but not the kind found in a church. The panes formed no picture; they were only colored glass. On bright mornings, the sun cast fractured blue and green light on the dining room table, but this day was cloudy.

  I was working in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher and returning the dishes to their places in the pantry, half listening to the banter of the two women who worked with Mrs. Penrose. Most of their work was done for the moment. Soon they’d go out and clear the table.

  Usually the residents left the dining room by nine o’c
lock, when quiet hours started. But Michan, who rarely had anything but coffee, had gone out to say good morning. They would linger as long as he did, to remain in his company.

  In the kitchen, we could not hear the conversation, only the hum of voices, broken by laughter.

  Mrs. Penrose handed me a fresh pot of coffee. “Bring this out there before someone comes in here asking, will you?”

  I had no desire to interact with the crowd, but she was already impatient with me, as though I were a cat who kept twining myself around her ankles. There was some old sensibility, I think, that as the de facto daughter of the house, my place was not in her kitchen. I had no doubt she would go into the pantry later and make sure the dishes had been put away correctly.

  I went into the dining room and the conversation stopped, as if I’d pressed a mute button. Ciaran was there with a man and two women.

  “You are real, then,” the older of the women said. “I was starting to wonder if you were made up.”

  I sensed the others collectively wince.

  Michan winked at me.

  I was sure he was thinking, as I was, about how Jorie used to say that in each group there will be one person everybody likes and one person everybody dislikes.

  “I’ve been real for some time,” I said, picking up the empty coffeepot and replacing it with the full one.

  “Who became real, in literature?” Hal asked, and I glanced at him gratefully. “Pinocchio? The Velveteen Rabbit.”

  “Any grown-up books?” Michan asked. “And I mean where the transformation is literal.”

  After a short silence, Ciaran said, “We’re a sad lot. Can’t think of one.”

  “It’s early.” Hal picked up his mug and stood, but I brought the coffeepot to him. He thanked me. I raised the pot, and Ciaran picked up his mug.

  “Thanks. Maybe this’ll help.”

  “Since we need to clear out for the cleaning crew this afternoon, some of us are going hiking,” Hal said. “Unless it pours, which it looks like it might. What is there to do around here in the rain?”

  “Not much,” I said, and they laughed.

  “You can work in the library. Go out to the rec room. Come in here,” Michan said.