Ghosts of the Missing Read online

  “I need a break,” Hal said. “None of that ‘write every day’ bullshit for me. Is there a bowling alley around here?”

  “Not in Culleton. There’s one in Onohedo, though,” Michan said.

  “Well, I’m going hiking, even if it’s pouring,” the younger woman, Brooke, said. “I need to move my legs. Exercise increases circulation to the brain.”

  “So does red wine,” Michan said.

  “Since it’s nine o’clock in the morning, I’ll go for a walk,” Brooke said. “I read about Degare Mountain Park’s wildflower tour where they take you on a hike and the guide identifies all sorts of species of flowers.”

  “Adair, didn’t you do that for a birthday party once?” Michan asked.

  “That was a class trip,” I said.

  “Same thing,” Michan said.

  It wasn’t, since you had to be invited to a birthday party, but I only pressed my left hand against the warm coffeepot.

  “Ciaran, are you coming hiking?” Brooke asked.

  “Afraid not,” he said. “I’ve got some research to do.”

  “Research, for your mysterious book that you won’t tell us about,” the older woman said. Her tone annoyed me, but Ciaran seemed unfazed.

  “That’s the one.” His tone was detached.

  “Too much research and not enough writing can be dangerous,” Hal said.

  “So can not doing enough research when you’re putting real people in a book,” Michan said, looking directly at Ciaran as if expecting him to agree. When Ciaran didn’t answer, Michan wished them all a productive and/or a relaxing day and reminded them to stick to the trail if they were going hiking. Years ago, a resident had gone off by himself to Degare Mountain, eager to write in complete solitude.

  “He went into the woods deliberately?” Brooke said.

  But Michan was serious. Luckily, the writer had told him of this plan. Michan, aware that the man had been raised in a city and had no hiking or camping experience, suggested that he not go far. Settle for the illusion of solitude. The woods could easily disorient. The man had replied that he had an excellent sense of direction.

  When he hadn’t returned by dinnertime, Michan contacted Degare Mountain State Park. There was still enough light to begin a search, and he was found within a couple of hours, a few miles west of a popular trail—but heading in the opposite direction.

  Michan had told me privately that if dark had fallen and the city boy had still been out there, he probably would have been too grateful to be embarrassed, but the relatively quick resolution made him feel foolish. He’d guessed that he would become a Moye House cautionary tale.

  Michan came with me into the kitchen. He told Mrs. Penrose that some of the residents were heading up the mountain. They’d probably be coming in to gather food for a picnic. She sighed and said she’d move the sandwich things to the front of the refrigerator, so they wouldn’t be calling her every five minutes to ask where the cheese was, or the mustard.

  I went outside and sat on the step, Poe by my feet. He was peeved because I’d forgotten to bring the ball. When he was younger, he’d have fetched a stick, but I supposed now he was content to sulk. Michan joined me and closed the door behind him. He was holding a newspaper, and I hoped for a minute that he’d want to read and not talk. But he sat down next to me, and though I considered dashing into the house on the pretense of getting a ball for Poe (and not coming back), I decided not to be a coward.

  “Ciaran told you about his book, I guess,” I said.

  “No, Ciaran didn’t tell me.”

  Michan unfolded the newspaper and handed it to me. It was the Culleton Beacon.

  “Page five,” Michan said.

  I opened it and considered reading out loud, “PTA Meeting Gets Heated,” but it would only annoy him further.

  Brother of Missing Culleton Girl Writing Book

  In the article’s four brief paragraphs, Molly Kelly was quoted confirming that “Rowan’s brother” had spoken to both her and her own brother. Ciaran was also quoted, but all he said was that he preferred to finish the book before commenting on it. The case was still open. Anyone who had any information should take it to the police.

  I folded the paper and handed it back to Michan, who set it down.

  “Gin called me this morning to ask if I’d seen it. She told me that you both talked to Molly.”

  “We did, yes,” I said defensively.

  “Why?” Michan asked. “Ciaran and Molly speak the same language. They hardly needed you to translate.”

  “I knew Rowan,” I said. “Ciaran only met her once, when she was little.”

  “Writers write about victims they never knew all the time. That’s how it usually goes, and I know you know that.”

  “Ciaran’s not some journalist looking for a story. She was his sister. He wants to know who she was.”

  “Is that the only way he wants you to help him?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Rowan’s been gone a long time now.”

  I recalled the first weeks, crying into my pillow, Michan sitting helplessly beside me, at first saying she would be okay, and then that they’d find out soon what happened because something had to break, and then finally nothing at all.

  It’s my fault, I had told him at one point.

  How is it your fault? he’d asked.

  I’m cursed.

  The ones left behind always think that, he’d said. You’re not.

  That was the last time I cried in front of him.

  “Why does it matter how long she’s been gone? What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “Because the odds of finding out what happened, or even uncovering new information, aren’t good,” Michan said. “Ciaran’s going to need more than what people can find online. What’s his book really about?”

  “He’s not only writing about Rowan’s case,” I said. “He has several. A lot of it is going to be about what it’s like to live with no answers.”

  “Okay, that could be a whole book, in the right hands,” Michan said. “Has he contacted Evelyn?”

  “Yes. She emailed him back saying she would think about talking to him. He’s hoping she’ll decide she wants to have her say. He thinks she will, since she would have said a flat-out no.”

  “And if she does say no?”

  “I guess he writes around her,” I said uncertainly.

  Michan was silent for a moment. “Has it occurred to you that he needs you? I don’t know how he’s structuring this book, but he’ll need an axis to spin each section on. The mom. The dad. The sibling.” He paused. “The friend.”

  “He could be the center of Rowan’s chapter. Again—he was her brother.”

  “Who wasn’t here. Who barely knew her.”

  I shrugged to hide my uneasiness. “If new information comes out, it’ll be worth it.”

  “Let me ask you this. Do you even know for sure there is a book? Has he shown you any of it?”

  “Why would he lie?” I asked, baffled.

  “Does he think Leo was involved?” Michan asked. “Is that why he’s here?”

  I turned my head to watch a crew of gardeners at work, raking. Each wore green cargo pants and a darker green T-shirt, the standard uniform. They moved in tandem too as they drew the rakes over the grass, back and forth. There was one woman and three men, too far away for me to see their faces.

  “You think he’s here to get to Leo so he can beat him up? Kill him?” I asked.

  “We don’t know him,” Michan said.

  “We don’t know any of the people we live with.”

  Michan laughed. “True enough. Any writer who comes here could be a maniac.”

  I hugged my knees.

  “But maybe he’s planning to write from the angle that Leo did it,” Michan said

  Leo, the lovesick accomplice. Leo, the child rapist and murderer. Leo, his proximity to a crime inadvertently revealing a crime he did commit.

>   “Maybe he’s going to dig into Leo’s life these past fifteen years.”

  We sat in silence for a while and then I asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Leave,” Michan said. “Go back to Brooklyn. Go someplace else.”

  “I’m broke, remember?”

  “Your inheritance.”

  My parents’ estate became mine on my twenty-first birthday. The government had eventually reached a settlement with the hemophiliacs infected by factor VIII.

  For years, Michan had been cautioning me not to spend all the money on rent. Save it for drugs, he’d say. What if something happens and you can’t afford your meds anymore and I can’t help? What if the cure is found and you can’t afford it? Insurance may not cover the shot or the pill. It may cost a fortune with insurance. It may be approved in Switzerland years before the United States. You may have to travel to get it. I’d roll my eyes and repeat: chronic but manageable. Yet his words had done their work, and I was afraid to touch a penny. I shook my head.

  “Then I’ll give you the money,” Michan said. “Free ride. Until you find a job.”

  I shook my head again. “I can’t go.”

  “I wish you would.” Michan shuffled his feet, a sign that he was reaching the limits of his patience.

  “Would you have tried to block Ciaran’s admission if you’d known who he was?” I asked.

  After a long pause, Michan said, “Admissions are not up to me.”

  “Come on, if you said, ‘Don’t let this guy in,’ the admissions committee or the board or whoever would listen.”

  “They shouldn’t,” Michan said. “And I’d never ask.”

  That night, near ten o’clock, I stole up to the second floor, where the residents worked and slept, Michan’s warning playing in my head like a song.

  I knocked softly, hoping nobody else on the floor would hear. When there was no answer, I put my hand on the doorknob but then withdrew it. I rested my forehead against the closed door and knocked more boldly.

  Ciaran opened the door and peered out, maybe reluctant to engage with the other residents. Perhaps someone had been trying to befriend him. But then I realized that I’d woken him up.

  “Adair?” he said, his voice thick with sleep, though he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

  “Are you really writing a book?” I asked.

  Perhaps he was still too foggy to ask why I would even think that. He pressed his palms to his eyes, then opened the door wider and stepped aside. I went in. All three windows were open and the curtains rose and fell.

  A painting called Writer at Work would have had the desk buried under a blizzard of papers and splayed books. But on Ciaran’s desk, the books were stacked neatly beside his keyboard, and there was a single open notebook, the page half filled with a gallop of words.

  I saw Lost Girls. The subtitle, in smaller print, said, An Anthology of Stories Written at Moye House Writers’ Colony. I picked it up. On the book jacket was a photograph of Moye House.

  “I’ve never read it.”

  “You can take it. I’ll need it back, though,” he said.

  “Of course.” I set the book down and looked at the cork bulletin board on the wall beside the desk, as in every writer’s room. Before the start of each residency, Shannon pinned up fliers for nearby businesses, a calendar and a list of Things to Do—a printout of the Local Attractions tab on the Moye House website. This time, it had been my job.

  Ciaran had removed all of it, and he’d used the pushpins to put up pictures. First I saw only Rowan’s Missing poster, but then my eyes jumped to the others.

  A boy, about twelve, in a collared shirt and longish hair that spoke of the seventies. A teenage girl wearing a wide headband, the ends of her hair flipped up, the late fifties or early sixties. A boy of about six whose photo might have been taken last week. His was the only one with a solitary picture. Each of the others had an age progression beside their original photo, a computer-generated leap into a future that likely did not exist.

  When Rowan’s first age progression was released, I’d studied her features closely. One minute I was certain I’d know this eighteen-year-old if I saw her, and the next I believed I’d pass her by without a glance. Ciaran had the most recent one: Rowan at twenty-three. Eighteen and twenty-three were not very different, except the artist had darkened her hair and made it shorter, to her shoulders.

  There were clippings, printouts of newspapers. My scanning eyes found all the trite phrases from the missing-person thesaurus. Gone in Minutes, Search Continues, No Leads, Baffling, Without a Trace.

  “They’re all missing, and I’m putting their stories in a book. I don’t know what made you think I wasn’t.”

  Ciaran didn’t sound angry, only curious.

  I looked back at the board, specifically at a newspaper clipping. “Culleton Man Sentenced.” The picture was of Leo leaving the courthouse. He was wearing a suit that was slightly too big for him. His eyes were wide and frightened, his jaw clenched tight. Leo told me that he’d been trying not to cry, but at the same time he’d wondered, if he did cry, would they be sorry and let him go?

  “Did you come to Culleton to find Leo?” I asked.

  Ciaran sat down on the bed, which was still made, though the red comforter was creased and the pillow dented.

  “Yes,” he said, but before I could speak, he added, “And Evelyn. And you.”

  In one drawing class I took in college, the students had taken turns being the model, and I felt the way I had when it was my turn, as if it were not only eyes on me, but hands, too.

  I pulled out his desk chair and sat down. “Do you think Leo was involved?”

  “My father does. He thinks Evelyn married David for his money, and he blames himself for that. She never had much help with Rowan. But he says she wouldn’t be sleeping with a goddamn kid.”

  “But if your father thinks it was Leo—”

  “He thinks it was Leo alone,” Ciaran said. “One thing that was said, you must know, was why didn’t Leo point the finger at Evelyn after he was arrested? If he only helped cover up whatever the hell Evelyn did, she’s the one on the hook for murder, not him. My father thinks Evelyn is telling the truth and Rowan did go into town that afternoon. She ran off, went home. Leo turned up at the house and he found Rowan there alone.”

  Ciaran was watching me carefully.

  I shook my head. “Leo wouldn’t. He didn’t. He never showed any special interest in her. She was a kid who was sometimes funny, sometimes annoying.”

  “Like a little sister?”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it fit. I nodded. “More or less.”

  I waited for him to say, Where is Leo? But instead he said, “Zachary Zengerle. The boy in the top row.”

  I turned and looked. Zachary Zengerle. Missing from Haynestown, Connecticut, August 30, 1981.

  “He took off on his bike about six o’clock on a summer evening to meet up with friends at the local park. Somewhere along the way, he and his bike vanished,” Ciaran said. “Right before I left to come here, I had to drop him from my book. I should take his picture down, but I’ve been looking at it for two years now. I’m not ready yet.”

  “They found him?” I asked, and I didn’t mean alive.

  “They found his bike,” Ciaran said. “Red bike with a bell that had the initials ZZ scratched in the paint. It was in the basement of a house around the corner, which the police searched a few months ago, after the man who lived there was arrested for trying to sexually assault a boy. The boy got away. This man was a lifelong bachelor. Took care of his mother until she died, then stayed on in the house. Churchgoer. The usual pillar-of-the-community bullshit.”

  “He was never a suspect?”

  Ciaran shook his head. “Questioned and cleared. From what I understand, it was a routine did-you-see-anything-unusual questioning. He had no record. He was only in his twenties then. He helped with the search. You never know.”

  I thought of the me
n of Culleton, popping fresh batteries into their flashlights and heading out in their hiking boots and raincoats.

  Rowan, they’d shouted.

  Rowan! Can you hear me! Over and over, as though they were some strange, verbose flock of birds, calling only to one another.

  “A psychic told Zachary’s mother that the boy had been taken by a couple to raise as their own, to replace the son they lost. He was afraid to come home because they’d threatened the family.”

  “She believed that?”

  “Mrs. Zengerle told me she would know if Zachary were dead. She could feel that he was alive. He’d make it back someday.”

  “Psychics came to Culleton,” I said. “Evelyn talked to them.”

  “Yes, I know. My father told me they came out of the woodwork.”

  I realized he was echoing me when he said something that I certainly knew. We both kept forgetting that our missing girl was the same girl.

  “She’s near water. She’s with a man with an accent,” Ciaran said. “A man whose name begins with S. A man with facial hair. Two women. Evelyn kept letting them in the house, and they’d go up to Rowan’s room and hold her hairbrush and sniff her sweaters. She’d call my dad and tell him. It was David who finally put a stop to it.”

  It was hard for me to believe he let even one in the house. Desperation, I supposed. Perhaps he’d been unable to say no to Evelyn.

  “There was one who came to see my father in Ireland,” Ciaran said softly. “She showed up at the house.”

  “Did your father talk to her?”

  Ciaran shook his head. “I did.”

  One day, in the hours between after school and his mother’s arriving home from work, the bell rang and he answered it. The woman was young, in her early twenties, her black hair in a loose bun. He’d never seen her before and thought that she had to be selling something, sweets or makeup.

  She asked if this was indeed the house with the girl gone missing in America. The first anniversary had just passed.

  Ciaran said it was, in a way. He lived here with his own mother. His father was nearby, but he was at work and would be for another two hours.

  She introduced herself as Una. She told him that she’d had dreams about the girl. Because she hadn’t the time to wait for his father, since she had to get the bus back home, could she tell him?