Ghosts of the Missing Read online

  The word “orphan” confused people, as if modern medicine had made it an anachronism. I’d have used it, though, if the story I had to tell began with my mother struggling in the ocean, my father swimming out to save her, one riptide taking them both. A fire, and both of them lost while I was saved. Me lifted out of our car, my parents still inside. This last one was born of a dream or a memory, I wasn’t sure which, of a time when we were going someplace but in the end did not.

  Even two different fatal illnesses would have been easier to grasp. Leukemia and a brain tumor. But I said nothing, unwilling to tell the truth and draw an arrow straight to me.

  “A girl in my town went missing when I was twelve,” I said.

  Emily sat up straighter. “Jesus, really? You’ve told me where you’re from—”

  “Culleton, New York. It’s about two hours from here. I wasn’t born there, but I moved there,” I said, as though my parents had chosen it for the cobblestone streets in the historic district or for its literary fame as the birthplace of a famous writer. Forget that I had an ancestor from Ireland there before the place was even named. That we—she—were woven into its myths.

  Hazel glanced at me as she rooted through the toy basket, checking to see if I was still watching. She set some Legos on the floor and began snapping them together, up and up but not in a straight line. A builder, then. I went back to sketching.

  “Right, right,” Emily said. “There’s a writers’ residence there. A mom in Willow’s class was talking about applying.”

  I’d always known it was possible in writer-choked Brooklyn that somebody would hear my last name and say, Any relation to Michan McCrohan, the poet?

  Long before it was Moye House Writers’ Colony, it was where Cassius Moye, the writer, was born and lived his whole life, except for the years he’d gone to fight the Civil War.

  When I was sixteen, I’d drawn a charcoal of him sitting at his desk, just to break him out of the solemn stare in the daguerreotype that was always published with articles about him. That photograph had been taken shortly before he joined the Union army, a rich man who could have bought his way out of the fight but instead chose to go.

  In my sketch, he is neither the young man heading off to war nor the broken man who returned home. This was intentional too. I wanted to take him out of his time. It was possible to be born at precisely the wrong moment. I knew what it was to be caught up in a tide that would take you simply because you were there, then.

  In my rendering, Cassius is slouched in his chair, his hands folded on his stomach, his legs outstretched as he gazed out the window, smiling slightly. The picture is framed and hangs on the wall of the study where Cassius wrote.

  “When did this happen? How old was she?”

  Maybe Emily was glad to change the subject, or maybe she was interested in true crime. My hand ached from gripping the pencil.

  “Fifteen years ago, in 1995,” I said. “She was almost thirteen.”

  Almost. A climbing word. A word like hand, outstretched.

  “Your age, then,” Emily said with something like wonder. “Did you know her?”

  “Culleton’s not that big,” I said, reaching for the wine with my right hand, the pencil dangling from my left. “We were in the same school. The Catholic school.”

  On my first day at St. Maren’s, my uncle had said to me, “Keep your head down and learn what you can, Adair.” Michan, tall and sober, his beard a brighter red than his hair. Michan, who patiently corrected those who mispronounced his name. It’s Mike-an. Michael, but with an n. The mothers dropping off their children turned as he passed by, touching their waists.

  I wiped a clammy hand on my jeans.

  “That’s awful. Do they know what happened? Is it one of those cases where they know who did it and have no evidence?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Her mother said she took both her and her other daughter, who was a baby, into town to go to the Halloween parade. But nobody saw her. Nobody saw her since the day before. There were a lot of strangers in town, though.”

  Emily’s back was to the hallway, but from my vantage point I could see the darkened staircase that led up to the parlor floor. One blue-jeaned leg appeared and then another.

  I recalled the age progressions. Rowan Kinnane at fifteen, at twenty-five. Incarnations of the dark-haired, blue-eyed girl who’d been photographed on her front porch on Easter Sunday, 1995. The collar of her green dress was crooked, the pearl button pressed against her throat. She was not wearing her glasses.

  The picture appeared on the Missing posters that were stapled to every telephone pole in Culleton throughout that autumn and winter. Yet by the time she vanished in October, she’d grown her bangs out. She’d never worn a dress unless she had to. The wrong girl was being advertised. Each time I passed a poster, I’d touch the photograph as if to sweep her bangs aside with the tip of my finger. Even when her image turned gray and indistinct, worn away by weather, I’d try to fix it.

  The Rowan who knelt on Emily’s step and peered at me from between the railings of the banister was the twelve-year-old who looked as she had when I last saw her, two days before she disappeared. Her hair was pulled back in two barrettes. She straightened her glasses, the ones with the square frames that our classmates had teased her about.

  You don’t haunt other people’s houses, I thought.

  She grinned in the way that had driven her mother a little bit mad.

  You don’t haunt houses. You haunt people.

  I looked away. The wine glass felt heavy in my hand. I cupped the bottom.

  “And they never found her. I can’t even imagine,” Emily said. “Did it ever happen again?”

  I drew a rudimentary tree beneath Hazel’s hand.

  “She was the only one,” I said.

  How much simpler it would be if another local girl had stepped into the same abyss. Then another and another. The abductor could be decisively declared a stranger, a random child-hunter.

  “There were searches, a lot of searches, but no, they never found a thing,” I said and then repeated it. “Not a thing.”

  In the woods behind Moye House there is a chapel. Once, it was the only Catholic church in the area, built to serve the Irish who came to work on the railroad and in the foundry. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had been replaced by a much grander church and the chapel bell was saved for Christmas Eve. But it rang on the morning of the first full day Rowan was gone, in the hope that if she was only lost in the woods or on the mountain, she might hear it and know which way to walk.

  If I opened my bedroom window on those first two days, I could hear the volunteers in the woods calling her name so persistently that it seemed impossible she would not answer, if only for some peace.

  Hazel stood up and said she wanted to go to her room. We followed her, and as if the change of scenery signaled the end of the subject, Emily moved on.

  When I left, it was getting dark and the air smelled of snow. The second glass of wine had made my head fuzzy, but then all I’d eaten that day was a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. I didn’t cook at all anymore and barely bothered with groceries.

  I got off the subway and began to walk the two blocks to my apartment. When the priest approached, his cassock swinging about his ankles, I moved to let him pass on the narrow sidewalk, quick-stepping onto an erupted slab of concrete beside the curb. The damage had been done by the roots of a tree that was long gone, felled by a storm years ago. The priest was almost upon me, and I bowed my head slightly and smoothed a hand over my skirt with a reflexive respect I didn’t feel yet couldn’t help.

  As he was about to reach me, there was a ripple in the air, some slight disturbance, and he became a woman wearing a belted black coat, her hair pale and not cut short, as I’d originally thought, but skimmed back from her face.

  She passed me by. I turned around to stare after her, trying to turn her back into a priest, but my vision stayed corrected. After she disappeared around t
he corner, I continued walking, faster than before, heedless of the icy sidewalk. Whenever this happened, the confusion was intense.

  The patient yellow Labrador sitting beside a parking meter is a woman in white who has knelt to fix the buckle on her shoe. The hipster carrying an instrument is a businessman holding a briefcase. A couple walking with a child are only passing each other on the sidewalk, nothing at all between them but her shopping bag.

  If there is a word for this phenomenon of turning one thing into another, of mis-seeing, I’ve never found it. Perhaps it doesn’t happen to anybody else. Maybe it’s just me. Me and my untrustworthy eyes, green as a cat’s.

  It wasn’t the cold that woke me.

  In Moye House, where I finished growing up, winter leaked around the window frames and the high ceilings drew warmth up, away from us, as we huddled in our beds or walked any one of the hallways or sat at the island in the kitchen, hands wrapped around a warm mug. Old houses are thoughtless, the way the beautiful can be.

  But because of Moye House, I had practice for this apartment. Sarah had moved into the brownstone as a bride, and in widowhood shifted her life to the parlor floor, the center of the house. Nights, she turned the thermostat way down, but I was too indebted to complain.

  My bed was a nest of quilts and blankets. I’d go shopping for clothes and instead of new jeans or fresh skirts for work, I’d bring home reversible comforters and patchwork quilts. It wasn’t the cold. I knew how to be cold. What I didn’t know, not really, was how to be warm.

  It may have been a siren, already gone in the distance before I opened my eyes. A shout on the street. A dog barking. Or this: if you cannot sleep, it means you are lost in someone else’s dream.

  The proverb does not say whether lost means a reverie, or if it’s lost as in cannot be found, but I imagined a search party calling my name across a dreamscape that veered between the familiar and the foreign. The October woods of Culleton, New York, raining orange and burgundy, and those same woods with licks of flame on the ends of the branches instead of leaves.

  I sat up in bed, struggling briefly against the weight of the blankets. The clock said 2:07. I’d stayed up late working on Hazel’s sketch, which I liked to do while a visit was still fresh. But now, knowing I’d never get back to sleep, I went to the bookcase in the corner of my room and slipped a sketchbook out from between the novels.

  Plenty of other sketchbooks were scattered around my apartment, splayed open on the coffee table, sunk in the folds of the couch. I couldn’t stand a cluttered sketchbook, so I went through them quickly. When they were about half full with experiments, false starts and, yes, pieces I was actually satisfied with, I started a new one.

  This one with the red cover I tucked away like a child hiding a diary, though there was no one to search for it. I fetched a box of good pencils from my desk. They had been a gift from my uncle on my twenty-fifth birthday. He sent them with a note:

  Adair,

  Happy quarter century.

  Michan

  He often phrased my age in words, the way a mother might say her toddler was twenty-seven months instead of two years old. Maybe it was because he was a writer. But unlike the mothers, he wasn’t trying to slow time. He liked to give my age more weight.

  I set my desk chair in front of the window and began to draw with Repose Gray, a shade with silver overtones, as if I were drawing the scene outside the window. The deserted street had the look of a Hopper painting, heavy with the sense that someone lonely has just left the canvas.

  I thought of all the things I could have told Emily, like pointing out the coincidence of a child gone missing in a town famous for a story called “The Lost Girl.” Cassius Moye had written many other stories as well as a novel and a play, but it was “The Lost Girl” that he was remembered for.

  I could have told Emily that the missing girl had not been particularly prized in town before she vanished.

  Rowan Kinnane would not have been the beauty of her generation. Neither was she an athlete or a scholar, on course to be valedictorian of her high school class. She could not sing. When questioned by reporters, those who’d known Rowan described her as quiet, a loner, shy, and awkward. Words for pity.

  The parade was not for Halloween but Quicken Day, which existed no place else but Culleton. Rowan had been scheduled to dress in a costume and march, as she’d done for the past seven years. Given her age, it would likely have been the last time. Teenagers never bothered with it.

  There was a “homemade costumes” rule that had long been ignored or met with half measures. A crown of cardboard and glue and glitter worn with an older sister’s slightly too big princess dress. A sheet cut in half and hemmed into a cape to pair with a store-bought superhero outfit.

  But Rowan’s mother was the exception. Some wondered if Evelyn was cheating. She didn’t look the part of seamstress. She had a full-time job. She probably hadn’t learned to sew as a girl. She hadn’t had the right kind of mother for it.

  Once, Rowan came as Rosie the Riveter. When asked by the reporter for the Culleton Beacon how she felt about dressing up as such a good role model for girls, Rowan answered, “She wasn’t an actual person.”

  Rowan hunched her shoulders and was clumsy with the accessories. She kept her eyes on the ground as she walked, the daughter of a beauty with no such promise. She missed it, people said, as though her mother’s looks were a train that pulled away without her.

  Evelyn.

  Evelyn, who said that she drove into town with both Rowan and the baby, Libby, Rowan’s half sister, who was eighteen months old. Her husband, Rowan’s stepfather, was out of town. The parade was to begin at two o’clock. They got a late start, she admitted, because Rowan had refused to put on her costume. She would go to the party at Moye House afterward, but she would not march. Evelyn gave in, yes, angry but afraid they would miss the parade altogether. She went outside first and got the baby in her car seat. Rowan followed shortly after, climbing into the front seat.

  Evelyn parked her car in the back of the municipal lot that served downtown Culleton’s main shopping district, a three-block stretch of stores, restaurants and an assortment of other businesses. As she got out of the car, Rowan opened the passenger door and jumped out. As Evelyn began unbuckling Libby from her car seat, Rowan took off across the parking lot. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved red shirt with a denim jacket over it. Evelyn claimed Rowan was wearing sneakers, blue with a white stripe, but they would later be found placed neatly by the back door of the house. Her brown hair was pulled back with two mismatched barrettes, holding back her bangs. She was wearing her glasses, of course.

  Evelyn called Rowan’s name. She said she did. But without looking back, Rowan ducked into the alley between the pharmacy and the bookstore. The alley led directly onto Vine Street, where the children were chaotically gathering for the parade.

  Evelyn walked in the parade with Libby, pushing her in the stroller, and after, she continued on to Moye House. The party was held on the back lawn, an expanse of grass that ended at the steps leading to the thirty-acre grounds, the rose, wildflower and moon gardens, each delineated by a network of flagstone paths and tall hedges. That evening, the temperature was supposed to drop precipitously, but the afternoon was a fall day made to order, making the forecast difficult to fathom.

  Only at 6 p.m., as the party broke up, did Evelyn start asking several people if they’d seen Rowan. Nobody had. She drove home, expecting to find Rowan in the living room, slouched in front of the television. But the windows were dark.

  Yet Evelyn did not call the police. Instead, she arranged for Libby’s regular babysitter to come over, and once the sixteen-year-old arrived, Evelyn left in her car. She peered through the locked gate at the Maple Street playground. She went next to the movie theater. The teenage boy selling tickets shrugged. Evelyn did not demand to see a manager or ask that the theater be searched. She crossed the street and returned to her car and sat for a long time, at least te
n minutes according to the ticket seller, before she pulled away.

  Next Evelyn parked on Vine Street. First she knocked on the door of the bookstore, even though it was closed. She ducked into Doyle’s Pub next door. The crowd was shoulder-to-shoulder, everyone talking through a fog of cigarette smoke. Evelyn elbowed her way through and left by the side door. She didn’t ask anyone if they’d seen Rowan.

  By 8 p.m., Libby was asleep and the babysitter was watching television in the living room. Evelyn opened the front door and dropped her purse in the hallway. She ran to the kitchen, where she picked up the phone and called the police. It had been six hours, Evelyn said, since she’d last seen her daughter.

  Over the first week, the facts were gathered by the police and reported by the press, which had descended on Culleton by midafternoon of October 29, when hours of daylight had failed to find Rowan Kinnane.

  On Friday, October 27, the mailman saw Rowan arrive home from school, alone. She had checked the mailbox, peering inside and then putting her hand in and feeling around. He remembered that because he’d thought it was funny. The mailbox was not very deep. It did not swallow letters.

  At around 8:30 Friday night, Leo Phelan said, Evelyn called him because the smoke detector in the upstairs hallway was chirping. The house Evelyn rented belonged to Leo’s grandmother, long in a nursing home. From the time Evelyn first moved in, a single parent to seven-year-old Rowan, Leo had been the one to come by and shovel the snow or mow the lawn.

  After Evelyn had married, her new husband moved in, and by the fall of 1995, they’d bought a new house and planned to move as soon as the renovations were finished.

  That night, with Evelyn’s husband out of town, it was nineteen-year-old Leo who fetched a ladder from the garage and changed the smoke alarm battery so that it wouldn’t keep the baby awake. Rowan, Leo said, had watched him from the doorway of her bedroom.

  The lone sighting on Saturday was a classmate who thought she saw Rowan in Byrd’s New & Used Books shortly before the parade began. Rowan had not been in costume, and she was carrying a red envelope in her hand. But the boy who lived across the street said he’d watched Evelyn leave for the parade, and only the baby was with her.