All the Lost Girls

by Bilinda P Sheehan

  She laid them out in front of me, one at a time and I stared down at them.

  The walls closed in around me, the air thinning until I was certain I was going to pass out.

  One of the photographs was an image of what remained of a pair of wide-legged blue jeans, or at least at one time they’d been blue. Now, they were dirty and faded, holes and rips where the fabric had degraded over the years. Yet, unmistakably, they were identical to the ones Clara had worn that night. Even the hem had that same ragged edge Mam was always telling her off about.

  The next picture was of a tattered black t-shirt, or at least I assumed it was a t-shirt but the fabric was almost entirely broken down. There was a patch of white on one section of it, as though at one time there had been a logo. I felt bile rushing up the back of my throat as I realised why there was so little for me to identify. Twenty-two years in the ground, wrapped around the remains of a dead body, meant the natural fibres had been all but destroyed. Eaten away by the decomposition process.

  I pushed the picture away and stared down at the last two. One was the remains of a shirt of some kind. It was brown now but when I closed my eyes I could see it as it had been. The blue denim shirt she’d been wearing, the one I’d noticed was ripped. My eyes snapped open once more and I searched the picture for signs of a tear in the fabric but there were too many rips to pinpoint one in particular.

  I didn’t want to look at the last photograph. My mind urged me to get up, to leave the room now while there was still time. The clothes could have belonged to anyone. Plenty of young women wore outfits almost identical to the one in the photographs. It didn’t mean anything.

  “She was wearing Converse,” I said, refusing to meet Siobhan’s inscrutable stare.

  “We found no shoes,” she said and the words hit me like a punch to the gut. I couldn’t help but imagine her wandering around in her bare feet. I shoved the thought away. It was stupid and unproductive.

  Why keep Clara’s shoes? It made no sense.

  “And this one,” Siobhan said, sliding the last photograph toward me.

  I picked it up, my hands trembling so badly I almost couldn’t focus on the image before me.

  The chain lay next to a ruler that had been put there to give an idea of size. What had once been gold was now tarnished. They’d tried to clean most of the dirt from the surface but it was still caught among the links. My heart crawled into my throat as I stared at the heart that sat at the bottom of the chain loop.

  The floral pattern, although a little worn, was still recognisable. Two photographs that had at one time sat inside the locket stared up at me. Faded now, but I knew them from memory. One of Clara, the other of me. Both of us grinning. It had been my birthday present to her for her sixteenth birthday, the year before she went missing. She had worn it everywhere.

  On the same sheet was n image of the back of the locket. The writing was illegible, almost a scrawl. Childish even.

  “Do you know what it says?” Siobhan asked.

  I shook my head and glanced up at her. “It’s Clara’s locket but that wasn’t there when she went missing.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe a—”

  “I bought her the locket,” I said. “I never got around to having it engraved. She wouldn’t have let anyone else do it.”

  Siobhan nodded. “You’re sure?” she said. “This is definitely your sister’s locket?”

  My heart sank into my stomach. I hadn’t wanted it to be true. There had been a part of me that had clung to the tiny flicker of hope that if it wasn’t her locket then it wasn’t her body. That she was alive somewhere, living her life. Happy. Content. And now that hope was extinguished, just as her life had been.

  “I’m sure. It’s Clara’s.”

  20

  September 17th 1996

  I’m done with that asshole and that bitch is welcome to him. If I never see Liam Donnelly again, it’ll be too soon!

  21

  “I’ll get Fiona to give you a lift home,” Siobhan said, pulling the photographs back across the table. I watched, only half listening to her prattle on as she rearranged the images into a neat stack and slipped them back inside her folder.

  “What now?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What happens now?” I repeated the question. Ice had wormed its way under my skin and was slowly stealing the warmth from my limbs. Was this what it felt like to be dead? “Her body. When do we get it back?”

  “There’s an ongoing investigation,” she said. “Until we’ve conducted our enquiries and the coroner is done with the remains, we can’t release them to you.”

  “So she’s been missing for over twenty years and even now she can’t come home?”

  “I’m sorry,” Siobhan said. “There’s nothing I can do. Fiona might have some better answers for you.” She pushed up from the table and headed for the door. She paused, her hand on the handle. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to call by your parent’s house tomorrow, ask a few questions.”

  “Will it bring her back?” I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice.

  “Nothing will do that,” she said, “but it might help bring the circumstances surrounding her death to light.”

  I stared down at the tabletop without answering as Siobhan pulled open the door.

  “Did she suffer?” The question bubbled out of me before I could stop it.

  “We don’t have all the information yet,” she said, but I could tell she was holding something back and instinct told me it was nothing good.

  “Try and get some rest, Alice,” she said, leaving the room.

  I sat at the table without moving for what felt like an age. Until finally, a young female Guard in a navy blue uniform poked her head around the door.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine, thanks,” I said, pushing wearily onto my feet.

  She shot me a sympathetic smile as I moved past her. My arm had started to throb once more and my eyes felt as though I’d rubbed grit in them. I needed somewhere I could lie down and curl into a ball, close my eyes and sleep until this was all over.

  “I’ll give you a lift home,” Fiona said, meeting me in the small hall that linked the interview rooms with the main reception.

  “Can you drop me in town instead?” I said. The thought of going home and watching Mam and Dad shrink in on themselves beneath the weight of Clara’s fate wasn’t something I could handle right now.

  She opened her mouth to argue, but changed her mind and nodded instead and for that I was grateful.

  We pulled up outside The Tobar, a bar and restaurant I’d visited many times before, as the sun started to sink behind the horizon. The lights outside made the white washed walls of the pub look inviting. It was as if I’d somehow stepped back in time. I half expected to see a pony and cart sitting outside and for John Wayne and Maureen O’ Hara to come chasing out of the double doors.

  “You sure you don’t want to go home?” Fiona asked for what felt like the millionth time.

  With a small smile I shook my head and picked my handbag up from where I’d set it between my feet.

  “No, I’m fine, I’ll make my own way back.”

  “Your mom won’t be worried about you?”

  I shrugged. “Doubtful, at least not with Imelda there. Plus there’ll be other people calling round to the house and to be honest, I really don’t want to see any of them.”

  She nodded. “Want someone to talk to?”

  It wasn’t that she really wanted to come with me; it was more a matter of form that she felt she needed to ask me.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  I pushed open the car door and stepped out into the misting rain, my hair sticking to my face as I cradled my injured arm against my body. Waving her off, I waited until the car was out of sight before I turned and made my way into the pub.

  Being a Tuesday night, the place was almost entirely deserted. A couple of the local farmers sat propped against the bar. Part of me w
ondered if they were the same locals that had propped up the bar when I’d come in as a teenager. From the looks of them, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

  Pausing at the edge of the counter, I caught the barman’s eye and he sauntered over toward me, his lazy grin widening as his eyes lit up with recognition.

  “Alice McCarthy, as I live and breathe, fancy seeing you here.” Declan propped his elbows on the bar and plopped his chin into the palm of his hand, bringing him eye level with me.

  Heat rose in my cheeks. How was it possible that a guy I’d had a crush on since I was a girl in secondary school could have that same effect even now?

  “If I’d known they let any old riff-raff behind the bar, I’d have gone to Henderson’s.”

  His grey eyes twinkled as he straightened up and tossed a bar-rag over his shoulder. The white shirt he wore stretched across his broad shoulders and bunched around his upper arms. Clearly, he didn’t spend all of his time stuck behind the bar pulling pints. His laughter took me by surprise and I found myself smiling in response.

  “What dragged you back here? I thought you were too good for all of us now, moved on to bigger and better things across the pond.”

  I felt the smile wilt on my lips. The fact that he didn’t know was honestly surprising to me. It had nearly always been the case that everyone knew everyone else’s business. When it came to small towns in Ireland, there was no such thing as secrets.

  “It’s Clara,” I said. “They think they’ve found her.”

  His expression instantly sobered and he leaned across the bar once more, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, shit, Alice. I didn’t put two and two together when I heard the news.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “In a way I’ve been preparing myself for this moment from the minute she was taken.”

  He straightened up and cleared his throat. “Yeah, that can’t have been easy.” There was a sudden awkwardness to his behaviour and without him needing to say anything, I already knew what was going through his head.

  No one had believed me when I’d said I was with Clara when she was taken. No one had listened to me. I’d been drinking. Just another daughter bringing shame upon our family.

  And because Clara was a pregnant teenager in Ireland, they’d all assumed she’d run away. Most people knew someone who’d travelled over to England on the boat to ‘deal with a problem’.

  It was one of those unspoken secrets, a stain upon the country whereby women were treated like second-class citizens because of the country’s strict Catholic culture.

  Here, we either swept our problems under the proverbial rug or exported them, right alongside our beef and rich culture.

  And everyone had assumed that Clara had done just that. Upped sticks and run away because she couldn’t handle the shame she’d brought on her family.

  And then, just like that, it had changed. Two other girls had gone, vanished in the night, just like Clara had and suddenly people were more willing to believe that Clara hadn’t just run away. That perhaps I had been telling the truth when I’d spoken of her being snatched off the side of the road.

  By then, it was too late and Clara’s trail, not that there had been much to begin with, had gone cold.

  Tears burned at the back of my throat and stung my eyes. She’d probably already been dead by then anyway.

  “What are you having, anything, it’s on the house?”

  “Whiskey,” I said. “And not the watered down crap they used to serve in here when I was a teenager.”

  Declan flashed a smile at me and then turned to grab a bottle off the top shelf. “You go and sit,” he said. “Your corner is free.”

  Craning my neck, I stared at the corner booth where I used to sit as a teen. Before we were legally allowed to drink, we would gather in the corners of fields, hiding our bottles of contraband in the bushes out of sight. Once we crossed the magical threshold that lay between childhood and adulthood, we’d realised there was no longer any reason to go drinking in a ditch so we’d come in from the cold, taking up residence in the corner of the pub. For a while, we had been like part of the furniture.

  I pushed away from the bar and made my way through the pub. Dropping my heavy handbag down onto the rickety wooden table, I slid into the worn seat. A newspaper lay discarded on top of the table and I scooped it up, staring down at the local headlines.

  “Body found in shallow grave.”

  A lump formed in the back of my throat and I started to put down the paper when another article on the front page caught my attention. One small column with a grainy picture attached of a young smiling girl.

  “Missing Girl’s Family Make Second Appeal.”

  I started to read but someone had carelessly let their pint rest on the page and some of the beer-soaked words were unreadable in the gloom of the bar.

  Declan set a glass down in front of me, along with the bottle.

  “I haven’t forgotten how you prefer to pour your own,” he said, dropping into the seat opposite me.

  “There’s another girl missing?” I gestured at the page in front of me. Declan’s expression clouded over.

  “Yeah, nineteen. Her family moved here last year and she came back from college for the weekend.”

  “And she just vanished?”

  “Went out with one of the lads one night and never came home.”

  Icy fingers wrapped around the back of my neck and I shuddered. “Do they think he’s responsible?”

  Declan shrugged. “You know how it is, people talk. But no one really knows anything. Cops hauled him in initially but they let him go without charge. Apparently, they told him not to leave the area.”

  “So they know something but they’re not saying.”

  Declan shrugged and sat back on the wooden chair.

  “Who was it?”

  “Colm Martin.” Declan pulled a face. “You don’t think this has anything to do with your sister do you? I mean, he’d have been two when she disappeared.”

  The surname sounded familiar but I couldn’t put a face to the name.

  A smile touched my lips. “No, I don’t think he has anything to do with Clara.” Grabbing the bottle, I filled it up.

  “Jesus,” Declan said, beginning to laugh. “Go easy there, cowboy. There are at least four measures in that glass.”

  It was my turn to shrug. Pain ripped through my shoulder and I winced, gripping the edge of the sticky table as I waited for the worst of the agony to subside.

  He waited until my face cleared and I stopped gritting my teeth before asking. “What happened to you anyway?”

  I contemplated telling him the same bullshit I’d spun out for Imelda but as I looked up into Declan’s honest face I found myself wanting to confide in him.

  “Got myself shot,” I said, grabbing the glass and downing the contents in two eye-watering gulps. It burned down the back of my throat, spreading heat through my core, bringing with it a kind of lazy lethargy that saw the tension in my shoulders seeping away.

  The wide-eyed way he was staring at me brought laughter bubbling up the back of my throat. It didn’t mingle well with the burning heat from the whiskey and the laughter quickly devolved into a coughing fit.

  “Jesus, you had me going there for a second,” he said. “I really thought you were serious.”

  Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and I scrubbed them away with the back of my hand as I nodded. “I am serious,” I said.

  He stared at me like I’d just sprouted a second head. He grabbed the bottle and took a gulp straight from the neck, grimacing before returning his attention to me once more.

  “You have got to be shitting me, Alice.” He poured another measure into my glass and, at my raised eyebrow, topped the glass up to the top. “Shot? How the hell did you manage that one?”

  “Long story,” I said. “Can’t really talk about it.” The more I thought about Zoe, Dan, and Rachel, the more I felt the pleasant afterglow that had accompanied the whiskey begin to
fade.

  “Ah come on,” he said. “You can’t drop a clanger like that on me and not tell me what happened.”

  Picking up the glass, I took another scalding mouthful. Why not tell him? It wasn’t as though I was going to have a job after Gerald and Jennifer were through using me as their scapegoat.

  “Fine,” I said, wiggling my half empty glass at him. “But you’ve got to keep this full.”

  “Deal.”

  “Declan!” A gruff shout went up from the bar. “Are you serving here or are we meant to fend for ourselves?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Give me a minute.” I watched him go and finished my drink.

  From my vantage point in the corner booth, I watched him slip in behind the bar, his ready smile and easygoing manner making him popular with the patrons.

  I glanced down at the edge of the paper once more and my stomach flip-flopped. Just how many girls had gone missing over the years? The headache that had been threatening all day started to build momentum.

  Grabbing my bag, I pulled out a fistful of euros and dropped them on the table before I climbed unsteadily to my feet. For a moment, the pub swirled around me and I thought the whiskey was going to make a reappearance. Instead, I swallowed the acrid bile down and headed for the door.

  “Alice!” Declan called after me but I raised my hand and gave him a backwards wave as I slipped out into the cold night air. At least it had stopped raining.

  After a moment of fumbling in my handbag, searching for my elusive iPhone, I gave up and started down the road. It was quiet and once the pub lights faded behind me, the darkness closed in around me.

  Headlights flared ahead of me and I raised my hand, trying to protect my eyes but bursts of colour swam in my vision making it impossible to stay on the road. It reminded me of the night Clara was taken. The headlights had dazzled me then too.

  And then they were gone, the light fading as the vehicle turned down another road.

  A few moments later, a second car pulled to a halt next to me.