Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  No other customers at Byrd’s Books saw Rowan go in or leave. Though the post office was on the same block, it closed at noon on Saturdays, including the lobby. The bookstore sighting was dismissed. And so only her mother’s word put Rowan in town.

  At the beginning of week three, Evelyn, who had talked to the press several times, had been slated to give another interview, but she abruptly canceled it when a story aired claiming that “police sources” had revealed that under questioning, Leo Phelan admitted he had stayed at Evelyn’s for a while after fixing her smoke detector. Maybe an hour. No more than two. They were talking, he said. They were friends. She’d been trying to persuade him to go to college. If he was perfectly happy working at Degare Mountain State Park as a groundskeeper, and taking tourists on hikes through the woods, fine, she’d said, but he’d never get promoted without a degree. He’d laughed and said he’d never take a job where he had to wear a tie and sit at a desk all day. That was it, the whole conversation.

  Stories in the press, stitched together with “alleged” and “reliable sources,” began to tell of a strained mother-daughter relationship, of a girl unhappy with her stepfather and the slew of new rules he’d implemented. Rowan, long the only child of a single mother, had been pushed to the outskirts of a reconfigured family.

  Had I recited all of this to Emily, she would have listened avidly. What happened next?, I pictured her saying.

  Nothing. After the first volunteer-driven searches, there were three professional searches of Degare Mountain. After the final push, Thanksgiving week, park rangers kept Rowan’s Missing poster up in the visitors’ center, beside a sign that asked hikers to report any items of clothing they found on the trails. Lost jackets, socks and even shoes were hardly unusual, but if anything looked like it might belong to a twelve-year-old, it should be picked up. Culleton’s first snow, a gentle coating in December, brought with it the end of anticipation. Anticipation of Rowan being found, alive or dead.

  Regular stories in the press ceased. Brief updates were tucked into the dead space right before the Letters to the Editor page. Around the anniversary of the disappearance, stories were more detailed, but only because they repeated all the facts and theories, often with little differentiation between the two.

  As the mystery aged, speculation still allowed for the possibility that Rowan was alive, but this was primarily for sport. Answers were spun out of every possibility without the weight of evidence. Her name itself came to mean the act of vanishing.

  Only one thing was generally agreed upon: that by the time the volunteers mobilized in the wintry light of the following sunrise, fueled by donated coffee, they never had any chance of success. Even as the bells of Rosary Chapel rang the Angelus, both as prayer and signal by which the real lost girl might find her way home, it was too late. Rowan Kinnane was already buried in the grave that nobody has yet found.

  I drew one curved line, then another, so I had the outline of a bell. The streetlight gave off a poor glow and my hand cast an interfering shadow over the page, things that bothered me when I was trying. But as it was, I didn’t tilt the sketchpad. I let the shadow follow.

  For nearly fifteen years I’d been drawing versions of this scene. My right hand was my body, moving with assurance as if through a dance it knew well. Not once did I have to flip the pencil upside down to erase, to turn back. When I finished, I tossed the pencil across the room and didn’t listen for its landing. The sketch was rough with ragged edges, but nobody but me would see it. Two girls, alone in the woods, wearing masks, fox and hare.

  I slipped the sketchbook back into the bookcase. There was a knot in the palm of my hand and my fingers ached. The tip of my nose was cold. I crawled back into bed and was falling asleep, a feeling like teetering on the edge of a cliff, when I felt a grin against my ear.

  Over the years, I’d trained myself not to think about her. A deliberate pushing away, the opposite of prayer. Yet when I mentioned her to Emily, used her to deflect attention from my own story, I’d summoned Rowan from wherever she’d gone.

  2

  Cassius Moye

  He saw the Irish girl the morning of the winter fire.

  Cold light was beginning to edge over Degare Mountain. He was alone in the front yard of his family’s home, a boy of twelve whistling softly for his dog, Archie, who had woken him before dawn looking to go out. Cassius obliged, in keeping with the pledge of responsibility he’d made to his parents when they’d let him keep the terrier, whom he’d found starved and shivering in the woods a year ago.

  It was the dead week between Christmas and the new year. Too bitter for snow, their groundskeeper had been grumbling since the holiday. With a growl, Archie ran off, probably on the scent of some small animal who didn’t get to sleep away the weather. Cassius pitched his whistle higher, impatient. His toes and his fingertips were numb.

  A girl appeared, running from the direction of the house, her skirt hitched in two fists nearly to her knees. Out of plain confusion, Cassius put out an arm as if to snag her by the waist. But she dashed by him and had cleared the front gate and reached the road before Cassius gave chase. He assumed she’d come out of the wild settlement on the banks of the Hudson River, a few miles away. This was where the Irish lived, not only the foundrymen who worked for William Moye, his father, but also those who’d come upstate to dig canals or lay the railroad. The foundry workers were mostly decent men, William Moye often said. Ironwork—bell-casting especially—was a skill that had to be learned, and anyone who didn’t wasn’t employed for long. Trust was important, and that was the reason the brothers and cousins of employees were brought on to apprentice before outsiders. It was the others who caused trouble.

  But the gentlemen who owned the area’s estates and the businessmen from the nearby city of Onohedo saw no distinction. They wrote letters to the newspapers decrying the “shantytown” disfiguring the countryside, with its makeshift houses where who knew how many families crowded inside. There were also two boardinghouses where the unmarried men lived, drinking nightly in the first-floor saloons.

  The letter writers didn’t use the name the Irish had given the settlement, Cullytown. Likely they didn’t know it. Cassius had heard it from the groundskeeper, an Irishman himself but one who’d been in America since he was a child. It came from the word for “sleep” in their own language. So, Sleeptown, because it wasn’t a place to live but a place to shut their eyes for the hours between shifts. A thief prowling the area would have come from there.

  The girl’s clothes were dark, and given the lead she had, Cassius could easily have lost her in the predawn dimness. But her pale hair, falling loose down her back, kept her clearly in his sight.

  As they neared the foundry, and as Cassius was beginning to truly fall back, the foundry’s fire bell rang. Cassius felt it like a punch. This was his father’s greatest fear. Fire could take all he’d built in the space of an hour.

  The girl stopped and leaned over, her hands on her knees. As he caught up to her, she straightened, turned around. A look of grief.

  They were near the entrance to the foundry compound. The fire watch were shouting; men were running farther up the road. The girl continued, walking now. She said nothing as Cassius fell in step with her, both of them breathing harsh bursts of frost. They took the curve in the road, followed the shouts of the men and the smell of smoke.

  It was the new church, the Catholic church. Cassius stopped to admire the beauty of the fire. Every window lit with leaping gold, and the steeple was burnished in orange, silhouetted against the sky.

  In the spring, before the church was completed, a fire had broken out, but since it began in the late afternoon, it was caught early and the damage was minimal. “Officials Know Nothing of Fire’s Cause,” the newspaper headline read. Construction continued. And on Christmas Eve, Cassius and his father had stepped outside at midnight to hear the bell ring as the church celebrated its first Mass.

  God help us, William Moye said ruefull
y. William had stayed up in case there was trouble, and Cassius had asked if he could as well. If there was an attack, it would likely be on the church again, or in the shantytown, but as William told Cassius, Moye House itself might be targeted too.

  Before, the nearest Catholic church was downriver from the foundry, too far to travel in a single Sunday, so once a month the missionary priest tasked with visiting the small parishes scattered up and down the Hudson came to say Mass. He had approached William Moye about contributing to a church for the foundrymen and their families. More and more Irish were arriving every day, and that meant more churches being built all over the country. Those churches would need bells for their steeples, for the altar. Hand bells for schools and convents.

  William agreed. Cassius knew that his father had been motivated by business sense and not kindness. For years, the foundrymen had been asking him to provide decent housing they could afford to rent. A church was a less expensive proposition, William explained to his son. Once built, responsibility for its upkeep would shift to the Catholic diocese of New York. The foundry and its politics would all come to Cassius one day, and William found a lesson to impart about it in nearly everything.

  The arsonists, whoever they were, took a lesson from the spring fire and they’d done a more thorough job in December. Darkness gave the flames headway. The church was full of pews, greenery for the season and altar cloths, and the river was frozen, which delayed fighting the flames that much longer.

  The sky had turned from purple to gray before the fire was out. All but one wall had collapsed. The bell was scorched black from smoke and flames. Ruined, someone said. Women were crying and a few were praying.

  Cassius’s throat was raw from the smoke. In the chaos, he’d lost the girl and, alone, he went home.

  A week passed. The year 1856 began with a storm fierce enough to halt any plans the Irishmen may have had to avenge the burning of St. Maren’s. The snow that fell for a full day and night also trapped Cassius indoors, except for short excursions outside with Archie.

  Early in the afternoon, Cassius joined his mother, Maddy, in her reading parlor, a small, warm room at the front of the house. His father was then meeting with the missionary priest, who asked for a new church to be built on the ruins of the old.

  His father did not want further unrest, so he offered instead to clear land in the woods just outside his own property and there he’d build, not a church, but a chapel.

  As Cassius came in, his mother asked him to pull the bell for the kitchen. He obliged and sat down heavily in the chair opposite her desk, where she sat writing a letter to her sister.

  Maddy set down her pen at the soft knock on the door.

  “Come in, Katie.”

  The girl entered the room. Cassius stared. She wore a white apron over her dress and her hair was hidden beneath a white cap, but it was her. For days after the fire, Cassius had waited for the housekeeper to call out that the good spoons were missing, but she had not, leaving him more confused than ever.

  He had tried to describe the girl in his journal, but with each attempt, his memory failed to bring her near enough to see her properly. He’d begun to believe she might have been a waking dream or a ghost, like the redheaded girl in the woods.

  But here she was again.

  He’d whistled and she ran to him. Now he’d rung a bell and she’d appeared. He was, for a moment, in awe of his power. Then his mother asked the girl to bring her a cup of tea.

  “Cassius?” his mother asked. Did he want anything, she meant. He shook his head.

  The girl bobbed her head and stepped back in the hall without looking at him.

  “She is quicker than a cat,” his mother said.

  Though speed should be something admirable in a servant, Cassius caught something in his mother’s tone. Unease?

  “How long has she been here?”

  His mother set down her pen. “I’ve no idea. Mrs. Walsh brings those girls on.”

  Mrs. Walsh was the housekeeper, head of all the staff.

  “Where does she find them?” Cassius asked.

  “Find them?” Maddy was amused. “They’re hardly rare as gems, Cassius.”

  The girl entered without knocking, and Maddy nodded at the small table in front of the fire. The girl set the teacup and saucer down, again without looking at him.

  Cassius realized then that though she was a wonder to him, he hardly was to her. She had no doubt been in his bedroom, dusting, washing the windows and making his bed. Every morning she may have been the one to come in while he was still sleeping and lay the fire to warm his room.

  Who are you? he wanted to ask. How did you know about the fire? Because she had. He had been outside first. The fire bell wasn’t ringing. No smoke was rising above the trees. He had smelled only the cold.

  After Cassius returned to school, days would pass without him thinking of her, and then he’d see her at work in the house or from a window, lugging a bucket from the water pump in the yard, the strain in her shoulders evident even from a distance. He would turn to see her disappearing around a corner or cresting the stairs. She was a puzzle he returned to when he had time.

  His father required him in the foundry office for two hours each day, to learn the recordkeeping and accounts. But the columns of figures were like knives pointed at him. Cassius dreamed of the wider world. He wanted to go to sea and climb mountains beyond Degare, which was vast and challenging, but he’d looked at it every day of his life.

  In his free time, he took books from the shelves of their own library and brought them up to the loft to read. The loft, which overlooked the library, was an alcove, like a box seat in a theater. He could go up there and sink back into the shadows, to be invisible to anyone in the room below.

  Cassius took Archie with him on a walk one drizzly Saturday afternoon. The light rain didn’t bother him or the dog, who trotted happily beside him.

  At Maplecrest, a house owned by a family named Croft, who came only in the summer, Cassius pushed open the gate. He headed around the side of the house to the servants’ entrance, a plain wooden door that creaked when he opened it. The first time Cassius had let himself into an empty house, he’d gotten in through a window and had come away with bruised shins. This had prompted him to try the doors first, and to his surprise he’d found that most of the houses had at least one left unlocked.

  Whenever he entered a summer house, he marveled at how each room stirred as he passed through it, as though waking from a long sleep. The Crofts’ library was smaller than the Moyes’, a one-story room, furnished sparingly. There was a desk by the window and a sofa in front of the fireplace. Archie jumped up on the middle cushion and put his head on his paws, settling in for a nap as Cassius browsed the bookshelves. There were many books about travel, which made this collection among the best to pilfer. He always wished to find a way to ask Mr. Croft if he’d done much traveling when he was young. It was hard to imagine the heavy, silent man as an adventurer. Quite probably he lived through reading, something he, Cassius, promised himself he would never do.

  He spied a book bound in brown leather, with gold lettering on the spine: Journey to Alaska: A True Account.

  As Cassius took the book from the shelf, Archie growled. In his mind, he’d rehearsed the scene where he got caught and then had to tell his father, but he’d imagined it only for the sake of protecting himself from it actually happening.

  The Irish girl stood in the doorway. She wore an apron over her gray dress but no cap, and in her hand she held a cloth.

  “What are you doing here?” Cassius asked.

  She said, with a smile that came and went so fast Cassius would never be quite sure he saw it, “This is how we meet.”

  The next Saturday, Cassius was at the desk in his father’s study, on the second floor of the house, trying to finish a history essay for school, when he saw her going into the woods.

  Saturday afternoons, once a month, she cleaned the Crofts’ house. Mrs. Croft
had asked Cassius’s mother for the loan of a girl to run a cloth over the woodwork, because she hated to think of how thick the dust would be when they returned in May.

  It had been a week since she’d caught him stealing from the library. He’d asked her not to tell, and she’d tilted her head and said she’d never thought of it, but anyway, nobody would believe her over him.

  Abashed after that, he had said little as they walked home together. Did she call it home too? He couldn’t bring himself to ask. She was silent, waiting for him not only to say something but to say something specific, he sensed. And because he was afraid of guessing wrong, he retreated into the capsizing shyness that plagued him so at school. He’d hoped for another chance.

  Now, Cassius pulled on his shoes, grabbed his coat and went outside. Archie, who had been napping on his bed, followed along. The October afternoon was overcast, which made the foliage seem brighter, like a house at dusk in lamplight.

  “Katie,” he called, and when she appeared not to hear him, he raised his voice. “Katie!”

  But she kept walking. He slowed down so that he was trailing behind her. She stopped at the quicken tree, a few feet away from the foundation of the soon-to-be chapel.

  Cassius stood near her, oddly nervous.

  “Will people come all the way out to the woods to go to church?” he asked, glad to have thought of something to say.

  “It isn’t far,” she said without looking at him. She rubbed a leaf between two fingers. “This is why they’re putting the church here.”

  It took him a moment to decipher her accent, and then another to figure out what the words meant.

  “The tree?” he said, confused.

  She nodded. “Do you know what it is?”

  Cassius shook his head.

  “A quicken tree. A rowan tree. There’s one where we lived back in Ireland.”