Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  My real father, Rowan said, went home to Ireland a long time ago, and that was where her actual brother lived.

  “Ireland?” I said faintly.

  “Ireland,” she said firmly. “I’m going to live there someday too.”

  Later, after dinner, I was in the upstairs living room, where all the lights were on, and the television too. Michan sat in his chair, reading a thick book. Jorie was in her rooms at the end of the hall, probably reading as well. She may have been north of seventy-five, but she was still a night owl. We were, the three of us, sequestered from the life downstairs, the writers drinking and talking in the front parlor.

  “Michan?”

  He looked up, the flash of irritation quickly replaced by a friendlier look. Raised eyebrows. Yes?

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  He closed the book, saving his place with his finger. “Been talking to Rowan?”

  “Well, yes,” I said, annoyed that he’d guessed. “But do you?”

  He wasn’t laughing at me, I saw, but appeared to be thinking about it.

  Finally he said, “I would like to believe that something comes after this. I don’t mean heaven, like the Church says. Some change of energy. We’re one thing now, and when our bodies die, shazam, we’re something else.”

  “Shazam?” I repeated, rolling my eyes.

  He grinned. “That’s the best I can do. What about you? Do you believe in ghosts?”

  I thought about it, staring at the commercial on the television. Michan left his book closed in his lap.

  “No,” I said, and he laughed, but what I meant and could not explain was that, like him, I wanted to believe. But to see a ghost seemed too much to ask for, like the ability to fly.

  11

  Adair

  2010

  To earn my keep, I would serve as a kind of Girl Friday for anyone who needed me, be it the office or kitchen staff. The on-site administrative office was a fifteen-minute walk across the grounds, in what had once been the gardener’s house.

  The gardener’s house handled residents’ issues as they arose. It booked Moye House weddings and other special events. I asked Shannon to please not put me on the phones, a job I’d had one summer in high school. Shannon had advised me then to keep in mind that the callers didn’t know the answers to their questions. I’d laughed, but soon found that she was right. It did start to feel personal, like a stalker was calling to torment me by asking the same ten questions over and over, using an array of different voices.

  I didn’t give the answers I wanted to, of course.

  How do I apply? Go online and read the instructions.

  Can my husband/wife/kids come? Why would you want them to?

  Can I bring my dog? Can the dog write?

  Can I bring my cat? The cat can probably write, but no.

  How good a writer do I have to be? Better than the cat.

  Nor did I want to work directly with the food. I was sure at least a few of the residents would be uncomfortable with it, no matter how much admiration they might express for me, the brave survivor.

  Late Tuesday afternoon, a few days after the start of the fall residency, Mrs. Penrose, who ran the kitchen, sent me into town to buy strawberries for the next day’s breakfast. It was usually a mistake to buy fruit from the supermarket, but she’d been running late, she told me. Now the ones she’d chosen were already going bad.

  I walked through town slowly, my hands in the pockets of a denim jacket I’d found in the back of my closet. This morning, the brisk weather had caused a buzz in the house. There had been some worried talk about the summer extending all the way into October, but overnight, the weather arrived that the residents had come here for.

  I left the fruit store and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking at the bookstore across the street. It still surprised me sometimes to see Wild Books, neat and inviting, instead of the old Byrd’s New & Used Books, with its peeling paint and cracked windows.

  Gin had the quote from which she took the store’s name stenciled on the front window.

  Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books.

  —Virginia Woolf

  Wild Books and Doyle’s Pub, beside it, were once a single private home that had been divided when the street turned from residential to the town’s business district. The two were connected by a sliding door that had once been the divide between the parlor and the dining room. The bar and bookstore were written up on the Moye House website under Local Attractions, and when the resident writers entered the bookstore for the first time, they always sought out the door. The black handle was recessed and barely a shade darker than the wooden wall, easy to miss, and because of the way the door slipped behind the magazine rack, it had the look of a secret passageway.

  At four o’clock on a weekday, the bookstore wasn’t too busy, and I was glad I didn’t see anybody I knew.

  “Hey, Adair,” Gin said as I approached the register. “Good to have you home.”

  Almost as soon as Gin began working at Byrd’s New & Used Books, she’d resolved to buy the store someday, and once it was truly hers, Gin gutted the place as if it had been an entirely different kind of business, like a butcher’s or a haberdashery. She’d made Wild Books practically an annex of Moye House, always making sure to stock the books of past and present writers who had come to stay and scheduling open mics and readings.

  “I’m taking a break,” I told her, though I knew Michan would have told her everything. “Recharging.”

  As if Culleton were a tropical island. I vowed not to say that again.

  “How’s the new crew?”

  I shrugged. “It’s early days. I haven’t met too many of them yet.”

  “I saw one in town this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon?” I said, surprised. “Too soon to be panicking.”

  For many of our residents, Moye House was their first experience at a writers’ colony. Some, as much as they’d dreamed of being alone with their thoughts, couldn’t make themselves sit still at their desks. Usually it took a full week before they began wandering around the gardens or stealing into town to go to the bookstore or the movies. Still, it didn’t happen very often. The personal statement and writing samples required with the application mostly separated the dreamers from the focused.

  “He could be settling in,” Gin said.

  Both of us always ignored the fact that Gin might have been my sort-of stepmother. Step-aunt, as it were. But even the well-meaning town busybodies had stopped asking when she and Michan were going to make it official. Gin, who’d been married and divorced young, liked to say if she’d gone skydiving once, and her parachute failed, she sure as hell wouldn’t go skydiving again. She lived on the edge of town in an enclave called Cottages. It was a neighborhood of small houses that had once been summer rentals for the rich.

  “Okay, I’m just going to—” I gestured to the store in general.

  “Surely,” Gin said. “Let me know if you need help.”

  After browsing for a bit, with a wave to Gin, who was with a customer, I left. On the sidewalk in front of the store, I hesitated and then turned down the alley. I could cut through the parking lot and walk one more block to the elementary school and my car.

  As I headed down the cobblestone street, I checked my phone for the time. It was only four thirty, though it would hardly have mattered if it were midnight, since I had no place to be. I dropped the phone in my purse and looked up to see a tall man holding a lantern coming toward me. I looked away and back, and saw that it was not a lantern, but a black shopping bag he held loosely by the handles.

  As I passed him, he put out a hand as if to lay it on my arm, but stopped.

  “Adair?” he said.

  “Yes?” I answered automatically and stepped back. This is how it happens, I thought. He calls your name, and even though he’s a stranger, you answer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “God, I’m an idiot, coming at you out of nowhere.” He mo
ved his hand in a gesture that I guessed meant the alley but might have included all of Culleton.

  He had an Irish accent.

  “My name is Ciaran Riordan. I’m at Moye House for the fall, ah, term? Residency, I guess we’re supposed to say, since it’s not school. I emailed you over the summer,” he said. “Of course you don’t know me, but I saw you at the house—” Ciaran stopped, as if he’d run out of words.

  I’ll be there in fall, I remembered. The email I never answered.

  Michan greeted the new arrivals. As a child, I had too, but once I became a teenager, I’d always preferred to meet them when we ran into one another in the hallways of the house or out on the grounds. I didn’t like being the center of their collective attention, even briefly.

  “Adair!” the residents would say with surprise when we were introduced. Though they knew I couldn’t still be a child, I was still like a character in a book. I was Beth from Little Women, if she had grabbed hold of the pen and crossed out the paragraphs that ended her life.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your email this summer,” I said. “There was a lot going on—”

  “I’m the one who’s sorry,” Ciaran said, fixing his gaze on the ground. “I’m not in the habit of emailing women I don’t know.”

  “It’s fine, really,” I said.

  Ciaran relaxed, which was my intention.

  “How did you get into town?” I asked. “Did you take the shuttle van from the house, or did you bring your car to the residency?”

  “I don’t have a car. I live in Brooklyn too. Don’t need one. I walked into town. Walking helps me think,” he said.

  “About your novel?” I asked.

  “I’m writing nonfiction, actually,” he said.

  “Oh, well, if you’re done—”

  He laughed. “Done thinking? I am, yes.”

  “I can take you back home,” I said, and then added, “To the house, I mean.”

  Moye House was not his home, of course.

  I drove back to the house and parked the car in the lot. As we walked to the house, Ciaran asked how far we were from Rosary Chapel.

  “It’s not far at all,” I said. “You can go and take a look and be back in time for dinner.”

  “I’m not much for that sort of thing. We were told it wasn’t required.”

  “Required, no, but it’s sort of expected, this early on at least,” I said.

  “It’s a hard sell for me,” Ciaran said, “sitting at a table for an hour, made to chat with whoever I happen to be beside. Drinks together after, I can get behind that because I can move about. I can leave if I want.”

  I started to give him directions to the chapel, and when I paused, he spoke.

  “Will you come with me?” he asked.

  Friendships formed quickly at Moye House, because the residents were together so much when they weren’t working. I used to try to guess on arrival day who would pair off, who were bound to hate each other. Ciaran was the youngest of this group by several years, and I wondered whom he was spending his off-time with. Maybe no one. Maybe that was why he was talking to me as if I were one of them.

  “I haven’t been back there in a long time,” I said, and then, “Yes.”

  He put his shopping bag inside his backpack, which I saw held a laptop, and we headed off.

  I led him off the grounds, to the edge of the woods. The trail was unmarked, but visible if you knew where to look. Ciaran walked beside me with a silence I recognized from my uncle Michan and so many of the writers who’d come to stay. I’d seen them wandering the gardens with the very expression Ciaran was wearing: his head tilted slightly, listening to his own thoughts to the exclusion of everything else.

  Because I knew, of course, how long it took to get to the chapel, I glanced at Ciaran to see his expression at the moment the tree line broke and the chapel appeared. He stared. Even when you were expecting to see the small church surrounded by woods, as if it had grown there like one of the trees, it was still startling.

  Rather than trailing behind him, I sat on the chapel steps as Ciaran walked around the building, studying it.

  “Where’s the quicken tree?”

  I stood and led him to it, the mountain ash, the quicken tree, a few feet away. In the spring, the tree was covered with white flowers, but now, in autumn, the berries were in bloom.

  “Are you using Culleton’s history in your book?” I asked.

  Ciaran rubbed his arms as though he were cold. “Yes. It’s—I’m sorry. This isn’t an easy thing to explain, since I’m hoping you can help me. That’s why I emailed you this summer. Then when I got here and saw you’d moved back in . . . I’ve been trying all week to think of a way to approach you.”

  “I don’t know what I could possibly help you with,” I said, baffled.

  Ciaran gestured in the direction of the chapel. “Can we sit for a minute?”

  We settled on the chapel steps. The key, I thought, and curled my fist as though it were in my hand.

  “I told you I was writing nonfiction,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “My book is about missing children,” Ciaran said.

  “Rowan.” I did not intend to whisper, but it came out that way.

  “Yes. Rowan Kinnane.”

  If I turned around, I’d see her, grinning at me.

  “You must know the case has never come close to being solved,” I said coolly. “I don’t know what you’re going to write about.”

  “The angle of the book is to spotlight cold cases,” Ciaran said. “I know there was speculation in the press about Rowan’s mother and the landlady’s son. One or both of them were guilty.”

  “The police never arrested anybody,” I said. “It’s Evelyn you should be talking to. She’s Rowan’s mother.”

  “I hope to,” Ciaran said. “Research is part of the reason for coming here. Getting a feel for the town, talking to people who remember. I know the boy across the street said she didn’t leave for the parade with her mother. And I know you told the police you saw her in town that afternoon. In the bookstore.”

  He’s right, you did. I could hear her voice, raspy, like a child smoker.

  “The police figured out I was wrong almost right away,” I said. “My name was never in the papers. How do you know something that wasn’t even worth reporting?”

  Ciaran sat very still, as though afraid he might startle me into bolting.

  “The lead detective who worked the case is retired now. I’ve interviewed him. Some of the police argued that with all the people out that day for the parade, it was possible that Rowan simply went unnoticed, but this detective thought the opposite. He said that the more people, the better the chances that somebody else would’ve seen her too. He thought she never made it into town.”

  Detective Huyser. He’d kept running a hand over his head, as if he’d forgotten he was balding. His belly jutted out over his belt, and his brown eyes were moist and sad, like a beagle’s.

  We need you to tell us the truth, honey. Think hard. What was Rowan wearing? Are you sure it was Saturday that you saw her? If you’re mixing up your days, that’s a mistake and that’s okay. Nobody else seems to have seen her. We need to find out what’s going on here.

  “Did he tell you I was lying or that I was crazy?”

  “Mistaken,” Ciaran said crisply.

  I liked that Ciaran didn’t reflexively protest that I was neither a liar nor crazy. He didn’t know me.

  “He said Adair McCrohan was confused and nobody could blame her, with all she’d been through already,” Ciaran said. “He said you were sick that week.”

  I sidestepped my health. “He gave you my name? Is he allowed to do that?”

  “He had a heart attack last year. I’m not sure if he cares much what he’s allowed to do. He was glad to talk to me. Said that nobody’d asked him about Rowan in years. He told me you were the poet’s niece, who lost her parents.”

  The girl with AIDS was what he’d said
, I had no doubt. I let it go.

  “Eyewitnesses are unreliable. It’s been proven. You invent details without meaning to and you’re convinced they’re real,” I said. “I don’t have anything to say. I’m sorry.”

  “You were cousins,” Ciaran said. “You share a four-times great-grandmother who once worked at Moye House as a maid.”

  “It makes us very distant cousins. Fifth, I think.”

  I started jiggling my foot, and I saw Ciaran glance at it.

  “Fifth, that’s right,” he said.

  Boo, I heard her say in my ear.

  Go away, I thought, afraid to turn my head and feel her cold breath on my cheek.

  “You found Rowan’s case online?” I moved my head slightly to the left as I said her name, though I sensed she’d retreated. Indeed, I saw only the trees, unbroken by the figure of a girl.

  Rowan had an entry on Missing in New York and another on The Perdita Blog, an online encyclopedia of the missing. I pictured Ciaran browsing a list of missing children and clicking on Rowan’s name, if only to see if she was a boy or a girl.

  Ciaran unzipped his backpack and took out a gray folder. He held it, closed, in his hands.

  “There’s not too many who’ll tell you off the top of their head that two people who share a four-times great-grandmother are fifth cousins,” he said.

  “Rowan told me,” I said, confused.

  “She told me too,” Ciaran said.

  He opened the folder and drew out a white envelope. I reached for it and then pulled back, as if the paper might burn, but Ciaran held it out further and I accepted it.

  Ciaran Riordan

  Ballyineen, Galway, Ireland

  The postmark: January 4, 1995.

  There was an air mail stamp but no return address on the front. I turned the envelope over. It had been torn open from the top. On the intact flap I saw the familiar signature, with its oversize R and K, the two letters exaggerated, almost interchangeable.

  Rowan Kinnane