Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  I pointed out St. Maren’s Catholic Church. Michan and I only went to Mass on Christmas Eve, and Rowan and Evelyn had not even bothered with that until David. I slowed down at the corner of Winter Hill Road.

  “The house that Rowan’s stepfather bought is right up there. See the red roof?” I said.

  Ciaran wanted to get a closer look, so I obliged.

  Twenty-two Winter Hill Road was at the crest of the hill. The house had four bedrooms, a wraparound porch and property of nearly a half acre.

  Ciaran made no move to get out of the car. “Did Rowan want to move?” he asked.

  “She did,” I said. “She said it was the one good thing about David. Her room was going to be much bigger. She was excited about having a big backyard.”

  “David and Evelyn never lived here either, am I right?”

  I shook my head. “Once the work was finished, David wanted to move in, but Evelyn wouldn’t leave where she’d lived with Rowan. He finally gave up and put it on the market. He left her not long after that.”

  “When I read about the new house being under construction, I was convinced I’d solved the case.”

  “Solved it?”

  “I thought Rowan came here that day. It was a Saturday, and the workmen wouldn’t have been here. She went in a window or an unlocked door and had some kind of accident. One of the workers covered it up because he knew they’d get in trouble.”

  “It’s plausible,” I said, “as a theory, but—”

  Ciaran looked at me. “Wrong. I know. I had some fantasy of confronting the detective and then he calls in the FBI to shut me up. They find her somewhere in the house or yard.”

  “They searched it back then,” I said, gazing at the house that was to be Rowan’s compensation for putting up with David. The shutters were painted dark green and the curtains behind the windows were white.

  “I know that now,” Ciaran said. “Detective Huyser told me that all the men who were working here were looked at. He was nice about it. Didn’t ask if I thought the investigators were so stupid they’d not thought of it.”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer, but then Ciaran asked abruptly, “How did Rowan talk about David Brayton? Did she not like him only because he was her stepfather and he made her eat her vegetables and go to bed at nine thirty?”

  David. Rowan’s lip practically curled each time she said his name.

  “And me—he wouldn’t let me in their house. Rowan was mad about that.”

  “You’re not serious,” Ciaran said. “Because of—”

  “Everyone thinks the worst was over by the nineties. It just stopped making the news,” I said. “He didn’t want me around Libby. Babies’ immune systems aren’t fully developed. That’s what he told Evelyn.”

  Ciaran frowned. “That shouldn’t matter, right?”

  “It isn’t the flu,” I said wearily.

  I remembered my humiliation when Rowan explained to me why I couldn’t come over to her house. Furious as she was, she had not considered my feelings in quoting her stepfather.

  Ciaran was watching me closely. “But you were still friends?”

  “Rowan liked the idea of defying him. If we went to the movies, we’d buy tickets separately and meet in the balcony. I went along, but I don’t think he’d have much cared. He just didn’t want me in their house.”

  Ciaran looked down at his hands. “That’s an awful thing to do to a child.”

  “I was twelve,” I said.

  “Do you mean you weren’t a child, or you were?”

  “I mean I’d had twelve years of it already,” I said. “And that’s a lot of practice.”

  He said no more, and I was pleased to have made it sound like a thing you could get used to.

  On Deering Road, Ciaran had his door open before I’d pulled the key out of the ignition. I dropped my keys in my purse and followed him. He was surveying the neighborhood as though it were a mysterious landscape and not an ordinary block of houses with sagging eaves and shingles missing from their roofs.

  He stopped before a house of red brick with navy-blue trim, like a house in a uniform. Number 4.

  “Has it changed much?” he asked.

  I rubbed my arms as I sorted the house into shapes as if preparing to draw it. The sharp triangle of the roof and the circular attic window. The twin rectangles of the second-story windows, Rowan’s bedroom.

  “No, not really,” I said. “The front window is different. The porch railing was white back then, not blue. But otherwise, it looks the same.”

  I glanced behind me, at the mailbox beside the curb, also the same. One newspaper article had called the path from Rowan’s front porch to the mailbox her “final walk,” as though she’d opened her front door and stepped off the planet.

  Ciaran went down the driveway and paused by the side door.

  I glanced up at the house. “I’m not sure who lives here now—”

  “No cars in the driveway. I don’t think anybody’s home,” Ciaran said, unconcerned. “Would Rowan have come out this way?”

  “She might have,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter if she came out the side door or the back door. Evelyn never pulled up this far.”

  Before Ciaran could answer, we both turned to watch a tan car pull into the Kellys’ driveway, across the street. When the driver’s door opened and a dark-haired woman got out, I believed for a moment that Brian’s mother had arrived, even younger than she’d been in 1995. But Mrs. Kelly must have been at least forty then, and this woman was near my own age.

  “That’s Molly,” I said.

  Ciaran glanced at me and then back at the woman as she closed her car door and paused, keys in hand, watching us. I hadn’t seen Brian’s sister in years. She was wearing a dress and low heels and her hair was pulled back with a headband. Ciaran and I met her at the edge of the driveway.

  “Adair,” she said before turning to Ciaran expectantly.

  I introduced them. “This is Ciaran Riordan. He’s a writer staying at Moye House.”

  Molly’s expression didn’t change. “You’re Rowan’s brother. My brother told me you called him. You’re writing a book. Well. We thought Rowan was making you up.”

  After hesitating a moment, Ciaran said, “We?” As though he had many questions and chose that one.

  “The girls at school,” she said and then looked at me. “Not Adair. Adair always believed her.”

  Her tone was casual, even friendly, but it rankled.

  “She wasn’t a liar,” I said.

  Molly raised her eyebrows and hoisted her purse higher on her shoulder.

  “How well did you know Rowan?” Ciaran asked.

  “We were summertime friends,” Molly said. “We roller-skated and rode bikes. The usual.”

  As far as I could recall, Rowan had only ever mentioned Molly in passing, as a girl who lived on her block.

  “But once Adair moved to town, forget it,” Molly said. “I couldn’t compete.”

  “Compete with me?” I said, my eyebrows raised.

  “You were way more exciting than I was,” Molly said.

  “Lucky me,” I said.

  Molly shrugged. “That’s the way her mind worked.”

  I thought, uncomfortably, that there was something to that.

  “What do you know about the day Rowan disappeared?” Ciaran asked, deciding to bypass the twists of childhood friendships.

  “Absolutely nothing,” Molly said archly. “I didn’t see Rowan at all.”

  “When did you last see her?” Ciaran asked.

  Now Molly hesitated, with a look at her house as if afraid of being overheard.

  “Two, three days before she disappeared,” Molly said. “I looked out my bedroom window and she was sitting on her roof.”

  “The roof?” Ciaran repeated. “Of her house?”

  Molly pointed. “Yes. Between the windows.”

  Molly explained that it had not been late, but she couldn’t remember if she’d looked at the clock.
That night, something had woken her up. A car door slamming. A barking dog. A dream. She only knew she had not been asleep very long and that she had keenly felt the need to go to her window, as though to check the sky on Christmas Eve. And there was Rowan, her legs stretched out in front of her. The roof was flat there, a cover for the porch below. Rowan had been wearing pajamas and no sweater or jacket, though it was a chilly night. She might not have been wearing socks, but given the distance, that was hard to say definitively. Next to her was a lit candle.

  “What was she doing?” Ciaran said.

  “I didn’t know. She couldn’t sleep? She’d gone out there to read instead of the typical flashlight under the covers? But I didn’t see a book either. She wasn’t doing anything,” Molly said. “After she disappeared, I told my mother about it, because the thought was in the back of my head, even if I couldn’t put it into words then, that she was hiding.”

  “From her stepfather?” Ciaran asked intently.

  “No,” she said. “He wasn’t home that night.”

  “He was away on business most of that week,” I said. “Then went to his mother’s that weekend.”

  “You never told the police?” Ciaran asked, his eyes on her.

  Molly shook her head. “My mother said it couldn’t have meant anything and we didn’t need to be more involved than we were. That used to be Leo’s room. My mom said he always did the same thing. He probably told Rowan and she was copying him. I always thought she had a crush on him.”

  After we left Molly, Ciaran headed back up Rowan’s driveway, then walked without pausing to the end of the street and climbed over the short brick wall that marked the block as a dead end. I followed him down a steep embankment to where a stream ran, shallow and cold. He squatted and put his hand in the water.

  “Even with a lot of rain, it wouldn’t get much deeper than this, am I right? One newspaper mentioned a search of the river behind her house. But this is no river.”

  “In the summer, we put our feet in,” I said. “No, it’s not enough to drown in.”

  “Sure it is, if someone held you and you couldn’t get free,” Ciaran said.

  “They’d have to move the body, after.”

  He nodded. “There’s this case, an old case from the fifties or sixties, here in the States. A two-year-old boy was playing with his dog in his backyard and the mother went inside to answer the phone. She came back and the boy was gone. There was a river behind the house, and I mean a real river with a strong current. The police were sure he drowned and was swept away.”

  “Because they never found him?”

  “Because of the dog. The mother found the dog, barking like mad on the riverbank,” Ciaran said. “The family never believed it, because the body never surfaced. They were sure he was abducted.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Ciaran stood up. “Occam’s razor—do you know what that is?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a rule of philosophy that says the simpler solution, the one that takes the fewest assumptions, is more likely to be true. Did a two-year-old wander out of his own backyard, or did a kidnapper wander in without being seen and without the dog barking? Then not a single neighbor hears or sees anything as the boy is taken, and all of it done in about ten minutes? Maybe, but it’s far more likely that he fell in the river. His body sank and then snagged on something underwater, so it never rose up.”

  Occam’s razor. Did Evelyn kill her daughter and then have her lover dispose of the body?

  Or did Rowan cross paths with a kidnapper that afternoon?

  But before I could frame the question, and ask which answer was the simpler one in Rowan’s case, because I honestly didn’t know, Ciaran turned and climbed back up the embankment. I followed. He stopped in front of Rowan’s house and started to speak, but then stopped, staring at the window. A young woman with long hair was watching us, one hand holding back the curtain.

  Not Rowan, I thought wildly. Never Rowan. The lost don’t simply reappear in their homes.

  The front door opened and a girl in a Gilbride sweatshirt came out on the porch in her stocking feet.

  “You’re here about the missing girl, aren’t you,” she said, as if Rowan were indeed in the house, waiting for us to collect her.

  “I’m writing about the case,” Ciaran said, and the ease with which he said it surprised me. Though he wasn’t lying, this woman surely had no sense of what he was leaving out.

  “Do a lot of curiosity seekers show up here?” he asked.

  “Not a lot. We’ve been renting this place since sophomore year, and it’s happened a few other times. We can tell because the people, like, stand out front and stare. Then there’s a guy who gives ghost tours of the Hudson Valley in October. This is a stop.” She leaned on the doorjamb. “Last time, he gave us forty dollars to bring the tour inside the house.”

  “And you let him?” I asked.

  She laughed. “We’re college students. He could’ve given us a six-pack and we would’ve said sure.”

  “I’ve no cash on me,” Ciaran said. “I’d be happy to send a pizza over later if we can come in and look around.”

  She laughed again but shifted from foot to foot, surely weighing her mother’s warnings about not trusting strangers. Then she studied me and, a moment later, opened the door wider.

  She had decided my presence meant Ciaran was safe. Obviously, she hadn’t spent enough time in the murky trenches of the internet. She had not read about girls who went to their fate together, assuming two could not be harmed at once, or girls who thought the woman in the passenger seat of a car meant the man driving was as harmless as he appeared to be.

  “Come in.”

  I started to grab Ciaran’s sleeve but he was already up the steps of the porch. Given his need to reconstruct what he could of Rowan’s life, he would not turn down the chance to see where she had lived. I’d intended to tell him that I would sit on the step and wait for him, but he was already inside and it now seemed worse to be alone, so I followed, at first slowly and then fighting the urge to run inside shouting for Rowan. She would not answer her brother, because she barely knew him. She wouldn’t come if her mother called, because in life she never had. But me, she would answer.

  The kitchen’s color scheme was different, yellow and beige instead of blue and green, but the cabinets and the placement of the table were the same. The stove and refrigerator were new. Evelyn’s furniture was gone, of course. The living room held only a couch, facing a big-screen television, and a coffee table.

  “What did the tour guide say?” Ciaran asked. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude. What’s your name?”

  “Sophie,” she said. “The tour guide? He said the girl disappeared and was never found. Most people think she died here.”

  “Where?” I asked, and as I thought she would, she pointed to the stairs that led from the front hallway to the second floor. They were narrow and uncarpeted.

  “An old tenant used to hear footsteps running down the hall and a banging on the stairs. Like someone falling? That’s why they moved out, and that’s why the house is only rented and never sold.” Sophie paused. “But that’s not true, because my dad asked about buying it, figuring he could fix it up and sell it once I’m done with school. But the lady who owns it said no.”

  “Have you ever heard anything?” Ciaran asked.

  He sounded almost stern, as though it were not the tour guide he disapproved of, but Rowan, as if she were indeed performing her death nightly, and he, her brother, had finally arrived to make her stop.

  “Me? No. But I don’t believe in that stuff. One of my roommates said lights have turned off and on, but she’s kind of a liar.”

  Silently, I agreed. Rowan was not here. But then why would she be? Her mother and sister were gone. Strangers moved in and left again. More strangers came.

  “Can we take a look upstairs?” Ciaran asked.

  Sophie shrugged. “Sure. Nobody else is home.�
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  She started up, with Ciaran behind her and me last. She paused on the landing and pointed.

  “See how steep these are?” she said. “It’d be easy to fall, especially if you were a kid and you were running.”

  I’d forgotten how short the hallway was. Both bedroom doors were open. She gestured to the room at the front. Rowan’s room.

  “It’s kind of a mess,” she said unapologetically.

  It was a mess, I thought. Clothes and books were scattered over the floor and the bed was unmade. Rowan had kept the room very neat.

  Ciaran went to the window, to look out at the roof. He parted the curtain, as if hoping to see whatever Rowan had been looking at that night.

  I stayed where I was, on the threshold. Ciaran didn’t speak or move. Minutes passed.

  Finally, Sophie coughed. “Hey, sorry, but I have to get going soon,” she said, as though she’d just realized it was a bad idea to let a strange man stroll right into your bedroom.

  Ciaran snapped the curtain closed and started back across the room. Then he stopped at the open closet door. The inside light was on, revealing hangers jammed with clothes and a jumble of shoes.

  “Adair?” Ciaran said and beckoned me to look.

  I went over. On the inside of the door were crooked marks, some in black pen, some in blue. There were no dates beside them, only numbers. Eight, nine, ten, eleven.

  “Her height,” Ciaran whispered.

  My fingertips climbed the marks like a ladder until I reached the highest one, twelve, which was level with my shoulder.

  “No,” I said. “Rowan was never this tall. This is Leo.”

  “Leo?” Ciaran said, raising his voice.

  “That’s our landlady’s son.” For the first time, Sophie actually looked at me. “Do you know him?” she breathed.

  “I grew up in town,” I said, turning away from her.

  “Do you know him?” Ciaran asked. “Does he live around here?”

  “We mail our rent checks to his mother—it’s a PO box,” she added, as though afraid he might ask for the address. “I have no idea where they live. He was, like, a drug dealer. We didn’t know that before we rented this place. My dad said to tell him immediately if the guy ever comes around. I never told him that Leo what’s-his-name was a suspect in this case. You know that, right?”