Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  “I know they think he knew more than he was telling,” Ciaran said. “I know the whole story, except what really happened and the ending.”

  It sounded as if he were expressing only a writer’s frustration, not a brother’s. But it made me wonder if Ciaran had come here not to write about Rowan but to find her, in spite of his insistence otherwise. Maybe he believed the case was his to break.

  13

  The oaks that lined the streets of the neighborhood were so dense with leaves that the sidewalks below were dark, the glow of the streetlamps caught in the branches.

  The neighborhood was on the far edge of town, so residents could go grocery shopping either in Culleton or in the more anonymous Onohedo.

  I drove slowly. All the lights in the houses were lit, it seemed. It was only seven o’clock. In the summer, children would still be out playing, but this deep in autumn, everyone was indoors.

  I pulled into the driveway of a corner house. Smoke drifted from the chimney. A pickup truck was in the driveway, the kind with an open bed, the better to carry rakes and shears and all the other gardening tools I could not name.

  I climbed the steps and stood on the narrow porch. In the dark, I shivered, as though I were at a stranger’s door to ask directions. There was a hole where the doorbell should have been. I knocked, and when there was no answer, I knocked again, a second set of three.

  When there was still no answer, I pulled my keys out of my purse. There were only three: my car key, the key to the servants’ door at Moye House and this one, which I had not used in five years, since I was twenty-one.

  The short hallway was uncarpeted, and though my soft-soled shoes made little noise on the wood floor, the sound was amplified by the quiet in the rest of the house. There was a small eat-in kitchen and then a living room with a bedroom off it that had a bathroom attached. The firelight was visible before the fire. I reached the end of the hallway and paused on the top step of the three that led into the sunken living room.

  He was feeding the fire. Even kneeling, it was clear he was tall, as those marks on his closet door had predicted. The kindling caught with a soft roar and the fire surged.

  “Leo,” I said.

  “Adair,” he said, still kneeling, watching the flames.

  I was cold where I stood, but I didn’t move until he got slowly to his feet and sat in the chair beside the fireplace.

  “How have you been? I think that’s what old friends are supposed to say.”

  I went down the stairs, and after dropping my purse by the couch, I sat down on the floor, not quite at his feet but close. I stretched my legs out in front of me. Leo would be thirty-five soon, but I thought those who didn’t know him would probably guess older.

  Though still slim, he had thickened since I’d last seen him. We’d been right here, lying together on a blanket I’d fetched from his bed. A fire was going then too. It was a freezing January night, and I’d been home from college on winter break but due back at school the next day.

  “What did you say to Molly when you saw her on Deering Road today?” he asked.

  “She called you? I should have known.”

  “She called my mother,” Leo said. “Who then called me, crying that it’s going to start all over again. Is this guy really Rowan’s brother? He’s really writing a book about her?”

  “He is,” I said. “But it’s about other missing kids too. He’s not making the case for anyone’s guilt,” I said. “I think you should talk to him.”

  “Jesus, did he send you here?” Leo asked.

  “No!” I said, angry that Leo would think that. “I just think he’ll listen.”

  “Even if he believes every word I say, he still has to write that I was a suspect. Am a suspect,” Leo said.

  “And he still has to write that I told the police I saw her that morning when nobody else did.”

  “Your name never got out,” Leo said. “Don’t fucking try that.”

  “It will this time,” I said. “Ciaran is going to write everything, I think.”

  Leo shook his head and stared at the fire. I waited patiently for him to answer, just as I’d been waiting these past weeks for him to break away from the grounds crew at Moye House as I crossed the lawn, or to come find me at the end of his workday. But maybe that was asking too much. Leo was too grateful to Michan for reaching out to him in the first year of his parole, when he was living with his mother, searching for the kind of work a man with a prison record could get. In 1995, he’d begun to consider formally studying horticulture, creating a real career for himself. Postprison, however, he was sure that was all over. He didn’t know, still, that it was me who got Michan to pull strings with the head gardener, who then offered Leo a job, with the caveat that at any time in the first three months Leo could be let go if he wasn’t working out.

  I was seventeen then. Michan thought I was acting out of pity, and there is truth to that. I never tried to explain to my uncle that, even more than pity, it was a gift of gratitude for a handshake.

  “Does this Ciaran think I did it?”

  “He doesn’t know,” I said.

  “He knows what he thinks. He’s just not telling you.”

  I shook my head. “He doesn’t think the police should’ve based their whole theory on Brian Kelly. He’s said that. If you think Brian’s wrong, then maybe I’m right.”

  Leo tilted his head, in acknowledgment, I thought.

  “And—I don’t know. He seems to want me to be right.”

  “Why?” Leo asked. “Are you sleeping with him?”

  I half smiled. “No. Even if he wanted to, I think he wouldn’t risk compromising his book. Otherwise, he might ask. He’s noble enough.”

  “Noble enough?” Leo said. “Give me a break, Adair. You aren’t that special.”

  “You always get nasty when you’re mad. I mean, he knows about me and would pretend not to care.”

  “Or, try this, he really wouldn’t care,” Leo said.

  “No guy wouldn’t care.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You knew me a long time, before.”

  I wanted to say that he had been in a dark place, and though free, when he closed his eyes he was still there in his cell. The stares on the street, the whispers. He’d been approached in the supermarket by old ladies, who put a hand on his arm. Tell where she is. She deserves a Christian burial.

  “Did you really come back home because you’re getting sick? I heard you were in the hospital.”

  I pulled my knees up to my chest. “Don’t listen to the village gossips.”

  “If all I had to do to fix my life was take some pills every day, I’d stop feeling sorry for myself and do it,” Leo said.

  “Maybe you’re the one who should stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “I spent two years in prison, Adair.”

  “Well, Leo, you were guilty.”

  He looked up and laughed. We sat quietly in the heat from the fire until I said it was getting late and I had to go. He barely nodded and didn’t try to stop me.

  At Moye House the next day, when it was four thirty and still light out, though early-winter darkness was beginning to encroach, I went up the front staircase to the second floor.

  With an hour and a half before the end of quiet hours, the residents were still at work. Jorie used to talk fondly about visiting the second floor just to hear the clack of typewriters behind closed doors. The doors were still closed, but keyboards had put an end to the sound of writing. Most of the hallways in the house were bare, but on the residents’ floor thick carpeting was meant to muffle the comings and goings during quiet hours.

  The hallway ended in a full-length mirror that was set in a cherrywood frame. The keyhole was obscured by the design of the woodwork, an intricate swirl of leaves. I took the key out of my pocket, quickly unlocked the door and shut it behind me.

  This room, my studio, was above the library, though half its size. It had once belonged to Maddy Moye, Cassiu
s’s mother, who had used it for reading and sewing and writing letters to her son, away at war.

  The library’s recessed windows kept the room dim, so leaving the library and coming up here was like trading the underworld for heaven.

  I was eleven when I first learned about the quality of light and how important it was to an artist. How in a room where the light shifted as the day aged, colors might take on different hues. A shadow might fall over a canvas.

  North light was best because it was consistent. North light: light from the sky, not the sun. It was my grandfather Darragh who told me this.

  On the last day of the December residency, Darragh had turned up at the servants’ door of Moye House with his square suitcase. He had come to stay with Michan before, often during the break between one set of residents leaving and the new ones arriving. Sober, but promising nothing.

  Previous visits, he’d slept in the small sitting room off the kitchen. The couch there was a sofa bed. It was fine, he said. But this time he moved into Jorie’s old suite. “Suite” was her word, he’d told me with a sad smile.

  If Michan resented his father, and I thought he must, he set those feelings aside in exchange for a break from being my sole guardian. Perhaps he hoped that this time Darragh would not leave, which would give him the chance to be the runaway, at least for a little while.

  On Christmas Day, Michan came out and asked his father how long he would be staying, which Michan had never done before. Darragh only said he’d see. I understood why Michan asked, though. There was a difference in Darragh, and it was not that he had aged. There were no changes that a year might not have brought. Rather, it was his willingness to talk about my father and his ability to look directly at me while doing so. Then, I believed it was a trick he had taught himself, as if since I’d last seen him, he’d done nothing but practice saying his son’s name without looking at the floor or closing his eyes.

  Darragh came upon me drawing at the dining room table, and he told me that my father had liked to draw in the rooms at the front of the house because he’d read about north light. The residents’ reading room was his favorite spot. When he was recovering from a bleed, Cathal would spend hours drawing to distract himself from the pain.

  The writers loved that room. They’d sink into the couch or one of the two green chairs. In good weather, they’d step out onto the balcony that was directly over the front door. That room was like being cocooned from the rest of the house.

  Then Darragh said we should turn it into a studio for me. There were dozens of other places for residents to park themselves. The new ones wouldn’t miss it, and returning ones, well, too bad. When Michan said he’d have to get a change like that approved by the board, Darragh told him he could explain what he’d done after the fact. If they objected, let them undo it. Let them be the ones to take the room away from me. Michan let it go, and in fact the project brought on a togetherness like a fever shared between them.

  Darragh hired a pair of local brothers to move the furniture out and empty the bookshelves. They removed the old wallpaper and painted the walls. Darragh chose a shade called Shadow White, which had overtones of gray. The name thrilled me. The throw rugs were rolled up and taken away to be set down on other floors, leaving the wood floor bare so I could paint. The balcony doors were replaced. The new ones had glass that was smooth, not divided into panes, so the light arrived unbroken.

  When finished, the room held a drafting table and an easel. The easel Michan bought new, but the drafting table he found after calling antique stores up and down the Hudson Valley, going to check out three at least before settling on one that was also a desk. In that same store he found the mirror that became the door, a secret entrance to a secret room.

  The room was well used now. The bookshelves were cluttered with supplies that I should have thrown away years ago. Clotted paintbrushes that I’d failed to clean properly after use, the way you were supposed to. Pencils worn down to a size too small for my hand. But I had a way of crediting the instruments for work that went well. Tossing them seemed a poor reward. They deserved retirement.

  Michan first called the room North Light when it was only half finished, and by the time it was done, that was its name. When Darragh left, he told me, “Keep North Light, Adair.”

  It was the middle of January, and he’d been with us more than a month, his longest visit ever, and his last. He never mentioned heart trouble, the opposite of the kind that had left him a widower. Cecilia had died without a chance of rescue, but Darragh was told his options (stents, surgery) and refused them. Michan learned this from his neighbor, the only friend Darragh had, as far as we knew. When he died, she was the one who called to tell us.

  After I moved away, North Light was the place in Moye House that I’d missed the most. Since coming back, I’d only briefly visited the room, afraid to see the work I’d left behind, the good as well as the bad. Afraid to remember what I’d been thinking back then.

  My sense of time felt off-kilter, as though my years away had been an interlude that had come to its natural end. If I belonged anywhere in the world, it was here.

  I went to a pile of my old sketchbooks, which were stacked in the nonworking fireplace. I found a couple from when I was twelve or thirteen and began leafing through them. It wasn’t until then that I admitted to myself that these sketchbooks were the reason I was here.

  I had not started putting dates on my sketchbooks until I was fifteen, and none of them were organized, which I cursed myself for now. In Brooklyn, I’d tried to keep a corner of my living room as a bit of studio space, but it never worked. Clutter crept over the invisible boundaries.

  I took out my phone, and after only a moment’s hesitation, I texted Ciaran: Go to the mirror at the end of the residents’ hallway.

  If he was working and had his phone put away, he might not see it for some time. But quiet hours were almost over. I was not surprised to hear the tap on the door not more than ten minutes after I asked him to come.

  I opened the door and stepped aside to let Ciaran in, resisting the urge to ask if anyone had seen him. The hallway was empty; I didn’t think so. As he passed by me, I caught the faintest tang of cigarettes.

  “I’ve been thinking there had to be a room at the end of this hallway. Otherwise, there’s no way to get to the balcony above the door,” Ciaran said, gesturing to it.

  A few residents over the years had noticed this, but most hardly paid attention to the length of the house. I shut the door and turned around to see Ciaran studying the sketches of mine that I’d hung on the wall. He pointed at one, a girl staring up at a grinning cat in a tree.

  “That’s the Cheshire Cat. But that’s not Alice. Is she anybody, or did you make her up?”

  “She’s not Alice from the illustrations, with the blond hair and the headband,” I said. “That’s Alice Liddell, who Lewis Carroll wrote the story for.”

  Blunt black hair. Hard stare. The sort of girl who was described as handsome rather than pretty and didn’t care. In nearly every photo I’d seen of her, I could imagine Alice Liddell giving the finger.

  Ciaran studied the other sketches of mine, which were mostly of Moye House from different angles or close-ups of things like the curio in the parlor. My grandfather’s button accordion, which had come to me though I couldn’t play it. The servants’ staircase. Other ordinary things. Ciaran moved next to my drafting table. He touched the edges with his fingertips.

  “This is North Light, isn’t it?” he said quietly.

  Neither my grandfather nor I had known that the construction of this room would be turned into poetry. “North Light” was probably Michan’s most well-known poem. His party piece, he called it, the one he was always expected to recite at readings. An elegy for me.

  “Did you mind him writing it?”

  I sat down at my drafting table, remembering. The slender book with its blue cover and the title in a black font: North Light and Other Poems.

  “Why would I min
d?”

  “If someone had imagined my death, I might mind.”

  “You must understand why he was thinking about it.”

  “Yes. But that wasn’t the question,” Ciaran said.

  “Yes,” I said, almost inaudibly. “But not for the reason you’re thinking. In the poem, I’m full of all the promise in the world, the way only the dead can be.”

  “You’re very talented,” he said.

  “I’m also alive,” I said, and then went out onto the balcony to stand at the rail, feeling as though I’d taken off my clothes. Ciaran followed, leaving the door open behind us.

  “Do you believe Molly Kelly about Rowan being on the roof?” Ciaran asked.

  I nearly smiled. We were done, then, talking about me. I was alive, yes, and so able to answer his questions.

  “You think she’s making it up so you’ll put her in your book?” I asked.

  “Maybe to get one up on her brother, the star witness? Possible star witness, I mean,” Ciaran said. “What do you think?”

  I considered Molly’s puzzlement, and I wondered how many nights she’d lain awake wondering what Rowan had been doing.

  “I think Rowan was on the roof,” I said.

  Ciaran was silent for a moment. “Waiting for someone? Hiding?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I said, but I meant remembering. “Looking at the moon is my best guess.”

  Whatever Ciaran had been expecting to hear, it was not that. “Looking at the moon? Why wouldn’t she just look through her window?”

  “She’d found a book, about spells and curses.” I frowned. “Well, I don’t know if there were any curses. Spells definitely. Irish spells.”

  “What are you talking about? Witchcraft?” Ciaran asked. “‘On the night of a full moon, say this three times—’”