Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  I did, as Rowan darted to the curb.

  Brian! she called.

  He strolled down his own driveway to the curb, his friends frozen behind him.

  She said she had to tell him something.

  The boys snuffled. Brian crossed the street. The street was empty. There was not so much as a dog walker out.

  Rowan and Brian talked briefly at the edge of the curb and then she led him partway down the driveway. She put a hand on his arm, guided him so he was leaning against the wall.

  Close your eyes, she told him. He did.

  Rowan came to me, peeking around the corner of the house.

  She put her mouth close to my ear.

  He’s sorry for what he did. He wants to show you that he knows nothing bad can happen. Her words smelled of beer.

  I stood in front of Brian, Rowan behind me.

  Kiss, Rowan whispered.

  Brian turned his head a fraction, as if he sensed her voice was not coming quite from the place it should have. Still, he leaned over and brushed his lips over mine. Barely a touch.

  Boo, Rowan said.

  Brian’s eyes snapped open and he reared back, scrubbing his mouth with the back of his hand as he looked from me to Rowan, who was grinning, her eyes cold and luminous in the dark.

  17

  Adair

  2010

  Ciaran and I walked across the expanse of lawn. I studied him surreptitiously. There were shadows beneath his eyes, as though he hadn’t managed to sleep after I left him the night before. When I asked a question about the psychic in Ireland, he shrugged and changed the subject.

  We paused outside a small, gated garden. The entryway was an arch, and inside, wrought-iron letters spelled out Kitchen Garden.

  I said, “It’s also known as Helen’s Garden.”

  “Did she plant it?” Ciaran asked.

  I laughed. “No, no. The historical society proposed it in the early nineties—the 1990s, when they turned the foundry into a museum—and they worked with the head gardener to make it happen. It’s an herb garden, because she was known as a healer. There’s a story where one of the foundry wives was bleeding after childbirth, and Helen made a tea out of something and it worked. She found her plants on the mountain. If you haven’t gone for a hike yet, that’s not something you should miss, while you’re here.”

  “I can’t. No break for me,” Ciaran said. “I realized this morning that this is the start of the third week, and that means I’m almost halfway to the end. It seemed like a lot more time in the abstract.”

  “Michan calls it the midresidency crisis. That’s when writers realize they aren’t going to finish the book here, or write five chapters, or whatever it was they hoped to do. Lots of them say it’s only after they’re back home that they realize how much they did get done.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Ciaran said ruefully.

  “What’s next?” I asked.

  “Next,” Ciaran said, “is Kit Sullivan.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked. A relative of Rowan’s stepfather, I thought. Some former teacher from before I moved to Culleton.

  “A private detective.”

  I stopped walking. “You’re hiring a private detective?”

  “No. This one was hired when Rowan had been gone six months. Did you know there’d been one on the case?”

  “Yes, I heard it at school,” I said slowly. “I didn’t know his name.”

  “Her. Kit’s a woman.”

  “Is she coming here, or—?”

  Ciaran said her office had been then, and was still, in Brooklyn.

  I offered to drive Ciaran there, but he said it was much easier to take the Metro-North and then jump on the subway. He had notes to read over, more questions to add to his list. The monotony of train time was what he needed.

  I felt like Poe when he saw me putting my shoes on and frantically fetched his leash.

  “I would like you to come with me, though,” Ciaran said. “If you want to. If you can. The detective doesn’t know the town the way you do. There may be things you think to ask that I won’t.”

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  When Ciaran wrote this scene in his book, I thought he’d probably describe how we were standing beside the dormant garden. He would mention that my jeans had frayed cuffs and that my hair was in a ponytail and how I looked away as if unable to find the words to thank him. But I was mostly thinking about how this seemed like a quest, with challenges to overcome and a reward to win. As if at the end, if we did everything right, Rowan would be one of the lucky ghosts who returned alive.

  Ciaran and I got off the F train at Bergen Street in Cobble Hill, a neighborhood not far from where I’d lived. We emerged to find that the overcast sky had given way to steady rain. Neither of us had thought to bring an umbrella, but we both were wearing jackets with hoods, and we pulled them up.

  I made a nervous remark about being in disguise, and Ciaran hunched his shoulders and said we might look like private eyes ourselves, following a suspect. Because of the wet weather, the sidewalks were far less crowded than they would normally be on a Sunday afternoon in autumn.

  I found myself searching for familiar faces the way I did in Culleton, where I was likely to find several. There were couples sharing umbrellas and parents pushing strollers shrouded in rain-guard plastic. But they were strangers, all. Since returning home, my time in Brooklyn had come to seem more like a long daydream, as if I’d never really belonged here.

  “Will you move back here after you leave Culleton?” I asked.

  “My place is sublet until December. I’ve got a student in there now who’ll be leaving after this semester. It’s worked out.”

  “But that leaves you with more than a month before you can move back in.”

  “I’ll sublet something myself.”

  Ciaran was walking so fast that I had to hurry to keep up with him. We passed a Key Food supermarket, a pediatric dentist, a few bars and restaurants.

  I remarked that a private investigator’s office should be above a check-cashing joint or a fast-food place. Ciaran said it might very well have been, once. The agency had been in business for over twenty years.

  He finally stopped in front of a two-story brick building. Between two storefronts were three doors. Two were recessed and made of glass, and the one in the middle was wood. Distinct as it was, because we were looking for a business, it took both Ciaran and me a moment of looking back and forth to sort this out.

  “It has to be the middle one,” Ciaran said, though there was no address on it.

  He tapped a finger beside the first doorbell of three beside the wooden door. S. I. was printed in black ink on a narrow strip of white.

  I grabbed his sleeve and then pushed my hood off.

  “They didn’t find out anything. We’d know, wouldn’t we, if they had?” I asked. “If they’d uncovered any real clues, they’d have gone to the police and let them take over?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Ciaran said. “My father said they worked the case for months. Nothing came of it in the end.”

  His questions for the detective had more to do with theories developed and impressions of the key witnesses.

  Ciaran pushed the bell and the door buzzed immediately. He opened it and glanced back at me. I raised my eyebrows back, echoing what I presumed to be his thought. We had not been asked to identify ourselves.

  Ciaran didn’t whisper but he kept his voice low. “Camera,” he said.

  I looked up and tried to find it.

  “Adair,” he said.

  I stepped inside so he could close the door. The cessation of street noise and rain was so sudden, it almost made me dizzy. Ciaran pushed off his hood.

  In front of us was a staircase and, in a repeat, three doors, all of which were white. There was a brass sign on the center door, bigger than the one outside.

  Sullivan Investigations.

  The door opened and a woman with long brown hair gestured us in. She was tal
l and wearing boots with a high, square heel.

  “Ciaran?” she said, extending her hand. “Kit Sullivan.”

  She looked at me expectantly. Ciaran said, “This is Adair McCrohan, she’s been—”

  “Adair?” Kit’s eyebrows went up. “The writer’s niece. Well. Nice to meet you at long last.”

  Though I was used to being known by strangers, the intensity of her stare was unnerving. She put out her hand and I took it loosely, but she squeezed it and held on, so I thought for a moment she might turn my hand over to read my palm.

  We followed her upstairs. Kit explained that the office was closed on Saturdays, which is why she thought it was the best day for us to meet.

  The stairs led to a hallway. Through an open door at one end, I saw a table, its wood gleaming, and a gray row of file cabinets. We went the opposite way, into a high-ceilinged room that had one wall made of brick. Its two windows overlooked Atlantic Avenue.

  “You’re both good and soaked,” Kit said. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “When we left this morning, it was threatening to clear. I guess an Irishman should know better than to forget an umbrella,” Ciaran said.

  “I never carry one unless it’s pouring. I make do with hats,” Kit said. “And now that you’re both picturing a female Sherlock Holmes, please take a seat.”

  She pointed to a dining room table between the galley kitchen and what looked like a regular living room, with a couch, an armchair and a coffee table. It did not, in other words, have the appearance of a waiting room.

  Ciaran and I sat in chairs beside each other while Kit went to the kitchen.

  In a corner of the room there was a spiral staircase that led to another floor. A cutaway in the wall above the kitchen revealed an office. The desk wasn’t visible, only the glowing computer screen.

  Ciaran and I accepted a sturdy white mug each from Kit, the kind used in diners. She sat down across from us. Ciaran reached into his backpack (which held his laptop), took out a tape recorder and set it down on the table. “Is it all right if I record this?”

  “Sure,” Kit said.

  “To start,” Ciaran said, “I understand your specialty is missing people.”

  “Specialty?” Kit said. “I don’t know if I’d put it that way. Most of the time, with kids, we start out knowing who took them. It’s one parent or the other after a bad custody fight. When you do see stories on the news, it’s because the kid was found after decades. But those are the exceptions. These folks cave and call their own mothers or a sibling because they’re running out of money. They head straight for the town they used to vacation at,” she said. “Then there are the cases that are impossible from the start. Without a lucky break, you’re not getting anywhere.”

  I wondered if she was making excuses for her failure to find Rowan. “Some kids are just gone for good?”

  Kit looked at me steadily. “Some are, yeah.”

  “That’s pessimistic, isn’t it?” Ciaran said.

  “It’s realistic,” Kit said. “Most kids are killed by a parent or another person in their household. Most who are taken by a stranger are murdered within hours. Rowan had been gone for months when we were hired. That’s a long time. It meant she was well hidden.”

  “Dead? Alive?” Ciaran asked.

  I thought of Una the psychic’s shipwrecked Irish sailors, making their way home after grass had grown over their graves.

  “Either,” Kit said.

  The word lingered in the room, acrid as smoke.

  “My grandfather,” Kit said, with a glance at the ceiling, “used to have a saying. He was a cop. NYPD. When he couldn’t crack a case, he’d say it’s got bad facts.”

  I set my coffee cup down.

  “No clear suspect or motive. No witnesses to the actual crime. No break in the first couple of days,” Kit said.

  “You thought Rowan’s case had ‘bad facts’?” Ciaran said.

  “A mother who looked just good enough for it that the cops figured she probably did it. There’s the gap in time from when the girl is last seen and the mother calling the police. They were never able to say with certainty when or where she disappeared from.”

  “They put together a timeline,” Ciaran said.

  “With the information they had. Speculation. Guesswork. Maybe good guesswork, but that’s what it was,” Kit said. “There’s always the chance of finding something the cops missed, but early on I thought it wouldn’t be solved unless Rowan’s case was linked to a similar crime.”

  After a brief silence, I said, “But there haven’t been any others?”

  Kit shook her head. “I still take a look now and then, because the guy could’ve gone to jail for another crime. He gets out, goes back to his territory. But at this point, I have to tell you, it’s not likely.”

  “Do you have a theory? Any suspects?” Ciaran asked.

  “Let me start at the beginning,” Kit said.

  I tensed. Beginning signaled ending. Yet there was no ending.

  “The beginning,” Ciaran said. “Rowan disappears.”

  “For you,” Kit said. “My beginning was a phone call from an Irishman who says a cop he used to know gave him my number. He says his daughter is gone.”

  Kit had gone to Culleton the day after receiving the phone call, but her first two full days of investigation had yielded little of interest.

  On her second night, she went out onto the small terrace of her hotel to review what she’d learned so far. It was early April and chilly, but not cold. She had a view of the woods and, in the distance, Degare Mountain, fading into the dark.

  Kit picked up her notebook and found the page she’d titled “Hard Sightings.”

  Hard sighting: a sighting that was credible, that fit in with the known timeline and was worth checking out. The mailman, who’d seen Rowan on Friday afternoon, October 27.

  Kit had spoken to Brian Kelly. They’d talked in the family’s living room, his parents perched at either end of the couch and Brian slouched in a La-Z-Boy. His answers didn’t vary from the record. Kit thought uneasily that if an ambitious prosecutor decided to go for a murder conviction without a body, he might have a shot based mostly on this kid’s testimony.

  Kit flipped a page in her notebook. That left Adair McCrohan.

  Walking into the bookstore on Vine Street was like walking into a book-filled cave.

  Charley Byrd was behind the counter, reading. He closed his book when he saw her.

  “Nothing I tell you is going to help find the girl,” he said after Kit introduced herself. “But ask away,” he said genially. “Practice on me.”

  Kit wanted to put her nose to his and calmly say that she didn’t need practice, and do it in such a way that would make him think, if only briefly, that she was not a private eye but a paid assassin.

  Instead, she smiled and said she had only a few questions for him.

  The day of Rowan’s disappearance, Charley had been alone behind the counter, which had a view of the front door. His sole employee, Gin, was helping to set up the reading in the yard. He’d told her if she wanted to host things like that, it was on her to organize it.

  The store was busy. At almost all times, there were customers inside and also outside, browsing the discount racks in front of the store.

  Michan McCrohan showed up with the other writers from Moye House. Charley had no idea who any of them were. Some people going to the reading walked through the store and out to the backyard, while others went in through the back gate.

  To clarify, Kit asked if Charley meant the side door, which opened onto the alley between his store and the pharmacy. He said no—the back gate opened, the side door wasn’t used. Sometimes he did open it, to let fresh air in, and then forgot to lock it, so though he couldn’t say for sure the door was locked that day, he could tell you that it was closed. Anybody who tried to come in that way would’ve knocked over a pile of books.

  Charley invited her to see for herself.

&nbs
p; Kit walked over to the door, which was out of sight of the register. There was, indeed, a stack of books up against it. She turned the knob. The door opened out. If you didn’t know the books were there, you’d trip over them as you came in. Yet for all that, the pile was only about as high as her ankle. If you knew to be careful, it would have been easy to step over them. And then you were inside.

  Kit returned to the register and asked if this ever happened. Annoyed, Charley answered that his customers knew to leave that door alone. But Kit knew that twelve-year-old girls were not necessarily the best at following directions.

  Charley picked up his book, but when Kit mentioned Adair McCrohan, he set it down again. Adair and Rowan came in together after school. Rowan had occasionally asked him if he had this book or that, but Adair barely said a word.

  That fall, he’d heard that she was getting sick. For-real sick. Rowan had been in the store alone several times, and Charley had found out it was because Adair was home from school.

  Rowan once asked Gin if they had any books on AIDS, and Gin suggested she go to the library. Later, Charley asked her why she didn’t at least check—he wasn’t mad about losing a sale, but only curious. Gin answered that even if she did find something on their shelves—and it wasn’t likely—a library book would have more updated information. Also, it might be best if Rowan got a book that she had to return in two weeks. That way, it wouldn’t be lying around her house when the worst happened.

  “Was Adair here on the day of the parade, October 28?” Kit asked.

  “With her uncle,” Charley confirmed. “And like I told the police, Rowan didn’t come in at all. The last time I saw her was a few days before. Tuesday, Wednesday. I don’t know. But I know she was alone.”

  “The day of the disappearance—did Adair say anything to you about seeing Rowan?”

  “About seeing her?” Charley repeated.

  “You know, anything like, I saw Rowan. Did you see where she went?”

  “She never said a word.” Charley shook his head. “I didn’t see any other kids besides Adair. They were all outside that day. You know what I mean? There was no kid in here Adair could have even thought was Rowan.”