Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  “It prolongs the inevitable,” I said, repeating words I’d often overheard back in the days of Janus’s support group. Those on the other side of the debate argued that it bought time and that was what they needed: time for the cure to be discovered. And the counterargument went that the cure was probably decades away. Diseases don’t arrive out of nowhere and then get vanquished within a generation.

  My mother had ignored the advice of doctors and the psychologists and even Janus, early on. Let your daughter grow up in peace. Don’t tell her unless she reaches an age when she must know. She may never need to know. But my mother had been too afraid that she would die before me. She wanted me to hear from her that my life would be brief, and though I might get very sick, at the end I would find both her and my father waiting for me. Where, she couldn’t quite say, and I’d always pictured something like the doctor’s office, with pale furniture and a tough carpet. There they would be sitting, thumbing through magazines and watching the door, waiting for me to arrive and release us all.

  It won’t be long, she’d once promised. It won’t be long at all.

  The doctor was uneasy with how much I understood. He glanced disapprovingly at Michan over the tops of his glasses when I asked for my counts. Michan only gazed back. He would neither accept responsibility nor criticize my mother.

  “But you don’t know, not for sure.” Rowan paused. “What if your parents decided you should all die together?”

  “My father died first and my mother second.”

  “I know that’s what happened,” Rowan said impatiently. “You’re here. But what if you died when you were in kindergarten? You wouldn’t have had all these years. Seven whole years.”

  “Seven,” I repeated, but I was thinking not of the years behind me, but the ones to come, the way you might start to ponder snow just as autumn begins.

  I closed my eyes, and it was a long time before Rowan spoke again.

  “The rowan tree was magic,” she said, and now she sounded drowsy too. “The wood of a rowan tree was only supposed to be used for spells. Not firewood or building stuff. The wood keeps the dead from wandering. That’s why in Ireland they plant rowan trees in cemeteries.”

  “They do?” I asked without opening my eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “My father told me.”

  I let my eyes close as Rowan continued with one of her monologues that I knew could go on and on. She recited:

  “The hags returned

  To the queen in a sorrowful mood,

  Crying that witches have no power,

  Where there is rowan-tree wood.”

  We lay on the beds in our colorful dresses, two wildflowers, taking naps.

  21

  Adair

  2010

  Ciaran and I went to talk to Evelyn on October 13.

  Libby had told her mother about her trip to Moye House, and about Ciaran’s book, and Evelyn called me. I told her that he was sincere and that I thought he would be fair.

  Evelyn lived on a tranquil street in Onohedo lined with trees, hers the only apartment building. The rest were modest private houses, surely filled with families. Ciaran and I had passed a school on our walk from the train station. I couldn’t help but think of the huge house that Evelyn was supposed to have moved into with David and Rowan and Libby, with its rambling yard and spacious front porch, a room for each daughter.

  It was three o’clock when Ciaran and I took the elevator to the top floor of the building, the fifth.

  He rang the bell. We waited so long that Ciaran lifted his hand to ring the bell again, but hesitated. We looked at each other. I was sure Ciaran was also picturing Evelyn standing on the other side of the door, trying to work up the courage to answer, or otherwise willing us to go away.

  Ciaran was about to press the bell again when the door opened.

  Evelyn was wearing a red sweater and gray pants.

  “Come in,” she said.

  She closed the door behind us, then introduced herself to Ciaran. They shook hands, staring at each other frankly.

  “Ciaran,” she said. “I’d know you anywhere. You look like Jamie.”

  Before he could answer, she turned to me.

  “Adair. Don’t you look well,” she said.

  Typically, my response to this, when it was someone who knew me as a child, was to say, Yes, I am alive. It often made people laugh and then relax. But here, that would be cruel.

  “I’m good,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Rowan used to bombard me with questions about you,” Evelyn said. “Your health. I kept telling her that you could have years left. She kept asking, as if she thought one day I’d have a different answer. And see? I would have.”

  I nodded. Evelyn saved me from responding by abruptly saying she’d worked that morning and would change and be right back.

  We could see the kitchen from the living room. It was so small there wasn’t room for a table. There was a counter, though, with two stools, and I guessed that was where Evelyn ate. It struck me as incredibly lonely, and I went still for a moment, imagining her sitting there eating a sandwich by herself.

  But for all I knew, Evelyn might have had a dozen friends and maybe a boyfriend. Yet I noticed how stark the place looked, not so much as a pair of shoes kicked off casually or an open book left on a table.

  Evelyn emerged from the bedroom wearing jeans and a loose, long-sleeved black shirt. She was in her stocking feet and she’d taken her hair down. It was much shorter than she used to wear it, barely skimming her shoulders. There was no gray at all, and I felt better, guessing that she colored it. It mattered somehow that she took the time.

  Her face was bare of makeup. The lines around her eyes were from aging, not grief, I thought. She did not appear ravaged, as she had in the photos published right after Rowan vanished, when it was clear she had barely slept for days.

  We sat on the couch and she settled in the armchair beside it.

  She asked Ciaran questions about his father, coolly, with no particular inflection, and Ciaran followed her lead, updating Evelyn on Jamie Riordan’s life since they’d last been in touch, over five years ago. He taught. He wrote book reviews, articles about literature, things like that. No fiction, not anymore. Ciaran said he believed it was Jamie’s way of punishing himself, for Rowan.

  Evelyn’s only response was a tilt of the head.

  She thinks he deserves it, I thought.

  She asked Ciaran about himself as well; a stranger walking in might have thought she was interviewing him.

  I realized Evelyn was probably used to people being awkward in her presence and had learned how to make them feel at ease. It was a skill that took practice, and patience.

  Finally, when a silence fell, I sensed Evelyn steeling herself. Go ahead.

  Ciaran reached into his backpack, which he’d set at his feet. He took out his tape recorder and held it up. Evelyn nodded indifferently.

  “As I’ve explained to you, I’m writing a book about several cases. Not just Rowan’s.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Why? These are other cases I’ve read about, and there are no answers there either.”

  Though he hadn’t quite answered her, Evelyn nodded. “What are the other cases? Don’t go into all of them, pick the one, besides Rowan’s, besides your sister’s”—a faint smile—“that haunts you the most.”

  Ciaran stared down at his hands for a moment and nodded once.

  “In Brooklyn, New York, about four o’clock in the afternoon of November 22, 1963, a twelve-year-old girl went to her church, a few blocks from her house, to light a candle for President Kennedy. A few people there were saying the rosary. The priest himself was there. He was to say a special Mass that evening. The girl lit her candle and she left. She never made it home. The family called the police, and by the next day they’d gone to the press, but one girl against a presidential assassination, they didn’t have a chance.”

  “Did they ever find her?”
Evelyn asked.

  “No,” Ciaran said. “Not a trace.”

  “Did they ever develop a suspect?” Evelyn stopped. “Listen to me, falling right back into it. Following all leads. Person of interest.”

  “They didn’t,” Ciaran said. “Nobody ever emerged.”

  A blank canvas and not a single drop of paint nearby. No brush. No way even to begin.

  “Her parents can’t still be alive,” Evelyn said.

  “No, they’re both gone a long time,” Ciaran said. “But there are brothers and sisters still. Nieces and nephews as well.”

  “And they’re still looking,” Evelyn said flatly.

  In those first few months, I’d chosen milestones and decided that the answer would have to be known by then. Forty years was as unimaginable as one year had been, in the beginning. Rowan would be fifty-two. Would she bother coming back if she found a way?

  “I don’t know if I’d say that, exactly. No work’s been done on the case in decades. But the family wants to know what happened.”

  Evelyn rubbed both hands against her knees and then got up and went into the kitchen.

  Ciaran and I looked at each other. The alarm on his face surely reflected my own. So she was not as composed, as resigned, as she seemed.

  The refrigerator opened and then a cabinet. She came back with a wine bottle in one hand and three glasses in the other, expertly held by the stems.

  “I’m going to make the bad joke of all functional alcoholics and say it’s happy hour somewhere.” She poured one glass and looked at us, eyebrows raised.

  I nodded, then Ciaran did too.

  Evelyn poured wine for us and sat back down. She sipped hers and closed her eyes.

  “What was the girl’s name?” Evelyn asked.

  “Caroline Kennedy,” he said.

  I thought I’d heard him wrong.

  Evelyn lowered her glass. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “God, no. That was her name,” he said. “When I was first planning the book, I scrolled through this site online that’s dedicated to missing kids. The name along with that date got my attention. A girl with the same name as President Kennedy’s daughter goes missing on the same day he’s killed?”

  “What did the police think? There has to be a connection,” I said.

  “The police were baffled. The girl wasn’t called Caroline. It was always Callie. Her sister told me they’re not sure how many people even knew her given name. She wouldn’t have introduced herself as Caroline.”

  “That day she might have,” I said.

  “Some of the family believe she did just that, though how and why it might’ve led to whatever happened to her, they haven’t a clue,” Ciaran said. “Others say no. It still wouldn’t have entered her head.”

  “Coincidence.” Evelyn pursed her lips as though the word tasted bitter. “The detectives who investigated Rowan’s disappearance didn’t know the meaning of the word.”

  “You mean there are things they should have put down as coincidence and didn’t?” Ciaran asked.

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Very good,” Evelyn said.

  Ciaran said calmly, “Like what?”

  “Leo being at the house the night before. David being away on business. David and Rowan not getting along,” Evelyn said. “He was a decent man, but I married him for the wrong reasons, and he married me for different wrong reasons.”

  “What were those reasons?”

  “Security, for me and Rowan. I wanted another child, too. I didn’t realize until we were living together how set in his ways he was. He and Rowan were like oil and water.” Evelyn looked at me. “He was being ridiculous not letting you around Libby. I told him that. That’s why I never stopped Rowan from seeing you.”

  “Rowan liked the challenge,” I said.

  Evelyn smiled. “I let her think she was fooling us.”

  “What were his reasons for marrying you?” Ciaran asked.

  “Children,” she said. “He and his ex-wife hadn’t had any kids and he regretted it. I wasn’t so young that I looked like a walking midlife crisis, but I could still have a baby. I’m not saying we were both thinking all of these things then. But time, you know—you see things.

  “David would probably tell you that what happened to Rowan broke up our marriage, but I knew when Libby was an infant that we weren’t going to make it. After, David thought Libby deserved to grow up without stigma. He figured she’d be pointed at in school. The sister of the missing girl.”

  “She would have been,” I said.

  “I know. He was right, but I couldn’t leave.”

  “Did you try and stop him?” Ciaran asked.

  “I didn’t know how.” Evelyn shook her head. “I didn’t want to stop him. When he’d take Libby places like the zoo or the park or the movies, he’d try and get me to go with them, but I wouldn’t. The house was so quiet when they were out. When he told me he was leaving with her, I thought: It’ll be like that all day. I can think. Finally. Back then, I thought I could answer the question if only I tried hard enough.”

  “The question?” I asked.

  “Where is she?” Evelyn said.

  “Did you really believe you could answer it?” Ciaran asked.

  “I did for a while. But a therapist told me I gave Libby up to punish myself. I don’t know if that’s true, but she was very pleased with her theory. I drove to Long Island on the weekends for visits. The trip filled up the hours. Now she comes to me. It works, as well as it can.”

  “Can you tell me about the day Rowan disappeared?” Ciaran asked.

  “It’s the only day of my life,” she said.

  Evelyn had no strong sense of the morning and early afternoon. The three of them were in their little backyard at one point. Rowan had played with Libby, rolling a ball to her. Evelyn had been glad to see it but hadn’t commented, lest Rowan get self-conscious. None of the neighbors saw them, or at least nobody came forward and said they had.

  The fight had begun at one o’clock, when Evelyn started getting Libby ready to leave and called to Rowan, who was in her room, that she’d better get her costume on. Rowan yelled back that she wasn’t wearing that stupid dress. It was an old-fashioned calico dress, Little House on the Prairie style. After the disappearance, it had been found in a heap on the floor in front of Rowan’s full-length mirror.

  Evelyn leaned forward and refilled her glass. She looked from Ciaran to me.

  “And this is the part of the story where I kill my daughter.” She sat back.

  Evelyn supposed the police had pictured them screaming at each other at the top of the stairs, but Rowan had been in her room, where the damn dress was found, and she’d been in the living room, dressing the baby.

  It was really an argument that never developed into a fight, because Evelyn had quickly caved, for the sake of peace. But then Rowan had decided she didn’t want to go at all.

  Every parent of a missing child has a cache of “if onlys.” Evelyn’s biggest one? If only she hadn’t been afraid of being a doormat. Her family had a fine tradition of mothers and daughters not ever recovering from the turmoil of adolescence. Her own mother had also given in over stupid things time and time again because she didn’t want to fight. It only encouraged her, Evelyn, to push harder. She was trying to avoid that pattern with Rowan by remaining firmly in charge.

  No costume, fine. But you are coming with us, Evelyn had told Rowan. That’s that.

  “Brian Kelly?” Ciaran asked.

  “Oh, yes, Brian.” Evelyn twisted her mouth. “He didn’t fucking see her. That’s all.”

  “Do you think he’s lying?”

  “I’d like to say yes because he was such an obnoxious kid. He used to play basketball in his driveway for hours. Thump, thump, thump. But no, I think he’s probably not lying,” Evelyn said.

  “He just wasn’t looking at the exact moment Rowan came outside?” I said.

  Evelyn stared into her glass. “I was getting Libby into
her car seat. If you’ve ever had to deal with one of those things, God. I always had trouble with the buckle. I looked up and Rowan was climbing in the front seat. I didn’t hear the front door open. I think Rowan was probably in the backyard and then came up the driveway. The car door, the back-seat door, was open. It would have blocked his view.”

  I swallowed a gulp of wine as if it were water, realizing she must have said this to the police a hundred times. It had not been enough to take her off the list of suspects.

  “What about her sneakers? She wasn’t wearing them,” Ciaran said.

  “Her sneakers,” Evelyn said impatiently. “Yes, I told the police she was wearing her new sneakers, but they were by the back door. Which made me a murderer because none of her other shoes were missing and she sure as hell wouldn’t have left the house barefoot. Her school shoes and her Easter shoes and her snow boots were all in her closet. So were her old sneakers that she wouldn’t throw away even though there was a hole in the toe.”

  “She wore those all summer.” I smiled. “She wore them without socks and would stick her big toe out the hole.”

  Evelyn turned to me. “That’s right,” she said. “I haven’t thought about that in years. There are so many things I’ve forgotten.”

  I thought fleetingly of my own parents, and I knew what she meant. It was unfair how much memory let go.

  “When I told the police all of her shoes were in the house, they thought I’d slipped up with my cover story,” Evelyn said. “The detective made me repeat it three, four times—no shoes missing—before he asked, ‘Then what the hell was your daughter wearing on her feet when she left the house that day?’”

  She mimicked an accusatory tone and I flinched at the sound.

  “What do you think she was wearing, then?” Ciaran asked.

  “She had an allowance. Back then, I figured she bought a pair of shoes with her own money, for some reason. There was one shoe store in Culleton that sold kids’ shoes she liked. But all the clerks said no, she’d hadn’t bought anything. They’d have remembered a kid coming in alone.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think she would have spent her money on shoes.”