“Neither do I, but it was my only explanation until they did the first age progression. I never looked at her Missing posters. I couldn’t. But the age progression I did. It gave her height at the time she disappeared as five feet. It sounds crazy, but I thought, She couldn’t have been that tall. That’s when I realized she might have been wearing a pair of my shoes. They would have fit.”
“Did you check?” I asked.
“I’d already moved by then. I’d gotten rid of almost everything of mine. I don’t remember any shoes being missing, but I wasn’t really paying that much attention.”
Evelyn began to speak more hesitantly when Ciaran led her into the earliest hours of Rowan’s disappearance.
When she did not find Rowan at their house, Evelyn had genuinely expected to find her at the movie theater. When the teenager selling tickets said he hadn’t seen her, Evelyn should have made the boy call the police. In the age of cell phones, she would have done it herself. But out of pure denial, she started looking for Rowan in other places.
“What made you think to look for Leo at the bar?” Ciaran asked. “He wasn’t twenty-one.”
Evelyn’s smile flickered. “I was not looking for Leo. I was not sleeping with Leo either, by the way. I thought Rowan might be there.”
“In a bar?” Ciaran said.
“There were Irish musicians there, for Quicken Day. She liked Irish music. She had some idea that her father did too. I don’t know why. I told her Jamie couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t really think I’d find her, but it was getting so late. I hadn’t seen her in so long . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“But you saw Leo,” Ciaran said.
“Yes. And I called him over to ask if he’d seen Rowan at all that day,” Evelyn said. “He hadn’t. Coincidence! I ran in there thinking, God, let Rowan be there, just let her be there, I won’t be mad. But there’s Leo, the handsome young handyman who was always at my house. And so I end up being there to make sure he’s gotten rid of my daughter’s body before I pull the trigger on our big conspiracy and call the police to report her missing.” She took a sip of wine, then another, and said, “I’ve always felt bad about Leo.”
“Bad? What do you mean?” I asked.
Evelyn turned her head so she was speaking to us in profile.
“He only got dragged into it because of me,” she said. “The police didn’t have a way to make their theory work otherwise. They needed to explain why Rowan was never found. David wasn’t there. Somebody had to have taken Rowan away. A lone woman with a baby? Leo—he was their only option.”
I traced my finger around the top of the wine glass.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Ciaran asked.
“Yes,” Evelyn said.
Back when she still sat for interviews with the press, in the hope of drumming up a lead, and was asked about the worst part of the whole ordeal, she was expected to say: Not knowing. Missing Rowan. Being under suspicion herself.
And yes, to all of these things. But in truth the worst part came before the ordeal began. When she learned Rowan hadn’t bought a ticket at the movie theater, Evelyn had known—even given the very real possibility that the boy selling tickets just hadn’t noticed Rowan, or that another person had been behind the counter then.
Evelyn couldn’t quite describe it. It was a shot of pure cold up her spine. A separation of mind and body. Trouble is here. For all the talk of hope over the next few weeks, months, years, she’d known then that Rowan was gone.
My throat hurt from the effort not to cry.
“I think she left the parking lot and started walking to Moye House,” Evelyn said. “Somebody she wasn’t afraid of pulled over and offered her a ride. She got in the car.”
“You don’t think there’s any chance she’s still alive?” Ciaran asked.
“Oh, God, no,” Evelyn said. “I don’t think she survived the night.”
Ciaran and I sat silently. Evelyn gazed at us both.
“She wanted to go back to Ireland. I was planning on taking her for summer vacation. Eventually. Someday.” Then she turned to me. “This is awful and I shouldn’t say it. I used to think it wasn’t fair that this had to happen to Rowan. I used to wish it were you.”
Ciaran said, “Listen, Evelyn—”
“I understand,” I said.
“Good,” Evelyn said. “I liked you. I felt sorry for you. I was glad Rowan finally had a real friend. But that’s what I used to think.”
Ciaran started to speak, but I put my hand on his arm.
I told Evelyn that I’d lain awake many nights thinking the same thoughts. It would never be fair. She smiled sadly.
“Ciaran,” Evelyn said. “Jamie’s son. This has been going on too long. Write your book. Pretend it’s your tragedy too. I don’t care. It’s been fifteen years. End this, will you?”
Ciaran was breathing rapidly as we left the apartment building, and I had to walk fast to keep up with him.
“She’d been drinking,” I said. “I bet she was drinking before we got there. That bottle was already open.”
“I understand what she said to me. She’s got a history with my father. I went in there sort of expecting it. I’m the reason he left the States.”
“She can hardly blame you because your father missed you.”
“Adair, he called for my birthday and I wouldn’t come to the phone. ‘What do you expect?’ my mother tells him. A month later he was back in Ireland.”
“That’s not your fault.”
“Most days, I know that. Other days, it’s ‘what if.’ What if he were still in the States and Rowan had been visiting him that Saturday?”
“What if, on a weekend visit, there was a car accident and both she and your father were killed? What if a woman met a man who needed medicine to live a normal life, and that medicine gave him a deadly virus that killed them both?”
“Point taken,” Ciaran said, his words clipped. “But she shouldn’t have said that to you. It was cruel.”
“It isn’t,” I said.
We were keeping our voices normal for the sake of passersby.
“It is.”
I stopped walking, and he stopped too.
“If one girl has a life expectancy of eighty and another is already past hers, who should be killed?” I asked.
“Neither,” he said quietly. “Neither.”
22
Adair
2010
For the first two years after Rowan disappeared, there were no Quicken Day celebrations held at all. But by 1998 the tradition was restarted, made permissible by the fact that the last Saturday in October was Halloween itself. The children would be dressed for trick-or-treating anyway. It would be a Halloween parade. The following year, Quicken Day was back to what it used to be, though the town’s police force and parents were vigilant.
For several years, a group of fathers appointed themselves as an undercover neighborhood watch. If Rowan had been abducted and the man returned for a second victim, he’d avoid the uniformed police, but dads in jeans and windbreakers would hardly be feared. They might catch him unawares.
There was no party at Moye House after 1995. Michan was not asked; it was understood he would refuse, for my sake.
Moye House continued to host a reading of “The Lost Girl,” but only on October 27. The writers’ residence and the town’s celebration have never merged again.
At seven o’clock, at evening drinks, Michan read “The Lost Girl” in the front parlor. I slipped in as he was giving a brief introduction to the story. He glanced up but kept speaking, too well practiced to be bothered by any interruption. I sat beside Ciaran on the small couch in the corner of the room.
Michan held a copy of the book, but he probably could have recited it by heart.
When he finished reading, the writers talked about the story. Sometimes it ended up sounding more like a classroom discussion, Michan once said, but this group kept it informal. I knew he would be pleased.
“
Could this story be written today?” Ciaran asked. “A DNA test would answer the question in hours. Identity is no longer a riddle, as long as there are family members to compare a sample to.”
Michan was intrigued by the question. Cassius would have to work around that problem. He could have made the sisters only friends, but she also would have to have been an orphan whose parents were unknown, to avoid inconvenient grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
One of the women asked another question, and the discussion went a different way.
I slipped out and went to the kitchen and then outside, where I picked ivy from the gate around the kitchen garden.
The woods were dark, but I knew the way well enough. There was no one at the chapel, but I hadn’t expected there would be any other girls celebrating Quicken Day as it was supposed to be celebrated.
I twined the stems of the ivy leaves together to make a small wreath and set it at the foot of the tree. Walk around the tree once and make a wish. The answer will come in a dream in nine days’ time.
I walked slowly around the tree and whispered my wish. I leaned back against the trunk.
I took a small bell out of my pocket. It was called a keepsake bell, used for weddings or Christmas ornaments. Gin sold them in the bookstore. I had tied a piece of red thread through the top. I stood on tiptoe and tied the bell to a branch. Then I rang it, and as I did, I closed my eyes and saw Rowan, pulling the mask over her face and handing me my own. Fox and hare.
23
Adair
2010
Ciaran and I stayed at the back of the crowd in the Maple Street playground. I had accepted a small candle, fitted through a small paper plate to catch the wax. Preparing the candles for the vigil probably had been the project of a Girl Scout troop.
Rowan had been a Brownie, but she’d dropped out. It was boring, she’d said. I thought she’d roll her eyes at all of the earnest townspeople come to mark this anniversary, many of whom had not known her.
The mayor spoke about the power of community and said he had faith that there would be answers someday.
Ciaran’s gaze was continually shifting, and I was doing the same, looking, I suppose, for a man alone. An older man. Not, in other words, men who had been children fifteen years ago. It was a dizzying thought: kindergartners of 1995 were now twenty years old.
Ciaran touched my elbow, and when I looked up at him, he jerked his chin. I followed his gaze and saw Libby with a man I initially thought must be her grandfather. I realized it was David Brayton. Libby’s head was bowed over her candle. David had his hand on her back. Evelyn was not with them. If she was there at all, I didn’t see her. Leo, too, was not there, but I’d never thought he would be.
When the ceremony ended, I blew out my candle, strangely disappointed, though logic told me murderers were not moved to confess by the calendar. They certainly didn’t choose to do so at public memorials to their victims.
Ciaran and I let the crowd disperse around us. Libby came over and hugged him. After a startled moment, he hugged her back. She pulled away and turned to me and handed me a small gift bag. Happy Birthday, it said on it.
“This is that book I told you about, the one you said belongs at Moye House. I still want it back, but I wanted you to see it.”
“Thank you.”
She walked back to her father, head down. He was watching, but only nodded his head at Ciaran and, after a pause, at me.
The writers were in the parlor at evening drinks, all of them. Time was short now, and they were no doubt thinking about how they would be separating soon.
I went up to the third floor and down the hall to Michan’s room. The door was closed, which meant he was working. I sat on the floor and tilted my head back against the wall. I closed my eyes and even dozed off before the door opened.
Michan was shrugging on his jacket.
“My very own foundling,” he said.
“Very funny.”
“What’s up?”
I sat up straighter. “You’re going out. It can wait.”
“It’s okay. Gin’s patient.”
Michan sat down opposite me, so we could see each other. There was just enough room for him.
“The anthology of stories written here, the one Ciaran’s father is in? Ciaran had a copy,” I said. “I read most of the stories.”
“Most of them?”
“I read Ciaran’s father’s. And yours. ‘The Last Night’ by Michan McCrohan.”
“I only wrote it because Jorie asked me to contribute a story to the anthology. You were I guess about seven or so when it was published. I’d decided long ago to stick to poetry.”
“‘The Last Night’ is good,” I said.
There’s a blood transfusion after an accident years before the child is born. When the story opens, the mother is already dead.
“Did you think I’d never read it?” I asked. Live long enough to read it, I meant.
“Never.” Michan closed his eyes briefly.
“Once you found out who Ciaran was, you must have thought that he might mention it. Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Because I’m a coward.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I came here when your father died and never left.” Michan moved his hand, a gesture meant to encompass the entire house.
“It’s not like you’re a hermit.”
Michan smiled. “What if Jorie had been in a monastery? A St. Brigid’s monastery that allows men and women. Then I would be a monk and not a poet.”
As if it were Moye House that had granted him his talent, his drive. As if, wherever he had taken refuge, he would have simply become part of the place. I started to say as much, but instead I smiled.
“Men and women both, but children?” I said. “I probably couldn’t have lived in a monastery.”
He laughed, as I meant him to, and then grew serious. “You remember that night?” he asked hesitantly. “Lissa was glad when you stopped talking about it. We thought you’d forgotten.”
But I hadn’t. I’d only lost the whole picture. Imagine zigzagging an eraser through a sketch done in pencil.
“I remember bits and pieces,” I said. “Was it Christmas Eve? God, Michan, why would they have done that to their parents?”
Michan took so long to answer, I started to think he would not.
“Cathal tried to tell us not to come, but my mother knew—not that she said it out loud—but she knew it would be his last Christmas. She didn’t tell my dad and me that we weren’t invited.”
“Why didn’t they wait until you left?”
Again, a long silence.
“Someone in Janus’s group told your mother there was an old Irish saying: the gates of heaven are open on Christmas Eve. Whoever dies that night will go straight in. All sins forgiven.”
“We didn’t even go to church. They couldn’t have really believed that?” I asked, not sure if I meant in heaven, Catholicism in general, or that it allowed for that kind of loophole.
“Adair, I can’t—” Michan said. “Listen to me, please. With AIDS nobody knew exactly what they’d die of or how long they had. But there were a few certainties. Your father was going first. Then Lissa would watch you die, or she would go first and you’d be without both of them. Cathal knew Lissa couldn’t do it. He felt it was the last thing he could do, as a father.”
“Kill me.”
“Spare you.” Michan’s voice took on an edge that served to remind me that I’d been a child, and shielded as such.
In Michan’s story, the ending is ambiguous. The father never actually turns the engine on. You don’t know what happened. You don’t know what to hope happened.
“What made them change their minds?” I asked.
“They didn’t,” Michan said. “My father woke up and went to look in on you, and you were gone. He went to Lissa and Cathal’s room to see if you were there, but they were gone too. His first thought was the hospital, so he went to the garage to l
ook for the car. Cathal had put a note on the door saying not to come in, call an ambulance. He was afraid if anybody opened the door, the fumes would knock them out.”
“Did he leave the number for a funeral home that would touch us?” I asked. When I came to that part of Michan’s story, I’d had to close the book.
Michan nodded. “He did. Dad went in the garage anyway. Cathal hadn’t turned the engine on yet, thank God. Dad took you out of the car and put you back in bed.”
The car. My parents in cold silhouette, not speaking. Arms lifting me up. Arms far stronger than my father’s were by then. My cheek against a solid chest. Not a dream but a memory.
“Why did Darragh do it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It may have just been his generation. You play the hand you’re dealt. You don’t take the easy way out. You don’t cheat. Or it might’ve had to do with factor VIII coming along the way it did. Miracle treatment. And it was. Before it killed us, it saved us.”
You’re still alive, I nearly said, but let it be. “They didn’t try again.”
“No. It was Christmas Eve or never.”
Sins forgiven. As in suicide. As in murder.
It was my turn to close my eyes. When I opened them again, I said, “So they stayed.”
“They wouldn’t leave without you.” Michan got to his feet and held out a hand. I took it and he pulled me up.
24
Adair
2010
The fall residency ended on Saturday, October 30, the same day as the Quicken Day celebration, a fluke of the calendar that year. Moye House was not a hotel. Residents didn’t have to be out of their rooms by eleven o’clock, but there were no extensions, even by a day. There had been writers who weren’t ready to go, who asked to stay one more night, and then two. Just until I finish this part. I’ll never be able to write it anywhere else.
Michan doubted it would happen anymore, given the pace of the world today, but he kept to the policy. Even if planes were canceled or trains delayed, they had to go. There was the hotel in town and a number of bed-and-breakfasts.
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