Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  Ciaran and I went into town that final residency day, not to participate in the Quicken Day festivities but to observe them.

  We walked around Culleton, which was crowded because the weather was good. Most of the shops had tables set up out front with items for sale. We spoke little. There were couples heading for a daytime drink, parents ushering their children, holding bits of their costumes.

  The air smelled of apples and of cinnamon from the bakery, which was selling doughnuts two for a dollar. Ciaran and I sat on the bench outside Wild Books and watched the parade’s uneven takeoff. The costumes were store bought. Plastic masks and capes. Disney princess dresses and cowboy hats.

  When the last of the children were out of sight, having turned the corner a block away, Ciaran stood up and said he had to go. He had to pick up the keys to the studio he’d rented in Brooklyn, sight unseen.

  I felt something close to panic, and then disappointment as I looked up and down the street. Had I expected, as Libby dreamed, we would turn around to see Rowan coming up the street, still a girl of twelve, grinning at us both?

  Ciaran thanked me for my help. When he had Rowan’s chapter written, there were bound to be questions. He would probably be back on some weekends, he thought.

  “If your place is uninhabitable, come back,” I said.

  Ciaran laughed, and then he left for the train station, a ten-minute walk, and I went back to Moye House alone.

  The next morning, returning to the house after walking Poe, I saw Ciaran coming up the path from the parking lot. I thought he’d come back because he had no place to go. The sublet he’d arranged had been a scam.

  Ciaran came closer, and when he was near enough for me to see the grim set of his mouth, I understood.

  “Adair—”

  I wanted to run. “They found her.”

  “They have a place to look.”

  The old foundry. Two outbuildings, one a garage, one a toolshed. Fifteen years ago, both had had dirt floors. In the course of renovations done in the late 1990s, both floors had been covered with cement.

  The tip had come by letter to Ciaran, mailed to his apartment in Brooklyn, unobtrusive in the stack of mail his tenant handed him.

  Undated, it was typewritten on plain white paper. He’d read it and called the police

  I didn’t ask Michan if Ciaran could stay. I told him myself that he was welcome, as my friend. But Michan didn’t object—I hadn’t thought he would, particularly when Ciaran explained in detail what the letter had said.

  Later, after a dinner of leftovers that both Ciaran and I barely touched, we went up to the third floor, to the small balcony off my bedroom.

  We sat in two chairs we’d brought outside. The cold air felt good.

  “How long will it take?” I asked, though he’d already told me more than once.

  “A few days at least. They’re going to bring in dogs, I think, and if they hit, then they’ll dig.”

  “Bloodhounds?”

  “Not bloodhounds, no. These are dogs specifically trained to find remains.”

  “Bones,” I said.

  Ciaran nodded.

  “Tell me again what it said.”

  The letter writer had referred to her only as Rowan. The use of her first name suggested that the person might have known her. She was not, in other words, “the missing girl” or “Rowan Kinnane.”

  He (assuming it was a man) claimed to have heard the story from someone who was actually there. Late that afternoon, as it was starting to get dark, Rowan was walking alone on the road.

  Two teenage boys went by in a car. They stopped beside her and said some things. She picked up a rock and threw it at the car. It bounced off the hood. They were in front of the old foundry. Abandoned. No one around for miles. Falling-down buildings. They got out of the car and she ran into one of them. They followed. If she hadn’t run, they would probably have driven off. But she ran. They chased.

  They cornered her. What exactly happened doesn’t matter, only that she died. They’d been drinking and they were high. Scared, they’d left the scene. Later, they went back to hide the body, afraid their car had been spotted by the side of the road. Too freaked out to put her in their car, they’d brought a shovel.

  Ciaran returned to his room on the second floor. I didn’t see much of him during the day. He said he was working. It was the only thing he could do. Evelyn had been told by the police detective working the case. Ciaran left her a message, but she didn’t call back. I was glad Libby was with her father. Were she nearby, I had no doubt she would have gone to the foundry. She would have seen the cars parked on the road outside, the police and dog handlers and lab techs and gawkers.

  One of the dogs hit on a corner of what had once been the toolshed. The police weren’t releasing the information, but it was obvious when the shed was roped off with yellow Crime Scene tape and a crew was demolishing the cement floor.

  On Wednesday, the day they began ripping up the floor, Ciaran and I went there, but we didn’t leave the car. We watched a young reporter speaking into a camera.

  “I hope to God they’ve told Libby,” Ciaran said.

  “I’m sure they have,” I said.

  “Her dad’s an old man, Adair. I don’t know that he’s going to realize she’ll see it online even if she’s not looking. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got a Google Alert for Rowan’s name.”

  “Evelyn will tell her.”

  “I don’t know that she will. Evelyn might still think of her as a little girl, if she thinks of her at all.”

  Ciaran was right, of course. Both he and I got an angry email from Libby later that day, asking us to let her know what was going on. Ciaran answered, telling her he didn’t know anything more than what was being reported.

  Michan, tense, clenching his jaw so tightly that I was afraid he would crack a tooth, had been asking me every morning, “Did you take your meds?”

  Yes, yes, yes.

  I had carefully filled the pill organizer with a week’s worth and left it on my nightstand. Every morning, I slid back the lid.

  Yet I almost wished I could come down with one of the old fevers that came out of nowhere and spiked in the night while I slept, bringing the dreams of my parents and of Rowan that I thought might be more than dreams.

  There was some evidence for it, I explained to Ciaran when I told him this during the long afternoon of checking our phones and trying not to check our phones. We had walked together to the residents’ library and were sitting on the couches in front of the fireplace. Me on one, Ciaran on the other. It felt like we were stranded together in a beautiful train station with nothing to do but wait. Wait for someone to arrive. Wait for a train to call us to board.

  Fevers did alter the brain. Children who couldn’t speak sometimes did when they were sick. Some believed fevers gave a window to the dead.

  “I don’t know if I believe any of that,” Ciaran said. “But I will tell you, as badly as you want an answer, for yourself or Evelyn or Libby—”

  “For you,” I said.

  “For me. In the end, Rowan will still be gone. There’s no point in your ruining your health for it.”

  I lay down on the couch, tucking a pillow beneath my head. Illness would hardly be instantaneous, but I was too tired to explain. Sometimes I could picture the scenario from the letter very vividly. Other times, it felt off. Wrong. There was something I should realize. Something lurking just out of my sight. Not Rowan herself. She had retreated, disappeared again.

  Late in the afternoon on Friday, I came in from a walk on the grounds, which I’d told myself was not a search for Leo, who would be out there working. I didn’t see him and I didn’t have his cell phone number. But I reasoned that if he wanted to talk to me, he certainly knew where to find me.

  I entered the kitchen to find Ciaran there, not reading or typing on his laptop, just sitting at the kitchen table. The lights were not on, but the room was still bright enough for me to see how red his eyes
were.

  “They found bones,” he said.

  For a minute I couldn’t breathe. Then I said, “They’re not Rowan’s. They can’t be.”

  “They aren’t. They’re animal bones,” Ciaran said. “Not human. They think now that the letter is from a crank. They’re done. I should have been prepared, I know that, but some part of me really thought this was it.”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  Ciaran looked at me. “Why not?”

  I went over and opened the door to the servants’ stairs. “Come with me?”

  Ciaran followed me to the second floor, then down the hallway past my room. All the way to the loft that overlooked the library. He asked no questions, made docile by grief and disappointment. And, I thought, possibly guilt as well. Certainly, now he could continue with his book, as he’d planned it. There was no need to place Rowan in a prologue or afterword.

  In the loft I asked him to sit down on one of the loveseats, and then I sat, too, on the one opposite, facing him.

  Friday, October 27, 1995

  I stayed home from school, the last bout with bronchitis lingering but slowly leaving.

  Michan taught me how to play gin rummy and then I made him watch Days of Our Lives with me. He said it was the stupidest thing he’d ever seen and went and got me a book.

  Lightning by Dean R. Koontz.

  A better use of your time, he said.

  I lay on my bed to read but soon fell asleep. It was still afternoon, light out, so I didn’t turn on my lamp.

  When I woke up, the room was dark. I sat up groggily, my throat so dry I could barely swallow. My fever was back. I always kept a cup of water on my nightstand, and I gulped half of it. I had just set the cup down when she appeared. I jumped and the water spilled over my hand and trickled down my arm.

  Rowan was standing at the foot of my bed. She grinned and put a finger to her lips.

  She had a mask on top of her head and she was holding another one.

  “What are you doing?”

  She said it was Quicken Day, the one that counted, not the parade one. She pulled two ribboned bells out of her pocket and showed them to me before tucking them away again.

  “I’m sick,” I said.

  She lost her grin and came over to the bed and pressed her hand to my forehead.

  “You’re fine,” she said.

  “I’ve never been fine,” I answered.

  “We have to go.”

  Rowan pulled down her mask. Hare. She handed me mine. Fox.

  Rowan walked quickly in the dark woods, glancing back to make sure I was keeping up.

  When we reached the chapel, she pulled her mask up. I’d already done so with mine, the better to breathe. I didn’t ask where she’d gotten them.

  “Quiet, in case somebody’s already there.”

  We stayed close together, walking slowly.

  But nobody was at the tree. We were alone. She had a bag over her shoulder and from it she withdrew an ivy wreath, which she set beneath the tree. She walked around the tree, and then I did. We tied the bells to one of the branches.

  This quicken tree was good enough for the bells, she said.

  This quicken tree? I thought it, but didn’t ask what she meant.

  Rowan reached into her bag and took out a pair of scissors. We couldn’t be blood sisters but we could exchange locks of hair, and that was almost as good.

  I was tired and the world was tipping. I wanted to go back to bed. I didn’t argue. I didn’t ask questions. I let her snip a bit of my hair and she did the same to her own. She put her hair in a baggie and gave it to me and then put mine in a separate one.

  I asked shouldn’t we be mixing the hair together? That’s what you were supposed to do with blood, but she said no, this was right.

  Rowan pulled her mask down and pulled mine down and we walked back to Moye House together.

  Ciaran listened without interrupting.

  “I got back in bed, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, Michan was asleep in a chair beside the bed. I was trying to drink water, and I dropped the cup and woke him. My fever was about 102. He gave me something for it and I went back to sleep. I was never sure whether or not it really happened, or if it, and the bookstore, were all part of some dream.”

  “I don’t know what this means,” Ciaran said.

  “You’ve asked everyone you spoke to what they think happened to her. Except for me,” I said. “It’s okay, though, because I wouldn’t have had an answer before.”

  He smiled wearily. Fine. I’ll play.

  “What do you think happened to her?”

  “The Moye House anthology. She found it.”

  “I never sent it to her.”

  Possibly she had found a copy in Byrd’s Books on a day I wasn’t with her. Stumbled upon it. Or maybe in those pre-Amazon days she’d called up some bookstore and had them order it, but I wasn’t sure she’d have thought to do that. Maybe her mother did have a copy hidden away in their house somewhere.

  I reached down and picked it up. For an anthology, it was a slender book. But then some of the stories were no more than two pages. I slipped off the book jacket to reveal the red cover beneath it.

  Ciaran looked at the book and then at me.

  “It might be mistaken for an envelope,” I said, “if you only see it for a minute.”

  “You can’t know for sure if she had it, Adair.”

  “She read it,” I told him. “Because she read Michan’s story, ‘The Last Night.’”

  Ciaran shook his head, confused. “‘The Last Night’?”

  The dying father and daughter. The garage.

  I told him about that day in the servants’ quarters when Rowan asked me to imagine the years I wouldn’t have had if I’d died when my father did. Then, I hadn’t thought much more about it. I was always being told I was lucky.

  “She was in town the day she vanished,” Ciaran said.

  I nodded. “I think so. Yes.”

  “She was in the bookstore. She went outside. And then where does she go?”

  “Anywhere,” I said. “But she was probably on her way to Moye House,” I said. “I think that’s why she was carrying the book. Maybe she was going to put it where she thought it belonged, on our shelves with the other residents’ books. She would have walked. Some man might have asked her directions. She might have gone up to the car. Somebody she knew might have pulled over to offer her a ride. She got in.”

  “Nobody saw her,” Ciaran said.

  “Nobody was looking,” I said. “Not yet. Not for hours.”

  After a moment, Ciaran asked, “What now?”

  “Write your book,” I said.

  He nodded, gazing past me, and I could tell he was already measuring this information, trying to frame it, trying to decide how to present it in prose.

  I told him then that since we’d talked to Kit, I’d been imagining Rowan as some town’s Jane Doe. In some place we’d never guess because it was so big or so small or too far away to contemplate. Perhaps she’d been mistaken for a boy and was buried as a John Doe. The remains of young girls were sometimes misread. Today, with DNA testing, it wouldn’t happen. But back then, it may have. Whatever the reason, she was buried anonymously, but properly, in a cemetery with a headstone. On the anniversary of when she was found, the locals brought her flowers and tried to guess her name. They never would. Maybe Ciaran’s book would find its way to one such citizen, or maybe some of the police officers who’d worked the case and had never let it go. They’d look up from the the photos of Rowan Kinnane, breath catching, knowing where they have seen her face before.

  25

  Adair

  2010

  Again, in the dark, I climbed Leo’s porch. It was cold for early November. I’d pulled a black winter coat out of my closet that I hadn’t worn in years. My next-season clothes were still packed in the boxes I’d brought back from Brooklyn.

  Wearing it, I’d gone to Michan’s rooms and knoc
ked, not sure if he’d be there. But when he answered, I told him where I was going. He didn’t tell me, as he had before, that I must find a way to tell new people. It was no good to seek friends and boyfriends only among those who already knew. But that advice was part of the reason I’d left Leo years ago, because I thought I had to at least try, no matter what I really wanted. This time, Michan only hesitated, and told me to be careful.

  This time when I knocked, Leo opened the door. He didn’t say anything as I followed him down the hall.

  At the kitchen he paused, then asked, “Can you drink on whatever you’re taking?”

  I laughed. “I’m supposed to drink in moderation.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Me too.”

  I sat down on the couch and watched him pour two beers. He handed me one and sat down beside me.

  “The brother’s gone?” Leo said.

  I nodded. “He’s finished. He only stayed longer because of the search. He left yesterday.”

  “With no answers.”

  “He doesn’t want answers. He wants questions,” I said. “He does think they should have searched the foundry longer. But she’s not there.”

  “How do you know that?” Leo asked. “It was abandoned then. It’s possible.” I explained Rowan’s search for the Moye House anthology with her father’s story in it, and why I believed the book was what I saw in her hand the day she disappeared.

  Leo listened, very still, waiting for the moment when all of this began to mean something.

  There was one children’s story in the anthology. It was written by a woman named Winifred Coen. Edward Adair illustrated many of her books, which took place in the gardens of Moye House. He drew the rose garden, the kitchen garden, the wildflower garden. She also wrote about Degare Mountain and the surrounding woods.

  For the anthology story, Edward drew the quicken tree—the rowan tree—by the chapel, and another one, a flying rowan, deeper in the woods, up the mountain, beneath an outcrop.

  The story is about a bird that takes a berry from the rowan tree by the chapel and drops it into an old oak tree that’s split in two. From there, the second tree begins to grow. The bird flies back and forth between the mother tree and the daughter, telling each about the other.