The Mountains Wild Read online

  A gull drops a mussel shell on a rock by my feet, then hovers overhead, waiting for me to leave.

  * * *

  I’m half packed by the time Lilly comes in at five.

  “Where’s your dad?” I ask her. Dinner’s in the oven and the table’s set. I have a bottle of red open, Brian’s favorite.

  “He had to go pick up some milk and bread. He’ll be here in fifteen. What?” She can see it on my face. I go over to her and tuck a stray piece of dark brown hair behind her ear, smelling strawberry shampoo and fried food. She’s taller than I am now. I have to reach up to do it. Lilly looks more like Brian than she does like me, with his father’s family’s Southern Italian coloring and softer features cancelling out his mother’s and my Irish genes, though she’s an original, too, and I’ve always been glad of that, and a little jealous. That she has her own face and no one else’s.

  “We heard from Dublin. They think they may have found my cousin Erin’s scarf. She was wearing it when she disappeared while she was living over there.”

  “No way. After all these years?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “What does it mean? Did they find her body?”

  I hesitate. “No, not yet. But they think it may be close by. They’re searching for another woman, who was hiking there and disappeared. They found Erin’s scarf while trying to figure out what happened to her.”

  “Is it connected to the other two women? Is there any evidence?” Poor Lilly knows a lot more about forensics than any fifteen-year-old should have to.

  “We just don’t know,” I tell her. “Uncle Danny wants me to go and see them and try to figure it out. You okay staying with Dad for a week or so?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Can he stay here, though? I can’t sleep with the trains going by his apartment.” She looks down at the table, feeling disloyal.

  There are a bunch of reasons I’d rather they stay at Brian’s, but I know it’s better for Lilly to be at home. “’Course. I’ll ask him, anyway. How was school?” She’s a sophomore this year, past the storms of puberty, though somehow even Lilly’s worst seemed fairly mild. One of the benefits of being a cop, I guess. A thirteen-year-old yelling that she wishes you’d leave her alone forever because you’re too nosy never seemed that serious compared to a thirteen-year-old who’s addicted to heroin ending up as a witness to the murder of another thirteen-year-old who was sex-trafficked and killed.

  “What do you think happened to her?” Lilly asks me seriously. She has a way of looking at you, her head tilted a little, her huge brown eyes watching you, that makes it impossible to lie.

  “I think…” I start. “I guess until last night, most days, I was pretty sure something happened to her, Lil, that someone killed her and hid her, I guess I’m saying. But then there were days where I thought maybe she started a new life somewhere, that she didn’t want to tell us. I pictured her sometimes, with a daughter…” I smile at her. “And bad, unfashionable jeans, just like me.”

  “But why wouldn’t she tell you?” Lilly has a tight group of best friends who share all their secrets. She can’t imagine why Erin would have kept something that big to herself.

  “I don’t know. Erin was complicated, sweetheart. She could be mysterious. She’d gone off before. It was hard to know what she was thinking.”

  I think she’s done asking questions, but then she says, “What was she like? Uncle Danny told me she looked like you. But what was she like?”

  Wavy brown hair, stiff with the salt, threads of gold where the sun bleached it. Freckles across her nose. Her hand tight in mine.

  “We grew up together. We were like sisters.” That doesn’t answer her question, though. “Erin was … We did look alike, enough alike that people sometimes thought we were twins, but she was really beautiful, in a way that people noticed. She was wild, a risk-taker, troubled, creative. Fun.” Lilly doesn’t say anything. I still haven’t really explained Erin. “When I say Erin to myself, I have this sort of picture that I see, of her running down a beach, her hair flying all around her, the sun behind her. She loved the beach. When we were little we spent all our time there.” Erin running, too fast for me to follow, turning to shout back at me.

  While Lilly finishes her homework, I head down to the basement to find the boxes of notes and files I’ve kept on Erin’s case. Twenty-three years. I’ve gone back to it over the years, when Roly Byrne called me with an update, and a few times on Erin’s birthday, when I was feeling melancholy and frustrated. But it’s been a while.

  They’re over in a dry corner of the basement, up on wooden pallets, in front of a pile of other boxes of my mother’s and father’s things and a bunch of Brian’s stuff from when we sold his parents’ house that I keep forgetting to return to him. Lilly likes to come down here and look through it; she pulled some of my mother’s clothes out and wore them for a bit, and decorated her room with things from Brian’s boxes, old Red Hot Chili Peppers posters from his University of Delaware dorm room and posters and soccer jerseys he bought while backpacking in Europe or the time he and his brother, Frank, and our friends Derek and Devin O’Brien spent spring break in Mexico.

  There are papers everywhere, old postcards and letters and receipts, and I have to stop myself yelling up the stairs at Lilly for making such a mess. I find the box that has all my notes from Erin’s case, but Lilly’s gone through it and it’s mixed up with things from the other boxes. It takes me twenty minutes to sort through Brian’s college papers and my mother’s old purses and find my box of notebooks and files. I open up the box and put them in a separate pile.

  In a plastic tub are the things from the house Erin lived in in Dublin, books and clothes and postcards and jewelry. The police in Ireland—the Guards, I remind myself, the Gardaí, with a little th sound added to the d—had gone through it. After she’d been missing for six months, her roommates had shipped her things home. At some point Uncle Danny had asked me to keep them since he couldn’t stand having them in the house. There are a few items of clothing, a white satin jewelry box that had held Erin’s claddagh necklace, a little fabric pouch of earrings, a four-leaf clover embedded in glass, some makeup, and some books and stationery.

  In another box, there’s a paper envelope of photographs and I open it and fan out a random assortment of pictures of me and Erin. It was my mom’s; she had kept some pictures of us on her bedside table when she was really sick, once we’d moved a hospital bed into the den.

  There’s one of Erin and me at the beach. I’m five or six; she’s a year older. We sit on little chairs on the sand, looking up at the photographer. We’re pink from the sun, our red bathing suits caked with sand. Erin’s grinning and waving. I’m clutching a little plastic sand shovel.

  Another is us in our Irish dancing costumes, onstage at an all–Long Island feis. There are school pictures of me from fifth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade.

  There’s one of Erin at seventeen, sitting on the beach and looking out across the water. Her long hair is wildly curly, the wind whipping corkscrews across her face; she’s in half profile. I seem to remember that her best friend Jessica took the pictures, that they were supposed to be a present for a boyfriend, though I don’t think Erin ever gave them to anyone. They’re too solitary, too dark, the expression on Erin’s face sad, stormy.

  And then there’s one of me at twenty, just before my mom was diagnosed, standing in front of the student center at Notre Dame. I’m wearing jeans and Doc Martens and a tweed blazer I got at the thrift store in South Bend and I look basically the way I looked almost two years later, in 1993, when Erin disappeared and I went to Dublin to try to find her.

  I look at the photograph for a few more minutes, trying to remember what it was like to be that person, before I put everything away and head back upstairs to finish dinner.

  3

  1993

  I was twenty-two that fall, a too-thin girl with shoulder-length brown hair that I always wore scraped back in a ponytail, working
at the bar to help out Uncle Danny, training for a marathon, and trying to stop my dad from drinking too much. I’d graduated from Notre Dame the spring before, after taking a semester off as my mom was dying and then finishing up the last of my coursework at the bar when things were quiet. I think I can say with complete honesty that I had no inkling, at that point, of my future career path, but I was curious about people and I knew, from bartending and from studying literature for four years, that people lie all the time, and that the interesting thing is not that they lie, but why they do. Now I know that this is a lot of it, of being a detective, and that perhaps I was setting off on some inevitable path that night we got the call from Dublin.

  I was working a long shift with Uncle Danny, serving beers and vodka and rum and Cokes to the cops and the plumbers and the bankers off the train, when the phone rang at the bar.

  “Is Mr. Flaherty there?” I recognized the accent as Irish, real Irish, and for just a moment I thought it was Erin, that somehow she’d picked up an accent since moving to Dublin almost a year before. I handed it to Uncle Danny and listened as he said, “Oh, no, I haven’t heard from her. She didn’t leave a note? No. Okay. Thanks. We’ll … yes, we’ll get back to ya.”

  “That was Erin’s roommates over there in Dublin,” he said, hesitating for a moment and then starting to wipe the bar down. “Eeemur or somesuch, one of those real Irishy names. She hasn’t been back to her place for a while. They got worried and thought they oughta call. Whaddya think, Mags? Ya think she’s okay?” His voice caught and I rubbed little circles on his shoulder. I could already feel the anger rising through my throat.

  Do you know how fucking worried Uncle Danny is about you?

  Why do you always do this, Erin?

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” I told him. “I bet she’ll be back.”

  But Erin wasn’t back the next day.

  My dad came by the bar after work to talk about what to do. Two old men. That’s what I thought when I came up from the basement and saw them. Uncle Danny was wearing one of his shiny golf shirts and the fabric was lighter where it stretched over his belly. My dad was just off the train from the city, still in a gray suit that had gotten too big for him, his blue eyes the only alive thing in his face. My mom had been gone for a year and a bit and he wasn’t over it. He was pale, shaky. He didn’t sleep much. I watched him stir the gin in front of him on the bar.

  They tossed it around for a bit, Uncle Danny going over, maybe my dad.

  “I wish Father Anthony was here,” Danny said. “He’d know what to do. God rest him. I guess I’d better go over.”

  I stepped in after Uncle Danny started coughing and couldn’t stop.

  “I’ll go,” I told them. “I can go look into it. Uncle Danny, your heart.”

  They barely tried to stop me.

  Two old men. I felt guilty for thinking it, but it was true. Uncle Danny. I kept finding cigarettes hidden in his desk in the office at the bar. He reeked of them. His doctor said he was a heart attack waiting to happen if he didn’t cut out the smokes and lose some weight.

  “I’ll go,” I told them again. “And then once I figure out what’s going on, you can come over. Hopefully she’s just…” We let it sit there, all the possibilities contained in that hopefully.

  “Okay, baby. Thanks. That’s a good idea. I can come when you figure out what’s going on.”

  * * *

  I arrived in Dublin on a wet, gray morning, the first of October. The airport was a ’70s movie, psychedelic carpet, cigarette smoke thick in the arrivals hall. Ireland. Cold wet air swept through me when I walked outside to find a cab. The accents were familiar from the bar, where we always had a guy or two just off the plane, but they took on a different quality when they filled all the spaces around me, looser, more confident. Changing money, I was conscious of my own accent, the nasal of it, the loud upward pitch of my words. The cabdriver was a skinny, leggy old man who said, “God bless you now, love. Take care o’ yourself,” when I got out at Erin’s house.

  Gordon Street was a little side street near a canal, a twisting narrow lane of squat little stucco one- and two-story houses, almost in miniature, with brick or red-painted facades and a few doors painted bright blue, a few shabbier ones painted black or dull red. Looming over the rooftops was a huge round structure shaped like a crown, and there was a Virgin Mary statue tucked into an alcove on the sidewalk. Children played and shouted in the street, their cheeks pink from the cold. With a little thrill of recognition, I thought, The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

  Ireland. It wasn’t the way I thought I’d get here. I’d been about to spend my junior year studying at Trinity when my mom got sick. Lately I’d been thinking about graduate school. The brochures from Trinity and UCD were still in the top drawer of my desk.

  Ireland. I could smell the ocean and something like woodsmoke and I inhaled deeply, clearing the stale odor of the cab from my nose. As I stood there, the sun broke through the clouds for a moment and illuminated the wet sidewalks, throwing the little row houses and brightly painted doors into impossibly beautiful color. It stopped me for a minute, the sheer magic gorgeousness of it, all the saturated reds and browns and blues, the light, the proportions of the houses, the shine of a silver car parked against the curb.

  Erin’s roommates were named Emer Nolan and Daisy Nugent. Emer, blond, round-faced, cheerful, was the one who had called the bar, and she took the lead once they let me in, showing me Erin’s tiny room, barely a closet, with a small twin bed and a folding table set up as a desk.

  They showed me the work schedule pinned on the wall over the desk and wrote down the address of the café where Erin worked.

  I got out my agenda book and had them show me the day she left. September 16. I circled it in green pen. “She didn’t tell you that she was going on a trip or anything, did she?”

  They shook their heads.

  “We got home from class and she’d gone already. Her rucksack wasn’t in the press, so we thought she’d just gone traveling. She’d done it before.”

  “Did she ever talk about friends from work?” I asked them.

  They glanced at each other. “There were some girls she went out dancing with a few times, and your man came by to see if she was sick when she missed work. But other than that, I don’t think so.”

  “My who?” I was tired, jet-lagged from the red eye, off center in this unfamiliar place, their accents taking all my concentration.

  “Sorry, the fella at her job. Conor. He came by Monday and we said we hadn’t seen her. That’s when we thought we should ring up your uncle.”

  It didn’t take long to check her room. I didn’t know what she’d brought with her to Ireland when she’d moved over in January but there weren’t a lot of clothes in the closet: a couple of short black dresses that I knew she wore to go out, two floral blouses, a couple of pairs of faded Levi’s. There was a heavy Aran sweater folded on the shelf over the hanging clothes, and a couple of cotton sweaters. Wherever she was, she must be wearing her brown leather jacket. She got it for herself for her birthday the year after she graduated from high school, and when you hugged her, the jacket smelled of new leather, cigarette smoke, and faintly of her perfume; the leather always felt cold to the touch. The velvet scarf I gave her for Christmas, green and blue, with thicker velvet butterflies gathering at one corner, wasn’t in the room, either, so she must be wearing that. Her claddagh necklace, a high school graduation present from Father Anthony, wasn’t in the little white box printed with a claddagh on the front that I found tucked into her underwear drawer. I could close my eyes and picture her wearing it, the delicate silver chain, the silver hands and purple amethyst heart in the center. I hadn’t seen her without the necklace in five years. She must be wearing it too. Wherever she was.

  A blue paper packet of photographs sat on top of a stack of bank statements and papers on the makeshift desk. They’d been printed at a photo shop in Dublin, and when I took t
hem out and leafed through them, I found a few of what I thought were Dublin landmarks—I recognized Trinity College—and the rest seemed to have been taken in the country, trees and mountains and what looked like an abandoned school: gray buildings, empty windows, grass growing up around the foundation.

  I sat on Erin’s bed for a moment, then brushed my teeth and washed my face in the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall. I told Emer and Daisy that I was going to the café and didn’t know when I’d be back. “Conor, right? That’s the guy she worked with?”

  “Yeah,” Emer said. They were staring at me, their faces in shadow in the dark little hallway.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s, it’s only,” Daisy stammered, “you have the look of her. It’s a bit weird.”

  I pushed down a flash of annoyance. “I know. Everyone says that. What are these pictures of?” I held out the stack and Daisy took it from me, looking through them slowly.

  “Four Courts, Grafton Street, Trinity. Here in Dublin,” she said. “The others I don’t know about. Wicklow maybe. She has a little camera.” I tucked the packet of prints into my backpack.

  Outside, the clouds were racing across the sky, a time-lapse movie. When they made space for the sun, the slightly shabby street was saturated with color and life again, the white lace curtains in the windows pristine before the clouds covered the sun and they went back to a dingy gray.

  * * *

  It took me twenty minutes to walk to Trinity College and the center of the city. I walked into a stiff wind the whole way, past a square of sober gray houses and a small park, and men in overcoats walking fast, their heads down, and old ladies in rain bonnets pushing shopping trolleys. I breathed the sour smell of beer pouring out of empty pubs and the steam rising from the backs of buildings. It was late morning now, but I had the sense of a city waking, a few students returning from nights out, long coats clutched around them. I didn’t linger outside the gray walls of the college or wander the lanes around Grafton Street, brimming with bookshops and little businesses behind glass windows.