Ghosts Of The Missing

Copyright © 2020 by Kathleen Donohoe

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Donohoe, Kathleen, author.

Title: Ghosts of the missing / Kathleen Donohoe.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019023912 (print) | LCCN 2019023913 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544557178 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780544557185 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Missing children—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. |Mystery fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3604.O5646 G48 2020 (print) | LCC PS3604.O5646 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023912

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023913

Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

Cover illustration by Carly Miller

Author photograph © Beowulf Sheehan

v1.0120

To Travis and Liam

And for Jennifer

Prologue

The woman was no one, until the bell began to ring.

The boy first saw her at the mountain ash, picking the berries, he believed, that were red and ripe in midautumn, too bitter for any creature but a bird. He was eleven then, and she was grown, near twenty at least. By her clothes and her red hair, unbraided, Cassius Moye placed her as an Irish girl, a servant. Within ten steps, he had forgotten her.

Yet when he passed near the tree again, hurrying to leave the woods before full dark, he heard a bell ringing. Looking up, he saw only a gathering of October stars. The sound persisted. Had he been younger, he might have run. Older, he’d have scoffed. But as it was, he listened carefully, aware that this was a story he would tell forever. As he neared the mountain ash, the sound grew stronger. It was coming from the tree, but he could see no other source.

The next morning at breakfast, Cassius told his mother. His father was already gone to work at Moye Foundry and Ironworks, the business he’d begun with his wife’s inheritance, and which had become as prosperous as he’d promised her. Cassius knew his father would not tolerate the story, but he was disappointed when his mother dismissed it as a trick of the darkness. He should not be in the woods at all, and most certainly not at night. Though neither the boy nor his mother knew what it meant, the girl carefully setting the plates on the breakfront understood what Cassius had seen and heard. Back in the kitchen, she repeated what he had said.

One year later, on the twenty-seventh of October 1855, in the big houses along the Hudson River, Irish girls slipped down the narrow staircases that took them from their attic rooms to the plain servants’ doors that freed them in the gardens. They met at the front gate of Moye House, and when complete, the gathering walked into the woods. Each held a lit candle in one hand and a small bell in the other, a thumb on the clapper to keep it silent.

The oldest of the servant girls was twenty-two and the youngest no more than twelve. For their first years in America, all they remembered of home was hunger like a claw and their escape on the sea. Often they dreamed that there had been no ship, that they’d crawled across the rough waves of the Atlantic. Cassius’s story made them remember Ireland, the feast day of Saint Maren, and how they had petitioned the saint with their prayers when they were children.

After entering the woods, they called up a song in Irish, the first language, the one they rarely spoke. They tied the bells to the branches of the mountain ash, which they called the crainn níos gasta, the quicken tree. Four days later, the girls returned. Untied the ribbon. Caught the bell in one hand. In Ireland, the bell had been meant to carry a prayer to the saint. In America, it was a wish.

The woman the boy had seen walked with them. They knew it, though none of them saw her, or knew who she was, or who among them she belonged to. They only sensed the extra footfall, the voice that was not a voice but an echo.

To this day, the woman and the bell haunt the woods. On nights when the wind is not too rough, the chime of the bell can be heard. In bell-speak, it is saying, Who looks for you?

1

Adair

March 2010

The children are untethered.

Their parents glide over the frozen surface of Prospect Park Lake, holding kite strings taut from the wind or simple magic. They are writing the names of the children into the ice with the blades of their skates. But the boys and girls, six in all, are drifting up into the storm, their arms outstretched. The sky awaits.

A summer ago, I was sketching this scene on a bench in Prospect Park, the third day of a heat wave that made descending into the subway a trip to a circle of hell. Always, I liked to draw out of the current season, but this, visiting winter in August, had been a deliberate diversion.

A woman parked her stroller and sat beside me as her daughter took off on a scooter. We recognized each other at the same time, and when she smiled and said hello, I returned her greeting through a grimace. A year ago, I had temped at Emily’s office.

When I was introduced to her, she said, Nice to meet you, Adair.

Not Claire or Blair or I’m sorry, what?

Indeed, the whole three months I’d been there, she’d greeted me every morning as she passed by the front desk, where I sat waiting for the phone to ring. When she went out to lunch, she’d ask if I wanted anything. I always declined, not wanting to burden her with an extra cup of coffee, though it was hard to cross the long hours of the afternoon on only the weak coffee in the office kitchen.

This friendliness, intermittent as it was, meant we couldn’t politely ignore each other, not while sitting on the same bench. As though it were a chore on a list, Emily initiated small talk.

You know, I wasn’t sure that was you for a minute. I didn’t remember your hair as red. Well, reddish, I should say. She smiled. Did you get highlights? I like it.

I answered slowly, out of practice. It was Sunday afternoon and I hadn’t spoken to another person since Friday afternoon when I left work.

It’s brown, really. The red only shows in the sun, I said, reaching up self-consciously to touch the ends. It was getting long again, nearly to my shoulders.

The baby, Hazel, was about to turn one, she told me. Soon she would go back to work full time, and God, was she looking forward to it. I recalled the office with its hospital-green walls and the droning meetings I transcribed, where every voice sounded like a housefly butting against a windowpane.

That’s great, I said.

Emily laughed, and before she could continue her obligatory update, she caught sight of the sketchpad in my lap.

That’s very good, she said.

Her obvious surprise qualified as a backhanded compliment. You can draw? You’re an artist? The girl who answered our phones? The girl who spent an entire eight-hour workday shredding our old files? But I was used to the amazement when my temporary coworkers saw me in a new context. It was as if they’d learned the Xerox machine had a lovely singing voice.

Really, Adair. These are fantastic. Can I—?

I hesitated before handing my book to her. She studied the sketch and asked if I drew portraits of children. Say yes, she added, because then she would pay me to draw her oldest.

Yes, I answered.

She smiled. Come up with a price, she told me. Then double it.

I saw her only twice more, when I drew her daughter and when I delivered the final portrait. But she emailed me frequently, mostly introductions to this mom or that one, all of whom hired me.

Once Emily was back at work, she had no time for side projects like mentoring talented but rudderless young women she came across in city parks. Her emails grew so brief they were the snail mail equivalent of a postcard (great!), and I chided myself for believing that she’d become a friend.

But my business had gotten its start. After a week of trying to think of a clever name, I went with the simple Portraits by Adair. They became a must-have in the neighborhood. A Maclaren stroller. A McCrohan portrait. My surname, easy to spell but tricky out loud, had finally proved an asset. (Crow-what? Hand?)

Then, a year after our meeting in the park, Emily emailed and asked me to draw Hazel, who was now two. Emily and her husband lived in Cobble Hill, four stops on the F train from me. It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when I arrived at the door beneath the stoop, as instructed. I rang the doorbell.

Emily answered as I was about to pull my glove off and knock. Her hair was a lighter shade of blond than I remembered, and it was pulled back in a messy bun that on Emily looked stylish. She was tall, too, and I straightened my shoulders as I went into the hallway.

She leaned in as if to hug me, but I put my hand out before she could. Unfazed, she took my hand and squeezed it gently.

Thank you for coming on short notice. I figured I’d better let you draw Hazel while you still can.

Emily led me into the living room. Hazel was in an armchair, an iPad in her lap. She didn’t look up as we came in. When I took a seat on the black couch, Emily offered me tea or coffee and then hesitated.

I have wine as well?

When I said wine would be great, she looked so happy that I was glad I hadn’t opted for caffeine.

Before departing for the kitchen, she knelt in front of Hazel and gathered the toddler’s feet in her hands. Hazel, love? Adair is here to draw your picture. Remember, like we talked about?

The little girl glanced up briefly. Emily squeezed her feet and stood up.

We don’t usually allow screen time during the day, she said, but James had her today and they were at the park for two hours, so she’s tired. Willow’s on a playdate.

I wanted to tell Emily that I didn’t care if Hazel watched cartoons for twelve hours straight, but instead I said, It’s better if she ignores me anyway.

Hazel is excellent at ignoring adults, Emily said, apparently cheered by the realization that she was not going to have to coax her child into responsiveness. I told the pediatrician I was worried about her hearing and he laughed at me.

Drawing Willow had set the template for how I worked. I always asked to sketch in person, but not so the children could pose for me. I liked to see what toys they chose and how they looked when they changed expression and what made them do so. This helped me decide where to settle a child. A train or a castle? In the sky or at sea or in space or in the woods or a garden?

Sometimes parents wanted one picture of all their children together, and I obliged, but I did prefer to draw them alone. Collective dreams were more difficult to capture.

On one of my earliest jobs, a four-year-old boy asked me to draw his imaginary friend beside him. No, his mother said wearily. Only you, Max.

When she left the room for a moment, I asked Max what his friend looked like. He whispered the answer, a child who’d always have secrets. When you get the picture back, I told him, look at the moon. I made a shadow of the craters, as though the old man, slightly bent, were standing just out of sight.

Hazel, do you have any imaginary friends?

Hazel glanced at me with her lips pursed, shook her head and turned back to the screen. She was more solid than Willow and brown-haired. Had their parents somehow foreseen this, or had the girls simply become their names? I would not have guessed the two were sisters.

Emily came back with a bottle of wine, already opened, and two glasses. She poured, then handed me a glass and set the bottle on the coffee table. It was, I noticed, already half empty. Emily took the iPad and I waited for Hazel to protest, but she stood up, resigned, and meandered over to a basket of toys.

I set the glass down and opened my sketchpad, angling it slightly for privacy. I didn’t voluntarily show parents the sketches when I was done, but if asked, I’d acquiesce. The page did unsettle some, since it wasn’t a capture of a whole child but drawings of eyes, a hand, a foot, a nose, a smile. The rough drafts of children.

Why am I drawing her while I can? I asked. Are you moving?

Maybe. It’s not definite yet.

I wasn’t surprised. Two kids in an apartment. They were probably overdue to move to Long Island or Westchester.

Emily asked how long I’d lived in Brooklyn, and I told her absently that I’d moved here right after college, almost four years ago. I’d had a roommate until recently but now I lived alone, and it was better.

Lots of the mothers talked to me as I worked, either because they felt they had to be good hostesses or because they were uneasy with silence. Maybe it was because they’d spent the day with toddlers and were happy to talk to anyone who could answer in full sentences. When I’d drawn Willow, Emily had sat at her laptop for most of the session, glancing up occasionally to watch.

How the hell can you afford your own place? No offense, Emily said, but is it a walk-in closet in somebody’s house?

I smiled. My landlady’s owned her house since the fifties, and she could get a lot more than what she’s charging me.

I deliberately let her stand as an elderly widow (she was) who either didn’t realize she could easily charge $2,000 a month for the four rooms on the top floor of her brownstone, or refused to, on moral grounds.

I was quite practiced in this sleight of hand, where I left out the parts of the story that would lead to questions. Like that it was my uncle who knew Sarah, and it was he who had called her to see if she would rent to me when I suddenly found myself with no roommate and not nearly enough money to live on my own.

Sarah was a poet who had taught school for twenty-five years, writing when she could find the time. Long ago, she’d decided tenants were too much trouble, but for me she made an exception, as a favor to my uncle but also to support an artist in a city that had turned from haven to burden.

You studied art in school, right? Emily asked. I think I remember you telling me this.

I did. Art with a minor in art history. I thought maybe I’d work in a museum. I mean, I still might, I said, though it had been almost two years since I’d sent out a résumé.

An art major, Emily said, amused. How did your parents feel about it? Willow keeps saying she wants to be an actress, and James keeps telling her that’s fine as long as she learns to code.

My pencil faltered on the page but I didn’t look up. My mother was a photographer and my father was an artist too, so— I stopped, as ever unsure how to describe two careers that had never been realized.

So you come by it naturally. Well, neither of us has an artistic bone in our body, so I don’t know where Willow gets it. I mean, if she has it. She hasn’t tried acting yet. We were going to start lessons or one of those theater summer camps, to see if she likes it, but money’s going to be tight for a while.

Because of moving? I asked.

Emily lifted her wine glass in a toast. James and I are separating.

I’m sorry, I said after a startled minute. I looked at Hazel, but she didn’t appear to be listening.

Emily shrugged, avoiding my eyes. James can’t pay half the rent here and on a place of his own. We’ve been talking about it for a month—we’re being very civil—but it’s about logistics. Nobody tells you that organizing a divorce is like planning a wedding. You know how weddings are supposed to be about beginning a life together but they’re really about where you stick the cousins you never see? Emily said. It’s also plain embarrassing. None of the books say that either. I haven’t told any of my friends yet.

I understood then. The wine was prodding her to rehearse the news, and I was the audience.

I’m sorry, I said again.

Emily sighed. Are your parents still together?

I nodded, cursing myself for mentioning photographer, artist. This had made them real.

How long have they been married? Mine celebrated their thirty-ninth few months ago.

For a moment, I panicked. Did everybody have this information at hand?

They got married, I think, almost two years before I was born, I said.

James says the girls will be fine. Every kid goes through some childhood trauma. If it’s something as normal as divorce, you’re lucky. He might be right. For me, it was my brother when he was in high school. Drugs, stealing. He’s fine now, but I do have something. You must have something. Everybody does, right?

She said it absently, not really a question, but I felt claustrophobic. It was like my first weeks of college, with my newly made friends sharing confidences, and me avoiding the personal by directing a question back to them.

The word orphan confused people, as if modern medicine had made it an anachronism. I’d have used it, though, if the story I had to tell began with my mother struggling in the ocean, my father swimming out to save her, one riptide taking them both. A fire, and both of them lost while I was saved. Me lifted out of our car, my parents still inside. This last one was born of a dream or a memory, I wasn’t sure which, of a time when we were going someplace but in the end did not.

Even two different fatal illnesses would have been easier to grasp. Leukemia and a brain tumor. But I said nothing, unwilling to tell the truth and draw an arrow straight to me.

A girl in my town went missing when I was twelve, I said.

Emily sat up straighter. Jesus, really? You’ve told me where you’re from—

Culleton, New York. It’s about two hours from here. I wasn’t born there, but I moved there, I said, as though my parents had chosen it for the cobblestone streets in the historic district or for its literary fame as the birthplace of a famous writer. Forget that I had an ancestor from Ireland there before the place was even named. That we—she—were woven into its myths.

Hazel glanced at me as she rooted through the toy basket, checking to see if I was still watching. She set some Legos on the floor and began snapping them together, up and up but not in a straight line. A builder, then. I went back to sketching.

Right, right, Emily said. There’s a writers’ residence there. A mom in Willow’s class was talking about applying.

I’d always known it was possible in writer-choked Brooklyn that somebody would hear my last name and say, Any relation to Michan McCrohan, the poet?

Long before it was Moye House Writers’ Colony, it was where Cassius Moye, the writer, was born and lived his whole life, except for the years he’d gone to fight the Civil War.

When I was sixteen, I’d drawn a charcoal of him sitting at his desk, just to break him out of the solemn stare in the daguerreotype that was always published with articles about him. That photograph had been taken shortly before he joined the Union army, a rich man who could have bought his way out of the fight but instead chose to go.

In my sketch, he is neither the young man heading off to war nor the broken man who returned home. This was intentional too. I wanted to take him out of his time. It was possible to be born at precisely the wrong moment. I knew what it was to be caught up in a tide that would take you simply because you were there, then.

In my rendering, Cassius is slouched in his chair, his hands folded on his stomach, his legs outstretched as he gazed out the window, smiling slightly. The picture is framed and hangs on the wall of the study where Cassius wrote.

When did this happen? How old was she?

Maybe Emily was glad to change the subject, or maybe she was interested in true crime. My hand ached from gripping the pencil.

Fifteen years ago, in 1995, I said. She was almost thirteen.

Almost. A climbing word. A word like hand, outstretched.

Your age, then, Emily said with something like wonder. Did you know her?

Culleton’s not that big, I said, reaching for the wine with my right hand, the pencil dangling from my left. We were in the same school. The Catholic school.

On my first day at St. Maren’s, my uncle had said to me, Keep your head down and learn what you can, Adair. Michan, tall and sober, his beard a brighter red than his hair. Michan, who patiently corrected those who mispronounced his name. It’s Mike-an. Michael, but with an n. The mothers dropping off their children turned as he passed by, touching their waists.

I wiped a clammy hand on my jeans.

That’s awful. Do they know what happened? Is it one of those cases where they know who did it and have no evidence? she asked.

I shook my head. Her mother said she took both her and her other daughter, who was a baby, into town to go to the Halloween parade. But nobody saw her. Nobody saw her since the day before. There were a lot of strangers in town, though.

Emily’s back was to the hallway, but from my vantage point I could see the darkened staircase that led up to the parlor floor. One blue-jeaned leg appeared and then another.

I recalled the age progressions. Rowan Kinnane at fifteen, at twenty-five. Incarnations of the dark-haired, blue-eyed girl who’d been photographed on her front porch on Easter Sunday, 1995. The collar of her green dress was crooked, the pearl button pressed against her throat. She was not wearing her glasses.

The picture appeared on the Missing posters that were stapled to every telephone pole in Culleton throughout that autumn and winter. Yet by the time she vanished in October, she’d grown her bangs out. She’d never worn a dress unless she had to. The wrong girl was being advertised. Each time I passed a poster, I’d touch the photograph as if to sweep her bangs aside with the tip of my finger. Even when her image turned gray and indistinct, worn away by weather, I’d try to fix it.

The Rowan who knelt on Emily’s step and peered at me from between the railings of the banister was the twelve-year-old who looked as she had when I last saw her, two days before she disappeared. Her hair was pulled back in two barrettes. She straightened her glasses, the ones with the square frames that our classmates had teased her about.

You don’t haunt other people’s houses, I thought.

She grinned in the way that had driven her mother a little bit mad.

You don’t haunt houses. You haunt people.

I looked away. The wine glass felt heavy in my hand. I cupped the bottom.

And they never found her. I can’t even imagine, Emily said. Did it ever happen again?

I drew a rudimentary tree beneath Hazel’s hand.

She was the only one, I said.

How much simpler it would be if another local girl had stepped into the same abyss. Then another and another. The abductor could be decisively declared a stranger, a random child-hunter.

There were searches, a lot of searches, but no, they never found a thing, I said and then repeated it. Not a thing.

In the woods behind Moye House there is a chapel. Once, it was the only Catholic church in the area, built to serve the Irish who came to work on the railroad and in the foundry. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had been replaced by a much grander church and the chapel bell was saved for Christmas Eve. But it rang on the morning of the first full day Rowan was gone, in the hope that if she was only lost in the woods or on the mountain, she might