The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  “Don’t worry yourself too much, now,” he said. “I’ll bet she’ll turn up with a grand story.” But the grim tone of his voice told me he didn’t believe a word of it.

  10

  1993

  Things started moving quickly after that. Byrne and McNeely got back to me the next day to tell me that they had found the bus driver who had taken Erin down on the sixteenth. He drove the private bus to Glendalough, but he said the bus had been empty and she’d asked if he could drop her in Glenmalure. He blushed when he said it and finally admitted she’d offered him five pounds but he hadn’t taken the money. Byrne told me that the guards in Wicklow were working with the Army Reserve to search the forest and mountains where I’d found the necklace, and would interview potential witnesses, including the bus driver.

  I tried to settle in at Erin’s, but it was strange sleeping in her bed while I waited for news. The sheets smelled faintly of her perfume. The next day I woke up and went to the corner store to get milk. I grabbed an Irish Independent and was reading a story about Erin when Emer and Daisy came into the kitchen.

  “Is there news?” Emer asked, flipping the switch on the electric kettle.

  I pushed the paper across the table to her. Gardaí Searching for American in Wicklow. Above a small reproduction of Erin’s picture, the article read, “The Gardaí are looking for any information about the whereabouts of an American student, Erin Flaherty, 23, who has been living in Dublin for the past year. Flaherty was last seen in Glenmalure on the afternoon of September 16 and the Gardaí will search the area today. Anyone who may have seen her or who may have information about her movements on the sixteenth of September is asked to contact the Gardaí.”

  “It’s awful, waiting,” I told them. “You haven’t thought of anything, have you? The names of any of the guys who called, anything like that? Any friends who visited the house?”

  Daisy looked up. “I realized last night. Her school friends came for a few days back in the summer. I think they were going Interrailing and they stopped in Dublin to see her. She seemed to have a good laugh with them.”

  “Really? American friends? Jessica? Was that one of them?”

  “Yeah, and two lads. Chris, I think, and Brian.”

  If Uncle Danny knew Erin’s best friends from high school had visited Dublin, he hadn’t said anything about it to me. Everything seemed to speed up for a moment. Maybe she was traveling around Europe with Jessica right now. “You don’t think she might have been going to meet them or anything like that?”

  Emer said, “She didn’t say it to us anyway. And that was back in the summer.”

  “I’ll check with my uncle and see if he’s been in touch with Jess’s parents.”

  Emer and Daisy said they were going to the shops and did I need anything? I asked them to get me more coffee and once they were gone, I shut Erin’s door and lay down on the bed, my eyes closed.

  They were back an hour later. From Erin’s room, I could hear the front door open and close and their voices out in the living room. Something made me get up and tiptoe to the door, where I pressed my ear against the wood.

  “Put it there,” Emer called out. “We’ll just be getting it out again in a bit.” They must have been unpacking groceries.

  “Did you…?” Their voices were too low for me to make out what they were saying. I moved my ear to the crack between the door and the wall. There were a few minutes of silence.

  One of them said something I didn’t understand and it took me a minute to realize they were speaking Irish. I took two semesters at Notre Dame and got really into the idea that I was speaking the language of my ancestors. I even joined a little Irish society on campus my sophomore year. But then I let it go and I don’t remember a lot—Conas tá tu? (Cone is Taw Too? How are you?) Go raibh maith agat. (Go Rev Mahagut. Thank you.)—I could only pick out words here and there. An raibh Erin … (On Rev Erin … Did Erin…)

  One phrase stood out, though.

  Tabhair aire. Pronounced Tur arah.

  I remember that, remember my teacher showing a slideshow with Irish phrases.

  Tabhair aire.

  A warning. Take care. Be careful.

  * * *

  Byrne called the next morning to say they had something: a woman named Eda Curran who said Erin had stayed at her bed-and-breakfast near the Drumgoff Crossroads.

  “Here’s the thing, though,” Roly Byrne said. Here’s the ting. I could hear the excitement coming down the phone line. “It was the sixteenth she stayed there.”

  “So…” I was trying to put it all together, what it meant. “So she…”

  “So she didn’t disappear up there on the sixteenth,” he finished for me. “On the night of the sixteenth she was alive and well and sleeping at the Rivers Glen Bed and Breakfast. The woman who owns it said she was walking on the Wicklow Way. The next morning she said she was getting a bus. Didn’t say where she was going.”

  “So she must have lost the necklace the day before?”

  “Yeah.” Roly shouted something to someone else in the room. “And that’s not all.” He told me they’d searched the bed-and-breakfast. At first they hadn’t found anything, but as they were leaving, McNeely had asked if there was another toilet in the house.

  “In the rubbish there was a little crumpled-up piece of paper,” he told me, his voice fast and excited over the phone. “It had a bus departure time written on it. We think it’s your cousin’s handwriting, based on the guest book she signed. It’s for the seventeenth, Miss D’arcy. From Dublin.”

  It took me a minute to understand what he was saying. After staying at the bed-and-breakfast, Erin had been planning to go back to Dublin? To take a bus?

  “Did she take the bus? Where is she now?”

  “It didn’t say where, just the time and ‘Busáras,’ which is the central bus station. None of the drivers remember her but we’re looking into it right now. I’ll ring you if anything turns up. One other thing. Does the name Gary Curran mean anything?”

  “No.”

  “He’s the son of the woman at the bed-and-breakfast. He works for the forestry service sometimes. When he was at university he got a bit too enthusiastic about a young one who didn’t return his enthusiasm. We’re looking at that, too. In the meantime, see if there’s anything else you can remember that could help us out, that could give us a sense of her state of mind. Sure, it always helps to have a nice, full picture of the subject.” I could hear people talking in the background, phones ringing. I thought about those green-and-brown mountains, the clouds moving over them.

  “Okay,” I said.

  But he’d already hung up.

  Erin, where are you?

  I tried to think about Erin. I tried to remember.

  Erin.

  Erin.

  Erin is quick, a blur, always in motion. Maggie sits quietly and plays or looks through books. I am Maggie. Maggie is quiet. Erin is not. Erin is freckles and brown skin in the summer. She is hair in her face and quick smile and loud voice. Erin is always moving. Grown-ups have to watch her every second or she’ll be off, over the fence, out into the road. Uncle Danny is tired all the time. He doesn’t have the energy to do it. She gets away, over to the neighbors’, out to the beach, into the water. Someone finds her playing alone in a neighbor’s yard.

  She starts staying at our house more so my mom can watch her. I hear my mom say to my dad, “Sometimes I wish I had a leash for her.”

  “Just like Brenda,” my dad says.

  “You’re terrible,” my mom says, but she’s laughing. I don’t know what they mean.

  But I imagine Erin on a leash. She’s a happy, loud, jumping dog, a golden retriever or a Labrador. She’s always trying to get away.

  Erin’s mother’s name was Brenda. I ask my mother about it and she tells me. Brenda. She grew up in Ireland. She somehow ended up at Uncle Danny’s pub and applied for a job as a waitress and “she and Uncle Danny liked each other a lot,” my mom says. When I a
sk what happened to her, she says that Brenda “wasn’t happy” and she “had some problems.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “She just … She had trouble staying put. Don’t say anything to Erin.”

  I wouldn’t. I’ve already figured out that Erin doesn’t like to talk about it.

  “Where did she go?”

  “We don’t know. She doesn’t seem to want to be in touch with Uncle Danny.”

  “Or Erin?”

  My mom sighs. “Or Erin.”

  Later that night, when she comes to put me to bed, my mom says in my ear, “You know I’m not going anywhere, right, sweetie? That was a different thing, what happened with Erin’s mom.”

  “Yeah. But … why did she go away?”

  “Like I said, she just … she couldn’t stay put.” She pushes my hair back from my forehead, kisses me. “So we have to be extra nice to Erin, right?” She lies down next to me for a little bit and I breathe in her scent, Alberto VO5 shampoo, cigarette smoke from the bar.

  After that, I imagine Brenda as a helium balloon with its string tied to the roof of Uncle Danny’s house.

  I imagine the balloon tugging, trying to get away and finally breaking free, floating up into the air until it’s just a tiny red dot high above us, among the clouds.

  11

  FRIDAY, MAY 27,

  2016

  The faces around the table blur and I take a deep breath, feeling my brain click into vigilance. This is my chance to get a sense of the investigation. If I am very careful, I may be able to get them to tell me more than they want to. I need to answer their questions, and I need to do it in a way that invites more. The longer this goes on, the better my chances.

  They go over the public details of the case for an hour, double-checking things with me, going over how I came to find the necklace. I tell them the story as clearly and concisely as I can.

  “This isn’t a judgment, like, but why didn’t you ring the Guards when you realized she’d been to Glenmalure?” Joey asks me. “When you realized she’d been up to the woods?”

  I meet his eyes. “I know it looks weird now, but I really thought she might be up there, just waiting for me. I know how that sounds. I do. But she’d done it so many times before. Disappeared, I mean.”

  “Everyone described her state of mind before her disappearance as fine, normal,” John White says. “Your actions suggest otherwise.”

  “I know. Erin was … She could be erratic, unpredictable. At the time, no one thought it was more than teenage rebellion. She went through periods where she was drinking a lot, maybe more than that, not taking care of herself. I worried about her, I wanted to protect her. That’s the only way I can explain my actions now.” I’m telling him the truth and he knows it. He nods. When I meet his eyes, he looks away. I get a little ping of recognition from some drawer of the filing cabinet in my brain. He looks familiar, and I wonder if I met him on the original investigation.

  “After we found the piece of paper at the bed-and-breakfast, the investigation shifted back to Dublin,” Griz says. “I don’t mean to call you out, Roly, but we’re in the business of reviewing decisions made in past cases. Did you agree with that decision to shift the investigation?”

  Roly pretends to stab himself in the back, but he’s got a grin on his face and he nods at her to say, good question.

  “It made perfect sense,” I say. “They’d already searched the hills around the walking trails. She wasn’t there. All of her actions suggested she was going back to Dublin that next day. It was an understandable shift.” They can all hear my hesitation. “But I still thought there was something in Wicklow we didn’t find. Maybe not … her. But something.” I look up, decide to risk it. “I always wondered about the door-to-doors, whether there were any eyewitnesses who didn’t want to come forward because their underwear drawers were filled with bags of pot. You know.”

  Nods around the table, but nothing else. If there were underwear drawers, they’re not going to tell me.

  “We haven’t been able to find any links between Erin and June Talbot, Teresa McKenny, or Niamh Horrigan,” Griz says, moving on. “There isn’t anything you can think of there?”

  “Well, there’s the geographic link,” I say. “Other than that, no. But there must be potential links there. Everyone Erin came into contact with on her trips to Glenmalure is a possible link. The guy at the B-and-B, right? Whatever happened with him? Or the bus driver?”

  “We’re on it,” Roly says quickly, and I look up to find a tall man with gray hair standing in the doorway. I know I recognize him from before. Superintendent Wilcox. “What else would you like to ask Detective D’arcy?”

  Griz exchanges a glance with him that I can’t read. “Well, the romantic angle is the obvious one. We have all these men who she knew, who she may have been involved with, but nothing definite on any of them. You knew her well. Did you ever have an instinct about that?” They’re right to be thinking this way. Murderers, even serial ones, have to identify their victims somehow. Truly random abductions and killings are remarkably rare.

  I start to tell them that any one of the men who were original persons of interest could be our guy, that I wasn’t satisfied by their alibis, that boys and then men had become obsessed with Erin before, but then I realize that’s not what Griz is asking. “My instinct was that there was someone,” I tell her. “Someone we didn’t know about, someone who wasn’t a main suspect in the original investigation. In the years since … I was over here, since she disappeared, I’ve come to think of him as this … this gray shadow. That’s how I see him. I’ve had dreams and … All of her actions those last few days, they make me think she was meeting someone. That guy, whoever he is. That’s who I think it is. And I think he must have a connection with Talbot and McKenny and Niamh Horrigan, too. Even if it’s just the geographic one, even if he happened to come across them because he delivered vegetables or cement or drove to work a particular way every morning and his route took him by the roads where they all disappeared. It’s something like that. You asked me about my instinct and that’s my instinct.”

  Everyone’s silent.

  “We know about those serial murders on Long Island,” Griz blurts out suddenly. “We know what you did there. You profiled that fella. You found him. The FBI couldn’t do it and you did it. What’s this fella’s profile? Who is he?”

  I force myself to wait. The panic starts, but I know this is my leverage. Carefully, I say, “I don’t have all the data I’d need. I couldn’t profile without that. But the infrequency, the span of the disappearances and killings. That’s the thing that jumps out at me—1993, 1998, 2006, 2016. What’s the pattern there? Your people are good. You’ve looked. But there must be something you’re not seeing. Are there other crimes that haven’t been included? It’s a long time line. The infrequency makes me think you’re missing something.”

  “Nothing else fits,” Roly says. “Believe me, we’ve looked.”

  “So, what’s happening in this guy’s life that these were his opportunities?”

  I can see on their faces that they’ve spent so much time thinking about this exact issue that my raising it feels like nails on a chalkboard. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Roly mutters.

  We go over a few more details and then John White says, “What about the political angle? What was your instinct on that?” He gives the word instinct a little stress that makes me pay attention. He thinks my instinct is bullshit.

  I shake my head and say, “I’ve gone over and over that so many times I can’t count. There’s nothing specific. She wasn’t ever overtly nationalist around me. But I mean, my uncle has a picture of Gerry Adams hanging in the bar.”

  “But sure, so does every Irish bar in America,” Joey says.

  “Yeah, you’re right. And Erin just … She wasn’t interested in any of that. At least she wasn’t before she came over here.”

  “This case,” John White says. “I keep going arou
nd with it. It’s an odd one. No matter how many times I read the files, I don’t feel like I have a sense of it, of her.”

  I don’t say anything, though I agree with him. It feels like agreeing would be a betrayal of Erin.

  When it’s clear they won’t get anything more useful out of me, Roly stands up, a little too quickly, and says, “Anything else, so? Thank you, Detective D’arcy. Everyone, back to your work.”

  When they’ve gone, Wilcox comes in and shakes my hand. He’s thinner, grayer, but I remember the fine-boned face, the nice suit and careful blue eyes. He’s the stern, upperclass dad in a romantic drama. “Thank you for your assistance, Miss D’arcy. Detective Inspector Byrne tells me you have made a career in law enforcement as well. Quite a successful one, it seems.”

  “Oh, well, thank you.”

  “It must be interesting to compare techniques,” he says.

  “It’s mostly the same, actually. Your team is doing an excellent job.”

  He watches me for a minute. He was a handsome man, back then. He still is, elegant, all silver hair and blue eyes and shirt collar. “God willing, there’ll be some progress to report,” he says.

  When he’s gone, Roly announces, “Now then, I want you lot working away like busy little beavers. Not a word until you’ve got something for me. The clock is ticking. If there’s a connection between Niamh Horrigan, Teresa McKenny, June Talbot, and Erin Flaherty, we need to find it yesterday. McKenny’s and Talbot’s bodies were found two weeks after they went missing and all indications were that they’d been alive for most of those two weeks. Niamh went missing last Saturday. Tomorrow it will be a week. That means that time is of the essence here. If we’ve just found Erin Flaherty’s remains in Wicklow, then that gives us a new opportunity for evidence. She’s not in the water. If there is anything we can find that can help us get this bastard, we need to do it fast. I can’t think too much about what Niamh Horrigan is going through, but if there’s anything we can do to get her back, we’re damned well going to do it.”