The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  “My sense is that the Garda Síochána is doing an excellent job,” I say. I put my room key into my bag and zip up my jacket.

  But he’s still standing there, his body a barrier between me and the elevator. “A number of people have mentioned to me that they’re not sure why the Guards aren’t using you more, using your expertise. Would you like to be more involved in the investigation, Detective D’arcy?”

  I look up at him. “The Guards are doing an excellent job,” I say. “I have a lot of confidence in them.”

  “Have you been told that Niamh’s family wants to meet you?”

  Now I’m interested. “Are you making that up?”

  “No, no,” he says. “I wouldn’t make up something like that. They want to talk to you. They want to meet you. Why are the Guards keeping that from you?”

  I watch him for a moment. He’s got an angle, but maybe I do, too. “Okay, what’s your theory?” I ask him. “You seem to really want to talk to me. What’s your theory on my cousin? On Niamh?”

  He smiles kindly, a favorite college professor getting ready to answer a question. “I was just starting out when your cousin went missing,” he says. “They had me writing stories about cattle auctions and traffic. I’ve only read my colleagues’ stories in the archives. But I think whoever took your cousin never stopped taking women and I think he took Niamh Horrigan and I think whoever it is there in the trees at Glenmalure was taken by him, too. Don’t you want to help find him? It must be driving you mad, with all your expertise. I mean, you bested the fecking FBI.”

  “Is that what you told the Horrigans?” I ask him.

  He only appears a little embarrassed.

  “I’m just looking for some information,” he says. “I’m a journalist. This is quite a confusing situation, as you know. My editor, like, he thinks I’m not working hard enough on this.”

  I feel the rage build up inside me. “Don’t do that. I know who you are. Are you kidding me? Do you know how many hours I’ve spent reading every fucking article about this case? I’ve read everything you’ve ever written, Stephen P. Hines, for the Independent. You’re a good reporter, you’re a dogged reporter. You’re obsessed with these cases. I can tell. So don’t pretend you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “All right,” he says. He’s smiling. This is just what he wanted. “Thanks for that. Really, very flattering. I can show my appreciation by giving you a little scoop. It’s not public. They’re just about to arrest some guy down in Wicklow.”

  Everything stops for a minute. I can hear a low buzzing coming from the emergency exit light on the wall.

  “Who?” I want to shake him and demand he tell me what he knows. Everything narrows down to his face, the dim hallway. Suddenly, I realize what he’s saying, what he’s doing. I take a deep breath. “I would be happy to meet with the Horrigans,” I tell him. “Of course I would. And I would be happy to aid the investigation in any way I can. But it’s delicate. I’m a civilian when I’m here.” I keep laying it on. “They would have to believe that the Horrigans really want me involved. The Horrigans would have to demand that I help with the profiling, really. Perhaps they might threaten to go to the press if I didn’t. I’d need access to a lot of case files and interviews. That’s not strictly legal. And it would have to be very clear that they were asking for this. That it’s not me who’s trying to get in on this.”

  Stephen Hines smiles angelically and spreads his hands at his sides.

  “I think we all just want to find Niamh safe and sound,” he says. “I think that’s what we all want. I’m sure someone will be in touch, Detective D’arcy.”

  I stand there, breathless, for a few minutes after he walks away.

  I’ve just played the only card I have.

  I’m sorry, Roly.

  I don’t feel nearly as guilty as I should.

  20

  1993

  I caught up to Byrne and McNeely outside the Irishtown Garda Station that next morning to tell them about Erin and Niall from Arklow.

  October 8. She had been missing for three weeks.

  They didn’t look happy to see me but they stopped and listened to me while I told them about the men at the Raven.

  Byrne looked up at the sky for a minute, then pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache. “That’s interesting. He really said that?”

  “Yeah. What does that mean? I know it’s for Provisional IRA, but I don’t really get it. Do they dress a particular way or something?”

  “Well, it might mean that your man from the bar is a prejudiced git and he thinks anyone with a northern accent is a terrorist, but it also might mean that they’re actually Provos. He’s right. There’s a sorta look, an energy. Can’t really explain it.”

  Bernie sighed but didn’t say anything.

  I said, “The town where Erin and I grew up on Long Island? It’s a regular suburb, but it’s Long Island, and there are a few Mafia guys living there. They don’t come into the bar a lot—I guess ’cause it’s an Irish bar—but I always know when they do, even if I’ve never seen them before. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is. Were they real Mafia guys? Like The Godfather? That sorta thing?”

  “Yeah. They had these shirts they always wore. Silk. I’ve never seen any other man wear a shirt like that.”

  He grinned. “‘I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,’” he said, in what was supposed to be The Godfather but didn’t quite hit the mark.

  Bernie rolled her eyes.

  “You sound more like Vincent Connelly than Vito Corleone,” I said.

  Roly and I grinned at each other. “Very funny,” he said. Foony.

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked.

  He glanced at Bernie. “We’re going to go down to the Westbury Hotel and we’re going to try to figure out who they were.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “How did I know you were going to ask me that? No, you can’t.”

  McNeely said, “I understand that you’re worried about your cousin, but you going off and pretending to be an amateur detective isn’t going to help us find her, and it’s likely to hurt, if you want to know the truth.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose. I went in there and I could tell he recognized me. I figured he might know something and thought I should ask him. If you’d gone in there he wouldn’t have told you.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. She studied me for a couple of seconds.

  We stood there for a moment in awkward silence and then I asked McNeely, “Are you from Northern Ireland?”

  Something crossed her face, annoyance maybe, and she said, “That’s right. I was raised in Armagh.”

  “That must have been intense, growing up there,” I said, then immediately felt stupid when I saw her face.

  “Ah, yeah, ‘intense’ is one word for it,” she said, then studied me for a long moment before she said, “Well, we’d better leg it, Roly.”

  “We’ll let you know if there’s anything,” he said.

  I’d already turned around and was walking back down Charlemont Place when he called out, “Miss D’arcy!” and I stopped and turned around to find him jogging after me.

  He stopped when he got to me and said, a little out of breath, “Let me ask ya something. She may or may not have come back to Dublin. She may or may not have known those fellas at the pub. I don’t know what to think about this thing. Where do you think she is?”

  I watched a couple walking by the canal. “When we were little, she used to run away all the time. She didn’t do it to be cruel or to make people worry. She just … ran. But she always came back.” There was a long silence. “Or I could always find her,” I added.

  Byrne didn’t say anything and I kept talking. “I think something happened to her. If she came back to take a bus, it was because she was going to meet someone. And that someone knows where she is.”

  “Okay.” He looked tired all of a sudden and I d
idn’t believe him when he said, “Don’t worry too much about Detective McNeely. She just doesn’t like Americans much.”

  “Why?”

  “That,” he said, with a little grin that wasn’t really a grin, “is a long story for another day.”

  * * *

  I got back to the house just as Emer and Daisy were leaving for classes. They’d bought the Irish Independent and I asked if I could read it.

  “’Course. I’m finished with it,” Daisy told me, drinking a cup of tea while Emer packed up her books. “Actually, do you know, I was reading it and I think I remembered the name of your man who rang for Erin. The sort o’ American-sounding one. It was that story that made me think of it. I can’t believe I forgot it, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “Hacky O’Hanrahan.” She said it in a funny voice.

  “What?” We both laughed. “It sounds like a cartoon character.”

  “I know. I wouldn’t have remembered but there’s a story about a fella named Hackman O’Hanrahan Sr. in the paper today and I thought, that was the same name as the one who called.” She picked up the paper, turned it to an inside page, and handed it over.

  IAI Chief O’Hanrahan Seeks Investors for New Sectors Fund

  The Irish American banker Hackman O’Hanrahan Sr. announced today a new fund for investors in new sectors in the Republic. O’Hanrahan, a former director of Allied Irish Banks and the Green Island Fund, calls the new fund a rare opportunity for the manufacturing and computer sector …

  “I’d say your man is his son,” Emer said.

  “That makes sense. That would make sense, right? If his father’s been over here doing business, his accent might be a bit funny. And he could be a Trinity student, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, with a look I couldn’t quite read. “There are loads of Americans at Trinity.”

  After they’d gone, I reread the story and paced around the house a bit, thinking.

  If Erin had been seeing this Hacky O’Hanrahan guy, he might know something about where she was and he might be able to tell us about her state of mind. He might know where she went when she left the bed-and-breakfast.

  I was just about to leave the house when the phone rang.

  “Maggie?” I didn’t recognize the voice but she said, “It’s Jess. Jess Friedman. My mom said you were trying to get in touch with us about Erin.” I can hear the emotion in her voice. “I’m with Lisa and Chris and Brian. We’re in Madrid at a youth hostel and my phone card might run out but she said you wanted to know when’s the last time we saw Erin. It was when we left Dublin in August.”

  “So she didn’t come over to travel with you or anything?”

  “No,” she said. “Is she okay? What’s going on?”

  I told her the basics. “The last place she was seen was at this bed-and-breakfast. She didn’t tell you about a boyfriend or anything or any travel plans, did she? How long did you guys stay with her?”

  “Three nights,” Jess said. “We flew into Dublin and stayed with her for, yeah, three nights, then took the ferry over to London and then Lisa and I met up with Stacy and we went over to France and started Eurailing. Brian was in London with college friends. Chris visited his family in Ireland then went over to London. And then they came over to Paris and met us.”

  “How did Erin seem?”

  “I guess good,” Jessica said. “Like she liked it there. She was … I don’t know. Different but happy.”

  “What do you mean different?”

  “She was just … She kept trying to talk about like, the news. There was some riot or something. She wanted to talk about it, but I didn’t really know anything about it. Here’s Chris.”

  Chris Fallon was one of Erin’s friends, too. “It’s Chris. Yeah, she seemed pretty happy. What did you think, Bri?”

  I heard Brian Lombardi’s voice say, “Yeah, she seemed good. You know Erin.” His voice called up his face. I’d had a huge crush on Brian in high school. He and his older brother, Frank, had both been popular, good-looking, and talented athletes.

  Jessica got back on and said, “Well, yeah. The last night, though. She … we went out. We had a lot to drink. And then she took us to this, like, club. We were all dancing and having so much fun. It was weird, you could only order, like, red wine. And then she just disappeared. We were ready to go home and we couldn’t find her. We searched for like an hour. We didn’t know what to do so we figured out how to get back to her house and we had to knock on the door and wake up her roommates. Chris was really pissed.”

  “So what happened? Did she come back the next day?”

  “Yeah. She came in and said she’d been to mass. It was weird. We were already up because we had to catch the ferry.”

  “Mass?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did she say she’d started going regularly?”

  “No, but she said something about Father Anthony. You know, just that she still couldn’t believe he was gone, that she really missed him. Anyway, she said she was sorry, she was really drunk and whatever, but she didn’t say who she’d been with.” I heard a beeping over the line. “Shit, Maggie, the card’s about to run out. I’ll try to—”

  The phone cut out and I stood there for a moment listening to the silence coming across the line.

  Erin has her Holy Communion first, when she’s in second grade.

  My mom gets her a white lacy dress with puffy sleeves and a white ribbon around the waist. She looks like a bride and I’m so jealous I think about spilling paint on the dress so she can’t wear it.

  I sit in the church next to my parents and watch Erin go up to kneel for the first time and take the wafer from Father Patrick. Father Anthony stands nearby and smiles at us. I feel guilty, thinking about how I wanted to spill paint on the dress, and I’m glad I don’t have to confess, for I know that Father Anthony won’t like me if I tell him how I feel.

  I watch Erin as she goes, Jessica behind her. When she kneels, she turns her face up to Father Patrick and the sun shining in through the windows covers her in golden light. She smiles and she looks happier than I’ve ever seen her, as though she’s smiling at Jesus. Later, I hear her tell Father Anthony that she felt Jesus there next to her, that she felt his presence, heard him telling her what to do.

  When I make my communion a year later, the lace dress is scratchy against my neck and the wafer makes my mouth feel funny. I wait to hear Jesus’s voice, but he never speaks to me.

  21

  1993

  There was no listing in the Dublin phone book for a Hackman O’Hanrahan, but there was a listing for the IAI group, with an address on Fitzwilliam Place, not far from St. Stephen’s Green.

  Fitzwilliam Place was a long avenue lined with huge Georgian houses, all of them with brightly painted doors and brass knockers and tiny signs indicating the businesses occupying each floor.

  The air smelled of peat fires and I thought of Conor, a sudden thrilling image of his neck and face flashing into my mind. I shook my head and tried the door. It was locked, but a little sign next to it instructed me to press the bell, and once I did, the door clicked open and let me into a tastefully decorated reception area.

  The woman behind the desk looked up curiously at me. She was perfect: long brown hair, a pale blue wool pantsuit and lavender silk scarf at her throat, and I was suddenly conscious of my jeans and sweater and backpack. “Can I help you?” she asked, studying me over the top of her reading spectacles.

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for a friend of mine. Hacky O’Hanrahan? I’m over here just traveling around and he said if I was ever in Dublin I should look him up. He gave me this address, but I didn’t realize it was a business…”

  The woman smiled. “His father owns the investment company,” she said. “That must be why he gave you this address. Mr. O’Hanrahan Jr. has a flat in Merrion Square, I believe. I’ll check on the number for you.”

  She disappeared through the door b
ehind her desk and came back a few minutes later with a piece of expensive-looking blue paper with a tasteful “IAI Investment Fund” embossed at the top. She’d written 93 Merrion Square West, #3 on the paper. I thanked her and headed back out to find Hacky O’Hanrahan.

  Merrion Square was a green rectangle surrounded by streets of brick Georgians. Some of the houses had freshly painted doors and neat black iron fences, but others looked a bit shabby. Hacky O’Hanrahan’s address fell somewhere in between. I stood there for a minute, trying to get a feel for the building before I rang the bell. There were four floors and the little directory next to the door had a law firm listed for the first floor and then the name Murphy written in pencil but scratched out. There were no names by the other two.

  I was about to ring the bell when the cobalt blue door flew open, nearly knocking me to the ground, and two boys came running out, backpacks flying behind them.

  “I’m fucking late!” one said to the other.

  “I am as well, Hoopers. Shite, shite, shite!” The taller of the two stopped to hunch down on the stairs to tie his bootlaces and I was about to ask if either of them knew Hacky O’Hanrahan when the taller, better-looking one, looked up and said, “Erin?”

  I tried to remember later exactly what combination of emotions flashed across his face. The first was fear, the second confusion, and the third was actually something more hopeful, maybe even excitement.

  My first thought was, He’s exactly Erin’s type. He had longish brown hair that curled around his ears and a conventionally handsome face. His clothes were shabbily expensive: worn cords, a gray cashmere sweater, leather boots.

  I stuck out my hand. “I’m Erin’s cousin Maggie, actually. I know I look like her. You’re Hacky O’Hanrahan. Can I ask you a few questions?” I was flustered, not quite ready for this.

  Suddenly he was guarded. His friend was still standing there. O’Hanrahan pushed his hair out of his face. “I’m really late, actually,” he said. “I can’t really talk now.”

  “Can I just walk with you? I’m heading that way, too.”