The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  “Mags, maybe she did take off, you know? Even Danny has started wondering about that.”

  “I know, Dad. But there are some strange things going on here, and even if she took off, I’m worried maybe she isn’t … thinking straight.”

  “Maybe I should come over,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let you handle this on your own. I’ve been so … tired, since your mom. But I’m doing better. Want me to come over?”

  I could feel the temptation of it. He’d come over, he’d talk to Roly. He’d make lots of noise. But then I thought of his face the day I left, thin, drawn, his shoulders slumped in his baggy suit. “Let’s give it another week,” I told him. “The police may find something by then.”

  “What do you think? Do you think she just took off? Danny asked me if I thought she had it in her, to do that, and I said no, though it’s so much better than the alternative.”

  “I don’t know, Dad. I don’t think so, but there’s just nothing to go on. I don’t like to tell Uncle Danny, but I think we may not know. I think she may just have disappeared into thin air.”

  “Oh, darlin’. I’m so sorry.” His voice was quiet, tired, and I was suddenly overcome with the most intense wave of homesickness I’d ever felt. I wanted to be home, instantly, magically. I wanted to walk through the door and find him sitting in his chair reading the papers, a glass of gin by his foot. I wanted to tell him everything but I didn’t want him to worry.

  “Love you,” I told him. “Don’t worry.”

  I thought about Niall Deasey and Arklow. I even went so far as to go to the bus station and look at the schedule. There were four buses a day. 11:30. It only took an hour.

  When I talked to Uncle Danny, I didn’t know what to say anymore, so I lied and said that the police were following lots of leads and that I was making sure that they kept Erin on the front burner. My dad asked again if I wanted him to come over and I put him off for another week.

  I barely slept that night, the room closing in on me from all sides, the loneliness and sadness crushing my chest. I cried, really cried, for the first time since I had arrived in Dublin, sobbing, raggedy crying I’m sure Emer and Daisy could hear through the walls, and I woke up groggy, frustrated, and homesick, and decided I was going to demand some answers from Roly and Bernie.

  I was walking down Irishtown Road toward the Garda station when I saw Bernie McNeely walking toward me. She stopped, trying to figure out if she could get away before I saw her. When she realized the game was up, she waved and came to meet me.

  “Hi, D’arcy,” she said. “I know we’ve been a bit hard to pin down.”

  “What’s going on?”

  She looked up and down the sidewalk. “Let’s go for a coffee. I can tell you a bit.”

  “Everybody’s nervous about Deasey,” she told me, once we were settled into a coffee shop far enough away from the station. “He’s got a lot of paper associated with himself.

  “Apparently, he’s been on everyone’s radar for a while now. His father was a fella named Petey Deasey. He was an old republican from way back. Petey’s da fought in the civil war; as a lad, he probably served as a messenger. Grew up in it, ya know. We know Petey ran guns for the IRA in the fifties. He had two families, one in Ireland and one over in London. Two wives, two houses. He went back and forth for years, one step ahead of whoever was looking for him. I once heard a story about a shootout down in Wicklow in 1967. He holed up in some cottage down there with a load of guns from America. The Guards had a standoff with him for nearly twenty-four hours. Right rebels, that family.

  “Petey Deasey is a bit old to make trouble now, but his boy Niall is involved in various criminal enterprises in Wicklow and Wexford. He definitely has some Republican connections up north. He was suspected in an arms running ring in eighty-nine, and though they never got the evidence, my friend swears Deasey did it and is probably still doing it. He’s got a half-brother in London who they think was somehow connected to it over there.” She gestured vaguely at the Irish Sea.

  “What about Erin?”

  “Someone asked him about meeting her at the Raven. He claims those fellas with him were in town for a dog conference.”

  “A what?”

  “Like a get-together of breeders of those real jumpy dogs, boxers. That’s what he claims. He says they chitchatted to Erin but that was all.”

  “But what if he’s lying? What if he’s holding Erin or knows where she is—” I was trying to keep my voice down, but Bernie’s face told me I hadn’t done a very good job.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “If I go down to Arklow,” I told her, “I could just see how he reacts when he sees me.” She didn’t say anything.

  Her hands were fidgeting around her coffee mug, and when the bell over the door jangled, she started and looked up to watch two older women, laden with shopping bags, coming through the door.

  “No, it’s too dangerous,” she said finally. “You’d need to be miked, we’d want backup. There’s a way to do something like that, and they’re never going to agree to it. I’ll keep looking and we’ll let you know. Roly feels badly about cutting you out, but his job might be on the line. I’m telling you, Wilcox shut us down when we even mentioned going to talk to Deasey. I’ll give you a ring in a couple of days and give you an update. By the way, Roly and I interviewed Gary Curran last week. There was nothing definite there, but the pair of us, we didn’t like him. We’re trying to find something more than the stalking charge in college. But I’d say we’ll be looking for a warrant in the next couple of days.”

  “Good, that’s progress, at least.”

  “So it is.” But she didn’t look very sure of herself. “Don’t blame Roly. He’s just following orders.”

  “Okay, thanks, Bernie.” She nodded and left me alone.

  Outside, I hunched my face and neck down into my coat and walked slowly into the city center, down Grafton Street, trying to will Conor into existence again. The shop windows were bright. The warm mouth of Bewley’s beckoned to me, the fragrant air wafting out whenever someone pushed through the doors. I sat in a corner with my coffee, watching an elderly couple sitting silently, holding hands, and a teenage girl laughing with her mother, their feet surrounded by shopping bags.

  When I was done, I walked back out onto Grafton Street and let myself get absorbed by the crowds. It must be almost Thanksgiving, I realized with a start. Pretty soon it would be Christmas.

  Christmas.

  Erin had been gone two months.

  Where are you?

  September. Long Island in September is summer and fall together: hot days, sweat running down the back of my school-picture-day blouse with the lacy neck, and nights that smell like cold ocean flowing in the windows.

  Erin’s at junior high now; she rides a different bus. I only see her at Irish Dance. My mom takes me but Erin walks over from Jessica’s house.

  That summer, Erin starts sleeping over at Jessica’s the night before class. They walk over to Brian Lombardi’s or one of the other boys’ in her class and they watch movies. Brian has an older brother—Frank—who’s in high school and his friends are always over, too. Erin tells me that Jessica has a crush on Frank but he never remembers her name. Frank has a girlfriend named Melissa and Erin and Jessica save their money to get blue hooded sweatshirts just like the one Melissa wears.

  In October, I smell cigarette smoke on Erin’s jacket when I move it in the changing room at dance class. When I see Erin at class, she always seems distant, older now. She starts wearing lots of black eyeliner and mascara, and I get the idea she wears it for Chris. I’m shy around her now. She can barely look at me, as though my very existence embarrasses her.

  Uncle Danny starts dating a woman named Gloria when Erin is in ninth grade. Erin hates her and Uncle Danny can’t even bring her into their house. So he starts going out to Montauk with her for the weekend sometimes, and Erin stays at our house.

  One of those weekends, I wake up to darkness
and the sound of rustling and open my eyes to see Erin dressing by the window. My clock glows red—10:34 p.m.—and I sit up, confused. “What’s going on?”

  “Shhhh. Nothing. Go back to sleep,” Erin whispers back.

  “What are you…?”

  “Nothing.” She waits there for a moment. Even in my half-asleep state, I know what to do. I lie down and close my eyes, breathing heavily so she thinks I’ve gone back to sleep. I can hear her hesitating and then she moves and I open my eyes, just a tiny bit, and watch as she bends to tie the laces of her sneakers, then slowly stands up and lifts the screen of my bedroom window. My bedroom is on the second floor but because the house is built into the hill above the water, my window opens onto our back deck. I watch her slip through the window and hear her drop onto the deck. She leaves the window open.

  I count to one hundred in my head and then get out of bed. I open my bedroom door and go across the hall to the upstairs bathroom. When I get to the window, I can just see the disappearing taillights of a car.

  I don’t think of getting my parents. I don’t know why. I get back in bed and I must fall asleep because the next thing I know my mom is waking us up and I look over and see Erin in the other bed and I wonder if I dreamed it.

  But then, when I come back to my room after brushing my teeth, I see a line of gray at the bottom of the window, the deck through the bottom of the screen, which is still open just a crack.

  27

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1,

  2016

  Griz and I are back at Pearse Street by seven a.m., ready to go. As soon as I see her, I know there’s been a development.

  “We got the ID,” she tells me first thing. “The remains are Katerina Greiner’s. Dentals confirm it.”

  “Good,” I say. “What’s the story?”

  “It’s a fucking odd one. After they reported her missing, the brother ran into a friend of Katerina’s and the friend said he’d seen her in Berlin. They called off the search in Ireland. But the brother told me that he now questions whether that was true. The guy was also into drugs, he said, and he thinks maybe he was mistaken, or lying for some other reason. The family had sort of broken up at that point. The mother had died. The father had moved to Luxembourg, and it had been so long the brother just assumed that either she didn’t want to be found or that something had happened to her. After more years went by, he assumed it was the latter. There were the drugs, and she’d had a couple of suicide attempts, too. When the father died, the brother needed to have her declared dead so he could inherit the estate outright, so he went to court and got the paperwork completed. They must have done some sort of investigation but it didn’t turn up anything. It had been the right number of years.”

  “Did she spend time in Dublin?” I asked Griz. “How did she and Erin meet each other?”

  “The brother thought she must have spent a night or two in Dublin when she got here, but he doesn’t think she’d lived here.”

  “So, why the ID card? Did she steal it? Did Erin give it to her?” I ask.

  Griz knows what I’m thinking. Was Erin there when she was killed?

  “We need more on her,” Griz says. “Joey’s going to go down and organize the door-to-doors. Roly said for me to keep at it here.”

  I know what she’s saying. We have today and tomorrow morning. This is it.

  “I guess we’d better get to it,” I tell her. I’ve brought my files and I put them on the table in front of Griz. “Take a look at all of this. It’s the stuff from Erin’s room at the Ringsend house. I’ve had it in my basement and I’ve looked at it a thousand times, but I was thinking about Katerina Greiner and, I don’t know, whether there’s something in there I didn’t know to look for before? Also, can you take a look at the missing persons lists so I can review them? I want to finish reading these files and then I’ll take a look at what your profilers have put together over the years.”

  “Sure.” She takes the files from me.

  “Thanks, Griz.”

  We get to work. It’s a bright day, the sun angling in the conference room windows, and for the next few hours, everything narrows to the words in front of me and what they might mean.

  * * *

  I put June Talbot’s file and Erin’s file on the table in front of me.

  June Talbot’s is fairly thin. They had been completely focused on the boyfriend for the first couple of days. Once they realized he had an alibi, they seemed to lose their momentum. Without a body, they hadn’t connected the disappearance to Teresa’s yet. There were a few interviews with possible eyewitnesses and men with records in Baltinglass, but by the time they’d realized that June’s disappearance might be related to Erin’s and Teresa’s, they’d lost some advantage.

  Griz looks up. “I’ve got something else on Robert Herricks. An interview that wasn’t filed with all the rest. One of the girls who worked as a cleaner at the golf course with Teresa McKenny thought he was a little creepy. Something about him spying on them in the bathroom.”

  “Anything else on him? Any harassment or sexual assault charges unrelated to Teresa?”

  “I’m waiting on that. I’ll let you know as soon as I get it.”

  I think for a minute. “Can you check in the system for any mention, not just charges?”

  She wiggles her eyebrows. “They’re transitioning the database over or some shite like that. I’ll try.”

  I turn to Erin.

  It’s all here, a record of those two months of my life. The initial interview that Emer and Daisy and I gave at the Irishtown Garda Station, the interviews with neighbors and the other workers at the café.

  The first thing I notice is how much of it there is. They were working it all along. What felt like inaction was just withholding of information. As soon as the report was made, the Gardaí in Wicklow had started canvassing, interviewing bus drivers, checking all the bed-and-breakfasts in Glendalough and Glenmalure. They’d discovered Mrs. Curran almost immediately.

  The first interview with Conor Kearney took place the same day I reported Erin missing. They seemed to be looking at him fairly seriously—a couple of subsequent interviews with him, interviews with his known associates—until they interviewed Bláithín Arpin and she told them that he’d been with her at her parents’ holiday house in someplace called Brittas Bay the weekend of the sixteenth. Additionally, every single friend of his said he had never shown any signs of violence or aggression, that he was one of the kindest people they knew. A friend from his graduate program said he knew that Bláithín hadn’t liked Conor’s friendship with Erin, but that he didn’t think there was anything more in it than Conor feeling protective of Erin. “I always thought it was more a little sister sort of relationship than anything,” he’d told Roly and Bernie. “He seemed to worry about her.”

  Back then, no one had told me Conor had a solid alibi for that weekend, and it makes sense all of a sudden that they turned away from him, especially once they knew Erin had gone back to Dublin. They’d clearly started looking elsewhere.

  The other surprising thing to me is how seriously they seemed to be considering Gary Curran as a suspect. As they’d mentioned, he’d been cautioned for stalking a fellow UCD student a few years before Erin’s disappearance. The picture I get, though, is of a socially inept teenager with a desperate crush on a girl who became increasingly alarmed by his behavior. In their interview with him, he said he hadn’t met Erin because he’d been doing errands in Wicklow when she arrived at the bed-and-breakfast and then was off to work again by the time she left the next morning.

  “Did you all look at Gary Curran again as part of the review?” I ask Griz.

  “Yeah, but he’s been out of the country for most of the last twenty years,” she says. “It seems like they were looking at him for Erin initially, but not once their focus shifted back to Dublin, and he wasn’t really in the picture for any of the other disappearances. That’s my sense of it, like.”

  Still, he and his mother were perha
ps nearly the last people to see Erin, and they’re right there in Glenmalure. If I were in charge, I’d want to talk to him again.

  After I told them about Hacky O’Hanrahan, they had gone and interviewed him at his parents’ house. The report lists the house name and address: Bridgehampton, Killiney Hill Road, Killiney.

  The parents seem to have controlled the interview fairly tightly but Hacky O’Hanrahan had told Roly and Bernie the same things he’d told me, that he and Erin had met at a club and gone back to his flat in Merrion Square. She’d left in the morning and he’d never seen her again. That must have been before they started recording interviews, because instead of a transcript it’s a signed statement.

  She seemed like a girl who wanted to have a good time. She was a nice girl. But she was the one who said she wanted to come home with me. She seemed pretty happy, if you want to know the truth. She said to ring her so I did. But she didn’t ring back and I left it. I didn’t even think of her again until I saw the thing on the SixOne.

  Reading between the lines, I can tell that they thought he was an asshole. But there isn’t anything more incriminating than that.

  I turn to Niall Deasey.

  Roly and Bernie had gotten the Murphy brothers’ names from the Westbury and run them through the system. I remember the conference room, Wilcox’s gaze on me as I said I’d never heard their names. He’d probably thought I was in on whatever it was Erin had been involved with. I read the detectives’ statements, laying out an incomplete profile of the brothers.

  They had been born in 1940 and 1945, respectively, and after a middle-class Irish American childhood with four other siblings in Somerville, Massachusetts, they’d started a cement company that had been very successful, mostly by obtaining contracts with the city of Boston and other municipalities in the suburbs. The Murphys had been active in raising money for IAFNI, the Northern Ireland aid organization I’d learned about from Ingrid, in the ’80s and early ’90s, and there was a note that the US Department of Justice knew about them because of it. Whatever they were up to then, they’re both dead now, one from lymphoma and the other from a classic widowmaker heart attack while eating at a Boston steakhouse.