The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  On Christmas morning, we go down to Uncle Danny’s and have breakfast, open a few presents. I give Erin a velvet scarf, decorated with butterflies. She puts it on, wears it all day. She’s quiet, thoughtful, and we watch The Sound of Music, which is our Christmas tradition. Around three we head over to the bar. Uncle Danny opens it for a few friends, more than a few usually. This is our other Christmas tradition, and Jessica and a bunch of Erin’s high school friends come out and so does my friend Helen, who lives in Portland, Oregon, now.

  It’s late when Uncle Danny asks me to take Erin home. “She had a few too many, I think,” he says. “Get her into bed if you can.”

  By the time we’re in the car, heading for the bay, she’s not too bad, babbling about Jessica’s new boyfriend and smoking out the window of my car.

  “Can you put that out?” I ask her. But she ignores me, telling me about how Jessica met the guy at the supermarket.

  “I was thinking, Mags,” she says. “About moving to Ireland. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Patrick’s cousin is from Dublin and he said they always need people to work in pubs. He said I’d be great at it because I know everything already, from the bar. I think I’m going to do it. You can come visit me. Weren’t you supposed to spend the year over there before you left school? Maybe you can come and live with me.”

  I don’t say anything, but she can feel the energy shift in the car. I just drive, focusing on the feel of my foot on the gas pedal, the way my back presses into the seat of my mom’s Honda.

  “What?” she asks after a minute, challenging, hurt.

  “Nothing.” I keep driving.

  “Say it. I know you want to.”

  “Erin, you can do whatever you want. This is probably not the craziest thing you’ve ever done, even.”

  “You think it’s crazy?”

  “I think it’s pretty par for the course, if you want to know the truth. This is what you do when things don’t work out for you one place. You run away. I should have seen it coming, actually, after you broke up with whatshisname Patchogue guy.”

  “Fuck you, I’m not running away.”

  “Okay. Whatever you say.” We’re on Ocean Avenue now and I turn down Bay toward our houses. It’s dark and cold outside. She pushes her cigarette butt out the slit at the top of the window and rolls it up. I just want her out of the car.

  “Fuck you, Maggie. What if this is what I’m supposed to do? What if things work out for me over there?”

  I don’t mean to, but I must make a sound, a little Ha! because she screams and says, “See! You don’t think I can do it. You think I’m a fuck-up.”

  “You are a fuck-up. Why should this be any different?” I’m furious, the rage filling me up and exploding out of me. “Do you know how awful you make everything for everybody? Uncle Danny? He never knows if you’re going to be alive or dead when he gets home. My dad? All your friends? Everyone thinks you’re a fuck-up. Everyone’s tired of your bullshit. Don’t you know that by now?”

  I’m practically screaming. We’re at the end of the road and I pull over, manage to get the parking brake on.

  She stares at me for a long moment, her eyes spheres of reflected streetlight in the dark car. She smells like cigarette smoke and rum.

  “You don’t understand anything,” she says finally. “You don’t know anything at all.”

  There’s a moment where she waits for me to ask, waits for me to say something else. I stare out into the dark night, pushing the tears down, pushing the words down. I focus on a tiny crack in the windshield, a crack my mom must have gotten at some point. The tiny sliver of streetlight reflects and bounces around inside the crack, a little mirrored hall of light.

  “Maggie.” She says it like the start of something. She’s waiting for me to answer.

  I keep staring at the little crack in the windshield. I don’t say anything.

  And she’s gone, the door slamming, running toward Uncle Danny’s house, the water below us black and yellow in the moonlight, and I don’t even care, don’t even check to make sure she gets home. I just drive away, trying to shake off my rage and shame.

  47

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8,

  2016

  Conor’s house is dark and quiet. He turns lights on and makes tea. He puts Miles Davis on and we lie on the couch with a blanket over us and drink tea and listen to Miles. I tell him about Cathal Deasey, about Niamh Horrigan, about how when she saw him as they brought her out, she broke down, screaming and crying, how I hugged her hard, told her she was okay, stroked her hair, how her parents came to the hospital, how they wouldn’t let go of her, wouldn’t leave her room for a second.

  They haven’t found any remains, but today they’ll search the grounds.

  Conor asks, “Do they know if he was responsible … if he, if Erin was one of his victims?” He tries to figure out how to say it. “Were they able to link the scarf and necklace to him?”

  I tell him we don’t know. Before I left the hospital, they told me they found some things of Teresa McKenny’s and June Talbot’s in the house and they think he must have killed Erin and Katerina Greiner, too. They’re searching his things, the house he lived in in Croydon. Niall Deasey’s in custody, too, but they don’t think he knew.

  We listen to music. Conor rubs my feet.

  I feel, for the first time in a long time, like I can stop paying attention.

  And yet I notice the way Miles’s trumpet wavers on high notes. I notice the framed black-and-white photograph of a peat digger hanging over the dining room table. I notice the way Conor’s hair sweeps over his ears, the graying whiskers he missed shaving.

  I like it here.

  Then headlights sweep across the front window.

  “Bláithín and Adrien,” Conor says. We get up and go to the door. Bláithín’s wearing a tweed cape in brilliant red. Adrien’s hair is wet and he’s shy when Conor reintroduces me. He comes in and goes straight to the kitchen and then upstairs. I stand back so Bláithín and Conor can talk but Bláithín just says she’ll come and get him Thursday for his dentist appointment.

  She’s out the door already when I say, “I’ll be right back,” and follow her out. I close the door behind me and call out, “I’m sorry. Bláithín, can I … can I ask you a question?”

  She turns, her keys already in her hand. She doesn’t say anything. The streetlight is illuminating her cape. She looks on fire.

  “I’m sorry about the way we first met,” I tell her.

  She hesitates. “I am as well. It was awkward and I behaved very badly. I saw … what happened, on the news. Are you okay?”

  I dip my head, just a little. I don’t know. I say, “I want to ask you something.”

  She looks up, on edge suddenly. The keys dangle from her hand. “Yes?”

  “Did Erin leave anything else behind? At the flat that day? Anything besides the jacket?”

  She puts the keys back in her pocket. She comes a little closer. Now she’s standing in shadow and I can barely see her eyes. But her voice comes out of the dark, strong but low.

  “I guess it can’t hurt now. There was a letter in the pocket. It was part of one, like she’d started writing it but hadn’t finished it. It was a letter to Conor. She said she’d been thinking about everything and she couldn’t be quiet anymore. There was something about how she didn’t care anymore what people thought, she had to tell the truth.”

  “It was a letter to Conor?”

  “I wasn’t sure—she hadn’t written his name—but then she wrote something about something that happened at O’Brien’s. ‘I’ve been thinking so much about what happened at O’Brien’s,’ she wrote. I figured it out. It was a night I was away in Wicklow. He’d told me he’d been at O’Brien’s that night. A pub. He’d said he was there with friends from college.”

  “This was in the summer?”

  “Yes. I … I read the letter and then I ripped it up and flushed it down the loo. It was like if I could destroy it, it wouldn’t exist a
nd maybe she’d never tell him. Maybe he’d never know and then he’d forget about it and things could just go back to the … to the way they were before she arrived.”

  She looks up at me and smiles. “It was magical thinking. I was so young. I didn’t know anything about relationships. I didn’t know that you can’t just erase things, you can’t just pretend they were never there. They have to be brought out into the open or else they just fester and grow. That’s what happened. All those years, it just sat there. We never talked about it until … well, recently.”

  I watch her for a moment. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry for everything.”

  “I am as well.” She smiles. “I hope they figure out what happened to her. I never thought … Until I had Adrien, I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for you, for her parents.”

  She gets in the car and she drives off. I watch her taillights heading south, back to Wicklow. I think of the mountains, the clouds gathering in the dark over the rusty brown and green valleys. Something’s stirring in my brain, but it’s not fully formed. An idea, a word, a name. O’Brien’s. O’Brien’s.

  Conor is doing dishes in the kitchen and when I come back in he turns around and looks worried. “Is everything okay? Was Bláithín all right? She’s okay, really. She just—”

  “No, she was fine,” I interrupt him. “Conor, did Erin ever tell you she had feelings for you?”

  “Maggie, there was nothing like that between us. I thought you understood that.”

  His eyes are dark, troubled. I watch him.

  I think of what he asked me.

  Do they know if the guy in Wicklow was responsible … if he, if Erin was one of his victims? Were they able to link the scarf and necklace to him?

  The scarf and necklace.

  The scarf and necklace.

  The water rushes from the faucet, eerily loud. My perceptions slide and blur. The lights are too bright over the sink, over Conor’s face.

  “I have to go,” I say. I turn too quickly. My shoulder flashes pain at me, but I barely notice it.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “Nothing, nothing’s wrong. I have to go,” I tell him. “Something’s come up. An emergency. I need to go right now. I’m really sorry.” I can’t look at him. I need to get away from him. I need to think.

  “What? With your family? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll explain later but I have to go. I’m really sorry.”

  I grab my coat and I’m out the door, running, running north, across the canal and up to Baggot Street.

  I don’t stop until I get to the hotel.

  I leave Roly a message while I pack. I don’t tell him anything specific, just that I have a lead but I need to go back to the States for a couple of days to follow up on it. I say I’ll tell him as much as I can when I know something definite.

  My phone keeps ringing. Conor. I silence it and ignore his calls and texts.

  I keep packing. I think about going to the airport, but when I call, I can’t get a seat until the eleven a.m. flight the next day, so I put my bags by the door and I try to sleep.

  Erin, crying.

  When?

  She’s in my bed, curled into herself, her body.

  The window, open just a little.

  Outside. Summer.

  Morning.

  Her shoulder moves, up and down, up and down, but she keeps the sobs inside.

  I only hear her breathing, uneven, her breath too sharp.

  I start to reach out to touch her, to ask her what’s wrong, but my hand won’t move.

  Reach.

  I try to reach.

  I don’t move.

  48

  THURSDAY, JUNE 9

  2016

  Later, I’ll barely remember the hours in the airport, the flight, the drive east, home, toward Lilly and Brian. I just keep going over it in my mind, trying to put everything together.

  Erin, on the trail.

  She sees him. She doesn’t know, not yet. She doesn’t know something’s wrong.

  Her face as she realizes.

  Alexandria is quiet, Main Street deserted, New York Avenue dark and silent. I drive slowly past the bar. Uncle Danny’s car is there and the lights are on. It’s nearly midnight. I head toward the ocean. Back toward Ireland, I tell myself. I think of Erin, looking across the Sound, wondering what it’s like over there.

  Erin.

  Ireland.

  When I pull up in front of the house, I sit there for a minute, the car windows open. The air is still and warm. I can smell the ocean as I walk the 542 steps to my house. I don’t want to wake Brian and Lilly up, so I put the code into the alarm system, let myself in the back door, and head down the basement stairs.

  I think I know what happened to Erin, but I need proof. And the proof is here.

  It’s cold down here, but I barely feel it. The boxes of Erin’s things are over on the right side, stacked against the wall, exactly as they were when I looked through them before I left two weeks ago. I get all the boxes down and I start going through them, taking everything out and laying it all on the floor.

  The box that held her claddagh necklace is still in the plastic tub I’d reorganized just before leaving for Dublin and I take it out and sit down on the hard floor. My legs and arms are shaky, as though I’ve just finished a long run.

  The satin lining comes away easily, once I’ve untucked the edges. I wait a minute before taking the paper out of the box and carefully unfolding it.

  It’s been here all this time.

  The handwriting is beautiful cursive, the date at the top clear and easy to read. November 3, 1988. The signature at the bottom is more flowery than I would have expected. Father Anthony Meehan.

  It doesn’t take long to read, and when I’m done, I refold it, holding it by the edges, and put it back in the box. Frantically, I search the basement, looking for a hiding spot. Finally I pick an old box over in one corner and tuck the box into that.

  I know there has to be something else here, something that will prove it.

  I’m sorting through papers and receipts, checking dates and locations, when I hear footsteps on the stairs and I turn to find Brian coming down.

  “You’re back.”

  He stops on the fifth stair up and stands there in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. In the harsh light from the hanging bulb, he looks as though he hasn’t slept in weeks. His eyes are bloodshot, his skin gray. He watches me going through the boxes.

  “Yeah, how’s Lilly?” I ask him.

  “She’s great,” he says. “She’s still asleep.”

  “Good.”

  We stare at each other and I have a sudden flashback to our wedding, to his face, bathed in sunlight from the windows.

  “What are you looking for?” he asks me.

  “I’m looking through your boxes of things from your parents’ house. There was a lot of your traveling stuff in there, an old passport, some old traveler’s checks. Lilly went all through the change and took out the Italian and Greek coins and everything. She liked all the postcards and souvenirs and things. It got all mixed up. Your papers and the other stuff. When I put it back, I did it wrong, I … mixed it up. The chain of evidence is a nightmare of course. I could never use it, but…” I’m babbling.

  He doesn’t say anything. He just watches me,

  “I’m looking for more receipts,” I say. “From Dublin. For after you were supposed to have left. Well, you did leave.”

  He waits. I’m still trying to get all the details straight in my head.

  “But then you went back.” I pause, then start again.

  “When I was over there, the last week, I found a receipt among Erin’s things—someone had saved it after changing traveler’s checks in Dublin on September eighteenth, 1993. I hadn’t seen it before and it made us think that Erin had gone back to Dublin after being in Wicklow. It made us think it was more likely that she’d disappeared on purpose.

  “But ther
e was something else that made me wonder, what if she hadn’t come back to Dublin? What if the receipt had gotten in among my stuff some other way? There was really only one way that could have happened.” I point to the boxes. “Lilly went through all this stuff. She got it all mixed up. I thought it was from Erin’s boxes, but it was from yours.

  “I didn’t know until yesterday—day before yesterday, now—that Erin had started writing a letter to someone. She referenced something that happened at O’Brien’s and she said she was tired of keeping it a secret. There’s a pub, in Dublin, called O’Brien’s. She used to go there. The person who found the letter thought that’s what she meant. But that’s not what she was talking about. She was talking about the O’Briens’ house. You guys used to go there a lot, didn’t you? They used to have a lot of parties.”

  He sits down on one of the boxes and he leans back against the wall. He looks so tired.

  I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. It’s all up to him now. It’s his story to tell. Finally, after a long silence, he says, “I think that for a long time I hoped someone would figure it out. But then, after Lilly, I was glad they hadn’t. I was glad I was free and that was the first time I began to be glad that it seemed to have just gone away, that everyone seemed to have decided that it was the guy in Ireland.”

  “What happened at the O’Briens’?” I ask him. “What happened to Erin at Derek O’Brien’s house?”

  “Christ.” He puts his head down. “That night.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We were at Devin and Derek’s. Their parents were in Colorado or something. I don’t know if you remember, but they always used to go away all the time.

  “Anyway, there were a ton of people on the beach and the party was just like, really good. I don’t know. It was a nice night. Almost summer. You know. Then the cops came and broke it up but some of us went back to the house. We were smoking pot, I guess, still drinking, and then Frank and Greg O’Brien showed up.”