The Woman Outside My Door

by Rachel Ryan

  That morning. Just hours ago.

  She let out a moan. The Guard on the other end of the phone was asking something, but Georgina pressed a hand to her mouth, stumbled over to the glossy sink, and retched.

  Kelly-Anne stroked her back. “They’ll find him, Georgina,” she said. “In over 90 percent of child abduction cases, the kid’s retrieved unharmed. In the UK, a child is reported missing every three minutes and they’re almost always brought home safe and sound.”

  Straightening up, Georgina looked at her. Kelly-Anne shrugged.

  “I watch a lot of true crime. You pick stuff up.”

  Bren was saying something to the police. Georgina caught Cody’s hair and eye color. Kelly-Anne went on, “In the majority of cases, it turns out to be someone the kid knows. It’s almost always a family member. Can you think of any relative who might have taken Cody?”

  Georgina shook her head.

  Kelly-Anne called her son over. “Patrick, did you see the lady who took Cody?”

  Patrick nodded, frightened eyes darting from his mother to Georgina.

  “And did you recognize the lady, P? Ever seen her before?”

  He shook his head.

  “Had Cody ever told you about her before?”

  “Yes,” admitted Patrick. He was tearful now. “Cody told me he had a new granny. He said she was picking him up but that it was a secret.”

  Georgina’s whole body was trembling, but Kelly-Anne remained composed.

  “Did Cody tell you where his new granny was taking him?”

  “For a fun day out.” Patrick started crying noisily. “Cody didn’t know where they were going, but he said his new granny promised she’d buy him cotton candy. He said it was a special treat because he won the game.”

  The world swam. Georgina slid down onto the tiled floor and closed her eyes. The inside of her lids was an explosion of orange against black.

  Chocolate is the prize for boys who win the game.

  She heard, as if from far away, Kelly-Anne saying to Patrick, “Shush, sweetheart, it’s not your fault.” And to Mark, “Did this woman have a car?”

  “I didn’t see.”

  “She had a car.” Patrick sniffed. “It was blue. I saw them get into it.”

  Georgina opened her eyes. The world was shivery and inconsistent around her. She wanted to give in and collapse and sob. But that wouldn’t help Cody.

  She tried to collect her scattered thoughts.

  What was it Kelly-Anne had said?

  Almost always a family member…

  Something clicked in Georgina’s brain.

  Jimmy’s disappearing act. His odd behavior.

  “My dad.” She grabbed the kitchen counter and pulled herself to her feet. She felt unsteady. “I think my dad—”

  She looked towards Bren, but he was still on the phone to the police. Kelly-Anne looked up sharply. “You think your dad’s involved? Isn’t he in hospital?”

  “He ran away from the hospital.” Georgina gripped the counter to keep from falling over. “He’s been acting strange. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going…”

  Kelly-Anne straightened up too. “Do you think Cody and this woman are with your father?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know where my father is! I called him, but he just shouted at me… Then he turned his phone off…”

  She was aware that she was babbling, but Kelly-Anne was listening closely.

  “You spoke to him on the phone?”

  Georgina nodded. “Two days ago.”

  “Did he let anything slip that hinted at his location?”

  “Nothing.” Georgina clenched her fists until her nails bit into her palms. How was she ever going to find her dad… find Cody…

  “Focus,” Kelly-Anne urged her. “During the phone call, was there any detail you noticed? Anything at all?”

  Georgina tried to think back. Jimmy had been shouting at her. “Learn to mind your own business,” he’d said. And she hadn’t been able to hear him well because… because in the background…

  “It was noisy,” she recalled. “He was somewhere outside. There was chanting and cheering… sounded like sports fans.”

  “Donegal vs. Meath,” said Kelly-Anne immediately.

  “What?”

  “Two days ago? There was a game in Croke Park. Donegal vs. Meath.”

  Croke Park was a huge sports stadium in Drumcondra, near Dublin’s city center.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I got Mark tickets,” said Kelly-Anne. “So maybe your dad’s staying somewhere in that area?”

  Georgina felt hopeless. Why would Jimmy be staying there? He had no friends or family in Drumcondra that she was aware of. She couldn’t make sense of it. Drumcondra…

  Then she heard her mother’s voice. We were stuck in a B&B for months… but as long as we could be together, we were happy… in Drumcondra, on Clonliffe Road…

  She straightened up. It wasn’t much to go on, but—it was a connection. Was it possible that was where he had gone?

  “Georgina?” said Kelly-Anne.

  “I think I might know where he’s staying.” Acting on pure instinct, Georgina moved towards the door.

  “Georgina!” Bren stopped her. “Where are you going? The police are almost here.”

  Georgina turned to Kelly-Anne. “What do I do?”

  “You think you know where your dad is?” Kelly-Anne clarified. “And you think Cody might be with him?”

  “Jimmy?” Bren said disbelievingly.

  Georgina nodded.

  “Obviously, you should wait here for the police,” said Kelly-Anne. “But if you think you might know where your son is…” She trailed off, but her eyes held Georgina’s, and her expression said: If I were you, I’d go right now.

  Georgina turned to Bren, who was white-faced and terrified. “I have to try. Talk to the police for me. Tell them everything. Tell them I’ve gone to Drumcondra. Once I figure out the exact address, I’ll let you know—that is, if he’s even there.”

  “Georgina, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  She felt sorry for Bren, whose fear and confusion and disheveled hair made him seem like a little boy himself. But she had no time for pause. She stepped over the scattered contents of her handbag in the hall, stooping only to grab her keys, and ran to the car.

  “Georgina!” Bren yelled after her. But she was already in the driver’s seat, slamming the door.

  If she could track down her father, maybe she could find her son.

  Chapter 39

  Georgina sped through the city streets. Her phone was in the car mount where she’d left it. She tried calling Jimmy, but each call went, as she’d predicted, to voicemail.

  “God-dammit, Dad!” she yelled as she shot through a red light. There was a furious blare of car horns, but Georgina barely heard it. She had to go fast. She had to find her son.

  Her phone rang. For a moment of desperate hope she was sure it would be her dad, telling her Cody was with him, and safe.

  But it was Bren.

  “The Guards are here. They want to talk to you.”

  A policeman’s amplified voice filled the car. Where was she going? Why had she reported her son missing if she believed he was with his grandfather?

  Georgina tried to explain, tripping over her words, struggling to focus on the road. It occurred to her, with a wave of fear, that the police might be taking this less seriously because she had rushed after Jimmy. Did that give them the impression of a family drama, a domestic, something less than police business?

  Tears stung her eyes. The road blurred, and the car swerved dangerously. She forced herself to focus. Wrapping her car around a lamppost wouldn’t help Cody.

  “I have to hang up,” she said thickly. “I’m going to crash.”

  Maybe she was stupid to think her dad was hiding out in this particular B&B just because he had an emotional link to it. But he had sounded so distraught, so lost, on the phone. She coul
d imagine him gravitating towards another familiar place, somewhere with comforting memories.

  “Do you think Cody and this woman are with your father?” Kelly-Anne had asked.

  Georgina didn’t know. But his disappearance was too much of a coincidence. With every passing second she grew more certain that Jimmy had some connection to whatever was going on.

  Pieces swirled in her brain. Pieces she should have put together sooner.

  Jimmy on the floor, clutching his chest, the phone on the carpet beside him.

  His explosive anger: You left those photos there?

  The grainy images of the skinny girl with the short black hair. Always standing beside Jimmy. Vanished from the later photos.

  They sent her to the laundries.

  Georgina stepped down on the accelerator. One thing she was sure of: her father had been lying to her. This time, Dad, you’re going to tell me the truth.

  Evening was creeping dark and shadowy across the city. Streetlights were flickering into life as she reached the red-brick roads of Drumcondra. Croke Park stadium dominated the skyline. She drove slowly, looking for street signs…

  Yes. This was Clonliffe Road.

  And there—a sign for a B&B.

  Georgina swerved into the first available spot. She grabbed her phone, leapt out of the car, and ran.

  The B&B in which her newlywed parents had once stayed was number 44. It had ivy growing up the walls, a large square reading VACANCIES in one window, and a sense of having not been renovated for decades. The mousy-haired woman sitting at the front desk, reading a romance novel, looked up with alarm when Georgina raced into the foyer. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a man called Jimmy McGrath.” Georgina was aware she was speaking too loudly. “Or James. James McGrath.”

  The mousy-haired woman looked askance. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we can’t give out our guests’ details.”

  Georgina forced herself to lower her voice. “He’s my dad, and I’m really worried about him.” Knowing that under other circumstances this lie would make her feel miserably guilty, she added, “He’s got Alzheimer’s, see, and he’s run off.”

  The woman was wavering.

  “Please,” said Georgina. “He’s a danger to himself. He thinks it’s 1972.”

  With a sigh, the woman put down her paperback and stood up.

  “We’re not supposed to do this. But…”

  Georgina tried to suppress her trembling impatience as the woman opened several drawers in search of a key, then shuffled sideways from behind the desk.

  “I knew something wasn’t right with him,” she continued as she led Georgina down the corridor. “He seemed off when he arrived… paranoid…”

  They reached a door marked with a copper 6. The woman rapped gently on the wood with her knuckles before turning the key in the lock. From inside came a puzzled: “Hello?”

  Her father’s voice. Georgina tensed.

  The mousy-haired woman mouthed “Good luck,” then walked away, leaving the door ajar.

  From behind it, Jimmy called again, “Hello? Is someone there?”

  Entire body tense and coiled as a spring, Georgina pushed the door open and walked into the room.

  Chapter 40

  It was a small room with a single bed. Jimmy was lying fully dressed on the duvet. When Georgina walked in, his expression of shock was so exaggerated it might have been comical under other circumstances. “Georgina. How did you—”

  “He’s not here, is he?” Georgina’s hope died as she looked around the sparsely furnished room. “Where’s Cody?”

  “Cody?” Jimmy sat up against the pillows. He looked exhausted, gray as old cloth, as if every drop of his usual cheeriness had been wrung from him. “Why would Cody be here?”

  “Because he’s missing! Cody’s missing! You’re telling me you didn’t know?”

  “He— What? Missing? What d’you mean?”

  His shock and disbelief were clearly unfeigned. But it wasn’t enough to convince Georgina that her father’s behavior and Cody’s kidnapping were unrelated.

  The photograph of Jimmy and the black-haired girl that she’d taken with her to question Billy was still in her coat pocket. She took it out and laid it on the bed.

  “Who is she, Dad?”

  Jimmy looked at the photo. Real fear crossed his face.

  “Why are you asking me this?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t question me! ANSWER ME!” Georgina heard herself shouting, screaming as she had never screamed in her life. The words were torn from her, scraping her throat on their way out. “I need to know who she is! She’s taken him! She’s taken Cody!”

  “No.” Jimmy stared, horrified, at the sepia-toned image of his teenage self and the smiling girl. “No. She couldn’t have—she wouldn’t—”

  “She has! She’s the one who called you before your heart attack, right?” Georgina could see all the pieces of the puzzle she’d missed before. Jimmy’s long-ago girlfriend wasn’t dead. She was back. “You told me it was Billy, and I didn’t question it—even when I saw Billy and it was clear he was too sick to have been gossiping on the phone—because I trusted you. But it was her, wasn’t it?”

  She could see it. A voice from the past. A shock that sent her father sinking to the floor, clutching his chest.

  “You’re right… she called me,” Jimmy mumbled, disorientated. “But there’s no way she’s taken Cody… You’ve gotten this mixed up.”

  “Those toffees you love, with the golden wrappers. She used to eat the same ones when you were young, didn’t she?” He nodded dumbly. “She’s been buying them for Cody! She’s been telling him she wants to be his grandmother!”

  Jimmy’s face turned from gray to white.

  “Oh, Jesus, no,” he said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, no.”

  Georgina got down on her knees beside the bed. She grabbed his hands.

  “I know she was your girlfriend. I know you got her pregnant and she was sent to a home. So just tell me—”

  “My girlfriend?” Jimmy shook his head. “Georgina, no. You’ve got it all wrong. I didn’t get anyone— Christ, how could you think—”

  He broke off. Georgina waited. When Jimmy spoke again, his voice was hoarse.

  “Her name is Anne McGrath,” he said.

  “Anne McGrath? What, were you married to her?”

  “No.” Jimmy took one more look at the photo, at the girl’s carefree freckled face and his own youthful, unlined features. Then he turned his aging, watery eyes up to his daughter.

  “She’s my sister.”

  Chapter 41

  “Your sister?” Georgina was momentarily blindsided. “You don’t have a sister.”

  “I did. I do.” Jimmy heaved himself up on the pillows a little. “Billy was the youngest. Anne was in the middle. A year younger than me.”

  “But why—” Georgina stopped herself. No time. She raised her phone to her ear. Jimmy listened, hollow-eyed, to her conversation with the police. “Anne McGrath… My father’s estranged sister… Yes… Yes… No… 44 Clonliffe Road.”

  She thrust the phone at Jimmy, who answered some further questions. No, he had no idea how to find Anne. He hadn’t seen her in fifty years. Yes, he and Georgina would wait for the police here.

  He put the phone down. “They’re on their way, Georgina… Georgina?”

  She knelt on the carpet, unmoving, in a state of shock. The hope that Cody would be here had been the only thing carrying her. Now a kind of paralysis gripped her along with the realization that she had no idea where to go next. No idea how to find her son.

  “I never wanted you to know,” Jimmy whispered. “I locked all that away in a box at the back of my mind. Thought I’d take it to the grave with me. Even your mother didn’t know.”

  Georgina didn’t respond. She couldn’t. But Jimmy kept talking. It was as if the box he spoke of was in the room with them, finally creaking open, dust and decades-old
secrets spilling out.

  “Anne and I were born within a year of each other. Did everything together. She was brilliant fun. She’d climb any tree, steal a pound from our father’s wallet so we could buy sweets… She was a bit like Cody that way. I can’t conceive of the woman that girl’s grown up to be. In my mind she’s still fifteen.

  “I was the first person she told. Our parents… they were wealthy, proud… concerned with their position in society. Anne was under no illusion they’d support her. The night she crept into my room to tell me, when I said ‘You’re pregnant?’ she hushed me even though I was whispering. She was terrified.”

  Georgina turned her head towards him. Her father was staring past her, his eyes fixed on the wall.

  “When I asked who the father was, she wouldn’t say. For the next few weeks, I was half embarrassed to look at Anne. A baby, growing in her belly! Whose baby was it? What would happen now?”

  Georgina was listening intently now. Perhaps there would be some detail in this story that would help the police find Anne. Find Cody.

  “Then one morning, my mother walked in on her changing. Saw the bump. God, the fighting and screaming… I saw my father drag Anne across the kitchen by the hair and, when I tried to stop him, got a black eye for my troubles. I was a big lad at sixteen, but it was my father I got my size from, and at forty he’d lost none of his strength.”

  For the first time since he started his story, Jimmy looked at Georgina.

  “My earliest memory is of my father hitting me,” he said quietly. “In public, in a shop. I was four. He clouted me over the head so viciously that I wet myself in terror. I’ve long since forgotten what I did wrong, but I’ve never forgotten the puddle on the shop floor. I’ve never forgotten the shock and humiliation.”

  Georgina couldn’t breathe. Jimmy went on:

  “She wouldn’t tell them who the father was, at first. She was stubborn. I sat in my room, listening to the shouting go on for hours. But eventually I heard her coming up the stairs, and I knew she’d told. Our father’s fists had a way of knocking the fight out of a person.

  “Nobody filled me in. But the next afternoon, our aunt paid us a visit.