All the Lost Girls

by Bilinda P Sheehan

  She stared at me in surprise.

  “Oh, yeah, of course,” she stammered, sounding somewhat bewildered. “I’ll let you get on.” She climbed to her feet and headed for the door.

  “If you need anything, Alice,” she said. “Any help with the preparations. I’m here for you.”

  “Thanks—”

  “I wasn’t there for Clara when it mattered,” she said, her voice cracking over the words. “But if you need me, I’m here now.”

  She turned on her heels and hurried from the sitting room, leaving me to stare at her retreating back. My mind puzzled over her words. What had she meant when she’d said she wasn’t there for Clara when it mattered? They’d been best friends. They’d shared everything. Was there something Sarah wasn’t telling me? Was there something she knew?

  If there was, I intended to find out.

  29

  After Sarah left, the morning was taken up with a steady stream of visitors. It never ceased to surprise me just how quickly news spread in a small community. People came and went, expressing their sympathies that Clara had been taken so young. They were like vultures gathering at a corpse. Perhaps it was unfair of me to think of them like that but when you’re forced to stand there and listen to a constant stream of platitudes, any patience you might have had quickly disappears.

  By lunchtime, my headache had grown to epic proportions and I escaped up to my bedroom. Lying back on the bed, face covered with the floral pillow, I tried to blot out the thoughts milling in my head.

  “Alice!” Imelda’s voice floated up the stairs and I tried to ignore it. Maybe then they’d all go away.

  The door banged open, making me jump and I peered out from beneath the edge of the pillow to see Imelda framed in the doorway. She was pale, the circles beneath her eyes standing out in stark relief. As I stared up at her in that moment, I realised just how much she’d aged. The strain of Clara’s discovery was clearly taking its toll on her.

  “What’s wrong?” I pushed the pillow aside and sat up, the movement triggering the pain circuits in my brain to light up like a Christmas tree.

  “The Gardaí are here,” she said. “Two detectives. They said they want to speak to all of us.”

  Shoving myself up off the bed, I followed her down the stairs and found myself in the doorway to the living room. The house was quiet, only the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway broke the silence with its steady rhythm. There was something else too: an answering tick, half a second out of time with the big timekeeper in the hall. I scanned the living room, my eyes coming to rest on the white rabbit with his pocket watch held aloft.

  I hadn’t been able to bring myself to take it upstairs to my room. There was something off about it, something that curdled my emotions in the pit of my stomach like cream that has gone sour. Despite being a gift from Clara, it was now tainted. It had gone missing just before she had and now it had returned just after her body had been found. The rational part of my brain knew the rabbit hadn’t really done those things itself but the more primal part of me, the instinctual side of my nature, was sure the two things were connected in some way.

  Mam sat on the sofa, staring out of the window, her gaze blank and unseeing. Dad had persuaded her to take one of the tranquillisers she’d been prescribed. Looking at her now, I wasn’t sure what was worse; the silent blank staring or the frantic obsessive persona that had entered my room this morning like a whirling dervish. They were both terrible. Neither was the woman I knew or recognised as my mother but then a part of me believed that woman had disappeared along with Clara.

  It was as though the man who’d taken Clara taken my mother too, leaving in her place something unrecognisable. What was left seemed to be raw, unbridled emotion in the guise of a human being. A changeling. And I knew, even if nobody else did, that it wasn’t my mother. It wasn’t the woman who soothed me to sleep when I was sick, or held me when the nightmares were too real for my childish mind to comprehend.

  But wasn’t that grief’s modus operandi? It’s signature? It stole away the ones you loved, ripping them from your arms and heart. Leaving you to struggle in the dark, dank, void alone. And in that void, it didn’t matter how loudly you screamed, no one could hear you. No one wanted to hear you. They were too caught up in their own emotions to notice you drowning in the silence of yours.

  Dad was next to her, his own expression one heavy with concern as he watched his wife closely. Seeing the two of them together caused the ache in my chest to increase. I knew how he felt. He wanted to make it better, to fix the problem. After all, wasn’t that what he was supposed to do? Wasn’t that his job? And he was good at it… Or he had been, before…

  He was good with his hands. Capable and strong they never faltered, never failed him. Whenever there was an issue at home, like the time the drains had backed up, or the central heating had packed up working, he’d jumped into action. In his element, righting the wrongs and fixing the issues…

  Only this time, there was nothing he could do about it.

  And I could see it written on his face, like someone had taken a black pen and written his thoughts across his forehead.

  I knew how he felt, not that I could tell him that.

  But I wanted to make this better too. I wanted to go back to that night and fight harder. In my dreams a thousand times since she’d disappeared, I’d felt Clara’s hand slipping from mine and every time I held her tighter. Securing my fingers around hers, taking her with me.

  Saving her…

  But my dreams weren’t the reality I found myself in now, no matter how much I wanted them to be.

  “Alice.” Detective Siobhan Geraghty stood up, her mouth a moue of displeasure. “I was just introducing myself and Ronan here and telling your parents why we’ve come here today and—”

  “When can we get her body back?” Mam asked, her eyes suddenly snapping into focus, like someone had just flipped the lights on inside.

  “That’s just it,” Siobhan said. “In circumstances like this, we need to hold onto the body for a little longer. At least while the investigation is ongoing.”

  “No.” Mam’s voice was the firmest I’d heard it in a long time. She levelled a glare at the detective Siobhan had introduced as Ronan. He seemed to wilt a little under her stare.

  “She doesn’t belong there,” Mam continued. “She needs to be here, with her family, where we can look after her.” Her voice cracked, taking with it another piece of my heart. “I don’t want her there alone. She doesn’t belong there…” She trailed off, her defiant expression crumpling.

  I knew what she meant. I wanted Clara home as well. It had been too long and she belonged here, with us. The rational side of me knew it wouldn’t be the same; she was bones now, not the flesh and blood sister I’d known. But the primal side of me pushed those thoughts aside. If we could just have her home, everything would be all right, it told me.

  “We’ve just come back from speaking with the pathologist,” Siobhan said, trying again with her gentle placating tone that only grated on me. “Despite the positive identification of Clara’s belongings…” She glanced up, giving me a small sympathetic smile. “We now believe the body is not that of your daughter, or sister,” she added for my benefit. “This is dependent on the DNA of course but the dental records, we have, are very clear on the matter.”

  Her words hit me like a bucket of icy water and I felt my body take an involuntary gasp of air, like I was resurfacing from beneath the surface of a frozen lake.

  I stumbled and without thinking, thumped the edge of the doorframe with my arm. The pain was enough to bring the world back into focus with a sharp jolt. Tears blurred my vision and I dashed them away with the back of my hand as I tried to wrap my mind around Siobhan’s words.

  It wasn’t Clara. They hadn’t found Clara…

  “I don’t understand,” Dad was speaking, his confusion evident. “You tell us you’ve found her and now you’re saying it’s not her at all… How
can you do that?”

  “I can’t imagine the distress this must be causing you all,” Siobhan said. “But when we initially told you about the body we did say it was dependent on the findings of the pathologist. We went on the preliminary identification from the items found with the body in question, which led us to believe it was in fact your daughter Clara. But—”

  “She’s not dead,” Mam said, her voice quiet, almost contemplative.

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Mrs McCarthy. As it stands right now, your daughter is still a missing person but—”

  “So she’s not dead then,” Mam said again, her eyes focusing in on the detective’s face. There was a shrewd intelligence glittering in her blue-eyed gaze, one I recognised only too well.

  She looked now at the detective, the same way she’d looked at me after I tried to tell her Clara had been taken. A combination of disbelief and rage, the part of her mind that Clara’s disappearance had awakened, peeking out, her attempt at protecting her mind from the terrible truth.

  To others it might have sounded stupid. Why couldn’t she face the truth? Her daughter was gone, most probably dead. But they didn’t know her as I did. She was the type of person always prone to imagination. When we’d been children, listening to her stories before bed had been our favourite way to fall asleep. We didn’t need bedtime fairytale books. Not when Mam was on hand to conjure the most imaginative of tales from her mind.

  I’d certainly inherited her ability to conjure up my own amusements and as I’d grown older and Clara had disappeared, what had once been an asset became a curse.

  There wasn’t one scenario Clara could have faced that I hadn’t already thought of. In the early hours of the morning, before the sun rose was the best time to conjure the kinds of horrors that would have most sane people running for the straight-jackets.

  “I can’t answer that with any certainty,” Siobhan said firmly. “However, I have to take into consideration all the elements in play.”

  “How did they get her clothes?” The question left my lips before I had the chance to truly think about what I was saying.

  “That’s one of the queries I’ve got,” Siobhan said. “How certain are you that the clothes you saw, were the clothes your sister was wearing at the time of her disappearance?”

  An image of Clara screaming and terrified popped into my head. Closing my eyes, I scrubbed my palm against the rough surface of my jeans, a pathetic attempt to rid myself of the ghostly brush of her fingers my mind liked to remind me of.

  “I’m positive,” I said. “That’s what she was wearing when she was—”

  “Shut up!” Mam screamed at me as she hopped to her feet and launched herself across the living room toward me.

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” She chanted the words over and over. I expected her to hit me, to lash out with the pain she was clearly suffering. But either she couldn’t, or didn’t want to. Instead, she stood over me, fisting her hands, her nails digging into the soft flesh of her palms, leaving bloody half-moon prints in their wake. Her eyes were wild.

  “Ita, stop it please, it’s not Alice’s fault.” Dad wrapped his arms around her frail shoulders but she refused to budge. She stared down at me with eyes that blazed with her rage and something else, another emotion I’d never noticed before. Terror.

  “She wants her dead,” she said, the words tumbling from her mouth. They hit the air, detonating inside my head with deadly accuracy. “She keeps saying she’s gone, Dennis, she said it from the start and even now, when they know it’s not Clara she still can’t leave it.”

  “Mam,” I said, straightening up in the doorway. “This isn’t what I wanted… I want Clara home as much as—”

  “Don’t say her name,” she said. “Don’t you speak her name to me.”

  I bit back the hurt and anger that rose in the back of my throat. It was always like this. In her eyes, only she was allowed to talk about Clara, to reminisce about her.

  Pushing past her, I escaped out into the hall and made for the front door. I wasn’t sure where I was going but I knew I couldn’t spend another moment in the house.

  “That’s it, Alice.” My mother’s voice drifted after me. “Run away. Run away and leave us, just like you left Clara.”

  My tears traced down my face, in hot angry rivulets as I slammed the door behind me, the glass rattling in its frame the same way my heart rattled in my chest.

  30

  “Jesus, that was harsh,” Ronan said, scrubbing his hands back through his hair, causing it to stand to attention.

  I said nothing as I climbed silently into the passenger seat. I waited for him to start the car. He didn’t say anything else as he started the engine and we drove out onto the road.

  The countryside whipped past and I kept my gaze trained on the horizon, my fingers curling and uncurling into fists as we took a turn a little too fast for my comfort.

  I was no stranger to grief. Spend long enough in the job and you get to witness first hand the raw unchecked emotions that came to those loved ones left behind. Knowing all of this never made any of it easier and watching Mrs McCarthy fly off the handle today at her only remaining daughter had been a lesson in keeping my tongue in check. No one, not even Alice would have thanked me for intervening on her behalf.

  I’d seen families torn apart by loss, forced to watch the disintegration of relationships in real time as the case progressed. The only difference with the McCarthy’s was that the disintegration had already occurred long before I’d ever made it to their living room. From what little I knew of Alice, she’d moved away as soon as she was old enough to strike out on her own. It had been she who had dogged the Gardaí over her sister’s disappearance. Her parents had taken a backseat, letting her chase and cajole, plead and threaten, with the powers that be, all so her sister could be categorised among the ranks of the missing. It couldn’t have been easy for her. When you looked into her eyes, you could almost see the toll her sister’s loss had taken on her. Pain and guilt, a nasty combination for anyone to bear but she hid it well. She was probably the type to bury it deep inside, keeping it from the watchful view of those around her.

  Perhaps, if I’d had to live with a mother like that, I would have done the same.

  Not that I could blame Ita McCarthy either.

  Her daughter was gone. It was a grief I couldn’t even begin to fathom.

  The English language was a miraculous thing. In its infinite wisdom, it gave us words for the loss of our loved ones.

  Losing parents left you an orphan, a lonely word that conjured images of gaunt, hollow eyed children desperately bereft of love.

  Losing a partner made you a widow, or widower, depending on your role in the partnership. A crushing loss that saw your soul cleaved in two, one half forever lost and forced to wander. It wasn’t something I could imagine.

  But the loss of a child… That type of loss was too great to imagine. So huge that not even the English language, which had given us so much, could do justice by giving a name to that kind of agony.

  Death was long supposed a natural occurrence. It would come to us all in time.

  But the loss of ones child, that was unnatural.

  The child was never supposed to go before their parents.

  And today, in that living room we’d witnessed the aftermath of that balance which had been so carelessly disrupted all those years ago.

  And it was a loss Ita McCarthy had had to endure for all these years. No doubt, she blocked it out, pretended to herself that it wasn’t true, that her child wasn’t missing, wasn’t dead. A form of survival because at the end of the day how was the human mind supposed to overcome something so terrible?

  “Are you all right?” Ronan’s voice cut through my thoughts and I jerked with the sudden realisation that the car had stopped moving.

  I glanced over at him. The Garda station was silhouetted behind him.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “Just thinking about the case i
s all.”

  “I can’t get Mrs McCarthy’s reaction out of my head. She was so—” he paused. “Cruel.” His forehead creased with consternation.

  “She can’t help it,” I said. “She’s hurting. When that happens you lash out at those nearest and dearest.”

  “She’s going to drive her daughter away,” he said, saying the very thought I’d had myself.

  I shrugged. “Not our problem. We can’t fix their familial issues,” I said. “All we can do is try and get the answers they need so they can begin to make sense of their lives.”

  “Do you think they will?” His question took me by surprise.

  “I don’t know,” I said, carefully. “Some make it back to each other. And then others…” I trailed off and Ronan nodded.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Same thing happened with my Mam’s sister and her husband.”

  “What happened?” I didn’t want to pry but there was something in the way he spoke that suggested he wanted to talk about it.

  “Auntie Eileen had a little one die,” he said, gruffly. “Cot death. One minute everything was fine and the next Ben was gone…”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said and even as I said it, I knew the words were woefully inadequate but there was nothing else I had to offer him. I couldn’t take his pain away for him. I couldn’t fix it. The tragedy was long passed.

  He shrugged, a non-committal move of his shoulders that hid a multitude of thoughts. “Auntie Eileen split from Frank not long after,” he said. “He’d been the one to put him down you see and she couldn’t look at him. Blamed him, in her own way.” He glanced up at me. “She didn’t mean to, she knew it wasn’t his fault, knew he loved the bones of Ben but still…”

  I nodded. I did understand. I’d never experienced it but it was too common a reaction to the tragedy the loss of a child brought. I’d seen it happen too many times before.

  “So what’s the next move now?” he said, abruptly changing the subject.