Roly’s voice opens up the filing cabinet for the case in my brain and suddenly the names come flooding out like they’ve been waiting for me: Gary Curran, Hacky O’Hanrahan, Emer Nolan, Daisy Nugent, Niall Deasey, Conor Kearney … Conor Kearney. I take a deep breath, mentally shutting the file drawers. This isn’t the time. Instead I look up at the framed photographs and posters on the walls of the bar: Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams, the tricolor, a framed copy of Yeats’s “Easter, 1916,” some newer stuff too: a Michael Collins movie poster, a signed and framed Dropkick Murphys album. The standard American Irish bar kit.
“Okay, give me the paper.” I dial the cell number. I don’t have to look up the country code for Ireland. I remember. For some reason I don’t want to do it on my cell.
He answers on the third ring. “Byrne here.”
“It’s Maggie. Maggie D’arcy. Uh, my uncle, uh, Daniel Flaherty, asked me to return your call.”
“D’arcy.” His voice is tight, stressed. “Thanks for ringing. I wanted to let your uncle know that we’ve found something in Wicklow. The forestry lands, not far from Glenmalure.” An image swims up before me, dark trees and sky and a narrow road, lined with rusty bracken.
“Something?” I see Uncle Danny wince, but we need to know if this is it.
“No remains. A scarf,” he says quickly. “Printed with butterflies.” With his Dublin accent he says it booterflies. “Crime scene woman says it’s been here a while. Maybe twenty years. There’s blood on the scarf. Quite a bit.” There’s a long pause. “It was deliberately buried.”
I can’t stop a memory coming to me. Christmas. Erin unwrapping the scarf, ripping the paper to get to it, her crazy hair in her eyes. She looks up, delighted. “Thank you, Mags. I love it.”
Roly Byrne hesitates, then says, “One of the lads checked the old cases, found your description of the scarf in the original report.” The line crackles a little.
I meet Uncle Danny’s eyes. He turns his head. The lights swim together. My eyes fill up. I swallow hard. I focus on Gerry Adams.
I can hear Roly Byrne breathing across the line, across the air, across the sea. He’s not finished.
“What?” I ask him.
“There’s a woman after going missing,” he says.
I look down at the floor. I know these boards better than the ones in my own kitchen. There are two shiny depressions where Uncle Danny likes to stand. “Another one?”
“Yeah. Her name is Niamh Horrigan. She’s twenty-five, a teacher from Galway. She stayed at a youth hostel near Glendalough and told someone she was going to walk to Glenmalure. She was seen on the path and then she just…” Disappeared. He doesn’t say it. “We don’t have a body. Nothing like that. This was just Sunday the family rang us up.”
“So you were searching for her and you found the scarf?”
“Well, one of the local lads.” He’s tired. I can hear it now. They would have launched the search immediately. He probably didn’t sleep last night. “We’re going to get right onto it. We’ll look for additional evidence of course. We’ll … uh, see if there’s anything else. Nearby.”
Anything else. Erin’s body. Her remains.
I’m already thinking about how it’s going to go down. They’ll conduct a search in the surrounding area, see if they can find anything. They’ll test the blood on the scarf, look for other biological material that might yield DNA, look for fibers, though after this much time there may not be much to find.
“This hasn’t been widely reported yet—though with all the reporters down here about Niamh Horrigan, a few of ’em know we found something. We had to tell ’em the, uh, the evidence wasn’t related to Horrigan’s case. For the family, like. But I thought I’d let you know. We’ll keep you informed. And I wondered if your uncle might need some assistance from us, if he’s going to travel.” I tot I’d letcha know. His Dublin accent has softened a bit but it’s still there, his ths disappearing into the ether.
I glance at Uncle Danny. He’s watching me, his right hand on automatic, still wiping the bar. It strikes me suddenly that I’ve been wrong all this time. I thought we knew. I thought we’d accepted it. But we haven’t.
I have a thousand questions, but now’s not the time. “I’ll get back to you,” I tell him. “Let me talk to him.”
I meet Uncle Danny’s eyes. He looks away and drops the cloth into the sink.
“Okay,” Roly Byrne says. “I’m sorry, D’arcy.” I click off. D’arcy. Only Roly Byrne calls me that.
I don’t wait. “They found her scarf,” I tell Uncle Danny. “They’re looking for remains now.”
I watch him take it in. He holds the knowledge for a long moment and then I see him grasping for something, some little drop of hope.
“They’re sure it’s hers?”
“I think so.” I hesitate, then I say, “There’s blood on it.”
He winces. “Maybe it’s not hers. Maybe it’s someone else’s. There must be a lot of those scarves around. It’s been so long. How can they be sure?”
I can feel it too, the tiny seedling, growing toward the light despite my job, despite everything I know. I need to stop it.
“Uncle Danny, I’m so sorry. It’s near where I found the necklace when I was over there in ninety-three. It’s near where she was walking. With the, the … other women, I think we have to face that it does indicate that … something happened.” He sobs then. This is it. I hug him hard, struggling to get my arms around the breadth of him. “I’m so sorry.” He cries for a little bit and then he pulls away from me, picks up the towel again.
“There’s something else, too,” I say quietly. “Another young woman has just disappeared. Close to the last place Erin was seen.”
“Oh, Christ. What do they…? Do they think it’s connected to Erin and the others?”
“They don’t know anything yet. It’s all new.”
“You gotta go, Mags,” he says. “You gotta go and make sure they do this right. Can Brian take Lilly for ya?”
“Uncle Danny. Let’s wait and—”
“It would kill me, trip like that,” he says. “My doc says I can’t exert myself at all, my heart’s so bad now. You gotta go and find out what’s going on. You went before. You were there a long time. You know everyone. You know the deal over there.”
Our eyes meet.
“Mags.”
My mind slides back. Cold air whipping my hair across my face. The smell of peat smoke. A gray street, the sidewalk dark, a door painted a shade of blue so alive it vibrates through the rain.
“Okay, I’ll go,” I tell my uncle Danny for the second time in twenty-three years. “Okay.” And then I hug him again hard, sinking into his huge middle, my arms wrapped around him, my hands rubbing circles on his back. He’s wearing one of the slippery golf shirts he likes and he smells like Guinness and lemon oil.
“Of course I’ll go, Uncle Danny. Of course I will.”