2
TUESDAY, MAY 24,
2016
I help him clean up and close the bar and we go for eggs and bagels. Lilly’s gone to school by the time I get home and after I check in with the homicide squad and let them know I’ll be away for a bit with a family emergency, I dress for my run and Google Niamh Horrigan.
I find a bunch of stories, in the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the local Galway papers, all of them covering Niamh Horrigan’s disappearance with barely contained excitement: “Galway Girl Niamh Loved the Out of Doors.” “We Just Want Our Niamh Back—Hillwalker’s Mam.” And then, “Is Niamh Southeast Killer’s Latest Victim?” along with small photographs of Erin and Teresa McKenny and June Talbot and a bigger one of Niamh, dark-haired and sporty-looking. If I squint, she looks a little like Erin.
Don’t go there.
Niamh’s an avid hillwalker, the papers say. She’s climbed all of Ireland’s highest peaks and goes mountaineering or walking every weekend.
Her hair looks naturally wavy. She has a spray of freckles across her nose. In the picture she’s grinning and holding a walking stick, trees behind her.
Don’t go there.
Alexandria is right in the middle of a little C-shaped bay on the North Shore of Long Island. Jogging on the wet sand, I can see the gray line of Connecticut across Long Island Sound. I love this run. I’ve been doing it almost my whole life and I know every house along the beach, every barking dog and every old man fishing for stripers from the shore. I run fast, putting in six miles on the streets around Fleet’s Cove and then heading back along the beach. When I come around the turn of the coastline, I stop and look back at the peppermint-striped LILCO stacks in Northport. I can’t help but think of the Poolbeg chimneys in Dublin, how you could see them from all over the city.
My memory has been doing funny things since Danny woke me and I have a sudden image of a long stretch of wet sand, the red-and-white-striped stacks in the distance.
Sandymount. It strikes me suddenly that they’re bookends to Erin’s life, these stacks. Long Island. Ireland. Here. There.
A gull drops a mussel shell on a rock by my feet, then hovers overhead, waiting for me to leave.
* * *
I’m half packed by the time Lilly comes in at five.
“Where’s your dad?” I ask her. Dinner’s in the oven and the table’s set. I have a bottle of red open, Brian’s favorite.
“He had to go pick up some milk and bread. He’ll be here in fifteen. What?” She can see it on my face. I go over to her and tuck a stray piece of dark brown hair behind her ear, smelling strawberry shampoo and fried food. She’s taller than I am now. I have to reach up to do it. Lilly looks more like Brian than she does like me, with his father’s family’s Southern Italian coloring and softer features cancelling out his mother’s and my Irish genes, though she’s an original, too, and I’ve always been glad of that, and a little jealous. That she has her own face and no one else’s.
“We heard from Dublin. They think they may have found my cousin Erin’s scarf. She was wearing it when she disappeared while she was living over there.”
“No way. After all these years?”
“Twenty-three.”
“What does it mean? Did they find her body?”
I hesitate. “No, not yet. But they think it may be close by. They’re searching for another woman, who was hiking there and disappeared. They found Erin’s scarf while trying to figure out what happened to her.”
“Is it connected to the other two women? Is there any evidence?” Poor Lilly knows a lot more about forensics than any fifteen-year-old should have to.
“We just don’t know,” I tell her. “Uncle Danny wants me to go and see them and try to figure it out. You okay staying with Dad for a week or so?”
“Yeah, I guess. Can he stay here, though? I can’t sleep with the trains going by his apartment.” She looks down at the table, feeling disloyal.
There are a bunch of reasons I’d rather they stay at Brian’s, but I know it’s better for Lilly to be at home. “’Course. I’ll ask him, anyway. How was school?” She’s a sophomore this year, past the storms of puberty, though somehow even Lilly’s worst seemed fairly mild. One of the benefits of being a cop, I guess. A thirteen-year-old yelling that she wishes you’d leave her alone forever because you’re too nosy never seemed that serious compared to a thirteen-year-old who’s addicted to heroin ending up as a witness to the murder of another thirteen-year-old who was sex-trafficked and killed.
“What do you think happened to her?” Lilly asks me seriously. She has a way of looking at you, her head tilted a little, her huge brown eyes watching you, that makes it impossible to lie.
“I think…” I start. “I guess until last night, most days, I was pretty sure something happened to her, Lil, that someone killed her and hid her, I guess I’m saying. But then there were days where I thought maybe she started a new life somewhere, that she didn’t want to tell us. I pictured her sometimes, with a daughter…” I smile at her. “And bad, unfashionable jeans, just like me.”
“But why wouldn’t she tell you?” Lilly has a tight group of best friends who share all their secrets. She can’t imagine why Erin would have kept something that big to herself.
“I don’t know. Erin was complicated, sweetheart. She could be mysterious. She’d gone off before. It was hard to know what she was thinking.”
I think she’s done asking questions, but then she says, “What was she like? Uncle Danny told me she looked like you. But what was she like?”
Wavy brown hair, stiff with the salt, threads of gold where the sun bleached it. Freckles across her nose. Her hand tight in mine.
“We grew up together. We were like sisters.” That doesn’t answer her question, though. “Erin was … We did look alike, enough alike that people sometimes thought we were twins, but she was really beautiful, in a way that people noticed. She was wild, a risk-taker, troubled, creative. Fun.” Lilly doesn’t say anything. I still haven’t really explained Erin. “When I say Erin to myself, I have this sort of picture that I see, of her running down a beach, her hair flying all around her, the sun behind her. She loved the beach. When we were little we spent all our time there.” Erin running, too fast for me to follow, turning to shout back at me.
While Lilly finishes her homework, I head down to the basement to find the boxes of notes and files I’ve kept on Erin’s case. Twenty-three years. I’ve gone back to it over the years, when Roly Byrne called me with an update, and a few times on Erin’s birthday, when I was feeling melancholy and frustrated. But it’s been a while.
They’re over in a dry corner of the basement, up on wooden pallets, in front of a pile of other boxes of my mother’s and father’s things and a bunch of Brian’s stuff from when we sold his parents’ house that I keep forgetting to return to him. Lilly likes to come down here and look through it; she pulled some of my mother’s clothes out and wore them for a bit, and decorated her room with things from Brian’s boxes, old Red Hot Chili Peppers posters from his University of Delaware dorm room and posters and soccer jerseys he bought while backpacking in Europe or the time he and his brother, Frank, and our friends Derek and Devin O’Brien spent spring break in Mexico.