The woman was still flustered but she turned to a large calendar hanging on the wall behind the bar. “Yes, she … It must have been a Thursday because we had a big walking group arriving the next day, for the weekend.” She traced a finger over the boxes, then said, “The sixteenth. It must have been the sixteenth.”
I glanced over at Emer. That was the day Erin had left Dublin. “Was that the first time you’d seen her? She took these pictures but these look more like spring.” I put them on the bar and the woman looked down at them quickly, fanning them out like cards.
“May. She came in and had lunch back in May and she was asking me about the barracks and the Wicklow Way. She wanted to do some walking and she asked me how to get to the path. I pointed her in the right direction and she set off. I remember it was May because it was my mam’s birthday and it was nice she had such a lovely day.”
“Okay, and then on September sixteenth she came down again?” My mind was racing. Obviously Erin had made it back to Dublin from the May trip. What we needed to know about was the more recent one.
The woman glanced back toward the calendar, remembering. “Yeah, she came in and was talking to Deirdre, who does the cleaning. I came in and saw her and I recognized her from before. She said she wanted to walk the other direction on the Wicklow Way, like she’d gone south before and now she wanted to go north. So Deirdre and I told her to walk back up the Military Road and she’d see the signposts.”
“How did she get down here?” I asked. “Did she tell you?”
“She must have taken the bus and had the driver stop. If it’s not busy, you can sometimes ask the Glendalough bus drivers to drop you here. We can call ahead and arrange it with Bus Éireann, but we hadn’t that day so she must have just asked once she was on the bus from Dublin. Or maybe she hitched. People would hitch around here quite a lot.”
“And you didn’t see her after you told her which way to go?”
“No. Is she all right then?” she asked again. “The Guards were in a few months ago asking about a German girl. I think they found her, though. They didn’t ask about your cousin.”
“No, they … We just don’t know,” I said. “I want to walk up that way.”
Emer cleared her throat. “Do you not think we should ring the Guards?”
“I want to look first.” I pointed back the way we’d come, along the Military Road. “Back that way. That’s where the trail is?” I asked the girl behind the bar.
“Yeah, you’ll see the signs.” She looked worried. “Take care. Come back and let us know, will you?”
Outside, the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped. The air was heavy, suddenly teetering on the edge of rain.
“You don’t have to come with me,” I told Emer. “I just want to see where she went. If I don’t find anything, we’ll call the police.”
“No, I’ll come along,” she said, without hesitating.
We started walking up the road, climbing gradually back the way we’d come. The road was narrow, lined with moss-covered stone walls, the ground obscured by fallen leaves and mud-brown bracken. After ten minutes of walking, we came to a little turnout on the left. “There’s the marker,” Emer said, pointing to a wooden sign with a little yellow hiker icon. The trail disappeared into the woods ahead of us. “Do you think she’s here?”
“I don’t know. Let’s just walk up there a bit,” I said. “Okay?”
Emer nodded and we set off.
The clouds crowded in around us; I had the sense of the looming shapes of mountains ahead of us and all around us, but I couldn’t see them through the mist. The woods got thicker as we went. We were back in a fir tree plantation now and there was something menacing about the uniform shapes of the trees, the way they reached toward the sky. When I turned around, I could no longer see the road. We were all alone in the woods.
Where are you, Erin?
Emer trudged along. I could feel her annoyed energy behind me but I wanted to keep going. I felt something in those woods. I knew Erin had been there.
“Maggie, do you not think—” Emer started.
“Hang on.” I’d been scanning the ground next to the trail, but it was only by chance that I caught the glint of silver, the sliver of purple an alarm against the brown and dark green.
I fell to my knees, scrabbling in the leaves on the side of the track.
A silver claddagh necklace, tangled and nearly buried. The chain was broken at the clasp, the small silver link on one side now in the shape of a C; whatever force had done it had bent the metal until it gave.
At the center—a pale purple amethyst.
Erin’s necklace.
5
TUESDAY, MAY 24,
2016
While I try to get the boxes back together, I think about giving Brian his stuff tonight, just to get it out of the basement. But his apartment doesn’t have much space and I’m about to ask him a big favor, so I leave them where they are and bring my notebooks and a few of the files up and tuck them into my leather messenger bag for the trip. I’ll have the six hours across the Atlantic to go through them.
The lasagna’s in the oven when Brian comes through the door. He knocks first, always trying to be respectful, which annoys me, unreasonably, and he has a bottle of white, which is my favorite. We’ve gotten relatively comfortable with each other since the divorce, but we’re not huggers or kissers. I take the bottle and say, “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
Lilly melts away to her room and I pour him a glass of red and we head out to the backyard. It’s up a bit from the beach; my dad always said that the more expensive houses with beachfront down on Ocean Street were likely to get flooded but that we had the benefit of the view without the risk. The patio table’s in the corner and we sit down and he leans back in his chair. He looks middle-aged, his hair thinning on top and his chest and stomach newly soft. I suddenly remember the desperate crush I had on him when I was sixteen and he was seventeen. I loved how tall he was, how the veins ran down the inside of his arms. I can still see that seventeen-year-old in his face.
“What’s up?” he asks.
“Uncle Danny got a call from Dublin last night. They found Erin’s scarf. Not far from where she disappeared. He wants me to go over.”
He doesn’t say anything, but he reaches out and touches my shoulder, just for a second. “Oh, Mags,” he says finally. “I’m so sorry.” I can feel his emotion. He cares about me, about Danny. He’s a good guy. He really is.
“And there’s another girl missing. That’s how they found the scarf.”
“But … is it connected to the other two? Did they find anything else?”
“No.” But now I’m wondering what Roly hasn’t told me. “Can you take Lilly for a week or so? Maybe more. I don’t know how long it will take.”
He hesitates and I know it’s his embarrassment about his apartment. “Yeah, of course.”
“It’s probably better for her if you just stay here, since it’s for so long. Do you mind?”
“No, no, of course not. Probably better for her.” I can hear the relief in his voice. I’m supposed to pay him spousal support, but he won’t take it. He was okay for a few years, after the divorce, but lately he’s had bad luck with jobs, layoffs and workforce reductions and so on. His family had money once, a lot of it. Brian and Frank were like royalty at our high school, their house one of the biggest and most expensive along the beach. But his dad went bankrupt in the early 2000s and he now lives in Florida with a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend. Lilly tells me that Brian gets into a bad place sometimes, thinking about that.