“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Nothing, nothing’s wrong. I have to go,” I tell him. “Something’s come up. An emergency. I need to go right now. I’m really sorry.” I can’t look at him. I need to get away from him. I need to think.
“What? With your family? What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain later but I have to go. I’m really sorry.”
I grab my coat and I’m out the door, running, running north, across the canal and up to Baggot Street.
I don’t stop until I get to the hotel.
I leave Roly a message while I pack. I don’t tell him anything specific, just that I have a lead but I need to go back to the States for a couple of days to follow up on it. I say I’ll tell him as much as I can when I know something definite.
My phone keeps ringing. Conor. I silence it and ignore his calls and texts.
I keep packing. I think about going to the airport, but when I call, I can’t get a seat until the eleven a.m. flight the next day, so I put my bags by the door and I try to sleep.
Erin, crying.
When?
She’s in my bed, curled into herself, her body.
The window, open just a little.
Outside. Summer.
Morning.
Her shoulder moves, up and down, up and down, but she keeps the sobs inside.
I only hear her breathing, uneven, her breath too sharp.
I start to reach out to touch her, to ask her what’s wrong, but my hand won’t move.
Reach.
I try to reach.
I don’t move.
48
THURSDAY, JUNE 9
2016
Later, I’ll barely remember the hours in the airport, the flight, the drive east, home, toward Lilly and Brian. I just keep going over it in my mind, trying to put everything together.
Erin, on the trail.
She sees him. She doesn’t know, not yet. She doesn’t know something’s wrong.
Her face as she realizes.
Alexandria is quiet, Main Street deserted, New York Avenue dark and silent. I drive slowly past the bar. Uncle Danny’s car is there and the lights are on. It’s nearly midnight. I head toward the ocean. Back toward Ireland, I tell myself. I think of Erin, looking across the Sound, wondering what it’s like over there.
Erin.
Ireland.
When I pull up in front of the house, I sit there for a minute, the car windows open. The air is still and warm. I can smell the ocean as I walk the 542 steps to my house. I don’t want to wake Brian and Lilly up, so I put the code into the alarm system, let myself in the back door, and head down the basement stairs.
I think I know what happened to Erin, but I need proof. And the proof is here.
It’s cold down here, but I barely feel it. The boxes of Erin’s things are over on the right side, stacked against the wall, exactly as they were when I looked through them before I left two weeks ago. I get all the boxes down and I start going through them, taking everything out and laying it all on the floor.
The box that held her claddagh necklace is still in the plastic tub I’d reorganized just before leaving for Dublin and I take it out and sit down on the hard floor. My legs and arms are shaky, as though I’ve just finished a long run.
The satin lining comes away easily, once I’ve untucked the edges. I wait a minute before taking the paper out of the box and carefully unfolding it.
It’s been here all this time.
The handwriting is beautiful cursive, the date at the top clear and easy to read. November 3, 1988. The signature at the bottom is more flowery than I would have expected. Father Anthony Meehan.
It doesn’t take long to read, and when I’m done, I refold it, holding it by the edges, and put it back in the box. Frantically, I search the basement, looking for a hiding spot. Finally I pick an old box over in one corner and tuck the box into that.
I know there has to be something else here, something that will prove it.
I’m sorting through papers and receipts, checking dates and locations, when I hear footsteps on the stairs and I turn to find Brian coming down.
“You’re back.”
He stops on the fifth stair up and stands there in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. In the harsh light from the hanging bulb, he looks as though he hasn’t slept in weeks. His eyes are bloodshot, his skin gray. He watches me going through the boxes.
“Yeah, how’s Lilly?” I ask him.
“She’s great,” he says. “She’s still asleep.”
“Good.”
We stare at each other and I have a sudden flashback to our wedding, to his face, bathed in sunlight from the windows.
“What are you looking for?” he asks me.
“I’m looking through your boxes of things from your parents’ house. There was a lot of your traveling stuff in there, an old passport, some old traveler’s checks. Lilly went all through the change and took out the Italian and Greek coins and everything. She liked all the postcards and souvenirs and things. It got all mixed up. Your papers and the other stuff. When I put it back, I did it wrong, I … mixed it up. The chain of evidence is a nightmare of course. I could never use it, but…” I’m babbling.
He doesn’t say anything. He just watches me,
“I’m looking for more receipts,” I say. “From Dublin. For after you were supposed to have left. Well, you did leave.”
He waits. I’m still trying to get all the details straight in my head.
“But then you went back.” I pause, then start again.
“When I was over there, the last week, I found a receipt among Erin’s things—someone had saved it after changing traveler’s checks in Dublin on September eighteenth, 1993. I hadn’t seen it before and it made us think that Erin had gone back to Dublin after being in Wicklow. It made us think it was more likely that she’d disappeared on purpose.
“But there was something else that made me wonder, what if she hadn’t come back to Dublin? What if the receipt had gotten in among my stuff some other way? There was really only one way that could have happened.” I point to the boxes. “Lilly went through all this stuff. She got it all mixed up. I thought it was from Erin’s boxes, but it was from yours.
“I didn’t know until yesterday—day before yesterday, now—that Erin had started writing a letter to someone. She referenced something that happened at O’Brien’s and she said she was tired of keeping it a secret. There’s a pub, in Dublin, called O’Brien’s. She used to go there. The person who found the letter thought that’s what she meant. But that’s not what she was talking about. She was talking about the O’Briens’ house. You guys used to go there a lot, didn’t you? They used to have a lot of parties.”
He sits down on one of the boxes and he leans back against the wall. He looks so tired.
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. It’s all up to him now. It’s his story to tell. Finally, after a long silence, he says, “I think that for a long time I hoped someone would figure it out. But then, after Lilly, I was glad they hadn’t. I was glad I was free and that was the first time I began to be glad that it seemed to have just gone away, that everyone seemed to have decided that it was the guy in Ireland.”
“What happened at the O’Briens’?” I ask him. “What happened to Erin at Derek O’Brien’s house?”