'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 19 & 20

I’ve just played the only card I have.

I’m sorry, Roly.

I don’t feel nearly as guilty as I should. 

Chapter 20

1993

I caught up to Byrne and McNeely outside the Irishtown Garda Station that next morning to tell them about Erin and Niall from Arklow.

October 8. She had been missing for three weeks.

They didn’t look happy to see me but they stopped and listened to me while I told them about the men at the Raven.

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Byrne looked up at the sky for a minute, then pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache. “That’s interesting. He really said that?”

“Yeah. What does that mean? I know it’s for Provisional IRA, but I don’t really get it. Do they dress a particular way or something?”

“Well, it might mean that your man from the bar is a prejudiced git and he thinks anyone with a northern accent is a terrorist, but it also might mean that they’re actually Provos. He’s right. There’s a sorta look, an energy. Can’t really explain it.”

Bernie sighed but didn’t say anything.

I said, “The town where Erin and I grew up on Long Island? It’s a regular suburb, but it’s Long Island, and there are a few Mafia guys living there. They don’t come into the bar a lot — I guess ’cause it’s an Irish bar — but I always know when they do, even if I’ve never seen them before. Is that what you mean?”

“Yeah, I guess it is. Were they real Mafia guys? Like The Godfather? That sorta thing?”

“Yeah. They had these shirts they always wore. Silk. I’ve never seen any other man wear a shirt like that.”

He grinned. “‘I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,’ ” he said, in what was supposed to be The Godfather but didn’t quite hit the mark.

Bernie rolled her eyes.

“You sound more like Vincent Connelly than Vito Corleone,” I said.

Roly and I grinned at each other. “Very funny,” he said. Foony.

“So what are you going to do?” I asked. He glanced at Bernie. “We’re going to go down to the Westbury Hotel and we’re going to try to figure out who they were.”

“Can I come with you?”

“How did I know you were going to ask me that? No, you can’t.” McNeely said, “I understand that you’re worried about your cousin, but you going off and pretending to be an amateur detective isn’t going to help us find her, and it’s likely to hurt, if you want to know the truth.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. I went in there and I could tell he recognized me. I figured he might know something and thought I should ask him. If you’d gone in there he wouldn’t have told you.”

“Fair enough,” she said. She studied me for a couple of seconds. We stood there for a moment in awkward silence and then I asked McNeely, “Are you from Northern Ireland?”

Something crossed her face, annoyance maybe, and she said, “That’s right. I was raised in Armagh.”

“That must have been intense, growing up there,” I said, then immediately felt stupid when I saw her face.

“Ah, yeah, ‘intense’ is one word for it,” she said, then studied me for a long moment before she said, “Well, we’d better leg it, Roly.”

“We’ll let you know if there’s anything,” he said.

I’d already turned around and was walking back down Charlemont Place when he called out, “Miss D’arcy!” and I stopped and turned around to find him jogging after me.

He stopped when he got to me and said, a little out of breath, “Let me ask ya something. She may or may not have come back to Dublin. She may or may not have known those fellas at the pub. I don’t know what to think about this thing. Where do you think she is?”

I watched a couple walking by the canal. “When we were little, she used to run away all the time. She didn’t do it to be cruel or to make people worry. She just ... ran. But she always came back.” There was a long silence. “Or I could always find her,” I added.

Byrne didn’t say anything and I kept talking. “I think something happened to her. If she came back to take a bus, it was because she was going to meet someone. And that someone knows where she is.”

“Okay.” He looked tired all of a sudden and I didn’t believe him when he said, “Don’t worry too much about Detective McNeely. She just doesn’t like Americans much.”

“Why?”

“That,” he said, with a little grin that wasn’t really a grin, “is a long story for another day.”

***

I got back to the house just as Emer and Daisy were leaving for classes. They’d bought the Irish Independent and I asked if I could read it.  

“’Course. I’m finished with it,” Daisy told me, drinking a cup of tea while Emer packed up her books. “Actually, do you know, I was reading it and I think I remembered the name of your man who rang for Erin. The sort o’ American-sounding one. It was that story that made me think of it. I can’t believe I forgot it, actually.”

“Really?”

“Hacky O’Hanrahan.” She said it in a funny voice.

“What?” We both laughed. “It sounds like a cartoon character.”

“I know. I wouldn’t have remembered but there’s a story about a fella named Hackman O’Hanrahan Sr. in the paper today and I thought, that was the same name as the one who called.” She picked up the paper, turned it to an inside page, and handed it over.

IAI Chief O’Hanrahan Seeks Investors for New Sectors Fund

The Irish American banker Hackman O’Hanrahan Sr. announced today a new fund for investors in new sectors in the Republic. O’Hanrahan, a former director of Allied Irish Banks and the Green Island Fund, calls the new fund a rare opportunity for the manufacturing and computer sector ...

“I’d say your man is his son,” Emer said.

“That makes sense. That would make sense, right? If his father’s been over here doing business, his accent might be a bit funny. And he could be a Trinity student, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, with a look I couldn’t quite read. “There are loads of Americans at Trinity.”

After they’d gone, I reread the story and paced around the house a bit, thinking. If Erin had been seeing this Hacky O’Hanrahan guy, he might know something about where she was and he might be able to tell us about her state of mind. He might know where she went when she left the bed-and-breakfast.

I was just about to leave the house when the phone rang.

“Maggie?” I didn’t recognize the voice but she said, “It’s Jess. Jess Friedman. My mom said you were trying to get in touch with us about Erin.” I can hear the emotion in her voice. “I’m with Lisa and Chris and Brian. We’re in Madrid at a youth hostel and my phone card might run out but she said you wanted to know when’s the last time we saw Erin. It was when we left Dublin in August.”

“So she didn’t come over to travel with you or anything?”

“No,” she said. “Is she okay? What’s going on?”

I told her the basics. “The last place she was seen was at this bed-and-breakfast. She didn’t tell you about a boyfriend or anything or any travel plans, did she? How long did you guys stay with her?”

“Three nights,” Jess said. “We flew into Dublin and stayed with her for, yeah, three nights, then took the ferry over to London and then Lisa and I met up with Stacy and we went over to France and started Eurailing. Brian was in London with college friends. Chris visited his family in Ireland then went over to London. And then they came over to Paris and met us.”

“How did Erin seem?”

“I guess good,” Jessica said. “Like she liked it there. She was ... I don’t know. Different but happy.”

“What do you mean different?”

“She was just ... She kept trying to talk about like, the news. There was some riot or something. She wanted to talk about it, but I didn’t really know anything about it. Here’s Chris.”

Chris Fallon was one of Erin’s friends, too. “It’s Chris. Yeah, she seemed pretty happy. What did you think, Bri?”

I heard Brian Lombardi’s voice say, “Yeah, she seemed good. You know Erin.” His voice called up his face. I’d had a huge crush on Brian in high school. He and his older brother, Frank, had both been popular, good-looking, and talented athletes.

Jessica got back on and said, “Well, yeah. The last night, though. She ... we went out. We had a lot to drink. And then she took us to this, like, club. We were all dancing and having so much fun. It was weird, you could only order, like, red wine. And then she just disappeared. We were ready to go home and we couldn’t find her. We searched for like an hour. We didn’t know what to do so we figured out how to get back to her house and we had to knock on the door and wake up her roommates. Chris was really pissed.”

“So what happened? Did she come back the next day?”

“Yeah. She came in and said she’d been to mass. It was weird. We were already up because we had to catch the ferry.”

“Mass?”

“Yeah.”

“Did she say she’d started going regularly?”

“No, but she said something about Father Anthony. You know, just that she still couldn’t believe he was gone, that she really missed him. Anyway, she said she was sorry, she was really drunk and whatever, but she didn’t say who she’d been with.” I heard a beeping over the line. “Shit, Maggie, the card’s about to run out. I’ll try to—”

The phone cut out and I stood there for a moment listening to the silence coming across the line.

 -----------------------------------------------

Erin has her Holy Communion first, when she’s in second grade.

My mom gets her a white lacy dress with puffy sleeves and a white ribbon around the waist. She looks like a bride and I’m so jealous I think about spilling paint on the dress so she can’t wear it.

I sit in the church next to my parents and watch Erin go up to kneel for the first time and take the wafer from Father Patrick. Father Anthony stands nearby and smiles at us. I feel guilty, thinking about how I wanted to spill paint on the dress, and I’m glad I don’t have to confess, for I know that Father Anthony won’t like me if I tell him how I feel.

I watch Erin as she goes, Jessica behind her. When she kneels, she turns her face up to Father Patrick and the sun shining in through the windows covers her in golden light. She smiles and she looks happier than I’ve ever seen her, as though she’s smiling at Jesus. Later, I hear her tell Father Anthony that she felt Jesus there next to her, that she felt his presence, heard him telling her what to do.

When I make my communion a year later, the lace dress is scratchy against my neck and the wafer makes my mouth feel funny. I wait to hear Jesus’s voice, but he never speaks to me.

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