In the Woods (30 page)

“In our file,” Cassie said, “the initial report says you called the police saying that your daughter and her friends had run away. Is there any particular reason why you assumed they’d run away, rather than, say, getting lost or having an accident?”

“Well, yes. You see . . . Oh, God.” Alicia Rowan ran her hands through her hair—long, boneless-looking hands. “I was going to send Jamie to boarding school, and she didn’t want to go. It makes me sound so horribly selfish. . . . I suppose I was. But I truly did have my reasons.”

“Ms. Rowan,” Cassie said gently, “we’re not here to judge you.”

“Oh, no, I know, I know you’re not. But one judges oneself, doesn’t one?

And you’d really . . . oh, you’d have to know the whole story to understand.”

“We’d be glad to hear the whole story. Anything you can tell us might help.”

Alicia nodded, without much hope; she must have heard those words so many times, over the years. “Yes. Yes, I see that.”

She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, eyes closed, over a count of 182

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ten. “Well . . .” she said. “I was only seventeen when I had Jamie, you see. Her father was a friend of my parents’, and very much married, but I was desperately in love with him. And it all felt very sophisticated and daring, having an affair—hotel rooms, you know, and cover stories—and I didn’t believe in marriage anyway. I thought it was an outdated form of oppression.”

Her father. He was in the file—George O’Donovan, a Dublin solicitor—

but thirty-odd years later Alicia was still shielding him. “But then you discovered you were pregnant,” Cassie said.

“Yes. He was horrified, and my parents found out the whole story and they were horrified. They all said I must give the baby up for adoption, but I wouldn’t. I put my foot down. I said I would keep the baby and raise her all by myself. I thought of it as a bit of a blow for women’s rights, I think: a rebellion against the patriarchy. I was very young.”

She had been lucky. In Ireland in 1972, women were given life sentences in asylums or convents for far less. “That was a brave thing to do,” Cassie said.

“Oh, thank you, Detective. Do you know, I think I was quite a brave person, back then. But I wonder if it was the right decision. I used to think—if I had given Jamie up for adoption, you see . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Did they come round in the end?” Cassie asked. “Your family and Jamie’s father?”

Alicia sighed. “Well, no. Not really. In the end they said I could keep the baby, as long as we both stayed well out of all their lives. I had disgraced the family, you see; and, of course, Jamie’s father didn’t want his wife to find out.” There was no anger in her voice, nothing but a simple, sad puzzlement.

“My parents bought me this house—nice and far away; I’m from Dublin originally, from Howth—and gave me a bit of money now and then. I sent Jamie’s father letters to tell him how she was getting on, and photographs. I was positive that sooner or later he would come round and want to start seeing her. Maybe he would have. I don’t know.”

“And when did you decide she should go to boarding school?”

Alicia wrapped her fingers in her hair. “I . . . oh, dear. I don’t like thinking about this.”

We waited.

“I had just turned thirty, you see,” she said eventually. “And I realized I In the Woods 183

didn’t like what I had become. I was waiting tables in a café in town while Jamie was at school, but it really wasn’t worth it, with the bus fares, and I had no education so I couldn’t get any other job. . . . I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life like that. I wanted something better, for me and for Jamie. I . . . oh, in many ways I was still a child myself. I’d never had a chance to grow up. And I wanted to.”

“And for that,” Cassie said, “you needed a little time to yourself?”

“Yes. Oh, exactly. You understand.” She squeezed Cassie’s arm gratefully.

“I wanted a proper career, so I wouldn’t have to rely on my parents, but I didn’t know what career. I needed a chance to figure it out. And once I did, I knew I would probably have to do some kind of course, and I couldn’t simply leave Jamie on her own all the time . . . It would have been different if I’d had a husband, or family. I had a few friends, but I couldn’t expect them to—”

She was twisting her hair tighter and tighter around her fingers. “Makes sense,” Cassie said matter-of-factly. “So you had just told Jamie your decision. . . .”

“Well, I told her first in May, when I decided. But she took it very badly. I tried to explain, and I brought her up to Dublin to show her around the school, but that only made things worse. She hated it. She said the girls there were all stupid and didn’t talk about anything except boys and clothes. Jamie was a bit of a tomboy, you see, she loved being outdoors in the wood all the time; she hated the thought of being cooped up in a city school and having to do exactly what everyone else did. And she didn’t want to leave her best friends. She was very close to Adam and Peter—the little boy who vanished with her, you know.” I fought down the impulse to hide my face behind my notebook.

“So you argued.”

“Heavens, yes. Well, really it was more like a siege than a battle. Jamie and Peter and Adam absolutely mutinied. They shut out the entire adult world for weeks—wouldn’t speak to us parents, wouldn’t even look at us, wouldn’t speak in class—every bit of homework Jamie did had ‘Don’t send me away’ written across the top. . . .”

She was right: it had been a mutiny. LET JAMIE STAY, red block letters across squared paper. My mother trying helplessly to reason with me while I sat cross-legged and unresponsive on the sofa, picking at the skin around my fingernails, my stomach squirming with excitement and terror at my own 184

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daring. But we won, I thought in confusion, surely we won: whoops and high fives on the castle wall, Coke cans raised high in a triumphant toast— “But you stuck by your decision,” Cassie said.

“Well, not exactly. They did wear me down. It was terribly difficult, you know—all the estate talking about it, and Jamie making it sound as though she were being sent off to the orphanage from Annie or somewhere—and I didn’t know what to do. . . . In the end I said, ‘Well, I’ll think about it.’ I told them not to worry, we would sort something out, and they called off their protest. I truly did think about waiting another year, but my parents had offered to pay Jamie’s school fees, and I couldn’t be sure they’d still feel the same way in a year’s time. I know this makes me sound like a terrible mother, but I really did think—”

“Not at all,” Cassie said. I shook my head automatically. “So, when you told Jamie she would be going after all . . .”

“Oh, dear, she just . . .” Alicia twisted her hands together. “She was devastated. She said I had lied to her. Which I hadn’t, you know, really I hadn’t. . . . And then she stormed out to find the others, and I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, now they’ll stop speaking again, but at least it’s only for a week or two’—I had waited until the last minute to tell her, you see, so she could enjoy her summer. And then, when she didn’t come home, I assumed . . .”

“You assumed she’d run away,” Cassie said gently. Alicia nodded. “Do you still feel that’s a possibility?”

“No. I don’t know. Oh, Detective, one day I think one thing, and the next . . . But there was her piggy bank, you see—she would have taken that, wouldn’t she? And Adam was still in the wood. And if they’d run away, surely by now she would have . . . would have . . .”

She turned away sharply, a hand going up to shield her face. “When it occurred to you that she might not have run away,” Cassie said, “what was your first thought?”

Alicia did the cleansing-breath thing again, folded her hands tightly in her lap. “I thought her father might just possibly have . . . I hoped he had taken her. He and his wife couldn’t have children, you know, so I thought maybe . . . But the detectives looked into it, and they said no.”

“In other words,” Cassie said, “there was nothing that made you think anyone might have harmed her. She hadn’t been scared of anyone, or upset about anything else, in the previous weeks.”

“Not really, no. There had been one day—oh, a couple of weeks earlier—

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when she ran in from playing early, looking a bit shaken up, and she was awfully quiet all evening. I asked her if anything had happened, if something was bothering her, but she said no.”

Something dark leaped in my mind—home early, No, Mammy, nothing’s wrong—but it was far too deep to catch. “I did tell the detectives,” Alicia said, “but that didn’t give them very much to go on, did it? And it might have been nothing, after all. She might just have had a little spat with the boys. Perhaps I should have been able to tell whether it was something serious or not. . . . But Jamie was quite a reserved child, quite private. It was hard to tell, with her.”

Cassie nodded. “Twelve’s a complicated age.”

“Yes, it is; it really is, isn’t it? That was the thing, you see: I don’t think I’d realized that she was old enough to—well, to feel so strongly about things. But she and Peter and Adam . . . they’d done everything together since they were babies. I don’t think they could imagine life without one another.”

The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day’s work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind. I bent my head over my notebook so that Alicia Rowan and Cassie wouldn’t see my face.

“I still keep her bedroom the way she left it,” Alicia said. “In case—I know it’s silly, of course I do, but if she did come home, I wouldn’t want her to think . . . . Would you like to see it? There might be—the other detectives might have missed something. . . .”

A flash of the bedroom slapped me straight across the face—white walls with posters of horses, yellow curtains blowing, a dream-catcher hanging above the bed—and I knew I had had enough. “I’ll wait in the car,” I said. Cassie gave me a quick glance. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Rowan.”

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I made it out to the car and put my head down on the steering wheel until the haze cleared from my eyes. When I looked up I saw a flutter of yellow, and adrenaline spiked through me as a white-blond head moved between the curtains; but it was only Alicia Rowan, turning the little vase of flowers on the windowsill to catch the last of the gray afternoon light.

“The bedroom’s eerie,” Cassie said, when we were out of the estate and negotiating the twisting little back roads. “Pajamas on the bed and an old paperback open on the floor. Nothing that gave me any ideas, though. Was that you, in the photo on the mantelpiece?”

“Presumably,” I said. I was still feeling like hell; the last thing I wanted to do was analyze Alicia Rowan’s decor.

“What she said about Jamie coming in upset one day. Do you remember what that was about?”

“Cassie,” I said, “we’ve been through this. Once more, with feeling: I remember sweet shining fuck-all. As far as I’m concerned, my life began when I was twelve and a half and on a ferry to England. OK?”

“Jesus, Ryan. I was just asking.”

“And now you know the answer,” I said, putting the car up a gear. Cassie threw up her hands, switched the radio on to something loud and left me to it. A couple of miles later I took a hand off the wheel and rumpled Cassie’s hair.

“Fuck off, dickface,” she said, without rancor.

I grinned, relieved, and pulled one of her curls. She smacked my hand away. “Listen, Cass,” I said, “I need to ask you something.”

She gave me a suspicious look.

“Do you think the two cases are linked, or not? If you had to make a guess.”

Cassie thought about this for a long time, looking out the window at the hedges and the gray sky, clouds chasing fast. “I don’t know, Rob,” she said at last. “There are things that don’t match up. Katy was left where she’d be found right away, while . . . That’s a big difference, psychologically. But maybe the guy was haunted by the first time, figured he might feel less guilty if he made sure the family got the body back this time round. And In the Woods 187

Sam’s right: what are the odds of two different child-killers in the same place? If I had to put money on it . . . I honestly don’t know.”

I hit the brakes, hard. I think both Cassie and I yelled. Something had darted across the road in front of the car—something dark and low to the ground, with the sinuous gait of a weasel or a stoat, but much too big for either—and disappeared into the overgrown hedge on the other side. We slammed forward in our seats—I had been going much too fast for a one-lane back road—but Cassie is fanatical about seat belts, which might have saved her parents’ lives, and we were both wearing ours. The car came to a stop skewed at a wild angle across the road, one wheel inches from a ditch. Cassie and I sat still, stunned. On the radio some girl band ululated with insane cheer, on and on.

“Rob?” Cassie said breathlessly, after a minute. “Are you OK?”

I couldn’t make my hands release their grip on the steering wheel. “What the hell was that?”

“What?” Her eyes were wide and frightened.

“The animal,” I said. “What was it?”

Cassie was looking at me with something new in her eyes, something that scared me almost as badly as the creature had. “I didn’t see an animal.”

“It went straight across the road. You must have missed it. You were looking out the side.”