'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 21 & 22

Sarah Stewart Taylor

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Published January 18, 2021

ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE LAM

Chapter 21

1993

THERE WAS NO LISTING IN THE Dublin phone book for a Hackman O’Hanrahan, but there was a listing for the IAI group, with an address on Fitzwilliam Place, not far from St. Stephen’s Green.

Fitzwilliam Place was a long avenue lined with huge Georgian houses, all of them with brightly painted doors and brass knockers and tiny signs indicating the businesses occupying each floor.

The air smelled of peat fires and I thought of Conor, a sudden thrilling image of his neck and face flashing into my mind. I shook my head and tried the door. It was locked, but a little sign next to it instructed me to press the bell, and once I did, the door clicked open and let me into a tastefully decorated reception area.

The woman behind the desk looked up curiously at me. She was perfect: long brown hair, a pale blue wool pantsuit and lavender silk scarf at her throat, and I was suddenly conscious of my jeans and sweater and backpack. “Can I help you?” she asked, studying me over the top of her reading spectacles.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for a friend of mine. Hacky O’Hanrahan? I’m over here just traveling around and he said if I was ever in Dublin I should look him up. He gave me this address, but I didn’t realize it was a business ...”

The woman smiled. “His father owns the investment company,” she said. “That must be why he gave you this address. Mr. O’Hanrahan Jr. has a flat in Merrion Square, I believe. I’ll check on the number for you.”

She disappeared through the door behind her desk and came back a few minutes later with a piece of expensive-looking blue paper with a tasteful “IAI Investment Fund” embossed at the top. She’d written 93 Merrion Square West, #3 on the paper. I thanked her and headed back out to find Hacky O’Hanrahan.

Merrion Square was a green rectangle surrounded by streets of brick Georgians. Some of the houses had freshly painted doors and neat black iron fences, but others looked a bit shabby. Hacky O’Hanrahan’s address fell somewhere in between. I stood there for a minute, trying to get a feel for the building before I rang the bell. There were four floors and the little directory next to the door had a law firm listed for the first floor and then the name Murphy written in pencil but scratched out. There were no names by the other two.

I was about to ring the bell when the cobalt blue door flew open, nearly knocking me to the ground, and two boys came running out, backpacks flying behind them.

“I’m late!” one said to the other.

“I am as well, Hoopers. Shite, shite, shite!” The taller of the two stopped to hunch down on the stairs to tie his bootlaces and I was about to ask if either of them knew Hacky O’Hanrahan when the taller, better-looking one, looked up and said, “Erin?”

I tried to remember later exactly what combination of emotions flashed across his face. The first was fear, the second confusion, and the third was actually something more hopeful, maybe even excitement.

My first thought was, He’s exactly Erin’s type. He had longish brown hair that curled around his ears and a conventionally handsome face. His clothes were shabbily expensive: worn cords, a gray cashmere sweater, leather boots.

I stuck out my hand. “I’m Erin’s cousin Maggie, actually. I know I look like her. You’re Hacky O’Hanrahan. Can I ask you a few questions?” I was flustered, not quite ready for this.

Suddenly he was guarded. His friend was still standing there. O’Hanrahan pushed his hair out of his face. “I’m really late, actually,” he said. “I can’t really talk now.”

“Can I just walk with you? I’m heading that way, too.”

“Uh, sure. All right.” His accent was only very faintly Irish, the edges rounded and smoothed — American, with just the slightest hint of Dublin.

The friend said, “I’ve got to run. Sorry.” He searched O’Hanrahan’s face for a moment, and then took off, a small smile playing at the corners of his lips. I imagined the conversation that would come up later. Cousins, huh? So she gave you a rave review and her cousin thought she’d give you a try.

“I’m really late. Sorry.” O’Hanrahan lengthened his stride and I matched it.

“I can keep up,” I told him. “You know about Erin, that she’s missing.” It was a statement, not a question, and he hesitated before nodding.

“How did you know her?” I asked him.

“I didn’t know her, not really,” he said.

We turned onto Nassau Street. I saw him glance up at the college entrance and then glance at his watch. It was a fancy watch, big and metal and bulky and expensive-looking. I didn’t have much time. At the pace we were walking, we’d be inside the walls of the college in five or six minutes. “But you did know her?”

“We weren’t — it wasn’t like a relationship,” he said.

“But you slept with her.” Statement, not question. I was going by instinct and his expression told me I was right.

“Well — why are you asking all these questions? I don’t know anything about what happened to her.” He was blushing. He looked scared.

“I didn’t say you did.” I was practically running to keep up with him now. “I know you don’t know where she is or anything, but I’m thinking maybe you could give me a sense of her state of mind before she disappeared. Did she say anything about going on a trip? Did she seem depressed?”

His upper lip curled in a smirk. “She definitely didn’t seem depressed. In fact, she seemed pretty happy to me.”

I stared him down. “You mean sexually? She seemed pretty happy sexually?”

“Uh, yeah.” He blushed hard. “You asked if she was depressed.”

“Okay, so she was so happy. Why didn’t you go out with her again?”

That smirk again. “I rang her. Called her. I didn’t really care.

I wasn’t going to beg her or anything. I’m not exactly hurting for, uh, a social life.” I was trying to think what to ask next when he blurted out, “She was a crazy girl, you know. I mean, I know you’re her cousin, but I gotta tell you.” He looked away, his face transforming into a small boy’s for just a second. “She liked it rough, if you want to know the truth. Who knows who she was mixed up with. Some freak. I bet that’s where she is.”

“Rough? As in, rough sex?”

“Yeah.” He blushed again.

“Are you American? Is that why you and Erin started talking?”

“I’ve lived here since I was ten, but yeah, maybe. I heard her accent. We talked about Long Island a little. My family summers in Bridgehampton.”

I thought of something then. “How did you know she was missing?”

There was something there. I could see him looking for the words. “I saw it on the news. I have to go now.”

He was gone before I could get another word out.

Erin had been missing for three weeks now and I was no closer to figuring out what had happened to her than I’d been the day I arrived. All I had were a bunch of dead ends.

I stood in the forecourt for a long time before I pulled the collar of my jacket up around my face and set off into the wind.

Chapter 22

Monday, May 30, 2016

IT'S A CLOUDY MORNING, a wind from the east whipping paper and dust into small tornadoes on Grafton Street. Niamh Horrigan’s been gone nine days. I can’t get Roly on the phone and there’s nothing on the news about an arrest in Wicklow. That makes me think it’s something minor, someone in one of the door-to-doors who had a big pile of pot on his dining room table when the Guards knocked on his door, a guy on probation who wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Every homicide investigation has a few of these arrests, collateral damage, the not-so-innocents who have nothing to do with the actual crime but get caught up in the nets we cast when we’re looking for a killer.

But how did Stephen Hines know about it, and what’s he doing trying to bring me onto the investigation?

I have generally good relationships with the press back on Long Island. I know when to throw them something and I know when to clam up and reveal nothing. There’s something about Hines that puts me on edge.

I stop at a café on Lemon Street for an espresso and carry it through to Parliament Square in Trinity, standing under the Lecky statue for a moment and then walking over to the stairs to the library. I’m ridiculous, a forty-five-year-old woman stalking a grown man who probably hasn’t thought about me once in twenty-three years. Finally, I stand right in front of the Arts Building, checking my phone.

No Conor.

When I finish my coffee, I head back to the hotel. I send some emails to my team so they’ll have them when they get in. There’s a message from Emer apologizing for the delay in getting back to me. She’s been traveling in Singapore and Hong Kong but she suggests a time for coffee midweek. I lie on the bed watching CNN and looking through the old notebooks and files I brought from home. At nine a.m., I turn on RTÉ news. The announcer says that officials in Wicklow are searching a new area at this hour. There’s nothing about Drumkee and that line of the investigation. Nothing about an arrest. Niamh’s parents have offered an increased reward for any information about her disappearance. Her uncle asks the public to think hard about whether they saw anything that might help bring her home.

They interview a retired detective garda, looking for a theory on what’s happened to Niamh. “Certainly, at this stage of an investigation, the concern is that she has been abducted,” the white-haired man says. He’s standing in front of an elaborate flower garden. “The location, sure it makes you think it could be connected to the American girl, Erin Flaherty, and Teresa McKenny and June Talbot. With every hour that goes by, the chances of her being found alive continue to decrease.”

I shut it off.

At loose ends, I go for a run along the quays. It feels good to move my legs and I go out fast, full of ambition. I’m still amazed at all the changes on the riverfront. There are huge new buildings on the north side, a giant glass-and-steel structure that looks like a barrel tipped onto its side and new office buildings gleaming along the river. I’m running past the Ferryman when I remember walking past it with Conor. It’s now surrounded by tall, gleaming office blocks. It feels like it’s been moved to a completely different part of the city. When I turn onto Cardiff Lane, the facade of a sleek modern building with the Facebook logo comes into view. I can see what Laura was talking about. Erin’s old neighborhood has gone ritzy.

The day is so beautiful, I don’t want to be back in the hotel, so I try to remember the way to the strand. I run straight out past Irishtown along Sandymount Road and then along one of the pleasant little streets lined with prosperous-looking bungalows to the park right on the strand. It’s just the way I remember it, the sand and the gleaming water in ripples across it, reaching so far out toward the sea I can’t tell where it ends. I run hard on the path out to the nature preserve, thinking of Conor, and then turn around, all my limbs feeling loose and strong, my head clearer. On the way back, I take a few pictures of the harp bridge and the view down the Liffey toward the Four Courts and text them to Lilly. I write, Miss you so much, Lillybean! Love you! I can smell her all of a sudden, her hair and her skin.

I’m almost to the hotel when I look up and find Roly and Griz coming my way on the sidewalk. I stop and watch them for a moment before they look up and see me. Roly looks exhausted, his hair and clothes the most rumpled I’ve ever seen them, his eyes baggy and bruised. Griz seems thinner, old mascara crusting in the corner of her right eye. She’s wearing a bright yellow wool coat and she’s the only colorful thing on the sidewalk.

“D’arcy,” Roly says. “We need to talk to you.”

“What did they find in Wicklow?” I ask them. “It must be a piece of clothing, right? I was thinking phone, but the way they covered it, it made me think it was a piece of clothing. I was trying to read between the lines in the stories.”

Roly sighs. Griz is trying not to smile. “All right,” Roly says finally. “They found a button. Let’s go inside and sit down.”

Of course. I should have known. A button, a medium-sized wooden button from the neck of a fleece pullover like the one Niamh Horrigan was wearing when she disappeared, and wrapped around it are three brown hairs, similar in length and color to the ones in a hairbrush obtained from her flat by her family. They have a picture of Niamh, on a mountaintop somewhere, wearing a green pullover fleece jacket with a hood and two wooden buttons at the neck, exactly like the button that was found.

I can see how hopeful it’s made them. Something as small as a button, but it’s significant. Instead of a vast mountainous area to search, they now have a neat little pin to put in the center of the map, a radius to draw. They can look for tire tracks, CCTV footage.

“What about the Drumkee angle?” I ask. “They made a lot of that on the news. Do you think there’s anything there?” I want to ask about the arrest, but I can’t. I can’t let them know I’ve been talking to Hines.

“We’re looking at it,” Roly says in a resigned voice. “And we think we may have a lead on the remains. Griz?”

Griz says, “Katerina Greiner. There’s a good chance it’s her.” She glances over at Roly and he nods for her to go on.

“In January of 1993, Katerina Greiner — she was twenty-three — left Germany to travel. Her family didn’t hear much from her. They didn’t have a close relationship. But they got a postcard from Galway and she said she was going to stay in Ireland for a few months and do some hillwalking in Wicklow and maybe go to Glendalough.”

I ask them, “But there was never confirmation that she was actually there?”

“No. The postcard was it. Her family contacted the Guards in July, to see if there had been any word of her. They did a bit of asking around, but couldn’t find anyone who’d seen her. Then, about a month before your cousin went missing, they spoke with the family and they seemed to be satisfied she wasn’t in Ireland. A friend of hers had seen her in Berlin and they were pretty sure she’d gone home.”

“Someone,” Roly says. “Someone who will surely be getting a good tongue lashing, closed the file. But when we looked, it was pretty clear no one really knew where she was. Her parents are both dead. Her brother had his own troubles. She was eventually declared dead. Anyway, we’re getting the dental records from Berlin.” He looks down. There’s probably more they’re not telling me. “That’s actually not why we needed to talk to you.”

I take a long drink of the water the waitress has brought me.

“Niamh Horrigan’s parents want to meet you,” Griz says.

“Really?” I try to look surprised.

Roly says, “No one wants to allow it, but everyone’s worried they’ll go to the press if we don’t let them. A day or two of blanket coverage of how shite we are at our jobs isn’t going to do anything to help find Niamh. So, the decision has been made that you can meet with them, briefly, mind, with Griz and myself and Wilcox and Bill Regan, who’s handling the search down in Wicklow. If you want to. What do you think?”

I make myself hesitate, act as though I’m thinking about it. “What do they want to talk to me about?”

“We don’t know exactly. They said they want to ask you some questions.”

Griz says, “They think you may be able to understand what they’re going through. The other families, well ... it’s a different sort of thing.”

I know what she means. With the other families, there were bodies. Meeting me allows them to keep hope alive.

“Of course I’ll meet them,” I say. “When?”

“Today,” Griz says. “They’re waiting for you at their hotel down in Wicklow.”

Roly makes a face. “So go and take a shower. You smell like a locker room.”

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