Mr. Daly said, roughly, “Where…” and took a breath between his teeth. “Where did you get that?”
I asked, “Do you recognize it?”
“It’s mine,” Mrs. Daly said, into her knuckles. “I brought it on our honeymoon.”
“Where did you get that,” Mr. Daly said, louder. His face was turning an unhealthy shade of red.
I gave Kevin the eyebrow. He told the story pretty well, all things considered: builders, birth cert, phone calls. I held up various items to illustrate, like an air hostess demonstrating life jackets, and watched the Dalys.
When I left, Nora had been maybe thirteen or fourteen, a round-shouldered, lumpy kid with a head of frizzy curls, developing early and not looking one bit happy about it. It had worked out well for her, in the end: she had the same knock-your-eye-out figure as Rosie, getting soft around the edges but still va-va-voom, the kind of figure you don’t see any more now that girls starve themselves into size zero and permanent narkiness. She was an inch or two shorter than Rosie and her coloring was a lot less dramatic-dark-brown hair, gray eyes-but the resemblance was there; not when you looked at her full-face, but when you caught a fast glimpse out of the corner of your eye. It was an intangible thing, somewhere in the angle of her shoulders and the arch of her neck, and in the way she listened: absolutely still, one hand cupping the opposite elbow, eyes straight on Kevin. Very few people can sit still and listen. Rosie was the queen of it.
Mrs. Daly had changed too, but not in a good way. I remembered her feisty, smoking on her steps, cocking a hip against the railings and calling double entendres to make us boys blush and scurry away from her throaty laugh. Rosie leaving, or just twenty-two years of life and Mr. Daly, had knocked the stuffing out of her: her back had curved over, her face had fallen in around the eyes and she had a general aura of being in need of a Xanax milk shake. The part that got to me, the thing I had missed about Mrs. Daly back when we were teenagers and she was ancient, was this: under the blue eye shadow and the explosive hair and the low-level crazy, she was the image of Rosie. Once I had spotted the resemblance I couldn’t stop seeing it, hanging in the corner of my eye, like a hologram flicking into view and then gone. The chance that Rosie might have turned into her ma, over the years, gave me a whole fresh layer of heebie-jeebies.
The longer I watched Mr. Daly, on the other hand, the more he looked like his very own free-spirited self. A couple of buttons had been resewn on his fashion-crime sweater-vest, his ear hair was neatly clipped and his shave was brand-new: he must have taken a razor with him to Nora’s, the night before, and shaved before she drove them home. Mrs. Daly twitched and whimpered and bit down on the side of her hand, watching me go through that suitcase, and Nora took deep breaths a couple of times, flicked her head back, blinked hard; Mr. Daly’s face never changed. He got paler and paler, and a muscle jumped in his cheek when I held up the birth cert, but that was all.
Kevin wound down, glancing at me to see if he had done it right. I folded Rosie’s paisley shirt back into the case and closed the lid. For a second there was absolute silence.
Then Mrs. Daly said, with her breath gone, “But how would that be in Number Sixteen? Rosie brought it with her to England.”
The certainty in her voice made my heart skip. I asked, “How do you know that?”
She stared. “It was gone after she went.”
“How do you know for a fact that she went to England?”
“She left us a note, sure. To say good-bye. The Shaughnessy young fellas and one of Sallie Hearne’s lads brought it round, the next day; they found it in Number Sixteen. It said right there, she was off to England. At first we thought the two of yous…” Mr. Daly moved, a stiff, angry little jerk. Mrs. Daly blinked fast and stopped talking.
I pretended not to notice. “I think everyone did, yeah,” I said easily. “When did you find out we weren’t together?”
When no one else answered, Nora said, “Ages ago. Fifteen years, maybe; it was before I got married. I ran into Jackie in the shop one day and she said she was after getting back in touch with you, and you were here in Dublin. She said Rosie had gone over without you.” Her eyes went from me to the suitcase and back again, widening fast. “Do you think… Where do you think she is?”
“I’m not thinking anything yet,” I said, in my best pleasant official voice, just like this was any missing girl. “Not till we know a little more. Have you heard anything at all from her since she left? A phone call, a letter, a message from someone who ran into her somewhere?”
Mrs. Daly said, in one impressive burst, “Sure, we’d no phone when she left, how would she ring us? When we got the phone in, I wrote down the number and I went to your mammy and your Jackie and Carmel and I said to them, I said, come here to me, if you ever hear anything from your Francis, you give him that number and you tell him to tell Rosie to ring us, even if it’s only for a minute at Christmas or-But, sure, once I heard she wasn’t with you I knew she wouldn’t ring, she hasn’t got the number after all an’ anyway, has she? She could still write, but Rosie, sure, she always did things in her own time. But I’ve my sixty-fifth coming up in February and she’ll send a card for that, she wouldn’t miss that-”
Her voice was getting higher and faster, with a brittle edge on it. Mr. Daly put out a hand and clasped it around hers for a moment, and she bit down on her lips. Kevin looked like he was trying to ooze down between the sofa cushions and disappear.
Nora said, quietly, “No. Not a word. At first we just thought…” She glanced fast at her father: she’d thought Rosie was taking it for granted that she was cut off, for running away with me. “Even once we heard you weren’t with her. We always thought she was in England.” Mrs. Daly tipped her head back and swiped off a tear.
So that was that: no quick out, no waving bye-bye to my family and erasing yesterday evening from my mind and going back to my personal approximation of normal, and no chance of getting Nora langered and coaxing Rosie’s phone number out of her. Mr. Daly said heavily, without looking at any of us, “We’ll have to ring the Guards.”
I almost hid a dubious look. “Right. You could, yeah. That was my family’s first instinct, too, but I thought you should be the ones to decide if you really want to go that way.”
He gave me a suspicious stare. “Why wouldn’t we?”
I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “Look,” I said. “I’d love to tell you the cops will give this the attention it deserves, but I can’t. Ideally I’d like to see this tested for fingerprints and for blood, just for starters”-Mrs. Daly made a terrible squeaking sound, into her hands-“but before that can happen, it would need to be given a case number, the case would need to be assigned to a detective, and the detective would need to submit a request for testing. I can tell you right now, it’s not going to happen. No one’s going to throw valuable resources at something that might not even be a crime to begin with. Missing Persons and Cold Cases and the General Unit will bounce this back and forth between them for a few months, until they get bored, give up and file it in a basement somewhere. You need to be prepared for that.”
Nora asked, “But what about you? Could you not put in the request?”
I shook my head ruefully. “Not officially, no. No matter how far you stretch it, this definitely isn’t something my squad would deal with. Once it goes into the system, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“But,” Nora said. She was sitting up straighter, alert, watching me. “If it wasn’t in the system, like; if it was just you. Could you… is there not a way to…?”
“Call in a few favors, on the QT?” I raised my eyebrows, had a think about that. “Well. I guess it could be done. You’d all need to be positive that that’s what you want, though.”