“Honey.“ He took her hands, folded them against his chest. “I didn’t want to scare you. Okay? But I made a few calls. No one has seen Orla since early last Sunday morning. It’s going on a week.”
“Women have been going missing for four years,” Liz said, taking a second bunch of papers from her purse. She stepped to the table. “May I?”
Patrick looked at Liz, and then at his wife.
“Head home, Fiona. I’ll lock up the shop. Have a bath. I’ll be home in an hour.”
To Liz’s surprise, Fiona didn’t argue. She hung her head, her eyes red-rimmed. She took her purse from the floor near her chair, slung it over her shoulder, and shuffled from the store, the bells tinkling behind her.
“I’m sorry,” Patrick said, sighing. “Fiona is a very sensitive woman. She’s afraid for Orla. So afraid that she’s pretending everything is fine.”
Liz bit her lip, tempted to tell him that was the worst thing Orla’s mother could do, but she withheld her judgement. After all, she too had desperately tried to dismiss Susan’s disappearance as a spontaneous adventure. In her gut, she knew better, but oh, how she wanted the alternative to be true.
Liz spread the papers on the desk. Five sheets, each featuring a different young woman beneath the word Missing.
He frowned and bent over, studying their faces.
“All these girls have disappeared?”
“Yes.” Liz tapped the first face. “Sherry went missing in the summer of 1971 in Gaylord. My daughter was next, Susie in August 1972. There were two in 1973 - Darlene in Traverse City and Rita in Beulah. This spring another girl went missing, Laura in Cadillac. And now your daughter, Orla.”
“What makes you think they’re connected?”
“A few things. One, all of them are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. They’re all young, pretty, disappearing in the summer and without a trace. No purse left behind, no note. As if they were plucked from thin air and didn’t leave even a stick of gum behind. No bodies have ever been found. All within a two-hundred-mile radius. That’s an awfully small space.”
“Have the police connected them?”
“They won’t confirm it. But I’ve been working with a journalist who’s convinced they’re connected. Detective Hansen in Petoskey is also investigating a connection, though not publicly. They’re all in different jurisdictions, and-”
“Orla doesn’t look like these other girls,” Patrick said, frowning. “These girls are all blonde. And reading about their appearances, they all seem rather small. Orla stood almost five-feet-nine inches tall, long black hair. It would take a strong man to abduct her.”
“Or a man with a weapon. I agree, she’s an anomaly. But I still think she’s connected. In my heart, I feel it. I’ve developed something from studying these cases, Mr. Sullivan. A sixth sense, if you will.”
Patrick gave her an odd little smile.
“What?” she asked.
“Just the sixth sense thing. Orla had something like that. I sometimes called it her bullshit detector, but it was more than that.”
“More how?”
He laughed, his face growing pink, and scratched at his short dark hair.
“Sometimes when she touched things, she got ideas about ‘em. Like one time she picked up a pipe in my desk and said, ‘This belonged to Pap and he liked potatoes.’ Crazy thing was that the pipe had belonged to my grandfather - a man who died long before Orla was born. He was a potato farmer in Ireland.”
“Was his name Pap?”
Patrick grinned and shook his head.
“Seamus. But our family called him Pap.”
Liz glanced toward the window, sun streaming through, and considered his story.
“Your daughter never came home?” Patrick asked, looking suddenly older than his forty-three years.
“No. But I intend to change that. I’ve let go of finding her alive. I’m not naïve. But I want a proper burial for my child. I want to lay her to rest next to my mother. I want to plant flowers and clean her headstone and have a space to be near her again.”
Patrick rubbed his slightly bristly jaw.
“Fiona would…” he trailed off. “It would kill her if Orla never came home.”
Liz nodded, gathered the papers into a pile.
“I once believed that too, but it’s almost cruel what we can survive.”
Chapter 11
Hazel
Hazel’s head hit the pillow, and she fell into an instant sleep.
She woke surprised at the darkness. When she’d crawled into bed, the half-light of evening had left her room awash in a warm summer’s glow. Now the black of deep night surrounded her.
She had been exhausted, still was, but an insatiable thirst turned her mouth dusty.
She swung her legs down and felt along the floor for her slippers.
“Hazel.” Her head snapped up at Orla’s voice.
“Finally,” Hazel huffed, her relief instantly turning to irritation.
Orla had come home.
She pushed through her door into the hallway and found her friend hovering at the top of the stairs, but she looked all wrong. A blindfold covered her eyes, a dark strap stretched over her mouth, and her wrists and ankles showed angry red welts.
“Orla,” she shrieked, running to her friend. But as she reached out to grab Orla, who appeared to be falling down the darkened stairs, her friend vanished.
Hazel teetered on the edge of the top stair, her torso jutting forward, hands flailing at the emptiness, and she started to fall.
She let out a little squeal, seized the bannister and caught it with one hand. The momentum of her body rocked forward, but her grip pulled her hard sideways and she crashed into the wall, twisting one ankle painfully as she missed the second step and landed awkwardly on the third.
The hallway light flicked on. Bethany hurried to the top of the stairs, her long t-shirt stopping above her.
Hazel still clutched the bannister, balancing her weight on her good ankle, breathing heavily and unable to shake the image of Orla, bound, calling out for help.
“Are you okay?” Bethany asked, squinting at Hazel while holding up a hand to block the glare from the lightbulb.
Hazel pushed away from the wall and winced at the pain in her ankle.
She sagged onto the top step.
“I heard Orla,” she murmured.
“Here? Is she home?” Bethany peered into the dark stairwell, but Hazel shook her head.
“No. It was like a dream, but it wasn’t a dream. I don’t know.” She pressed a finger against her already swelling ankle.
“Did you hurt it?” Bethany squatted next to her.
“Yeah. Could you get me a towel with ice and a glass of water? Sorry to be a pest, but I think walking down the stairs might do me in.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
Bethany hurried down the stairs.
Hazel stood shakily and limped back to her room. She turned on her bedside lamp and picked up her tarot cards, shuffling several times, envisioning Orla. She pulled a card from the top.
The Devil stared back at her. She pulled a second card - the ten of swords - an equally, if not more, ominous card that depicted a man lying face-down with ten swords jutting from his back.
Bethany hurried in, handed Hazel the water.
“Here, let’s prop your leg up.” Bethany stacked two pillows and helped Hazel lift her leg on top. She laid the towel with ice over her leg. “Are you worried about her?”