"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 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-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."
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?"