Free Faithful Place by Tana French

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