The Searcher

THIRTEEN

First thing next morning, Cal texts Lena. Hi, Cal Hooper here. Wondering if I might be able to come see how that pup’s doing sometime today. No problem if that’s not convenient. Thanks.

The clouds opened up during the night. Even in his sleep, Cal heard the heavy unceasing drum of rain on his roof; it drilled its way through his dreams, which seemed important at the time, although he can’t now remember them. He eats breakfast watching it streak past the window, dense enough to blur the fields beyond.

He’s doing the dishes when Lena texts him back. I’m in all morning till half twelve. Pup is twice the size.

Given the weather, Cal takes the car. The windshield mottles with big splatters too fast for the wipers to keep up, and his tires send fans of muddy water spraying from potholes. The smell of the fields comes through the cracked car window, fresh with wet grass and fertile with cow dung. The mountains are invisible; beyond the fields there’s only gray, cloud blending into mist. The herd animals stand still, huddled together, with their heads down.

“You found the place again,” Lena says, when she opens the door. “Fair play to you.”

“I’m getting the hang of the area,” Cal says. He stoops to pat Nellie, who, delighted to see him, is wagging her whole hind end. “Little by little.”

He expects Lena to put on a jacket and come out, but instead she holds the door open for him. He scrapes his boots on the mat and follows her down the hall.

Lena’s kitchen is big and warm, made up of things that have seen plenty of use but are solid enough that they’ve held up: gray stone floor tiles worn smooth in spots, wooden cabinets painted a chipped butter-yellow, a long farmhouse table that could be decades old or centuries. The lights are on against the dark day. The room is clean but not neat: there’s a tumble of books and newspapers spread across the table, and piles of ironing waiting to be put away on two of the chairs. The place makes it clear that whoever lives there has only themselves to please.

Mewling and rustling noises come from a big cardboard box tucked in a corner. “There they are,” Lena says.

“They moved indoors in the end, huh?” Cal says. The mama dog lifts her head and lets out a low rumble, deep in her chest. He turns away and fusses over Nellie, who’s brought him a chewed sneaker.

“That bit of frost the other night did it,” Lena says. She kneels down and cups the mama dog’s jaw to calm her. “Midnight, she came scratching at the door with a pup in her mouth, wanting to bring them all into the warm. They’ll have to go out again once they start running about—I’m not cleaning the floor after them. But they’ll do grand here for another few days.”

Cal ambles across and squats beside Lena. The mama dog doesn’t object, although she keeps one wary eye on him. The cardboard box is lined with thick layers of soft towels and newspaper. The pups are clambering over each other, making sounds like a flock of seabirds. Even in these few days, they’ve grown.

“There’s your fella,” Lena says. Cal has already spotted the ragged black flag. She reaches into the box, scoops out the pup and passes it to him.

“Hey, little guy,” Cal says, holding up the pup, which squirms and paddles its paws furiously. He can feel the change in it, both its weight and its muscle. “He’s gotten strong.”

“He has. He’s still the smallest, but it’s not getting in his way. That big black-and-tan bruiser there barges right over the rest, but your fella’s having none of it: gives as good as he gets.”

“Attaboy,” Cal says gently to the pup. It can hold up its head without wobbling now. One of its eyes is beginning to open, showing a droplet of hazy gray-blue.

“Will you have a cup of tea?” Lena asks. “You look like you could be there a while.”

“Sure,” Cal says. “Thanks.” She gets up and goes to the counter.

The pup has started to struggle. Cal settles himself on the floor and brings it in to his chest. It relaxes against his warmth and his heartbeat, turning soft and heavy, nuzzling a little. He runs one of its ears between his fingers. At the counter, Lena moves about, filling the electric kettle and taking mugs out of a cabinet. The room smells of toast, ironing and wet dog.

Cal figures Noreen is bound to have every kind of cardboard box in the land. He could get one the right size and line it with old shirts, so his smell would be a comfort to the pup. He could put it right beside his mattress, where he could keep one hand on the pup during the night, just till it settles in and gets used to doing without its mama. The thought hits him powerfully. Even in imagination, it changes his sense of his house.

“I was expecting I’d be mobbed with children looking to pet them,” Lena says, over the building hiss of the kettle. “I remember doing that when we were little, the whole lot of us running down to anyone that had puppies or kittens. But there’s only been a few.”

“The rest of them too deep in their screens?”

Lena shakes her head. “There’s no rest of them. Like we were talking about before. It’s not just this generation that headed for the towns. Ever since they started being allowed to do good jobs, the girls go. The lads stay if there’s land being left to them, but most people round here don’t leave land to girls. So they head off.”

“You can’t blame them for that,” Cal says, thinking of Caroline. The pup is starting to teethe. He shoves at Cal’s finger with both tiny forepaws, finally manages to get a corner of it into his mouth, and does his best to gum it to death.

“I don’t. I’d’ve done the same if I hadn’t fallen in love with Sean. But it means the lads have no one to marry. And now we’ve no children coming to see these, and a load of aul’ bachelors up on the farms.”

“That’s tough on the area,” Cal says.

The kettle bubbles and clicks off, and Lena pours the tea. “More ways than one,” she says. “Men with no children get to feeling unsafe, when they get older. The world’s changing and they’ve no young people to show them it’s grand, so they feel like they’re being attacked. Like they need to be ready for a fight the whole time.”

“Having kids can do the same thing,” Cal says. “Make you feel like you need to fight things.”

Lena glances over at him, as she drops tea bags into the trash can, but she doesn’t ask. “That’s different. If you’ve kids, you’re always looking out into the world to see if anything needs fighting, because that’s where they’re headed; you’re not barricading yourself indoors and listening for the Indians to attack. It’s not good for a place, having too many aul’ bachelors out on their land with no one to talk to, feeling like they need to defend their territory, even though they’re not sure from what. D’you take milk?”

“Nope. Just the way it comes.”

She takes milk from the fridge for herself. Cal likes the way she moves around the kitchen, efficient but not rushed, at ease with the place. He considers what it would be like to live your life in a place where your personal decisions, whether to get married or to have kids or to move away, alter the entire townland. Outside the windows, the rain is still coming down thick as ever.

“So what’ll happen when all the bachelors die off?” he asks. “Who’ll take over the farms?”

“Nephews or cousins, some of them. God knows about the rest.”

She brings the mugs of tea over to Cal on the floor and sits down, with her back against the wall and her knees up. One of the pups is scrabbling at the edge of the box. She scoops it into her lap. “I like them this age,” she says. “I can come and have a cuddle whenever I fancy one, and then put them back when I’ve had enough. Another week or two and they won’t stay put for it; they’ll be getting under my feet instead.”

“I like ’em this way,” Cal says, “but I like ’em a little bit bigger, too. When they get to playing with you.”

“They’re always needing something then. Even if it’s just an eye out so you don’t step on them.” She holds her tea out to the side, away from her pup, which is trying to clamber up her knees. “Once they’re out of the basket, I can’t wait for them to get big enough to have a bit of sense. That’s why I got a half-grown dog and not a pup. And now look at me.”

“You find homes for the rest?”

“Two. Noreen’ll take the others, if no one else does. She says she won’t, but she will.”

“Your sister’s a good woman,” Cal says.

“She is. She drives me mental sometimes, but the world wouldn’t get far without the likes of her.” She smiles. “I do make fun of her sometimes because her youngest, Cliona, she’s exactly the same as her mam, but the truth is I’m glad of it. Without someone to take over Ardnakelty when Noreen gets old, the place’d fall apart.”

“Cliona the one that’s around ten or eleven?” Cal asks. “Red hair?”

“That’s the one.”

“She was helping out one time I went into the store. She told me I was buying the wrong dish soap, it’d dry out my hands and wouldn’t get my dishes shiny, and she went up that ladder to fetch me the one she recommends. Then she asked me why I moved here and why I’m not married.”

Lena laughs. “There you go. We’re in safe hands.”

Cal shifts so he can hold the pup one-handed and drink his tea, which is strong and good. He says, “I’ve been asking around about Brendan Reddy.”

“I know, yeah,” Lena says. Her puppy, exhausted by its efforts, has collapsed on her lap. She tickles the tiny pads of one paw. “Why?”

“I met your old friend Sheila. She’s pretty cut up about her boy going off.”

Lena shoots him an amused look. “Knight in shining armor?”

“Just saw a question that needed answering,” Cal says. “My neighbor Mart, he thinks I’m bored, looking for something to occupy my mind. He might be right.”

Lena blows on her tea and regards him across the mug, still with that wry quirk to one corner of her mouth. “How’re you getting on with it?”

“Not too good,” Cal says. “I’ve heard plenty about Brendan, but no one wants to talk about where he might have gone, or why.”

“Maybe they don’t know.”

“I’ve talked to his mama, his two best buddies, and his girlfriend. Not one of them had anything to say. If they don’t know, who would?”

“Maybe no one knows.”

“Well,” Cal says, “I did wonder about that. But then Mart warned me to back off, the other night. He thinks I’m gonna get myself in trouble. That sounds to me like someone knows something, or thinks they do.”

Lena is still watching him sideways on, as she drinks her tea away from the pup. “Are you one of those people that can’t rest easy? If they don’t have any trouble in their lives, they go looking for some.”

“Not me,” Cal says. “What I went looking for was peace and quiet. I’m taking what came my way. Same as you are.”

“These pups are hassle. They’re not trouble.”

“Well,” Cal says, “no one’s explained to me how Brendan Reddy might be trouble, either. Who’s Mart scared of?”

Lena says, “I didn’t think Mart Lavin was ever afraid of anyone.”

“Maybe not. But he thinks I should be.”

“Then maybe you should.”

“I’m contrary by nature,” Cal explains. “The more people try to shoo me away from something, the more I dig my heels in. I always was that way, even as a little guy.” His puppy has eased its gnawing on his finger; when he looks down he sees that it’s fallen asleep, sprawled gracelessly against his chest, in the cup of his palm. “I figure,” he says, “if anyone in this townland’s gonna give me a straight answer about Brendan Reddy, it’ll be you.”

Lena leans back against the wall and examines him, drinking her tea and stroking her pup with her free hand. In the end she says, “I don’t know what happened to Brendan Reddy.”

“But you could take a guess.”

“I could, yeah. But I won’t.”

“You don’t strike me as the kind that scares easy,” Cal says. “Any more than Mart does.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t get involved in things.” She grins suddenly. “That does people’s heads in. There’s always someone trying to get me to join the Countrywomen’s Association, or the Tidy Towns. Probably if we’d had kids I’da done it: the PTA and sports clubs, and all the rest. But we never did, so I don’t have to. Sure, Noreen’s involved enough for the two of us.”

“That she is,” Cal says. “Some people are built that way, and some aren’t.”

“Tell that to Noreen. She’s been that way since the day she was born; it drives her mental that I’m not the same. That’s one reason why her and the rest are always trying to matchmake me. They think if I get myself a nice fella who’s up to his neck in the townland’s business, he’ll pull me in as well.” Lena gives Cal another grin, frank and mischievous, unembarrassed. “Which kind are you?”

“I enjoy being the kind that doesn’t get involved,” Cal says. “That suits me down to the ground.”

Lena’s eyebrows lift a little, but all she says is, “You can do that; no one’ll give you hassle. People around here respect a man who keeps to himself. It’s just a woman that makes them nervous as cats.”

“Well, I’m not asking you to get involved,” Cal says. “I’m just asking for your thoughts.”

“And I’m not planning on sharing them. You’re well able to get your own.” She glances up at the clock ticking on the wall. “I’ve to head in to work. Tell me now, do you want this pup, or did you just want an excuse to ask me about Brendan?”

“Little bit of both.”

Lena eases her own pup back into the basket and holds out her hands for Cal’s. She says, “So you’ll take this fella.”

Cal puts the pup gently into her hands, trying not to wake it, and gives it a last stroke along the white blaze on its nose. The pup, still mostly asleep, lifts its face and licks his finger.

He says, “Gimme another week or two. Just to be sure.”

Lena looks at him for a moment, unsmiling. Then she says, “Fair enough.” She turns away from him and tucks the pup carefully in among the rest.

Trey shows up late in the afternoon. The rain has finally worn itself out, so Cal is sitting on his back step, having a beer and watching the rooks. Their day seems to be winding down. Two of them are playing tug-of-war with a twig; another two are taking turns preening each other, lazily, exchanging remarks about what they find. Another one is off under the dripping hedge, burying something and throwing sneaky glances over his shoulder.

The sound of feet in wet grass makes Cal turn. Trey comes tramping around from the front of the house and dumps a packet of little white-frosted cupcakes onto the step. “You need to quit doing that,” Cal says. “Noreen’s gonna call the cops on you.”

“Those aren’t from Noreen’s,” Trey says. He looks tense and skinny again. To Cal, squinting up at him from the step, he also looks a shade taller, like he might be starting his teenage growth spurt. “I knocked.”

“Didn’t hear you,” Cal says. “I was thinking.”

“I called round earlier. And yesterday. You weren’t in.”

“Nope.”

“What were you doing? You find out anything?”

Cal finishes the last of his beer and gets up. “First things first,” he says, brushing off his rear end, which is damp from the step. “I’m gonna get my gun and we can have another try at those rabbits.”

Trey follows him indoors, close on his heels. “I wanta know.”

“And I’m gonna tell you. But if we want a chance at the rabbits, we need to get ourselves set up before they come out for their dinner.”

After a moment Trey accepts this with a nod. Cal gets his gun out of the safe and fills up his pockets with the other things they might need—bullets, his hunting knife, a bottle of water, a plastic bag—and they head for their spot facing the edge of the wood. The sky is one motionless spread of sulky gray cloud, with streaks of pale-rinsed yellow under the western edge. The grass is heavy with rain, and the earth gives underfoot.

“We’re gonna get wet,” Cal says. “And muddy.”

Trey shrugs.

“OK,” Cal says, settling himself on one knee in the grass. “You remember everything I showed you the other day?”

Trey gives him the moron look and holds out his hands for the gun.

“OK,” Cal says, handing it over. “Let’s see.”

Trey checks the gun, clicks the safety on and loads it, slowly but neatly and methodically, making no mistakes. Then he looks up at Cal.

“Good,” Cal says.

Trey keeps looking at him, unblinking. “Rabbits aren’t out yet.”

“All right,” Cal says. He sits himself down in the wet grass, takes the gun from Trey and rests it across his knees. He didn’t want to tell Trey that Brendan had some plan till he knew what it was, but nobody appears to have any intention of sharing that information with him, and he needs to get it somehow. “Here’s your update. I’ve talked to a bunch of people. What I’m getting is that Brendan had got pretty frustrated with being poor, so he came up with some plan that he reckoned would fix that. That fits with what you told me about him promising you a bike for your birthday. When’s your birthday?”

“Third of May.” The kid’s eyes are fixed on Cal like he’s a preacher about to hand down the Word. It makes Cal edgy. He turns his voice a few notches more casual.

“So he figured the cash would be coming in pretty soon. You got any idea what his plan might’ve been?”

“He gave grinds sometimes. Coulda been more of those. Exams were coming up.”

“I doubt it. He also talked about taking a vacation in Ibiza, and about showing people he was going places. Tutoring a few kids wasn’t gonna cover all that. He was thinking bigger.”

Trey lifts his shoulders, baffled.

“No ideas?”

The kid shakes his head.

“The other thing I heard,” Cal says, “is that your brother was nervous about police, the week before he went missing.”

“Bren’s not dodgy,” Trey says instantly and fiercely, glaring. “Just ’cause he’s a Reddy, everyone thinks—”

“I’m not saying he’s dodgy, kid,” Cal says. “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard, from people who care about him. Can you think of any reason why he mighta been scared of police?”

“Maybe he had a bitta hash on him. Or a few yokes.”

“He was scareder than that. This wasn’t some pissant little thing he was dealing with. Like I said, your brother was thinking big. And if his big plan was on the up-and-up, then how come no one can tell me what it was?”

“He mighta wanted to surprise people,” Trey says, after a moment. “Like, ye all thought I was a waster, fuck you.”

“You ever think he was a waster?”

“No!”

“Then why would he need to surprise you?”

Trey shrugs. “Just felt like it, maybe.”

“Lemme ask you something,” Cal says. “When Brendan was planning out what he wanted to do in college, he tell you about it?”

“Yeah.”

“When he was thinking about doing tutoring?”

“Yeah.”

“He tell you his plan to get Caroline tickets to some singer for Christmas?”

“Yeah. Hozier. They broke up first, but, so he sold the tickets to Eugene. Why?”

Cal says, “So Brendan told you his plans, when there was no particular reason he shouldn’t.”

“Yeah. He did.”

“Which means, whatever his big idea was, there was a reason why you shouldn’t know about it.”

Trey is silent. Cal is quiet too, leaving him to turn that over and fit it into his mind. At the edge of the woods, the branches hang heavy with leftover rain. Above them, swallows arc tiny and black against the cloud, sending down their high twittering.

After a few moments Trey says suddenly and savagely, “I wouldn’ta ratted him out.”

“I know that,” Cal says. “I bet he did too.”

“Then why would he not—”

“He wanted to keep you safe, kid,” Cal says gently. “Whatever he was getting into, he knew it could bring trouble. Bad trouble.”

Trey goes silent again. He picks threads out of a hole in the knee of his jeans.

“I think we can make a fair guess,” Cal says, “that when Brendan left your house that day, acting like he had somewhere important to be, it was connected to his plan some way or other. I’m not taking it as definite, but I’m gonna go ahead and work on that assumption. Either he was skipping town because he got spooked, or else he was going to do something that would move that plan forwards.”

The kid is still messing with his jeans, but his head has tilted towards Cal. He’s listening.

“He promised you the bike that same afternoon, and a couple days earlier he borrowed a few bucks from Fergal and said he’d pay him back. So it doesn’t seem likely he intended to leave for good. He might have been planning on lying low just for a few days, till whatever spooked him had died down, but in that case I’d expect him to take his phone charger, deodorant, coupla changes of clothes. Seeing as all he took with him was his cash, it seems more likely he was headed to buy something, or to give someone money.”

Trey says, low and tight, “And they kidnapped him.”

“Could be,” Cal said. “We’re not far enough on to settle on that yet. Something could’ve gone wrong, maybe, and he had to run. Where would he meet someone? He have anywhere special he liked to go?”

Trey’s eyebrows twitch together. “Like a pub?”

“Nah. Somewhere private. You said when he needed a little privacy, he went up the mountains. Anywhere in particular that you know of?”

“Yeah. One time he said he was going for a walk and I followed him, ’cause I was bored. Only when I found him, he was just sitting there. He gave me a clatter and told me to fuck off ’cause he wanted some privacy. Like that?”

“Sounds about right,” Cal says. “Where was he?”

Trey jerks his chin at the mountains. “Aul’ cottage. Empty, like.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Few years back. But he went there again after. ’Cause I followed him a couple more times, when I was bored again.”

For a minute Cal sees the kid trudging up those bare windy hillsides, trailing after the one person in his life worth following. “You look there since he left?”

Trey says, “Looked everywhere.”

“Any sign of him?”

“Nah. Bits of aul’ rubbish, just.” The kid’s eyes skid away. The memory is a hard one. He went there hoping he would find either Brendan or something he’d left, a message, and afraid he would find something bad.

Cal says, “Any reason why you didn’t tell me about this place?”

Trey gives him the moron stare. “Why would I? It’s not where he went.”

“Right,” Cal says. “I’d like to take a look at it for myself. Could you tell me how to get there?”

“Up past our place maybe a mile. Then off the road, up the mountain a bit. Through some trees.”

“Uh-huh. You gonna send out a search party when I’m not back in a few days?”

“I know the way. I could bring you there.” The kid is up off his knee, halfway to a runner’s stance, like one word from Cal and he’ll shoot right off.

“I’d rather the two of us didn’t get spotted wandering around together,” Cal says. “Specially not round there.”

Trey’s face is lit up fiercely. “I’ll go on my own. No one’ll spot me. Lend me your phone, I’ll take photos, bring them back to you.”

“No,” Cal says, more sharply than he intends. “You stay away from that cottage. You hear me?”

“Why?”

“In case, is why. Did you hear me?”

“I’m not gonna get kidnapped. I’m not thick.”

“Good for you. You stay away from it anyway.”

“I wanta do something.”

“That’s what you got me into this for. To do things. So let me do them.”

The kid is opening his mouth to argue. Cal says, “You wanna do something useful, get us dinner.” He puts the rifle into Trey’s hands and nods towards the edge of the wood. The rabbits have come out to feed.

After a second of indecision, Trey drops the argument. He eases himself slowly into position, settles the rifle against his shoulder and squints down the sight. “Take your time,” Cal says. “We’re in no hurry.”

They wait and watch. The rabbits are feeling frisky; a few half-grown ones chase each other through the grass, springing high, in the long slants of gold light slipping under the cloud. P.J. is singing to his sheep as he looks them over: scraps of some plaintive old ballad, too fragmented to catch, drift across the fields.

“That big guy there,” Cal says softly. One rabbit is turned broadside on to them, working away at a clump of white-flowered weed. Trey shifts the rifle a fraction, lining up his sights. Cal hears the long whisper of his breath, and then the gun’s roar.

The rabbits whirl and streak for cover, and a high screaming starts. It sounds like a child being tortured.

Trey swings round to Cal, his mouth opening and nothing coming out.

“You got it,” Cal says, standing up and taking the gun from Trey. “We’ll have to finish it off.”

He pulls his hunting knife out of his pocket on his way across the field. Trey half-runs to keep up. His eyes are flaring with pure wild panic at the runaway momentum of what he’s set in motion. He says, “We could try to fix him.”

“It’s in bad shape, kid,” Cal says gently. “We need to stop it suffering. I’ll do it.”

“No,” Trey says. He’s white. “I shot him.”

One of the rabbit’s forelegs has been taken half off and is bleeding in fast bright-red spurts. It lies on its side, jerking, with its back arched; its eyes are white-ringed and its mouth is open, lips pulled back, showing strong teeth and a bloody foam. Its screaming fills up the air.

“You sure?” Cal says.

“Yeah,” Trey says tightly, and holds out his hand for the knife.

“Back of the neck,” Cal says. “Right here. You need to cut through the spine.”

Trey positions the knife. His mouth is set like he’s stopping himself from throwing up. He takes a breath and lets it out long, like he’s about to fire the rifle. It eases the shake in his hand. He comes down hard on the knife, with his weight behind it, and the screaming stops. The rabbit’s head lolls.

“OK,” Cal says. He digs in his pocket for the plastic bag, so he can get the rabbit out of the kid’s sight. “It’s done now. You did good.” He picks up the rabbit by the ears and maneuvers it into the bag.

Trey wipes the hunting knife on the grass and gives it back to Cal. He’s still breathing hard, but the panic has gone out of his eyes, and his face is starting to get its color back. It was the suffering he couldn’t take.

“Gimme your hands,” Cal says, finding his water bottle.

Trey looks down at his hands. They’re crisscrossed with fine lines of blood droplets, from the arterial spray.

“Come here,” Cal says. He pours water over Trey’s hands, while Trey rubs at the blood, till it’s run off into the grass. “That’ll do for now. You can scrub up good and hard once we’re done with the messy part.”

Trey dries off his hands on his jeans. He turns his face up to Cal, still a little stunned, like he needs to be told what to do next.

“Here you go,” Cal says, holding out the plastic bag. “It’s your kill.”

Trey looks down at the bag, and it sinks in. “Hah!” he says, a sound halfway between a burst of breath and a triumphant crack of laughter. “I did it!”

“You did, all right,” Cal says, grinning down at him. He feels an impulse to clap the kid on the shoulder. “Come on,” he says instead, turning towards the house. Its wall is lit to pale gold by the setting sun, so that it stands square-set and radiant against the gray sky. “Let’s take it home.”

They dress the rabbit on Cal’s kitchen counter. He shows Trey how to take off the feet, make a slit across the rabbit’s back and hook his fingers under the skin to pull it off, twisting the head away with it; then how to cut open the belly, free the organs and coax them out. He’s pleased to find the skill coming back to him so smoothly, after all these years. His mind hardly remembers what to do, but his hands still know.

Trey watches intently and follows Cal’s instructions, with the same methodical neatness that he brought to the desk and to the gun, as Cal shows him how to pinch out the urine sac cleanly and how to check the liver for disease spots. Together they strip off silverskin and sinew and the mangled front leg, then cut away the three good legs, the belly and the loin. “There’s your eating meat,” Cal says. “Next time I’ll make stock from the rest, but today we’re gonna put a little bit of this back where we got it.” It’s what he and his granddaddy did with his first squirrel, way back when: gave the parts they didn’t need back to the wild. It seems like the right thing to do with a first kill.

They take the offal down to the back of the garden and leave it on the stump, for the rooks or the foxes or whoever gets to it first. Cal whistles up to the rooks, but they’re settling into their tree and ignore him, except for a halfhearted rude remark or two.

“Well, we did offer,” he says. “You hungry? Or that take the edge off your appetite?”

“Starving,” Trey says promptly.

“Good,” Cal says, glancing up at the sky. The strip of pale yellow has dimmed into a clear green. “I was planning on stew, but that takes a while. We’ll just fry it up.” He wants Trey home before it gets too late. “You like garlic?”

“I guess.”

It occurs to Cal, looking at his blank face, that he may not know. “Let’s find out,” he says. “You cook?”

Trey shrugs. “Sometimes. Sorta.”

“OK,” Cal says. “You’re gonna cook today.”

They scrub up, and Cal puts on some Waylon Jennings to help them work. Trey grins up at him.

“What?”

“Aul’-fella music.”

“OK, DJ Cool. What do you listen to?”

“Nothing you’ve heard of.”

“Smartass,” Cal says, getting ingredients out of the little kitchen cupboard with the busted hinge. “Lemme guess. Opera.”

Trey snorts.

“One Direction.”

That gets him an outraged stare that makes him grin. “Well, thank the Lord for small mercies. Quit complaining and listen. Maybe it’ll teach you to appreciate good music.” Trey rolls his eyes. Cal turns up the volume another notch.

He shows Trey how to shake the chunks of meat in a plastic bag of flour, salt and pepper, and then fry them up in oil, with strips of bell pepper and onion and some garlic Cal picked up in town. “If I had tomatoes and mushrooms,” he says, “we could throw those in too, but Noreen’s tomatoes weren’t looking too perky this week. This’ll do fine. We’ll have it with rice.” He microwaves packet rice while Trey, frowning with concentration, turns the meat frying in the pan. The kitchen is warm, condensation veiling the window, and starting to smell good. For a minute Cal thinks of the dusk thickening outside that window, and about the fear in Sheila’s eyes and Caroline’s, but he puts them out of his mind.

Cal is waiting for Trey to bring up Brendan again, or the cottage, but he doesn’t. For a while Cal is wary of this; he’s inclined to take it as a sign that the kid is making plans he’s not sharing. Then he happens to glance over, checking how the rabbit is doing. The kid is poking at the frying pan and nodding his head along to “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” his lips pursed in a goofy half whistle, his cheeks rosy from the heat of the stove. He looks several years younger than he is, and completely at ease. It comes to Cal that, for once, the kid’s mind isn’t taken up by worrying about Brendan. He’s rewarded himself for the rabbit by allowing himself to put that away, just for a little while.

Trey looks askance at his plate when they sit down at the table, but after one bite his doubts disappear. He shovels in the food like he hasn’t eaten in weeks. His face is practically touching the plate.

“Turns out you like garlic, huh?” Cal asks, grinning.

The kid nods, over another big forkful.

“This dinner’s down to you,” Cal says. “Start to finish. No farmer, no butcher, no factory, no Noreen: just you. How’s that feel?”

Trey is smiling a particular small, private smile that Cal has come to realize means he’s specially happy. “Not bad,” he says.

“If I had my way,” Cal says, “I’d do this for every piece of meat I ever ate. It’s harder and messier than buying a hamburger, but that seems fitting. Eating a creature shouldn’t be a light thing.”

Trey nods. They eat without talking for a while. Outside the window, twilight is setting in and the cloud has started to break up, leaving patches of sky a luminous lavender-blue, edged by the lacy black silhouette of the tree line. Somewhere far away, a fox barks sharply.

“You could live up the mountains,” Trey says. He has clearly been thinking this over. “If you got good at it. Never come down again.”

“You can’t shoot jeans,” Cal points out. “Or sneakers. Unless you want to sew your clothes out of hides, you’d have to come down sometimes.”

“Once a year. Stock up.”

“You could, I guess,” Cal says. “I’d get lonesome, though. I like having someone to talk to, now and again.”

The kid, scraping his plate, throws him a glance that says they differ widely on this. “Nah,” he says.

Cal gets up to fix Trey a second helping. From the stove he says, “You wanna bring one of your friends with us, next time we go hunting?”

The last thing he wants is more random kids hanging around his house, but he feels pretty safe; he just wants to confirm a suspicion he has. Sure enough, Trey stares at him like he just suggested inviting a buffalo to dinner, and shakes his head.

“Your call,” Cal says. “You got friends, though, right?”

“Huh?”

“Friends. Buddies. Compañeros. People you hang out with.”

“I did have. I’ll get back with them sometime.”

Cal puts Trey’s plate in front of him and goes back to his own dinner. “What happened?”

“They’re not allowed hang around with me any more. They don’t care, but; they would anyway. I just . . .” He twitches one shoulder, sawing at a chunk of rabbit. “Not now.”

An edge of tension has slid back into his body. Cal says, “How come they’re not allowed to hang out with you?”

“We did some stuff together,” Trey explains through a mouthful, “like we robbed a coupla bottles of cider and got drunk. Stuff like that. There was the four of us in it—the cider wasn’t my idea, even. But their parents reckoned it was all my fault ’cause I’m the bad one.”

“You don’t seem like a bad kid to me,” Cal says, even though Trey doesn’t seem particularly upset about it. “Who says you are?”

Trey shrugs. “Everyone.”

“Like who?”

“Noreen. Teachers.”

“What’d you do that’s so bad?”

Trey twists one corner of his mouth, implying a surfeit of examples. Cal says, “Pick one.”

“Teacher was giving me hassle today. For not paying attention. I told her I don’t give a shite.”

“Well, that’s not bad,” Cal says. “It’s unmannerly, and you shouldn’ta done it. But it’s not a question of morals.”

The kid is giving him that look again. “That’s not manners. Manners is like chew with your mouth closed.”

“Nah. That’s just etiquette.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just ’cause that’s how everyone does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying ‘Bless you’ if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.”

“I don’t always,” Trey says.

“Well, there you go,” Cal says. “Maybe it’s your manners that need work. You could do with keeping your mouth shut when you chew, too.”

Trey ignores that. “Then what’s a question of morals, so?”

Cal finds himself uncomfortable with this conversation. It brings back things that put a bad taste in his mouth. Over the last few years it’s been brought home to him that the boundaries between morals, manners and etiquette, which have always seemed crystal-clear to him, may not look the same to everyone else. He hears talk about the immorality of young people nowadays, but it seems to him that Alyssa and Ben and their friends spend plenty of their time concentrating on right and wrong. The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what words you should and shouldn’t use for people, based on what problems they have, what race they are, or who they like to sleep with. While Cal agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals. This outraged Ben enough that he stormed out of Cal and Donna’s house in the middle of Thanksgiving dessert, with Alyssa in tears running after him, and it took him an hour to cool down enough to come back in.

In Cal’s view, morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn’t mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair, and Cal would bet a year’s pension that the little twerp would have brought it up if he had. And on top of that, the right terms change every few years, so that someone who thinks like Ben has to be always listening for other people to tell him what’s moral and immoral now. It seems to Cal that this isn’t how a man, or a woman either, goes about having a sense of right and wrong.

He tried putting it down to him getting middle-aged and grumpy about young people these days, but then the department went the same way. They brought in a mandatory sensitivity training session—which was fine by Cal, given the way some of the guys treated, for example, witnesses from bad hoods and rape victims, except the session turned out to be all about what words they were and weren’t allowed to use; nothing about what they were doing, underneath all the words, and how they could do it better. Everyone was always talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.

He’s afraid to answer Trey, in case he leads him wrong and gets him into all kinds of trouble, but no one else is going to do it. “Morals,” he says in the end, “is the stuff that doesn’t change. The stuff you do no matter what other people do. Like, if someone’s an asshole to you, you might not be mannerly to him; you might tell him to go fuck himself, or even punch him in the face. But if you see him trapped in a burning car, you’re still gonna open the door and pull him out. However much of an asshole he is. That’s your morals.”

Trey chews and considers this. “What if he was a psycho killer?”

“Then maybe I wouldn’t help him up if he fell down and broke his leg. Still wouldn’t leave him in that car, though.”

Trey thinks that over some more. “I might,” he says. “Depending.”

“Well,” Cal says, “I got my code.”

“You don’t ever break it?”

“If you don’t have your code,” Cal says, “you’ve got nothing to hold you down. You just drift any way things blow you.”

“What’s your code?”

“Kid,” Cal says, with a sudden surge of weariness, “you don’t want to listen to me about this stuff.”

“How come?”

“You don’t want to listen to anyone about this stuff. You gotta come up with your own code.”

“But what’s yours?”

“I just try to do right by people,” Cal says. “Is all.”

Trey is silent, but Cal can feel more questions shaping themselves in his mind. He says, “Eat your dinner.”

Trey shrugs and does as he’s told. When he finishes his second helping, he sets down his fork and knife, leans back in his chair with his hands on his belly and gives a satisfied sigh. “Stuffed,” he says.

Cal hates to bring the kid’s mind back to Brendan, but if he doesn’t provide a plan for the next step, Trey is liable to come up with one of his own. After he clears the table, he finds a pen and a fresh page in his notebook, and puts them in front of Trey. “Draw me a map,” he says. “How to get to the cottage where Brendan hung out.”

The kid genuinely tries, but Cal can tell within a minute that it’s hopeless. All the landmarks are shit like BIG GORSE BUSH and WALL THAT BENDS LEFT. “Forget it,” he says in the end. “You’re gonna have to take me there.”

“Now?” The kid is half off his seat.

“No, not now. We’ll go tomorrow. Up to here”—Cal taps the map at a bend in the mountain road—“I can follow what you’re driving at. I’ll meet you here. Three-thirty.”

“Earlier. Morning time.”

“Nope,” Cal says. “You got school. Which means right now you need to go home and get your homework done.” He stands up and takes the notebook away, ignoring the look that says Trey will do no such thing. “Take one of those cupcakes with you, for your dessert.”

On his way out the door Trey turns, unexpectedly, to give Cal a great big grin over his shoulder, through the half of the cupcake that’s already stuffed in his mouth. Cal grins back. He wants to tell the kid to be careful out there, but he knows it wouldn’t do any good.