The Searcher

SIXTEEN

What with one thing and another, Cal has been neglecting some stuff: the rooks, for example, and his daily walks around the countryside, and that desk. When he sees the morning—pristine in the sharp autumn sunlight, cold enough to chill his palate with each breath—he figures this is as good a time as any to get back to them. They’ll keep him outdoors, which is where he wants to be when Trey comes around. And he needs to herd his mind off its dusty old detective trail, back to the pretty, scenic one he was thoroughly enjoying until the kid showed up smack in the middle of it.

He starts by walking his legs sore. After that he moves on to the rooks, who have been surveilling him for long enough that they ought to be comfortable with him by now. Alyssa used to have some book about kids who had done surprising things, among them a little girl who had made friends with a crow. There were photos of the presents the crow would bring her: candy wrappers, car keys, broken earrings and Lego figurines. Alyssa spent months trying to strike up a relationship with their neighborhood pigeons, who as far as Cal could tell were too dumb even to identify her as a living creature rather than a weird-shaped food dispenser. He would really like to send her a photo of some rooks bringing him presents.

He lays out a handful of strawberries on the stump, and then a trail of them leading from the stump to the back step, where he sits down to wait. The rooks tumble down from their tree, bicker over the stumpful, get halfway along the trail, then give Cal a collective eye-roll and head back to their business.

Cal tries to find his patience, but it appears to have gone missing somewhere along the way, and the step is cold. After nowhere near enough time, he decides the rooks can fuck themselves, and goes inside to fetch the desk and his tools. By the time he comes back outdoors, every strawberry is gone, and the rooks are back in their tree laughing their asses off at him.

The desk still has tricky deposits of white paint in crevices, and Trey cracked another shelf when she went at it. Disentangling the broken shelf from all the rest looks like a pain in the rear end, so Cal goes at the paint with a toothbrush and a cup of soapy water, a job that starts to irritate him almost immediately. Despite not having touched a drop of booze yesterday, he has the same feeling he associates with hangovers, a heavy, prickly disinclination towards everything around him. He wants today over and done with.

He gives up on the paint, wrangles the shelf loose and starts tracing its outline on a fresh piece of wood. He’s finishing up when he hears the swish of feet through the grass.

The kid looks the same as always, all ratty parka and unyielding stare. Cal can’t see a girl there. For all he knows, she has bosoms of some degree, but he never had any occasion to examine that area in detail before and there’s no way in hell he’s going to do it now. It occurs to him that one reason he’s pissed off with Trey is because he would have liked at least one person around this damn place to be exactly what they seem.

“I went to school,” she informs him.

“Congratulations,” Cal says. “I’m impressed.”

The kid doesn’t smile. “You talk to Donie?”

“Come here,” Cal says. “Let’s get this fixed up. You wanna do the sawing?”

Trey stands still for another moment, looking at him. Then she nods and comes tramping across the grass.

She knows Cal has something to tell her that she doesn’t want to hear. She would never have asked for the mercy of a few extra minutes without it, but she’s taking them when he puts them in her hand. The stoicism of her, complete and unthinking as an animal’s, makes Cal feel blinded.

He wants to change his mind. But, shitty though his plan is, every other one he can think of is even worse. It feels like a vast, implacable failing in his character that he can’t come up with just one good solution to offer this scrawny, dauntless kid.

He hands her the saw and moves so she can take over at the table. “You had a snack after school?”

“Nah,” Trey says, squinting along the saw line.

Cal goes inside and comes out with a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and a glass of milk. “Say thank you,” he says automatically.

“Yeah. Thanks.” The kid drops cross-legged on the grass and aims herself at the sandwich like she hasn’t eaten all day.

Cal goes back to his paint streaks. He doesn’t want to say what he’s about to say. He would like to leave this afternoon undisturbed, let it unroll itself in its own slow time across the newly plowed fields, to the rhythms of their work and the west wind and the low autumn sun, right up until the moment when he has to wreck everything.

But, Mart’s theory notwithstanding, there are a couple of reasons Cal can think of why a girl might not want to look like a girl. If someone has been doing bad things to Trey, his plan will need to change.

“I got a bone to pick with you,” he says.

Trey chews and gives him a blank look. Cal can’t tell whether this relates to the subject at hand, or whether she just hasn’t heard the expression before.

He says, “You never told me you’re a girl.”

The kid lowers her sandwich and watches him, with fast things zipping behind her eyes. She’s trying to read in his face what this means. For the first time in a long time, she looks ready to run.

She says, “Never said I was a boy.”

“You knew I thought you were, though.”

“Never thought about it.”

Her muscles are still primed for flight. Cal says, “Are you scared I’m gonna hurt you?”

“Are you pissed off?”

“I’m not mad,” Cal says. “I’m just not crazy about surprises. Did someone do something bad to you ’cause you’re a girl?”

Her eyebrows twitch together. “Like what?”

“Like anything. Anything that might make you feel better going around like a boy.”

He’s alert for the slightest flinch of tension or withdrawal, but the kid just shakes her head. “Nah. My dad, he went easier on us girls.”

She has no idea what he’s aiming at. Cal feels a flood of relief, chased by something thornier and harder to identify. The kid doesn’t need his rescuing; there’s no reason to change his plan. “Well then,” he says. “Quit looking at me like I’m gonna throw this toothbrush at you.”

“How’d you know? Did someone say it to you?”

Cal says, “What’s with the hair?”

Trey swipes a hand over her head and checks it, like she’s expecting a leaf or something. “Huh?”

“The buzz cut. Makes you look like a boy.”

“I had lice. My mam hadta shave it.”

“Great. You still got ’em?”

“Nah. Last year.”

“Then how come it’s still short?”

“Less hassle.”

Cal is still trying to overlay a girl on top of the boy he’s accustomed to. “What was it like before?”

Trey holds up a hand somewhere around her collarbone. Cal can’t picture it. “When I was in school, kids would’ve given a girl shit for having her hair like that. No one does?”

The kid does a combination shrug, mouth-twist and eye-roll, which Cal takes to mean that this is the least of her problems. “They mostly leave me alone. ’Cause I bet up Brian Carney.”

“How come?”

Trey shrugs again. This one means it’s not worth going into. After a moment she says, with a quick glance at Cal under her eyebrows, “Do you care?”

“That you beat up Brian Whatsisname? Depends on why. Sometimes you got no choice but to set someone straight.”

“That I’m a girl.”

“At your age a kid’s a kid,” Cal says. “Doesn’t make much difference what kind.” He would love this to be true.

Trey nods and goes back to her food. Cal can’t tell whether the subject is closed in her mind. After a little bit she says, “You got any kids?”

“One.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl. She’s grown.”

“Where’s her mam? Were you not married?”

“We were. Not any more.”

Trey absorbs this, chewing. “How come? You a hoormaster like your dad?”

“Nope.”

“Didja beat her?”

“No. Never laid a finger on her.”

“Then how come?”

“Kid,” Cal says, “I have no idea.”

Trey’s eyebrows twitch together skeptically, but she says nothing. She bites a chunk off the apple, puts it inside her last piece of sandwich and tries out the combination, with mixed results, going by the look on her face. It makes Cal’s bones feel weak, how little she sometimes is.

She says, “Does your girl know you’re here?”

“Sure. I talk to her every week.”

“Is the desk gonna be for her?”

“Nah,” Cal says. “She’s got her own place, her own furniture. That’s staying right here.”

Trey nods. She finishes the apple and tosses the core, with a hard whip of her wrist, down the garden towards the rooks. Then she wipes her hands on her jeans and goes back to sawing.

The sounds of their work fall into a balance that could sustain itself forever. The swifts streak and crisscross in the cool blue sky, and the weaning lambs call to each other in wavery trebles. Off on Dumbo Gannon’s land a red tractor lumbers patiently back and forth, small as a beetle with distance, leaving a broad band of dark upturned earth behind it.

Cal gives them as long as he can afford. Trey saws out the shelf, measures and checks, chisels and planes, squints and measures again. Cal scrubs cracks, wipes them down, scrapes a little with a blade when he needs to. Trey, finally satisfied, moves on to sanding.

The light is starting to condense, lying golden as honey across the fields. Cal needs to get this done.

“I talked to Donie,” he says, hearing the words start something splitting like wood.

Trey’s shoulders set. She puts down the shelf and the sandpaper, carefully, and turns to look at him. “Yeah,” she says.

Cal can see the white around her eyes, and the flare of her nostrils when she breathes. He knows her heart is going like a runaway horse.

“It’s not bad news, kid. OK?”

A hard breath comes out of her. She swipes the back of her wrist across her mouth. “OK,” she says.

She’s the same bad white as she was when she winged the rabbit. “You wanna sit down for this, get comfortable?” Cal asks. “It’s a long story.”

“Nah.”

“Suit yourself,” Cal says. He brushes paint dust off the desk and leans his forearms on the top of it, keeping his movements slow and easy, the way he would around a spooked animal; the way he did the first couple of times the kid came around, just a few weeks ago. “To start with: you wanted to know why I was aiming to talk to Donie. My thinking went like this. Brendan was planning to use that cottage to generate a good income. He had something shady in mind, or he’d’ve told you about it. Which means he would’ve needed to talk to people who have shady connections. The only people like that round here are the boys who come down from Dublin selling drugs. And I’d seen Donie hanging out with them in the pub.”

Trey nods, one tight jerk. She’s following him. She’s still white, but the wildness has gone out of her eyes.

“So I went to call on Donie. I knew, like you said, he wouldn’t be too eager to tell the story to a stranger—specially since, if you heard I was a cop, he had to have heard the same thing. But we came to an understanding in the end.”

“Didja beat him up?”

“Nah. No need. You only have to meet Donie once to know he’s not a big player. He’s just some two-bit hanger-on, kissing the real guys’ asses and scared shitless of them the whole time. So all I had to do was make it sound like I knew a lot more than I did, and then tell Donie if he didn’t fill in the gaps for me, I was gonna make sure his city friends heard he’d been talking to a cop.”

Trey clearly approves of this. “And he talked?”

“Sang like a little birdie,” Cal says. “Donie isn’t exactly a mastermind, so he mighta had some details wrong, but I think he got all the bones of the matter in place. Here’s what he says, anyway. You know all that crap up in Brendan’s hideout?”

Trey nods sharply.

“Sometimes people get hold of stuff they shouldn’t have. Then they sell it on.”

“Brendan’s not a thief.”

“Shut up and listen, kid. I’m not saying he is. What I’m saying is, sometimes it might take these people a while to find buyers. While they’re looking, they need somewhere to store the stuff. Somewhere secure and out of the way, so no one’s gonna stumble on it by mistake, and the cops won’t find it unless they know exactly where to look. If these guys find the right place, run by someone reliable who’s gonna keep their stuff safe, they’ll pay decent rent.”

“Like a warehouse.”

“Yeah. Exactly like. And a place like here, not too far from the border, this is prime territory. Brendan saw a gap in the market, and he realized his hideout was the perfect place to fill it. All he needed to do was fix it up some, and get in touch with people who’d use it.”

Trey evaluates this. Apparently she can fit this level of shadiness into her idea of Brendan. She nods.

“So Brendan started fixing the place up. Maybe he even got a couple of local guys using it, here and there, but they’d be too small-time to be much use to him. He needed to land some bigger fish.”

“The lads from Dublin,” Trey says.

“This part’s where Donie got a little hazy on the details,” Cal says. “No one’s gonna tell a dumbass like him more than they need to; he just got given the general gist of what went down. Best he can tell, Brendan waited till the Dublin boys were in town and asked them to put him in touch with people who might want his services. They were interested, but there was a little bit of disagreement among them about Brendan’s operation. Some of them thought he’d be an asset, but some of them thought he’d be more of a liability. From what I can gather, they’re planning on running something of their own up those mountains, and they didn’t want Brendan and his clients drawing police attention in that direction.”

“Guys like that,” Trey says. She doesn’t finish.

“Yeah,” Cal says. “You don’t want to piss them off. Brendan probably shoulda taken that possibility into account, but from what I’ve been told, he had a tendency to get carried away and forget to factor in other people’s reactions. That sound right to you?”

Trey nods. Cal spent half the night smoothing the edges on this story and looking it over from different angles, making sure it holds together and incorporates all the pieces Trey has possession of. There are little holes here and there, but nothing that would make it fall apart under pressure. It has enough truth in it to act as glue. There’s even a chance, and what a trip that would be, that with a few minor substitutions this hinky story is accidentally true.

“So,” he says, “Brendan set up a meeting with them, thinking he was gonna pay them for a bunch of phone numbers and everyone would go away happy. By the time the meeting came around, though, the ones that thought he was a liability had shouted down the rest. They told him to get out of town and stay gone.”

“Just told him to leave,” Trey says. Her breath is coming fast and shallow. “They didn’t take him? For definite?”

“Nah. What would they want him for? All they wanted from him was to get out of their hair, and he did that himself, right quick. He had more sense than to hang around till he got told again.”

“So that’s why he went. Not ’cause he wanted to.”

“That’s right,” Cal says. “He didn’t have a choice.”

A hard breath comes out of Trey and her eyes skid away, one place and then another. The thought of Brendan walking out without a word, because he wanted to, has been eating her raw and bloody for months. Now that it’s gone, she can’t take in the clear space where it used to be.

Cal lets her be. After a minute she asks, “Where’d he go?”

“Donie’s not sure. He thinks Scotland, for whatever that’s worth. He says the boys didn’t take any cash off Brendan, so he shoulda had enough to get him somewhere and get him set up. And if he’s got sense, he won’t be back for a while.”

Trey says, coming down heavy on the words, “But he’s alive.”

“Far as anyone knows. No guarantees—he coulda fallen off the boat on the way over, or got hit by a car, same as anyone could. But there’s no reason to think he’s anything but.”

“Then why didn’t he ring? Even once, let us know he was OK?”

The question forces its way out against her will. This is the other half of what’s been gnawing her to the bones. She wanted Brendan kidnapped because that would have been fixable.

“These are pretty scary guys, kid,” Cal says gently. “My guess is, Brendan knows you well enough to figure that if you got any smell of what went down, you might go trying to fix things so he could come home. And that would’ve just made the situation worse. For him and you both. He liked to protect you, right?”

“Yeah. He did.”

“That’s what he was doing. If you want to do the same for him, the best thing you can do is trust him and stick to what he wanted you to do. Pull in your horns, keep your mouth shut and go about your business till he figures it’s safe to come home.”

Trey looks at him for another long minute. Then she says, “Thanks.” She turns back to the table and starts sanding again, very carefully and very neatly.

Cal goes back to his toothbrush and his soapy water, even though the desk is already as clean as he can get it. Trey doesn’t say another word, so neither does he. Their side of the mountains has darkened, its great shadow bleeding across the fields towards them, by the time the kid brings the shelf over to him.

Every edge is smooth as paper. Cal passes Trey the hammer and she fits the shelf carefully into place, a tap on one side and then a tap on the other. She stands back and looks up at Cal.

“Good job,” he says. “You’ve done fine work on this, kid. Now you better get home.”

Trey nods, dusting her hands on her jeans.

“So,” Cal says. “You got your answer, near as I can come to it. Glad I could help out.” He holds out his hand.

The kid looks at it, and then up at Cal’s face, baffled.

“Case closed, kid,” Cal says. “I hope your brother comes home when things settle down. See you round Noreen’s sometime, if she doesn’t ban you.”

Trey says, “I’ll come back anyway. Finish that.” She jerks her chin at the desk.

“Nope,” Cal says. “Nothing personal. You’re handy and you’re fine company, but I came here to get away from company.”

The kid is staring at him with her face wiped blank by shock. Cal realizes, with a grief so deep and exhausting that he wants to sink to his knees and put his forehead down on the cool grass, how badly she wants to keep coming round.

He has experience in what happens if you try to make Trey Reddy give up on something she’s set her heart on. His only course is to make her want to never come back.

If she doesn’t realize what people will say, he can’t bring himself to put that into her mind. Instead he says, “You wanted me to find out what happened to your brother, kid. I did that. What else do you want from me?”

Trey keeps staring. She looks like she might say something, but nothing comes out.

Cal lets a wry grin slide onto his face. “Huh,” he says. “I did get warned about the Reddys and cash. Is that what you want? Pay for the work you’ve done? ’Cause I can probably spare fifty, sixty bucks, but if you’re thinking about taking what you’re owed when I’m not looking—”

For a second he thinks she’s going to go for the desk again, or maybe for him. He’s fine with either one. She can take the desk to splinters if that’s what she needs. He even moves back to give her a clear shot. Instead she spits, swift and vicious as a rattlesnake striking, at his feet. It lands on his boot with a splat. Then she whips around and strides off, fast and hard, towards the road.

Cal waits a minute and goes to the gate. Trey is already far away, moving fast through the blotches of light and shadow that pattern the road, with her head down and her hands jammed deep in her pockets. He watches till she reaches the upwards slant in the road and is received into the bright muddle of sun and hedge-branches at the top, and a long time after. Nothing follows her.

He carries his tools inside, and his table, and finally the desk. He puts the desk in the spare bedroom, where it won’t be always catching his eye. He would have liked to finish that desk together with Trey, before he had to send her away.

Probably he should make the rest of yesterday’s perch into dinner, but instead he gets himself a beer and takes it out to the back step. In the east the sky is deepening towards lavender; beneath it the red tractor stands still, abandoned in mid-furrow. The plowing has added a new layer to the air’s smell, something richer and darker, thick with hidden things.

See? he tells Donna, in his head. I can walk away from a case, if it’s the right thing to do. Donna, refusing to be obliging even in his imagination, rolls her eyes and makes a ferocious noise at the heavens.

Cal told Trey the truth: he does not, in fact, know why he and Donna split up. As far as he can tell, what happened was that in Alyssa’s junior year of college she got mugged and beat up pretty bad, and two years later Donna walked out, and apparently there was some mysterious connection that Cal is too dumb to understand.

At the time, there was no indication that the first of these events would lead to the second. He and Donna flew out to Seattle so fast that they got there while Alyssa was still in recovery from surgery for a smashed shoulder bone. Once Cal was sure she was going to be OK, he left Donna to sit with her and headed down to the precinct. He knew exactly what priority would be assigned to a random mugging, but the mugging of a cop’s daughter was a different matter, and the daughter of a cop who was all up in the precinct’s grille was another thing again. Over the next couple of weeks Cal harried that precinct, politely and relentlessly, till they pulled CCTV footage from every camera in a block radius. That got them a couple of grainy shots of the mugger, which Cal and the precinct guys worked—some days Cal put in twenty hours—till they dragged up a runty, redheaded junkie called Lyle, who still had Alyssa’s credit card in his jacket pocket.

When Cal told Alyssa, she was still too shaken up even to show relief; she just looked at him and then turned her head away. Cal understood: he had hoped she would be pleased, but he had seen enough victims to understand that trauma shapes feelings into forms you would never expect.

Over the next while, he and Donna were mostly taken up by worrying about Alyssa. She wouldn’t let them stay with her, after the first couple of weeks, and she wouldn’t come home, so they had to do their worrying long-distance. The attack had cracked her mind all over, like a dropped mirror where the pieces are still in place but the whole doesn’t function right any more. Cal never did figure out whether it was the physical harm or the things Lyle had threatened to do to her—Alyssa had tried to talk him down, connect with him like one human being to another, and Lyle hadn’t taken well to that. Either way, she would barely get out of bed, let alone go to class and hang out with her friends and whatever else she should have been doing.

Gradually, though, her mind healed over. She started going to classes again. One night she laughed on the phone. A few weeks later, when Cal phoned to tell her that Lyle was pleading guilty, she was at a bar with Ben. Cal knew the cracks were still there and still fragile, but he also knew how strong the drive towards life is in healthy young creatures. He put his trust in that, as far as he was capable of doing.

When Donna started giving him shit, at first Cal put that down to the same thing: delayed trauma, coming out now that she had room for it. The shit in question was initially a generalized buckshot spatter of anger, but gradually, as Donna talked her thoughts into clarity, it focused in on their time in Seattle: specifically, the fact that Cal had spent most of that time tracking down Lyle. Donna felt, apparently, that he should have spent it in Alyssa’s apartment, with her and her roommates and Donna and Ben and whatever other friends had shown up to offer moral support and gossip and crap with chia seeds in it.

“What was I gonna do there?”

“Talk to her. Hug her. Just fucking sit there. Anything would’ve been better than nothing.”

“I did something. I went out and got the guy. Without me, they would have—”

“She didn’t need you out somewhere being a cop. She needed you right in that room being her father.”

“She didn’t want me there,” Cal said, baffled. “She had you.”

“Did you ask her?” Donna snapped, hands and eyebrows flying up. “Did you ever ask?”

Cal hadn’t. It had seemed obvious to him that at a time like that, a kid needed her mama with her, and that Donna would do the talking and hugging part a lot better than he would. He had gone out and brought Alyssa the best he had to offer, which was Lyle’s louse-ridden scalp. That didn’t seem like nothing to him. Without his work, Lyle would still have been on the streets; every time she went out her door, Alyssa would have been watching for him on every corner. Now, at least for the next seven to ten years, she could go out without being afraid.

Either way, this did not, at first, seem like marriage-ending material. But over the next months it led them, via a series of leaps and skids that Cal barely managed to follow even at the time, into much darker and muddier places. They argued for hours on end, late into the night, far past the point where Cal became too punch-drunk and exhausted to understand what they were arguing about. In the end Donna got mad enough that she left, which stunned Cal to the bones. He had got plenty mad at Donna, in the course of their time together, but never mad enough that it occurred to him to walk out.

The only thing he took away from those arguments with any clarity was that Donna believed he would be a better husband, and a better father, if he wasn’t a cop. Cal thought that was a load of hooey, but he found himself willing to run with it anyway. He had his twenty-five, Alyssa was out of college, and the job was no longer what it had been, or maybe what Cal had believed it was. He couldn’t tell what it was, any more, but he was becoming clearer and clearer that he didn’t like it.

He didn’t tell Donna what he had decided until he had turned in his paperwork, got it all approved and got in writing the date when he would hand in his badge. He wanted to present her with something solid, so she would know he wasn’t bullshitting. Maybe he left it too long, because when he told Donna, she said she had something to tell him, too, which turned out to be that she was seeing some guy called Elliott from her book club.

Cal didn’t reveal that part to his buddies. They would have said that Donna had been banging Elliott all along and that was why she left to begin with, and Cal knows she wasn’t. He would like to believe she was, for his own peace of mind, but he knows Donna better than that. She has her code too. Probably the thought of hooking up with Elliott never so much as crossed her mind while she and Cal were together, or she would never have laid a finger on him even after they split. He just told the guys that she had said it was too late, which she had, and the guys bought Cal more beer and they all agreed on the incomprehensibility of women.

But this, which should have provided some comfort, just made him feel worse. He feels like a fraud, because the other thing he took away from all those fights with Donna was that somehow, without ever intending to, he had let her and Alyssa down. All Cal ever wanted to be was a steady man who took care of his family and did right by the people around him. For more than twenty years, he went about his business believing he was that man. Only somewhere along the way, he fucked up. He lost hold of his code, and the worst part is that he can’t understand what he did. Everything he’s been since that moment has been worth nothing, and he doesn’t even know what the moment was.

Cal finishes his beer and heads up the fading road. Mart and Kojak come to their door in a cloud of onions and paprika. “Well, would you look at that,” Mart says happily. “It’s Sunny Jim. How’s she cutting?”

“I told Trey Reddy to get lost,” Cal says. “She won’t be coming round any more.”

“Good man yourself,” Mart says. “I knew my money was safe on you. You’ll be glad you did it in the end.” He waves Cal towards the kitchen. “Sit you down there now, and I’ll get another plate. I’m after making a chicken and bacon paella that’s only feckin’ beautiful, if I do say so myself.”

“I ate,” Cal says. “Thanks.” He gives Kojak’s ears a rub and goes home, through the cold darkening air and the smell of smoke coming from somewhere.