The Searcher

SEVEN

Cal wakes up next morning with that bad feeling still running round his gut. His last year or two on the job, he woke up every day like this, with this same thick knotted certainty that something bad was rolling towards him, something unpreventable and implacable, like a hurricane or a mass shooting. It made him jumpy as a rookie; people noticed, and gave him shit about it. When Donna walked out, he thought that must be it, the bomb he had been waiting for. Only the feeling was still there in his gut, hulking and surly as ever. Then he figured it must be the hazards of the job catching him in some new middle-aged awareness of mortality, but when he put in his papers and walked away, still it stayed. It only started to loosen its grip when he signed the papers on this place, and it only finally left him the day he walked through his overgrown grass to his peeling front door. And now here it is again, like it just took a little while to sniff him out, all these miles away, and track him down.

He deals with it the way he did on the job, which is by trying to work it to death. After breakfast he gets back to painting the living room, as hard and fast as he can and whether he wants to or not. This works as well as it ever did, which is to say not particularly, but at least he gets shit done along the way. By dinnertime he has the primer put on, walls and ceiling, and most of the first coat of paint. He’s still skittish as a wild horse. The day is windy, which means all kinds of noises inside and outside and up the chimney, and Cal jumps at every one of them even though he knows they’re nothing but leaves and window frames. Or, possibly, the kid. Cal wishes the kid’s mama had decided to send him to military school when he first started playing hooky.

The days are shortening. By the time Cal knocks off work it’s dark, an edgy, blustery dark that makes his plan to walk off the rest of the feeling seem a lot less attractive. He’s eating a hamburger and trying to firm up his resolve when something smashes against his front door. Not the wind, this time; something solid.

Cal puts down his hamburger, goes quietly out the back and edges around the side of the house. There’s only a sliver of moon; the shadows are thick enough to hide even a guy his size. From out over Mart’s land floats the imperturbable call of an owl.

The front lawn is empty, wind yanking the grass this way and that. Cal waits. After a minute, something small comes whizzing out of the hedge and smacks into the wall of the house. This time, with the juicy crack and splatter it makes against the stone, Cal gets it. The damn kid is egging his house.

Cal goes back indoors and stands in his living room, evaluating the situation and listening hard. The same applies to the eggs as to the tires: a couple of rocks would have been easier to come by, and would have done a lot more damage. The kid isn’t attacking Cal; he’s demanding him.

Another egg splats against the front door. Before he knows he’s going to do it, Cal gives up. He can hold out against this kid and he can hold out against his own intractable unsettled places, but not both at the same time.

He goes to the sink, fills up the plastic tub where he does his dishes, and finds an old dish towel. Then he takes them both to the door and flings it wide open.

“Kid!” he calls, good and loud, to the hedge. “Get out here.”

Silence. Then a flying egg misses Cal by inches and splatters against the wall.

“Kid! I changed my mind. Knock that shit off before I change it back again.”

There’s another silence, this one longer. Then Trey, egg box in hand and egg in the other, steps out of the hedge and stands waiting, ready to run or throw. The V of light from the doorway stretches his shadow behind him, turning him elongated and narrow, a dark figure materialized in headlight beams on a deserted road.

“I’ll look into your brother,” Cal says. “I’m not promising you anything, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Trey is staring at him with pure, feral suspicion. “Why?” he demands.

“Like I said. I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“None of your beeswax,” Cal says. “Not because of you pulling this dumb crap, tell you that much. You still want me to do this, or not?”

Trey nods.

“OK,” Cal says. “Then first off, you clean up all this shit. When you’re done, come inside and we’ll talk.” He dumps the towel and the bucket on the doorstep, goes back inside and slams the door behind him.

He’s finishing up the last of his burger when he hears the door open and the wind comes charging in, looking for things to grab. Trey stands in the doorway.

“You done?” Cal asks.

Trey nods.

Cal doesn’t need to check whether he did it right. “OK,” he says. “Sit down.”

Trey doesn’t move. It takes Cal a minute to realize: he’s scared he’s being lured inside for a beating.

“Jesus, kid,” he says. “I’m not gonna hit you. If you cleaned up, we’re square.”

Trey’s eyes go to the desk, in a corner.

“Yeah,” Cal says. “You messed it up pretty good. I got most of the paint off, but there’s some in the cracks. You can work on it with a toothbrush sometime.”

The kid still looks wary. “I would say you can leave the door open in case you want to run,” Cal says, “but it’s too windy for that. Your call.”

After a minute Trey makes up his mind. He moves into the room, shuts the door behind him and thrusts the egg box at Cal. There’s one left.

“Thanks,” Cal says. “I guess. Stick it in the fridge.”

Trey does. Then he sits down across the table from Cal, chair pushed well back and feet braced, just in case. He’s wearing a dirty army-green parka, which is a relief; Cal has been wondering if the kid even had a winter coat.

“You want something to eat? Drink?”

Trey shakes his head.

“OK,” Cal says. He pushes back his chair—Trey flinches—takes his plate to the sink, then goes into his room and comes back with a notebook and a pen.

“First off,” he says, pulling his chair back up to the table, “most likely I won’t find out anything. Or if I do, it’ll be just what your mama already told you: your brother ran off. You OK with that?”

“He didn’t.”

“Maybe not. What I’m saying is, this might not go the way you got in mind, and you need to be ready for that. Are you?”

“Yeah.”

Cal knows this is a lie, even if the kid doesn’t. “You better be,” he says. “The other thing is, you don’t bullshit me. I ask you a question, you give me all the answer you’ve got. Even if you don’t like it. Any bullshit, I’m out. We clear?”

Trey says, “Same for you. Anything you find out, you tell me.”

“We got a deal,” Cal says. He flips open his notebook. “So. What’s your brother’s full name?”

The kid is straight-backed, with his hands clamped on his thighs, like this is an oral exam and he needs to ace it. “Brendan John Reddy.”

Cal writes that down. “Date of birth?”

“Twelfth of February.”

“Where’d he live, up until he went missing?”

“At home. With us.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“My mam. My sisters. My other brother.”

“Names and ages?”

“My mam’s Sheila Reddy, she’s forty-four. Maeve’s nine. Liam’s four. Alanna’s three.”

“You said before you had three sisters,” Cal says, writing. “Where’s the other one?”

“Emer. She went up to Dublin, two years ago. She’s twenty-one.”

“Any chance Brendan’s staying with her?”

Trey shakes his head hard.

“Why not?”

“They don’t get on.”

“How come?”

Shrug. “Brendan says she’s thick.”

“What’s she do?”

“Works at Dunnes Stores. Stacking shelves.”

“How ’bout Brendan? Was he working? In school? College?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

Shrug.

“When’d he leave school?”

“Last year. He got his Leaving Cert, he didn’t drop out.”

“He have anything he wanted to do? He apply to any colleges, any jobs?”

“He wanted to do electrical engineering. Or chemistry. He didn’t get the points.”

“Why not? He dumb?”

“No!”

“Then why?”

“Hated school. The teachers.”

The kid is shooting out answers like he’s on the timed round of a quiz show. Cal can tell, watching him, that it feels good. This—the two of them facing each other across this table, the notebook and pen—is what Trey has been working towards, all this time.

“Gimme a little more about him,” Cal says. “What’s he like?”

Trey’s eyebrows twitch together; clearly he has never tried to articulate this before. “He’s a laugh,” he says, in the end. “He talks a lot.”

“You sure you’re related?”

Trey gives Cal a blank stare. “Never mind,” Cal says. “Just joshing you. Go on.”

The kid makes a baffled what-do-you-want-from-me grimace, but Cal waits. “He can’t sit still,” Trey says, in the end. “Mam gives out about that. He got in hassle in school for it, and for messing.”

When Cal keeps waiting: “He likes motorbikes. And making stuff. Like when I was a kid, he made me little cars that actually went, and experiments out the back field to blow stuff up. And he’s not thick. He has ideas. In school he made a load of money buying sweets in town and then selling them at lunch, till the teachers found out.” He glances at Cal, checking whether that’s enough.

Cal is thinking that it sounds like Brendan takes after his daddy a lot more than Trey does, and look what Daddy ended up doing. “Good,” he says. “I like to get an idea who I’m looking for, see what direction it points me. Your brother have any medical conditions? Mental illnesses?”

“No!”

“It’s not an insult, kid,” Cal says. “I need to know.”

The kid is still affronted. “He’s grand.”

“Never went to the doctor for anything?”

“He broke his arm one time. Came off a motorbike. But he went to the hospital for that, not the doctor.”

“He ever seem depressed to you? Anxious?”

Clearly these aren’t concepts to which Trey has given a lot of thought. “He was well pissed off when he didn’t get into college,” he offers, after considering this.

“Pissed off like what? Like staying in his room all day? Not eating? Not talking? What?”

Trey gives Cal a look like he’s being a drama queen. “Nah. Like pissed off. Like he swore a lot, and he went out on the lash that night, and he was in a humor all week. Then he said fuck college anyway, he’d be grand.”

“OK,” Cal says. That doesn’t sound like a tendency towards depression, but family aren’t always the best observers. “Who’d he hang out with?”

“Eugene Moynihan. Fergal O’Connor. Paddy Fallon. Alan Geraghty. Some other lads as well, but mostly them.”

Cal writes those down. “Which one was he closest to?”

“He doesn’t have a best friend, like. Just whichever of them are about.”

“He have a girlfriend?”

“Nah. Not the last while.”

“Exes?”

“He went out with Caroline Horan for a couple of years, in school.”

“Good relationship?”

Trey shrugs. This is an extravagant one that means How the hell would I know?

“When’d it end?”

“A while back. Before Christmas.”

“Why?”

Another shrug. “She dumped him.”

“Any beef there? She accuse him of anything? Hitting her, cheating on her?”

Shrug.

Cal underlines Caroline’s name. “Where would I find Caroline? She work around here?”

“In town. Or she did when Bren was going out with her, anyway. Shop that sells shite to tourists. And sometimes she usedta give Noreen a hand—her mam and Noreen are cousins. I think she’s in college now, but, so I dunno.”

“He have any problems with anyone else?”

“Nah. Fought with the lads, sometimes. Nothing serious, but.”

“Fought like what? Arguments? Yelling? Fists? Knives?”

Trey gives Cal the drama-queen look again. “Not knives. All the rest, yeah. Didn’t mean anything.”

“Just guys being guys,” Cal says, nodding. This may well be true, but it needs checking. “What’s he do for fun? Any hobbies?”

“Plays hurling. Goes out.”

“He a drinker?”

“Sometimes. Not every night, like.”

“Where? Seán Óg’s?”

That gets an eye-roll. “Seán’s is old fellas. Brendan goes into town. Or people’s houses.”

“What’s he like drunk?”

“He’s not a bad drunk or nothing. He goes messing, like him and his mates robbed a load of signboards from outside shops in town and put them in people’s gardens. And one time Fergal’s parents were away and he had a party, and he passed out drunk, so the rest of them put a sheep in his bathroom.”

“Brendan ever get rowdy?” Cal asks. “Start fights?”

Trey makes a dismissive pfft. “Nah. He gets into fights the odd time, like once a bunch of lads from Boyle jumped on them in town. But he doesn’t go looking.”

“What about drugs? He ever do any of those?”

That gives Trey his first real pause. He eyes Cal warily. Cal looks back at him. He’s got no duty to nudge and cajole, not here. If Trey decides he doesn’t want to do this after all, that’s fine by Cal.

“Sometimes,” Trey says, finally.

“What kinds?”

“Hash. E. Bitta speed.”

“Where’s he get it?”

“There’s a few lads around the townland that always have stuff. Everyone knows to go to them. Or he’d buy it in town, sometimes.”

“He ever do any dealing?”

“Nah.”

“Would you know?”

“He told me things. I wouldn’t rat on him. He knew that.”

There’s a quick fierce flare of pride in Trey’s eyes. Cal is getting the flavor of this. The kid was Brendan’s pet brother, and everything about that was special.

“He ever have any problems with the police?”

The corner of Trey’s mouth twists scornfully. “Mitching off school. This fat lump comes down from town and gives us shite.”

“He’s doing you guys a favor,” Cal says. “He could report it to child protective services, get you and your mama in big trouble. Instead, he takes the time to come out here and talk to you. Next time you see him, you thank him real nice. Brendan run into police any other ways?”

“He got caught speeding, coupla times. Racing, like, with his mates. Nearly lost his license.”

“Anything else?”

Trey shakes his head.

“What about stuff he didn’t get caught for?”

They look at each other. Cal says, “I told you. Any bullshit, we’re done.”

Trey says, “He robs off Noreen sometimes.”

“And?”

“And off places in town. Nothing big. Only for the laugh.”

“Anything else?”

“Nah. You gonna tell Noreen?”

“Pretty sure she already knows, kid,” Cal says dryly. “But don’t worry, I’m not gonna say anything. How’d Brendan get on with your daddy?”

Trey doesn’t flinch, just one blink. “Bad.”

“Like what?”

“They’d fight.”

“Argue? Or it got physical?”

Trey’s eyes snap furiously with the fact that this is none of Cal’s damn business. Cal sits and watches, letting the silence stretch, while the kid’s instincts drag him two ways.

“Yeah,” Trey says, in the end. His face has tightened up.

“How often?”

“Few times.”

“Over what?”

“Dad said Brendan was a waster, sponging. Bren said look who’s talking. And sometimes . . .” Trey’s chin jerks sideways, but he keeps going. He’s sticking to his side of the deal. “To make Dad leave Mam or one of us alone, sometimes. If he was raging.”

“So,” Cal says, staying back from that, “it’s not likely Brendan headed off to join your dad.”

Trey makes a harsh, explosive noise that’s something like a laugh. “No chance.”

“You got a phone number for your dad, or an email address? Just in case.”

“Nah.”

“ ’Bout for Brendan?”

“Know his phone number.”

Cal flips to a fresh page in his notebook and passes it to Trey. He writes carefully, pressing the pen down hard. The wind is still going outside, rattling the door and pushing in at its edges to wrap cold around their ankles.

“He have a smartphone?” Cal asks.

“Yeah.”

An hour with that number, and the techs at work would have known every single thing that was on Brendan’s mind. Cal has none of their skills, none of their software and of course none of their rights.

Trey passes the notebook back. “You tried calling him?” Cal asks.

That gets him the moron look. “Course. Off the land line, every time my mam’s not around.”

“And?”

For the first time that day, that terrible, tense wretchedness rises up in Trey’s face. He’s been keeping it down hard. “Voicemail,” he says.

“OK,” Cal says gently. “Straight to voicemail? Or it rings out?”

“First day, it rang out. Now it’s straight to voicemail.”

That could, of course, mean Brendan is being held captive by bad guys who haven’t provided a charger in his dungeon. Or it could mean he switched to a new phone when he got wherever he was headed. Or it could mean he hanged himself from a tree, somewhere up in the mountains, and his phone lasted a little longer than he did.

“OK,” Cal says. “That’s enough background stuff to keep me going, for now. Good job.”

Trey lets out his breath.

“Nah,” Cal says. “We’re not done yet. I need to hear about the last time you saw Brendan.”

After a second Trey takes another breath and braces himself again. It takes an effort this time. He looks drawn and shadowy-eyed all of a sudden, and too young for this, but Cal has talked to plenty of kids who were too young for this, and none of them were there by their own demand. He says, “Twenty-first of March, you said.”

“Yeah.”

“What day of the week was that?”

“Tuesday.”

“So go back a few days before that. Anything out of the ordinary happen? Brendan have a fight with your mama? With one of his buddies? Guys in town?”

“My mam doesn’t have fights. She’s not like that.”

“OK. Someone else?”

Trey shrugs. “Dunno. He didn’t say he did.”

“He get turned down for a job? Mention a girl he met? Stay out later’n usual? We’re looking for anything out of his routine.”

The kid thinks. “He was a bit off that week, maybe. Narky, like. The day he went, he was grand, but. Mam said, ‘You’re very cheerful,’ and he said, ‘No point sitting around sulking, sure, I haven’t got time for that.’ That’s all.”

“Huh,” Cal says. An escape plan would cheer a guy up, all right. “So let’s talk about the twenty-first. Start at the beginning. You got up.”

“Didn’t see Bren then. He was in bed. I went to school. Got home and he was watching the telly. I went in to him. After a while he went out.”

“What time?”

“Five, maybe. ’Cause when Mam called us for tea he said nah, he was going out, and then he went.”

“What kind of ride he have? Car, motorbike, bike?”

“Nothing. Mam’s got a car, but he didn’t take it. He doesn’t have a motorbike. He was just walking.”

“He tell you where he was going?”

“Nah. I thought he was meeting the lads. He was checking his watch like he had to be somewhere.”

Or he could have had a bus to catch. The buses to Dublin and Sligo both pass on the main road, just a couple of miles away, and while they don’t officially stop, Noreen has assured Cal that most of the drivers are good-natured about being waved down. Cal writes down Bus timetables 4–8 p.m. Tues.

“You guys talk about anything, while you watched TV?”

“My birthday. Bren said he’d get me a decent bike; I’ve only his old one and it’s pure shite, the chain keeps jamming. And just the program on the telly. One of them singing shows, don’t remember what one.”

“How’d he seem? Good mood? Bad mood?”

“Fidgety, like. He was talking the whole time, slagging off the people singing. Sitting on different bits of the sofa. Poking me if I didn’t answer him.”

“That normal for him?”

Trey twitches one shoulder. “Sorta. He’s always up and down like a fiddler’s elbow, my mam usedta say. Only not like that.”

“How was that day different?”

The kid pulls at a frayed place in the knee of his jeans, trawling through his mind for the right words. Cal swallows the urge to tell him to knock it off.

“Bren,” Trey says in the end, “he’s a messer, mostly. He’d always be making me laugh. Making everyone laugh, but . . . we had jokes, like. Just us. He liked making me laugh.”

Cal gets a little bit of a glimpse of what Brendan leaving meant to Trey. The kid doesn’t look like he’s laughed since.

“But that day he wasn’t looking for laughs,” he says.

“Yeah. Not even once. He was the same kind of fidgety like during the exams.” Trey shoots Cal a sudden sharp frown. “That doesn’t mean he was planning on—”

“Focus,” Cal says. “How was he dressed? Like he was heading into town? What?”

Trey thinks. “Just normal. Jeans and a hoodie. Not like for going out in town, like not a good shirt or nothing.”

“He take a coat?”

“Bomber jacket, just. It wasn’t raining.”

“He say anything about when he was aiming to get back? ‘Keep me some dinner,’ ‘Don’t wait up,’ anything like that?”

“Dunno.” Trey’s face is tightening again. “Can’t remember. I tried.”

Cal says, “And he didn’t come back.”

“Yeah.” The kid’s shoulders have hunched up inside his parka, like he’s cold. “Not that night, or when I got back from school next day.”

“He ever do that before?”

“Yeah. Stayed with one of his mates.”

“So that’s what you figured he was doing.”

“At first. Yeah.” Trey looks pinched and curled in on himself, the look street kids get, flooded with more of life than they can absorb. “I wasn’t even worried.”

“When’d you get worried?”

“Day after that. Just starting to. My mam rang him, only his phone rang out. Day after, she rang round asking people was he there. Only no one’d seen him. Not even the night he went out. They said, anyway.”

“She didn’t call the police?”

“I said to.” The flash of pure fury in Trey’s eyes takes Cal by surprise. “She said he just went off, same as my da. Cops won’t do anything about that.”

“OK,” Cal says. He writes a 1 next to Sheila Reddy’s name, and circles it.

“I did go looking for him,” Trey says abruptly. “All along the roads, and up the mountain. For days, I went. In case he caught his foot in a hole and broke his leg, or something.”

For a moment Cal sees it, the kid bent into the wind, tramping between great slopes of heather and moor grass, boulders patched with moss and lichen. He says, “Any reason why he’d be up the mountain?”

“He usedta go there sometimes. Just to be on his own.”

Those aren’t the Rockies out there, but Cal knows they’re plenty big enough and bad enough to take a man if he makes a mistake with them. He says, “You go through his stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“Find anything you didn’t expect?”

Trey shakes his head.

“Anything missing?”

“Dunno. Wasn’t looking for that.”

The sharp downwards flick of the kid’s eyes tells Cal what he was looking for. A note, with his name on it. Here’s where I’m going, or I’ll be back, or anything at all.

“Find any money?” he asks.

That makes Trey’s eyes snap up again, hot with anger. “I wouldn’t’ve taken it.”

“I know,” Cal says. “Find any?”

“Nah.”

“You expect to? Brendan normally keep cash at home?”

“Yeah. Envelope stuck to the underneath of his jumper drawer. Sometimes he’d give me a fiver out of it, if he’d done a nixer. See? He knew I wouldn’t rob it.”

“And the envelope was empty.”

“Yeah.”

“When was the last time you saw cash in there?”

“Coupla days before he went. I came in, he was counting it on the bed. Few hundred, maybe.”

And the day Brendan disappeared, so did his savings. Trey is no dummy. There’s no way he’s missed where that points.

Cal says, “And you think someone took him.”

Trey bites down on his lip. He nods.

“OK,” Cal says. “Is there someone you’ve got in mind, who might do something like that? Someone around here who’s dangerous, who’s maybe done sketchy stuff before?”

Trey stares at Cal like the question is beyond an answer. In the end he shrugs.

“I don’t mean pissant crap like shoplifting or moonshining. Anyone who’s ever kidnapped someone before? Hurt someone real bad?”

Another shrug, this one more exaggerated: How would I know?

“Anyone your mama tells you to stay away from?”

“Gurny Barry Moloney. He tries to get kids to come with him for sweets, and if you say no he cries.”

“He ever try that on you?”

Trey blows air scornfully out of the corner of his mouth. “When I was a kid.”

“What’d you do?”

“Legged it.”

“How ’bout Brendan, he ever have trouble with this guy when he was little? Or any of your other brothers and sisters?”

“Nah. Gurny Barry’s not . . .” Trey’s lip curls in disgust. “He’s pathetic. People throw things at him.”

“Anyone else you’ve been warned about?”

“Nah.”

Cal puts down his pen and leans back in his chair, rubbing mattress ache out of his neck. “You gotta spell it out for me, kid,” he says. “How come you think your brother’s been kidnapped? You’re telling me no one had any beef with him, he wasn’t mixed up in any bad stuff, just a regular guy. How come you’re so sure he didn’t just take off?”

Trey says, with absolute bedrock certainty, “He wouldn’t do that.”

Cal reached the point a long time ago where those words make him tired for all of humanity. All the innocents say that, and believe it to the bone, right up until the moment when they can’t any more. My husband would never do that to our children, my baby ain’t no thief. Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.

“OK,” he says. He closes his notebook and goes to slide it into his breast pocket, out of habit, before he realizes he doesn’t have one. “Let’s see where we get. How do you get from here to your place?”

That gives Trey’s head a wary backwards tilt. “Up past Mart Lavin’s about a mile, then there’s a road goes off that way, to the mountain. We live a coupla miles up there. Why?”

“Your mama know you come here?”

Trey shakes his head, which comes as no surprise. “No one,” he says.

Cal is less confident about that than Trey is, given Mart’s view of his backyard, but he decides not to bring this up. “For now,” he says, “let’s keep it that way. So if I show up at your place and start visiting with your mama, you never saw me before. Can you do that?”

Trey looks less than delighted at the idea of Cal showing up at his place. “You want me to do this or not?” Cal asks.

“Yeah.”

“Then do what I say. I know how to go about this. You don’t.”

Trey acknowledges this with a nod. He looks wrung out and loosened, like he just made it through having a tooth pulled with no anesthetic. He says, “Is this how you did it when you were a cop?”

“Near enough.”

Trey watches him and turns things over, behind those gray eyes. “How come you became a cop?”

“Seemed like a good steady job. I needed one of those.” Alyssa was on the way, and the fire department wasn’t hiring.

“Was your dad a cop?”

“Nah,” Cal says. “My daddy wasn’t a steady man.”

“What’d he do?”

“Little bit of this, little bit of that. Traveling around selling things, mostly. Vacuum cleaners, for a while. Another time it was toilet paper and cleaning supplies, to businesses. Like I said, he wasn’t steady.”

“But they let you be a cop anyway.”

“Sure. They didn’t care if my daddy was a billy goat, long as I could do the job right.”

“Was it fun?”

“Sometimes,” Cal says. His feelings for the job, which started out wholehearted and powerful, gradually got tangled enough that these days he prefers not to think about it. “Sounds like Brendan’s good with electrical stuff. He ever do anything like that for people on the side, pick up a few bucks?”

Trey looks baffled. “Yeah. Sometimes. Fixing things, like.”

“Could he do some rewiring in this place, if I needed it?”

Trey gives him a look that says Cal has lost his mind.

“This isn’t like my badge days,” Cal says, “when I could wade on in asking any questions I wanted. If I’m gonna go around bringing up your brother’s name in conversation, I need a reason.”

Trey considers this. “He fixed the wiring in our sitting room before. He’s gone, but. People know that.”

“Yeah, but I might not,” Cal says. “I’m just a stranger that hasn’t got the hang of who’s who around here. If I hear a name mentioned as a guy who did some electrical work, how’m I supposed to know where he is or isn’t?”

For the first time that day, a small smile lands on Trey’s face. “You’re gonna act thick,” he says.

“You think I can pull that off?”

The grin widens. “No problem to you.”

“Smartass kid,” Cal says, but it pleases him to see the drawn look dissolve. “Now get outa my hair. Before your mama wonders where you’ve gotten to.”

“She won’t.”

“Then get before I change my mind.”

The kid bounces out of his chair with alacrity, but he grins at Cal again as he does it, to show he’s not worried. He takes for granted that Cal, his word once given, won’t go back on it. Cal finds this both more touching and more intimidating than he would have expected.

“Can I come back tomorrow? See what you’ve found out?”

“Jeez, kid,” Cal says. “Give me time. I don’t want you expecting anything for at least a week or two. Maybe never.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “Can I come anyway?”

“Yeah, you can. You got an appointment with a desk and a toothbrush.”

Trey nods, a single definite jerk, making it clear he takes that seriously.

“Come in the afternoon,” Cal says. “I got places to go in the morning.”

The kid’s ears prick up. “What’re you gonna do?”

“Less you know, the better.”

“I wanta do something.”

He’s all charged up and fizzing with energy, practically bouncing on his toes. Cal likes seeing him that way, but at the same time it makes him wince. He’s already pretty sure what he’s going to find. Brendan is textbook runaway, ticks just about every box: a bored, restless, underachieving kid with a shitty home life, no job or girlfriend or close friends to root him down, no career plan, in an area that offers him no prospects and no fun. On the other side of the scales, there’s apparently nothing: no serious criminal activity, no serious criminal associates, no mental illness, nothing. Cal puts this at about five percent chance of an accident, five percent suicide, ninety percent up and gone. Or maybe eighty-nine percent up and gone, one percent something else.

“OK,” he says. “You check if any of your brother’s stuff is missing. You guys share a room?”

“Nah. He shares with Liam.”

“Who else shares with who?”

“Me and Maeve. Alanna’s in with my mam.”

And Sheila hasn’t moved her out. She’s left Brendan’s space waiting for him, even after six months. That sounds to Cal like she told Trey the truth: she thinks Brendan took off, and he’ll be back. The question is whether that’s just hope, or whether she’s got reasons.

“Huh,” Cal says. “Liam’s four, right? So he’s gonna notice if you go snooping. Wait till he’s out playing or something. You don’t get a good opportunity, leave it for another day.”

Trey gives Cal a look that says Duh. He zips his parka. That sharp wind is still rattling around the door, looking for a way in and not giving up.

“Look for stuff like Brendan’s phone charger,” Cal says, “or his razor. Stuff that could fit in pockets, that he might want with him if he was planning on being gone a couple of days. If he’s got a rucksack, or a backpack, check for that. And for missing clothes, if you know what he’s got.”

Trey has glanced up, instantly alert, from fighting with his zipper. “You think? He went somewhere on purpose, and then they kept him?”

“I don’t think anything,” Cal says. “Not yet.” All of a sudden he has that sensation he kept getting, back when Trey was an unknown quantity and Cal was deciding what to do about him: an intense awareness of the spread of the dark countryside all around his house; a sense of being surrounded by a vast invisible web, where one wrong touch could shake things so far distant he hasn’t even spotted them.

He says, “You’re sure about this, kid. Right? Because if you’re not sure, this is when you need to tell me.”

The kid throws him an eye-roll like Cal just told him to eat his broccoli. “Seeya tomorrow,” he says, and he flips up his hood and steps out into the dark.