The Searcher

EIGHT

The mountainside is colder than the grassland below. The cold has a different quality from what Cal gets down at his place, too, finer and more challenging, coming straight for him on a honed wind. After decades of classifying weather in broad categories of nuisance value—wet, frozen, sweltering, OK—Cal enjoys noticing the subtle gradations here. He reckons at this point he could draw distinctions between five or six different types of rain.

As mountains go, these aren’t much to write home about, a long sweep of hunches maybe a thousand feet high, but contrast gives them a force out of proportion to their size. Right up to their feet the fields are easy, gentle and green; the mountains rise brown and wild out of nowhere, commandeering the horizon.

The slope pulls in Cal’s thighs. The road isn’t much more than a track, twisting upwards between heather and rocky outcrops, weeds and wild grass leaning in from both sides. Above him, thick patches of spruce cling to the mountainside. Somewhere a bird sends up a high warning cry, and when Cal looks up he sees a raptor tilting down the wind, small against the thin blue sky.

Trey’s directions turn out to be good: a couple of miles up the mountainside, Cal comes across a low, pebbledashed gray house, set back from the road in a poorly defined yard of balding grass. A beat-up silver Hyundai Accent with a 2002 license plate sags in one corner. Two little kids, presumably Liam and Alanna, are banging a piece of rusty metal with rocks.

Cal keeps going. A hundred yards farther up the road, he finds a boggy patch of ground and sinks one foot in it up to the ankle. Pulling it out again is harder than he expected; the bog hangs on to his boot startlingly tight, trying to keep it. Once he’s free, he turns around and heads back to the house.

The kids are still squatting over their piece of metal. When Cal leans on the gate, they stop banging and watch him.

“Morning,” Cal says to the bigger one, the boy. “Is your mama home?”

“Yeah,” the boy says. He has overgrown dark hair, a worn-out blue sweatshirt and enough of a look of Trey that Cal knows he’s in the right place.

“Can you ask her to come out here for a minute?”

Both kids stare. Cal recognizes that slight drawing back: the wariness of kids who already know that a stranger looking for your parents is likely some incarnation of the Man, and the Man is never there to make things better.

“I was out having a nice walk,” Cal says, grimacing ruefully, “and look what I went and did to myself.” He holds up his wet foot.

The little girl giggles. She has a sweet dirty face and brown hair pulled up in two uneven pigtails.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Cal says, mock-offended. “You go ahead and laugh at the dummy with the soggy boot. But I was wondering if your mama might be able to give me something to dry it off a little, so I don’t have to squelch my way down this mountain?”

“Squelch,” the little girl says. She giggles again.

“That’s right,” Cal says, grinning back at her and waggling his foot. “Squelch all the way home.”

“We’ll get Mammy,” the boy says. He pulls on the girl’s sleeve, hard enough that she overbalances and sits down on her behind in the dirt. “Come on.” And he runs off round the back of the house, with the little girl trying to keep up and look back at Cal at the same time.

While they’re gone, Cal looks the place over. It’s run-down, with the window frames peeling and sagging, and moss growing between the roof tiles. Someone has made an effort here and there, though. There are flowerpots on each side of the door, with a multicolored crop only just dying off, and to one side of the yard is a play structure built of random pieces of wood and rope and piping. Cal would have expected a woman alone up here with a mess of kids to have a dog or two, but there’s no sound of barking.

The kids come back circling a tall, scraggy woman in jeans and the kind of bafflingly ugly patterned sweater that only exists secondhand. She has rough red-brown hair pulled back in a sloppy bun, and a weather-beaten, high-boned face that must have been verging on beautiful, way back when. Cal knows she’s a few years younger than him, but she doesn’t look it. She has the same wary expression as the kids.

“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” Cal says. “I was out walking, and I was foolish enough to step off the road. Found myself a nice big puddle.”

He holds up his foot. The woman gazes at it like she has no idea what it is and doesn’t much care.

“I live a few miles down thataway,” Cal says, pointing, “and that’s a long walk with a wet foot. I was wondering if you might be able to help me out.”

The woman moves her gaze to his face, slowly. She has the look of a woman who’s had too much land on top of her, not in one great big avalanche but trickling down little by little over a lot of years.

“You’re the American,” she says in the end. Her voice is rusty and unaccustomed, like she hasn’t done much talking lately. “In O’Shea’s.”

“That’s me,” Cal says. “Cal Hooper. Pleased to meet you.” He holds out his hand over the gate.

Most of the wariness fades. The woman comes forwards, wiping her hand on her jeans, and gives it briefly to Cal. “Sheila Reddy,” she says.

“Hey,” Cal says, with pleased recognition, “I’ve heard that name before. Now where . . .” He snaps his fingers. “That’s it. Lena. Noreen’s sister. She was telling me about her young days, and she mentioned you.”

Sheila looks at him without curiosity, waiting for what he wants.

Cal grins. “Lena said the two of you used to run wild together. Get out your windows at night and hitch rides to discos.”

That finds Sheila, enough to get a faint twitch of a smile. One of her top teeth is missing, near the front. “That was a long time ago,” she says.

“Know what you mean,” Cal says ruefully. “I remember when, if I went out, I was heading half a dozen different places and I wasn’t coming home till daylight. Nowadays, three beers in Seán Óg’s and I’ve had just about all the excitement I can handle for one week.”

He gives her a sheepish smile. Cal has had plenty of practice being harmless. At his size, he has to put the work into that, specially with a lone woman. Sheila doesn’t seem afraid, though, not now that she’s placed him. She’s not the timid kind. Her first wariness wasn’t of him as a man, but of whatever authority he might be carrying with him.

“Back then,” he says, “I’d have thought nothing of walking home wet. These days, though, my circulation isn’t too good; by the time I make it all the way down the mountain, I won’t be able to feel my toes. Could I trouble you for a handful of paper towels to soak up a little of this, or an old cloth? Maybe even a dry pair of socks, if you’ve got some to spare?”

Sheila examines his foot again and finally nods. “I’ll get something,” she says, and she turns and goes back behind the house. The kids hang off the play structure and watch Cal. When he smiles at them, their expressions don’t change.

Sheila comes back carrying a roll of paper towels and a pair of men’s gray socks. “Now,” she says, passing them over the gate.

“Miz Reddy,” Cal says, “you just saved my day. Much obliged to you.”

She doesn’t smile. She watches, arms folded at her waist, as he makes himself comfortable on a boulder by the gatepost and takes off his boot. “Excuse my foot,” he says, with an embarrassed grin. “It was clean this morning, even if it’s not now.” The kids, who have edged closer to watch, giggle.

Cal wads up paper towel and presses it inside his boot to soak up some of the water, taking his time. “It’s beautiful country round here,” he says, nodding at the mountain slope rising behind the house.

Sheila takes one glance over her shoulder and then looks away again. “Maybe,” she says.

“Good place to raise a family. Clean air and plenty of space to run wild; there’s not much else a kid needs.”

She shrugs.

“I was raised a country boy,” Cal explains, “but I was in the city a long time. This here looks like paradise to me.”

Sheila says, “I’d be happy enough if I never saw it again.”

“Oh?” Cal says, but she doesn’t answer.

He tests the boot, which is about as dry as it’s going to get. “I’m fond of hillwalking,” he says. “The city turned me fat and lazy. Now that I’m here, I’m getting back into good habits. Although I better get back into the habit of looking where I put my feet.”

That doesn’t get a response, either. Sheila is harder work than he bargained for—Noreen and Mart and the guys in the pub have given him high expectations of the small talk around here—but at least now he knows where Trey got his conversational skills. And she doesn’t seem to mind him talking away. She’s watching him wrap his wet sock in more paper towel and tuck it away in his pocket, without interest, but without giving the impression that she has anything urgent to get back to.

“Ahh,” Cal says, pulling on the dry sock, which is worn but whole. “Now that’s an improvement. I’ll give these a good wash and get them back to you.”

“No need.”

“I guess I wouldn’t want my socks back once they’d been on some stranger’s big ol’ muddy feet, either,” Cal says, lacing up his boot and grinning. “In that case, I’ll bring you a new pair, soon as I get into town. In the meantime . . .” He produces two Kit Kat bars out of his jacket pocket. “I brought these to eat along my way, but now that I’m turning back early, doesn’t seem like I’ll need them. Would it be OK if I offered them to your young ’uns?”

Sheila comes up with a trace of a smile. “They’d like that, all right,” she says. “They do love the sweet stuff.”

“That’s kids,” Cal says. “My girl, when she was that size, she’da eaten candy all day long if we’da let her. I could tell if my wife had candy anywhere in the house, because my girl was like a bird dog, pointing right at it.” He mimes. Sheila’s smile grows, and softens. A freebie, even a little one, does that to poor people; it loosens them. Cal still recognizes that in himself, even though it’s been twenty-five years since he was that kind of poor. It’s the sweet warm wave of astonishment that, just for once and out of the blue, the world is feeling generous to you today.

“Hey,” he calls, getting up and holding out the chocolate over the gate. “You guys like Kit Kats?”

The kids glance at their mama for permission. When she nods, they edge closer, shouldering each other, till they can grab the bars.

“Say thank you,” Sheila says automatically. They don’t, although the little girl gives Cal a big happy grin. The two of them retreat to the play structure fast, before someone can take the chocolate back.

“You just have these two?” Cal asks, propping himself more comfortably on the gate.

“Six. Those are my little ones.”

“Whoa,” Cal says. “That’s a lot of hard work. Your big kids in school?”

Sheila looks around like one of them might materialize from somewhere, which Cal agrees is entirely possible. “Two,” she says. “The others are grown.”

“Wait a minute,” Cal says, delighted to have made the connection. “Is Brendan Reddy your boy? The one who did the electrical work for that guy, what’s his name, skinny old guy with a cap?”

Sheila spaces right back out, instantly and completely. Her eyes skid off Cal’s face and she gazes up the road like she’s watching some action unfold. “Don’t know,” she says. “He might’ve done.”

“Well, there’s a piece of luck,” Cal says. “ ’Cause, see, my house, O’Shea’s place? I’ve been fixing it up myself. I’m doing OK with most stuff, the plumbing and the painting. But I don’t wanna go messing around with any wires, not till someone’s taken a look who knows what he’s doing. Brendan knows his way around electrics, right?”

“Yeah,” Sheila says. Her arms have come up to wrap tightly under her bosom. “He does, yeah. But he’s not around.”

“When’ll he be back?”

Her shoulders twitch. “Don’t know. He went off. Last spring.”

“Oh,” Cal says, with dawning understanding. “He moved out?”

She nods, still not looking at him.

“He go somewhere close by, where I could maybe give him a call?”

She shakes her head, a quick jerk. “He didn’t say.”

“Well, that’s rough,” Cal says peacefully. “My girl, she did that one time. When she was eighteen. Got a bee in her bonnet about how me and her mama didn’t give her enough freedom, and off she went.” Alyssa never did any such thing. She was always a good kid, stuck to the rules, hated making people unhappy. But Sheila’s eyes have come back to him. “Her mama wanted to look for her, but I said no, let her win this one. If we go find her, she’ll be even madder, and she’ll just go farther next time. Let her go, and she’ll come back when she’s ready. You been looking for your boy?”

Sheila says, “Wouldn’t know where.”

“Well,” Cal says, “he got a passport? Can’t get too far without one of those.”

“I never had him one. He could’ve got it himself, but. He’s nineteen. Or you can get to England without.”

“Any places he wanted to see? People he talked about visiting? Our girl always did say she liked the sound of New York, and sure enough, that’s where she ran to.”

She lifts one shoulder. “Plenty of places. Amsterdam. Sydney. Nowhere I can go look for him.”

“When my girl went,” Cal says reflectively, rearranging his forearms on the gate and watching the kids take apart their chocolate, “her mama kept thinking we should’ve seen it coming. All that talk about New York, she figured that was a hint we should’ve caught. She tore herself up pretty bad about it. Boys, though, they’re different.” Cal never did like to use a daughter in his work stories; he mostly preferred to stick with his imaginary son, Buddy. Sometimes, though, a girl makes for a better angle. “They keep quiet, don’t they?”

“Brendan doesn’t,” Sheila says. “He’s a great talker.”

“Yeah? He dropped hints he was thinking about leaving?”

“Nothing about leaving. He said he was sick of it, only. Sick of having nothing to do. No money. There was a load of things he wanted, always, and he could never . . .” She throws Cal a glance that’s a mix of shame and defiance and resentment. “It wears you out.”

“That it does,” Cal agrees. “Specially if you can’t see your way out. That’s hard on a young man.”

“I knew he was fed up. Maybe I should have . . .” The wind is slapping straggles of hair across her face; she wipes them away, hard, with the back of a work-reddened hand.

“You can’t blame yourself,” Cal says gently. “That’s what I told my wife. You’re not a mind reader. All you can do is work with what you’ve got.”

Sheila nods, unconvinced. Her eyes have slipped off him again.

“The other thing that hurt her,” Cal says, “was the note our girl left. Telling us how mean we were, and how it was all our fault. Me, I figured she was just working up a good head of steam to get herself out the door, but her mama didn’t see it that way. Your boy leave you a note?”

Sheila shakes her head again. “Nothing,” she says. Her eyes are dry, but her voice has a raw, scraped sound.

“Well, he’s young,” Cal says. “Same as my girl was. That age, they don’t realize what they’re doing to us.”

Sheila says, “Did your girl come back?”

“Sure did,” Cal says, grinning. “Took her a couple of months, but once her point was made and she got tired of working in a diner and sharing a studio full of roaches, she came running. Safe and sound.”

She smiles, just a twitch. “Thank God,” she says.

“Oh, we did,” Cal says. “God and the roaches.” And then, more soberly: “The waiting was hard, though. We were worrying every minute, what if she’s fallen in with some guy that doesn’t treat her right, what if she’s got nowhere to stay. And worse things.” He blows out air, looking up at the mountain. “Tough times. Maybe it’s different with a boy, though. You worry about him? Or you figure he can take care of himself?”

Sheila turns her face away from him, and he sees the long cord in her neck move as she swallows. “I worry, all right,” she says.

“Any particular reason? Or just ’cause you’re his mama, and that’s your job?”

The wind whips strands of her hair against the sharp peak of her cheekbone. This time she doesn’t push them away. She says, “There’s always reasons to worry.”

“I don’t mean to pry,” Cal says. “Pardon me if I’ve overstepped. I’m just saying, kids do the darnedest things. Most times, it all comes out in the wash. Not always, but mostly.”

Sheila takes a quick breath and turns back to him. “He’ll be grand,” she says, with a crisp snap to her voice all of a sudden; she doesn’t sound spacey any more. “Sure, I don’t blame him. He’s only doing what I should’ve done myself, when I was his age. Are you right, now, with them socks?”

“I’m a new man,” Cal says. “Thanks to you.”

“Right,” Sheila says. Her body is half-turned towards the house. “Liam! Alanna! Get off that yoke and come in for your dinner!”

“Much obliged,” Cal says, but she’s already hurrying off across the grass. She barely turns to nod over her shoulder before she’s gone behind the house, herding the kids in front of her with sharp flaps of her hands.

Cal walks back down the mountain. Apart from the patches of spruce, trees are few and far between; just the odd lonesome one, spiky and contorted, bare for winter and blown permanently sideways by the memory of hard prevailing winds. In the crook of a hill, someone’s been dumping garbage: a rusty iron bedstead, complete with stained mattress, and a heap of big plastic bags ripped open and spilling. Once he passes the stone-wall scraps of an abandoned cottage. An old crow, perched amid the grass that’s seeded in the cracks, opens its beak wide and tells him to keep moving.

He’s come across plenty of people like Sheila, both in his childhood and on the job. Whether they started out that way or got brought to it somehow, their focus isn’t much broader than a prey animal’s. They’re all used up by scrabbling to keep their footing; they don’t have room to aim for anything bigger or farther than staying one jump ahead of bad things and snatching the occasional treat along the way. He gets another inkling of what a brother like Brendan must have meant to a kid like Trey, in that house.

Sheila told the kid the truth, or at least she told him the same thing she’s telling herself: she believes Brendan got fed up and ran away, and he’ll be back. That may well be true, but Sheila hasn’t offered Cal anything to nudge him farther in that direction than he already was. Her belief is built purely out of hope, piled on top of nothing, solid as smoke.

Her worry, on the other hand, is dense and sharp-cornered as a lump of rock. Sheila’s got reasons to worry about Brendan, even if she’s not about to share them with Cal. One of Brendan’s buddies might, though.

Cal thought he was done with this stuff for good, the day he turned in his badge. Well, would you look at that, he thinks, with a feeling he can’t identify. I guess I still got it.

Donna would have rolled her eyes and said, I knew it, the only surprise is that it took you this long. She said Cal was addicted to fixing things, like a guy jabbing on and on at a slot machine, unable to leave it alone until the lights flashed and the prize came pouring out. Cal objected to that comparison, given the amount of hard work and skill he put into fixing things, but that just made Donna throw up her hands and make an explosive noise like a pissed-off cat.

Probably Donna was right, or a little bit right, anyway. The restless feeling is gone.

Mart is leaning on Cal’s gate, staring out across the fields and smoking one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. When he hears the crunch of Cal’s boots on the road, he whips round and greets him with a whoop and a fist pump. “Get up, ya boy ya!”

“Huh?” Cal says.

“I heard you were over at Lena’s place the other day. How’d you get on? Did you get the ride?”

“Jesus, Mart.”

“Did you?”

Cal shakes his head, grinning against his will.

Mart’s screwed-up eyes are alight with mischief. “Don’t be letting me down, bucko. Did you get a kiss and a cuddle, at least?”

“I got to cuddle a puppy,” Cal says. “Does that count?”

“Ah, for Christ’s sake,” Mart says, disgusted. More philosophically, he adds, “Well, it’s a step, anyhow. The women do love a man that likes puppies. You’ll be in like Flynn before you know it. Are you taking her out?”

“Nope,” Cal says. “Might take the puppy, though.”

“If it’s outa that beagle of hers, you might as well. That’s a fine dog. Is that where you’ve been the day? Cuddling puppies?”

“Nah. Went for a walk up the mountain. Stood in a patch of bog, though, so I came home.” Cal holds up his wet boot.

“Watch yourself around them bogs, now,” Mart says, inspecting the boot. Today he’s wearing a dirty orange baseball cap that says BOAT HAIR DON’T CARE. “You don’t know their ways. Step in the wrong patch and you’ll never step out again. They’re fulla tourists; eat ’em like sweeties, so they do.” He shoots Cal a wicked slantwise look.

“Gee,” Cal says. “I didn’t realize I was taking my life in my hands.”

“And that’s before you start on the mountainy men. They’re all stone mad, up there; split your head open as soon as look at you.”

“Tourist board wouldn’t like you,” Cal says.

“Tourist board hasn’t been up them mountains. You stay down here, where we’re civilized.”

“I might do that,” Cal says, reaching to open his gate. And, when Mart doesn’t move: “I haven’t been to town, man. Sorry ’bout that.”

The mischief falls off Mart’s face instantly and completely, leaving it grim. “I’m not here looking for biscuits,” he says. He takes one more hard draw on his cigarette and throws it into a puddle. “Come on up to my back field. I’ve something to show you.”

Mart’s sheep are clumped together in the near field. They’re edgy, jostling and picking up their feet nervously, not grazing. The far field is empty, or almost. In the middle of the green grass is a rough pale heap, not immediately identifiable.

“One of my best ewes,” Mart says, swinging the gate open. His voice has a flat tone so far from its usual snappy lilt that Cal finds it a little bit unsettling. “Found her this morning.”

Cal walks round the ewe the way he would walk a crime scene, keeping his distance and taking his time. Clusters of big black flies are busy among the white wool. When he moves closer he waves an arm to make them rise, looping and buzzing angrily, so he can get a clear view.

Something bad has got at the sheep. Its throat is a mess of clotted blood; so is the inside of its mouth, lolling too wide open. Its eyes are gone. A rectangular patch on its side, two hand-spans across, is flayed to the ribs. Under its tail is a great red hole.

“Well,” Cal says. “This isn’t good.”

“Same as Bobby Feeney’s,” Mart says. His face is hard.

Cal is examining the grass, but it’s too springy to hold prints. “I looked,” Mart says. “In the muck out by the road, as well. There’s nothing to see.”

“Kojak pick up any trail?”

“He’s a herd dog, not a tracking dog.” Mart tilts his chin at the ewe. “He didn’t like this at all, at all. He went pure mental. Didn’t know whether to attack it or run for his life.”

“Poor guy,” Cal says. He squats to look more closely, still keeping some distance—the rich smell of rot is already starting to seep from the ewe. The edges of the wounds are clean and precise, like they were made by a sharp knife, but Cal knows from shooting the shit with the Homicide guys that dead skin can do strange things. “Bobby lost any more sheep?”

“He has not,” Mart says. “He’s been out on his land half the nights this last while, hoping to spot the little green men coming down for more, and he hasn’t seen hide nor hair of anything worse than a badger. You tell me: what animal is cute enough to take just the one sheep from a farm, and then move on from a place where it knows there’s food, as soon as the farmer’s on guard?”

Cal was wondering the same thing. “Big cat might, maybe,” he says. “But you don’t have those here, do you?”

“They’re cute hoors, all right,” Mart says. He narrows his eyes at the hills. “We haven’t, not native, anyhow. But who knows what someone mighta wanted to get rid of. They’re a great place for getting rid of things, them mountains.”

Cal says, “A human would be smart enough to move on after one sheep.”

Mart doesn’t look away from the mountains. He says, “Someone that’s gone in the head, is what you’re talking about. Gone rotten in his mind.”

“Anyone round here fit that description?”

“No one that I know of. But we mightn’t know, sure.”

“In a place this size?”

“You’d never know what maggot’s ating someone’s mind,” Mart says. “The Mannions’ lad—lovely young fella, never a bit of trouble to his mammy and daddy—a few year back, he threw a cat on a bonfire. Burned it up alive. No drink on him or nothing. He just fancied doing it.”

Anyone could do anything; even, apparently, here. Cal says, “Where’s the Mannion kid these days?”

“He went to New Zealand, after that. Hasn’t been back.”

“Huh,” Cal says. “So you gonna call the police? Animal Control?”

Mart flicks him a glance exactly like Trey’s moron look. “OK,” Cal says. He’s wondering what Mart wants from him here. Things have got plenty out of hand already; he doesn’t plan on adding a dead sheep to his caseload. “Your sheep, your call.”

“I want to know what done this,” Mart says. “Your bitta woods there, that’s thick enough to keep me hid. I’m asking you to let me spend the nights in there for a while.”

“You think it’ll come back?”

“Not to my sheep. But that bitta woods has a great view of P.J. Fallon’s land, and he’s got a fine flock. If this creature goes after them, it’ll find me waiting.”

“Well, be my guest,” Cal says. He’s not crazy about the idea of Mart out there on his own. Mart is a scrawny little old guy with rickety joints, and Cal knows, in a way that Mart might not, that a shotgun isn’t a magic wand. “I might join you. Keep all the angles covered.”

Mart shakes his head. “I’ll do better on my own. One man can stay hid better than two.”

“I’ve done my share of hunting. I know how to keep still.”

“Ah, no.” Mart’s face crunches into a grin. “The size of you; sure, whatever’s out there, it’d see you from space. You stay indoors and don’t be freezing your bollocks off for something that’s likely long gone anyway.”

“Well,” Cal says. “If you’re sure about that.” He needs to warn Trey not to make any more nighttime visits, or he’s liable to end up with an ass full of shotgun pellets. “You let me know if you change your mind.”

The flies have resettled into tight, roiling clumps. Mart pokes the ewe with the toe of his boot and they rise again, briefly, before getting back to work. “I never heard a sound,” he says. He kicks the ewe one more time, harder. Then he turns and stumps off, hands deep in his jacket pockets, towards his house.

The mailman has been by: Cal’s firearm license is waiting for him on the floor by the door. When he applied for that license, he did it with a hankering for homemade rabbit stew rather than with any sense of real need. One of the things that had caught his attention, when he first started looking into Ireland, was the lack of dangers: no handguns, no snakes, no bears or coyotes, no black widows, not even a mosquito. Cal feels like he’s spent most of his life dealing with feral creatures, one way or another, and he liked the thought of passing his retirement without having to take any of them into account. It seemed to him that Irish people were likely to be at ease with the world in ways they didn’t even notice. Now that rifle feels like something it would be good to have in the house, the sooner the better.

He makes himself a ham sandwich for lunch. While he eats it, he manages to get the internet to show him bus timetables. On Tuesday evenings, a bus headed for Sligo goes by on the main road sometime around five, and one headed for Dublin goes past a little after seven. Both of these are possible, although neither one leaps out at Cal as the obvious answer. The main road is about a three-mile walk from the Reddy place, and Trey says Brendan left the house around five, just as Sheila was serving tea, which around here means dinner. Trey’s sense of time has a haphazard quality that means his guess might well be off, and Cal doubts that Sheila serves meals on a strict schedule, but even four-fifteen would be cutting it close for the Sligo bus. On the other hand, five or even five-thirty would be too early to leave for the Dublin bus, specially if it meant skipping dinner unnecessarily. Overall, if Brendan was going any distance, Cal inclines towards him getting a ride from someone.

He calls Brendan’s number, just for the hell of it. Like Trey said, it goes straight to voicemail: Hi, this is Brendan, leave a message. His voice is young, rough-edged, quick and casual, like he dashed this off in between two more important things. Cal takes a few shots at the voicemail password, in case Brendan left it on the default, but none of them get him anywhere.

He finishes his sandwich, washes up and heads for Daniel Boone’s Guns & Ammunition. Daniel Boone’s is concealed down multiple back roads, and Kevin—Daniel’s real name—is a loose-limbed, scraggly-haired guy who looks like he would be more at home running a mildewy basement record store, but he knows his wares inside out and he has Cal’s Henry .22 oiled, ready and waiting.

It’s been a long time since Cal held one of these, and he’d forgotten the pure physical satisfaction of it. The warm solidity of the walnut stock is a sheer pleasure to his palm; the action is so smooth he could rack the lever back and forth all day. “Well,” he says. “This was worth waiting for.”

“Don’t get a lot of demand for those,” Kevin says, leaning his hip against the counter and eyeing the rifle sourly. “Or I wouldn’t’ve had to order it in.” Kevin took that personally. He clearly felt he had let himself down, and possibly let down his country while he was at it, by allowing some Yank to find him unprepared.

“My granddaddy had one,” Cal says. “When I was a kid. Don’t know what happened to it.” He lifts the rifle to his shoulder and sights, enjoying the elegantly balanced weight of it. Cal could never muster up much fondness for his duty Glock, with its thuggish lines, the insolent swagger with which it wore the fact that it existed to be pointed at human beings. It carried nothing but aggression; it had no dignity. The Henry is, to him, what a gun should be.

“They haven’t changed much,” Kevin says. “You’ll have your eye back in before you know it. Down to the range now, is it?”

“Nah,” Cal says. He’s a little nettled by the idea that he looks like someone who needs a range to shoot. “Gonna go get myself some dinner.”

“I do love a rabbit,” Kevin says. “Specially now, with them good and fat for winter. Bring me one in and I’ll give you a few bob off bullets.”

Cal heads home planning on doing exactly that, to earn Kevin’s forgiveness for the Henry. His plans change because Trey is sitting against his front door, knees up, eating a doughnut.

“Quit swiping shit from Noreen,” Cal says.

The kid gets out of the way so Cal can unlock the door. He digs around in his coat pocket and hands Cal a paper bag containing another, slightly mashed doughnut.

“Thanks,” Cal says.

“You got a gun,” Trey points out, impressed.

“Yep,” Cal says. “Your family doesn’t have any?”

“Nah.”

“How come? If I lived all the way up there, no one for miles around, I’d want some protection.”

“My dad had one. He sold it before he left. You find out anything yet?”

“I told you. It’s gonna take time.” Cal heads inside and leans the rifle in a corner. He doesn’t feel like showing Trey where he keeps his gun safe.

Trey follows him. “I know, yeah. What’d you find out today, but?”

“You keep bugging me about it, I’m gonna make you get lost and not come back for a week.”

Trey stuffs the rest of his doughnut in his mouth and thinks this over while he chews. Apparently he concludes that Cal means it. “You said you’d teach me how to use that,” he says, nodding at the gun.

“I said maybe.”

“I’m old enough. My dad showed Bren when he was twelve.”

Which isn’t relevant, seeing as that gun was gone before Brendan was, but Cal files it away in his mind anyway. “You got a job to do,” he reminds the kid. He opens his toolbox and tosses Trey the old toothbrush. “Warm water and dish soap.”

Trey catches the toothbrush, dumps his parka on a chair, gets himself a mug of soap and water, and tips the desk carefully onto its back so he can kneel beside it. Cal, spreading his drop sheet and levering the lid off his paint can, watches him sideways. The kid sets to work at a pace that he’s not going to be able to keep up: proving himself all over again, after his outburst the other day. Cal pours paint into the roller tray and leaves him to it.

“I checked Bren’s things,” Trey says, without looking up.

“And?”

“His phone charger’s there. And his razor and his shaving foam, and his deodorant. And his bag from school, that’s the only one he’s got.”

“Clothes?”

“Nothing missing that I can tell. Only what he was wearing. He doesn’t have a lot.”

“He got anything he wouldn’t leave behind? Anything that’s precious to him?”

“His watch, that was my granddad’s. My mam gave him that on his eighteenth. It’s not there. He always wears it anyway, but.”

“Huh,” Cal says, dipping the roller. “Good job.”

Trey says, louder, with a flash of triumph and fear, “See?”

“That doesn’t mean much, kid,” Cal says gently. “He mighta figured someone would notice if he snuck things out. He had cash; he could replace all that stuff.”

Trey bites the inside of his cheek and bends his head back over the desk, but Cal can tell he’s working towards saying something. He starts putting a second coat of paint on his wall, and waits.

It takes a while. In the meantime, Cal finds that he likes his work rhythm better with the kid there. On his own the last few days, he got ragged, speeding up and slowing down; not enough to make any difference to the job, just enough to get on his nerves. With the kid needing to be shown how to do it right, he stays nice and even. Gradually Trey’s ferocious pace slows to something steadier.

Eventually he says, “You went to my house.”

“Yeah,” Cal says. “You might’ve actually been in school, for once.”

“What’d my mam say?”

“What you thought she would.”

“Doesn’t mean she’s right. My mam, she misses things. Sometimes.”

“Well,” Cal says, “don’t we all. What’d she say to you?”

“She didn’t tell me you were there. Alanna did. Said a beardy fella with a wet shoe gave them Kit Kats.”

“Yep. I was out for a walk, had the misfortune to step in the bog right by your mama’s place. What’s the odds?”

Trey doesn’t smile. After a second he says, “My mam’s not mental.”

“Never said she was.”

“People say it.”

“People say a heap besides their prayers.”

Trey obviously has no idea what this means. “Do you think she’s mental?”

Cal thinks this over, noticing along the way that he would strongly prefer not to lie to Trey if he can help it. “No,” he says in the end, “I wouldn’t have said mental. She seems to me more like a lady who could really use a few pieces of good luck.”

He can tell by the twitch of Trey’s eyebrows that he hasn’t looked at things in this light before. After a minute he says, “So find Brendan.”

Cal says, “Brendan’s buddies, that you told me about. Which of ’em’s the most reliable?”

Clearly Trey hasn’t considered this. “Dunno. Paddy’s an awful blow, he’d say anything. And Alan, he’s a spacer, wouldn’t know his arse from his elbow. Fergal, maybe.”

“Where’s Fergal live?”

“Out the other side of the village, ’bout half a mile down the road. Sheep farm, white house. You gonna question him?”

“Which one’s the smartest?”

Trey’s lip curls. “Eugene Moynihan thinks he is. He’s doing a course in Sligo Tech, business or something. Thinks he’s only brilliant.”

“Good for him,” Cal says. “He move to Sligo for that, or is he still around?”

“He wouldn’t want to be stuck in digs. Bet he goes in every day. He has a motorbike.”

“Where’s Eugene live?”

“In the village. That big yella house with the conservatory on the side.”

“What’re they like?”

Trey blows a scornful puff of air out of the side of his mouth. “Eugene’s a wanker. Fergal’s thick.”

“Huh,” Cal says. He figures this is as much detail as he can hope to get. “Sounds like Brendan doesn’t have much of a gift for picking good buddies.”

That gets him a glare. “Not a lot to choose from, round here. What’s he supposed to do?”

“I’m not criticizing, kid,” Cal says, lifting his hands. “He can run with whoever he wants.”

“You gonna question them?”

“I’m gonna talk to them. Like I told you before. We talk to the missing person’s associates.”

Trey nods, satisfied with this. “What do I do?”

“You do nothing,” Cal says. “You stay away from Eugene, stay away from Fergal, keep your head down.” When Trey’s mouth gets a mutinous set: “Kid.”

Trey rolls his eyes and goes back to work. Cal decides against pushing it; the kid knows the deal, and he’s no dummy. For now, anyway, the likelihood is that he’ll do what he’s told.

When the sky in the window starts to burn orange behind the tree line, Cal says, “What time do you reckon it is?”

Trey gives him a suspicious look. “Says on your phone.”

“I know that. I’m asking for your best guess.”

The suspicious look stays, but in the end Trey shrugs. “Seven, maybe.”

Cal checks. It’s eight minutes of. “Close enough,” he says. If Trey figures Brendan left at five, he probably isn’t too far off. “And late enough that you need to get home. I want you to keep away from here after dark, the next while.”

“Why?”

“My neighbor Mart, something killed one of his sheep. He’s not a happy guy.”

Trey thinks this over. “One of Bobby Feeney’s sheep got killed,” he says.

“Yep. You know of anything around here that might go killing sheep?”

“Dog, maybe. That happened before. Senan Maguire shot it.”

“Maybe,” Cal says, thinking of the neat flayed patch on the ewe’s ribs. “You ever see a dog running free, when you were hanging around here at night? Or any other animal big enough to do that?”

“It’s dark,” Trey points out. “You don’t always know what you’re seeing.”

“So you’ve seen something.”

The kid shrugs, one-shouldered, eyes on the neat back-and-forth of the toothbrush. “Seen people going into houses where they shouldn’ta been, coupla times.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I went away.”

“Good call,” Cal says. “Now get. You can come back tomorrow. Afternoon.”

Trey stands up, dusting his hands on his jeans, and nods at the desk. Cal goes over and examines it. “Looking good,” he says. “Another hour or two’s work and it’ll be back on track.”

“When I’m done,” Trey says, shoving an arm into his parka, “you can teach me that.” He jerks his chin at the gun and heads out the door before Cal can answer.

Cal goes to the door and watches the kid stride off, keeping to the hedge line. There are small flickers of movement among the long grass in his field, rabbits out for their evening meal, but the Henry and stew aren’t on his mind any more. Once Trey turns up the road towards the mountains, Cal gives him a minute and then goes to the gate. He watches the kid’s skinny back as he lopes up the road, hands in his pockets, between the blackberry brambles into the thickening dusk. Even after Trey is invisible Cal stays there, leaning his arms on the gate and listening.