The Searcher(39)
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.
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.