The Searcher(45)

“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?”