The Searcher(49)
Fergal shakes his head, but there’s a very slight shifty dip to it, and he blinks too fast. “And I didn’t see him after that,” he says. “I swear.”
“I musta misheard that part,” Cal says. “My point is, if you know where Brendan’s fetched up, you need to say something to his mama. Right away.”
“I haven’t a notion where he is. Honest to God.”
“Well, the part you don’t know isn’t gonna be much help to Miz Reddy, son,” Cal points out. He doubts it will occur to Fergal to wonder why some stranger is getting so exercised about Sheila Reddy’s feelings. “What’s the part you do know? Brendan told you what he was planning, is that it?”
Fergal moves his feet in the dirt like a restless horse, trying to get back to work, but Cal stays put.
“I dunno,” Fergal says, in the end. His face has smoothed out; he’s retreated into vacant blankness. “I just think he’ll come back in a while.”
Cal knows that look. He’s seen it on plenty of street corners and in plenty of interview rooms. It’s the look you get, not from the kid who did it, but from his buddy, the one who can convince himself that he knows nothing because he wasn’t there; the one who just got told about it, and is determined to prove himself worthy of that little bit of secondhand adventure by not being a snitch.
“Now, son,” Cal says, lifting a tolerant eyebrow. “I look dumb to you?”
“What? . . . No. I didn’t—”
“Well, that’s good to hear. I’m a lotta things, but I’m not dumb, at least not so far as anyone’s told me.”
Fergal is still holding on to the vacant stare, but it has little twitches of worry going on around the edges. Cal says gently, “And I was a wild kid myself, once upon a time. Whatever Brendan’s been up to, I probably did worse. But I never left my mama scared out of her wits for months on end. I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal with Miz Reddy yourself, but she has a right to know what’s going on. Any message you’ve got for her, I’m willing to pass it along. I don’t need to tell her where it came from.”
But he’s run into a barrier in Fergal’s mind, a mixture of confusion and loyalty that’s set like concrete. “I dunno where Brendan went,” Fergal says, more solidly this time. He’s planning to keep on saying it, and nothing else. Like most people just quick enough to understand that they lag a little behind, he knows he can beat all the quicker ones with this.
Cal has ways of chipping away at this barrier, but he doesn’t want to use them. He never liked rubbing dumb people’s dumbness in their faces. It feels too much like playground picking on the weak kid, and besides, once you do that there’s no going back. He’s not looking to make an enemy in this place.
“Well,” he says, with a sigh and a shake of his head, “that’s your call. I hope you change your mind.” He can’t work out whether Fergal actually knows something that needs keeping quiet, or whether this is just reflex. He allows for the possibility that he’s overthinking things, out of professional deformation: back on the job that was always one of the main time-wasters, people keeping their mouths shut for no good reason, but Cal didn’t expect to run into it here in the land of the gift of the gab. “When you do, you know where to find me.”
Fergal mumbles something and heads off towards the shed as fast as he can go. Cal ambles along after him and asks a question about sheep breeds, which are what they talk about while they finish unloading the sacks. Fergal has relaxed a fair amount by the time they get done and Cal heads back towards the village, turning over Fergal and Brendan in his mind.
Being nineteen didn’t sit right with Cal. He thought it did at the time, when he was running wild in Chicago, giddy on freedom, working as a bouncer at skeevy clubs and playing house with Donna in a fourth-floor walkup with no air-conditioning. It was only a few years later, when they found out Alyssa was on the way, that he realized running wild never had suited him. It had been a lot of fun, but deep down, so deep that he’d never spotted it there, Cal yearned after getting his feet on the ground and doing right by someone.
He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don’t have their feet on the ground. They’re turning loose from their families and they haven’t found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They’re unknowns, to the people who used to know them inside out and to themselves.
The people who know a nineteen-year-old best are his buddies, and his girl if he has a good one. Fergal, who knows Brendan’s mind a lot better than his baby brother or his mama or Officer Dennis, thinks Brendan is in the wind by his own choice, and that he’s running not towards something but away from something, or someone.
This place has one thing in common with the tougher neighborhoods Cal used to work: in fine weather people spend much of their time outside, which is handy when you want to run into them by chance. In the driveway of the big yellow house with the conservatory, just on the edge of the village, a dark-haired young guy in skinny jeans is waxing a motorbike.
The bike is a weedy little Yamaha, but it’s pretty near brand-new, and it wasn’t cheap. Neither was the giant black SUV parked beside it, or the famous conservatory, come to that. The front garden has neat flower beds around a water feature shaped like a stone pagoda, with a lit-up crystal ball on top that keeps changing color. Cal knows from pub talk that Tommy Moynihan is some kind of big shot in the meat-processing plant a couple of townlands over. The Moynihans—like the O’Connors, although in a different way—are a whole lot better off than the Reddys.