The Searcher(68)

“How about this one?” She picks out a cream-colored one with a black head. “Look at the face on that. It wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“That one’s scared of the crazy one. Look.” Cal puts the timid sheep hiding behind the others, with the loco one staring them down. “It’s shaking in its hooves.”

Caroline is laughing again. “Then you oughta get it out of here. Give it a safe new home and it’ll be grand.”

“OK,” Cal says. “I’ll do that. My good deed for the day.”

“You can tell your niece it’s a rescue sheep,” Caroline says. She starts putting the extra sheep back on their shelf.

“You know,” Cal says, turning the green baseball cap in his hands, “I don’t want to interfere, but I was talking with Brendan Reddy’s mama the other day, and she’s pretty worried about him. If you’ve heard from him, maybe you might take a minute to let her know he’s OK.”

Caroline glances back at him, but only for a second. She says, “I haven’t heard from him.”

“You don’t need to tell me. Just tell his mama.”

“I know. I haven’t, though.”

“Even if he mentioned somewhere he might be headed. She’s not handling it too well. Anything would help.”

Caroline shakes her head. “He never said anything about it to me,” she says. “There’s no reason he would, sure. We weren’t really in touch, after we broke up.”

The hurt in her voice hasn’t healed over. Whatever went wrong between the two of them, she liked Brendan a lot.

“He took it hard?” Cal asks.

“Sort of. Yeah.”

“You worried about him too?”

Caroline comes back to the counter. She runs a finger down the sheep’s nose.

“I’d like to know,” she says.

“You got any guesses?”

Caroline picks a curl of gray fuzz off the sheep’s back. “The thing about Brendan,” she says. “He gets ideas, and he gets carried away by them. He forgets to take other people into account.”

“How’s that?”

“Like,” Caroline says, “OK, we both really like this singer Hozier, right? And he was playing in Dublin last December. So Brendan picked up any bits of work he could find, to get together the money for tickets and the bus and a B and B. For my Christmas present. Which would have been amazing, only he got them for the night before my last exam.”

“Oh, man,” Cal says, grimacing.

“Yeah. Not on purpose, like; he just forgot to check with me. Then when I said I couldn’t go, he was genuinely shocked. And angry. Like, ‘You only care about college, you think I’m not worth the hassle because I’m going nowhere . . . ’ Which I didn’t think at all, but . . . yeah.”

“But you’re not gonna get that through to a guy who’s feeling sensitive,” Cal says.

“Yeah. That’s why we broke up, basically.”

Cal considers this. “So you think he went off chasing a big idea,” he says, “and he forgot his mama would worry?”

Caroline glances at him; then her eyes slide away again. “Maybe,” she says.

Cal says, “Or . . . ?”

Caroline asks, “Will I gift-wrap this for you?”

“Well, that’d be great,” Cal says. “I’m not much of a hand with wrapping stuff.”

“No problem,” Caroline says, deftly whipping out some green tissue paper from under the counter. “Sure, if she’s six she won’t care either way, but your sister might. Let’s do it right.”

Cal tries spinning the baseball cap on one finger, listens to the singer crooning about homesickness, and considers Caroline, who is layering sheets of tissue paper in various shades of green. With Eugene, he played dumb, because Eugene wants people to be dumb. It’s clear to Cal that Caroline wants people to be smart, and to get things done.

“Miss Caroline,” he says, “I’m gonna ask you a couple of things, because I figure you’re my best chance at getting good answers.”

Caroline stops wrapping and lifts her head to look at him. She says, “About what?”

“Brendan Reddy.”

Caroline says, “Why?”

She and Cal look at each other. Cal knows he’s been lucky to get this far without anyone asking him that question.

“You could say I’m just nosy,” he says, “or restless, or both. I can promise you this much: I’m not aiming to do him any kind of harm. Just find out where he’s gone, is all.”

Caroline nods, like she believes him. She says, “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

Cal says, “You want to know where he went. You gonna go asking around yourself?”

Caroline shakes her head. The sharp jerk makes Cal understand that she’s afraid.

He says, “Then I’m the best hope you’ve got.”

“And if you find out, you’ll tell me.”

“I can’t promise you that,” Cal says. A minute ago he might have, but that shake of her head has turned him wary. She doesn’t seem like the type who scares easy. “But if I find him, I’ll tell him he should give you a call. That’s better’n nothing.”