The Searcher(69)

After a moment she says, without any expression, “OK. Fire away.”

“How was Brendan, in his mind?”

“What way?”

“Was he depressed?”

“I don’t think so,” Caroline says. The answer comes promptly enough to tell Cal that she’s thought about this before. “He wasn’t happy, but that’s a different thing. He didn’t seem dragged down by it, you know? More just . . . frustrated. Annoyed. He’s basically an optimist. He always reckoned something would turn up, in the end.”

“I apologize for putting this harshly,” Cal says, “but do you think there’s any chance he might have taken his own life?”

“I don’t,” Caroline says. This comes out instantly, too. “I know you can’t say someone’s not the type for suicide, and people might be a lot worse off than they let on, but . . . the way Brendan thinks: always ‘Sure, I’ll find a way, it’ll be grand in the end one way or another . . . ’ That doesn’t seem like it goes with suicide.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” Cal says. He tends to agree with Caroline, although he also shares her reservations. “He ever seem out of touch with reality? Saying stuff that didn’t make sense?”

“You mean like schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder.”

“Or anything else along those lines.”

Caroline thinks for a moment, her hands lying still on the tissue paper. Then she shakes her head. “No,” she says, with certainty. “He gets unrealistic, sometimes, like with the tickets and my exam—‘It’ll be grand, just do all your studying beforehand and we’ll catch the early bus home the next day . . . ’ But that’s different from being out of touch with reality.”

“That it is,” Cal says. He’s, he gets. Caroline, just like Fergal and Eugene, thinks Brendan is alive. Cal doesn’t set too much store by that. To them, the idea of someone their age dying is impossible. He hopes it can stay that way a while longer. “That unrealistic attitude make him any enemies?”

Caroline’s eyes widen, just a flicker, but her voice stays even. “Not like you’re talking about. People got annoyed with him, sometimes. But . . . sure, we’ve all known each other all our lives. Everyone knows what he’s like. It was never a big deal.”

“I know how that goes,” Cal says. “Is he reliable? Say he tells you he’s gonna do something for you, or get you something. Would you expect that he’d get it done, or that he’d forget the whole thing?”

“He’d follow through,” Caroline says immediately. “It’s a matter of pride for him, like. His dad was an awful man for making promises and forgetting them. Brendan hated it. He didn’t want to be like that.”

“Well, there you go. People can forgive a man for being a little bit unrealistic, as long as he’s reliable.” Cal puts the baseball cap back on the counter and pats it into shape. “I’m guessing that means he wouldn’t have up and left if he thought you were pregnant.”

He’s betting on Caroline having more sense than to get huffy about that. Sure enough, she says matter-of-factly, “No way. He’d’ve done everything he could to be the perfect daddy. Anyway, there’s no reason he’d think that. I’d no scare or anything.”

“You said money was tight for Brendan, and he worried that you thought he was going nowhere. He have any plans to try and fix that?”

Caroline blows out air through a small wry smile. “I bet he did, yeah. He said—when we were breaking up, like—he said he’d show me he was going places.”

“He mention how?”

She shakes her head.

Cal says, “Maybe by getting involved in something he shouldn’t’ve?”

“Like what?”

Caroline’s voice has sharpened. “Well, like something against the law,” Cal says mildly. “Stealing, maybe, or running drugs.”

“He never did anything like that. Not when we were going out.”

“How’d he get the money for the band tickets?”

“One of our friends’ uncle does furniture removals, so Brendan got a few days with him. And he gave grinds.” At Cal’s uncomprehending look, she says, “Tutored people from our school in chemistry, and engineering—they’re his best subjects. Stuff like that.”

Back on the job, Cal could have verified all this. Now all he’s got is his gut, which is telling him that Caroline wants to think well of Brendan, but also that she’s no fool. “Smart thinking,” he says. “Not gonna make a guy rich, though.”

“No, but you see what I mean. He didn’t do anything dodgy.”

“You’re not telling me he never would, though,” Cal points out.

Caroline goes back to her tissue paper, folding it around the sheep with deft quick fingers. Cal waits.

“There were rumors going round,” Caroline says in the end, “after Brendan went.” Her hands are moving faster, and her voice has tightened. She doesn’t enjoy talking about this. “People were saying he’d raped me, and he went on the run because I was going to the Guards.”

“And that wasn’t true?”

“No, it wasn’t. Brendan never laid a finger on me that I didn’t want. I squashed that one quick, once I heard about it. But there were plenty of others I couldn’t do anything about. That he ran because he beat up his mam. Or because he got caught peeping in women’s windows. Probably worse ones that no one told me.”