Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

“Guys like that,” Trey says. She doesn’t finish.

“Yeah,” Cal says. “You don’t want to piss them off. Brendan probably shoulda taken that possibility into account, but from what I’ve been told, he had a tendency to get carried away and forget to factor in other people’s reactions. That sound right to you?”

Trey nods. Cal spent half the night smoothing the edges on this story and looking it over from different angles, making sure it holds together and incorporates all the pieces Trey has possession of. There are little holes here and there, but nothing that would make it fall apart under pressure. It has enough truth in it to act as glue. There’s even a chance, and what a trip that would be, that with a few minor substitutions this hinky story is accidentally true.

“So,” he says, “Brendan set up a meeting with them, thinking he was gonna pay them for a bunch of phone numbers and everyone would go away happy. By the time the meeting came around, though, the ones that thought he was a liability had shouted down the rest. They told him to get out of town and stay gone.”

“Just told him to leave,” Trey says. Her breath is coming fast and shallow. “They didn’t take him? For definite?”

“Nah. What would they want him for? All they wanted from him was to get out of their hair, and he did that himself, right quick. He had more sense than to hang around till he got told again.”

“So that’s why he went. Not ’cause he wanted to.”

“That’s right,” Cal says. “He didn’t have a choice.”

A hard breath comes out of Trey and her eyes skid away, one place and then another. The thought of Brendan walking out without a word, because he wanted to, has been eating her raw and bloody for months. Now that it’s gone, she can’t take in the clear space where it used to be.

Cal lets her be. After a minute she asks, “Where’d he go?”

“Donie’s not sure. He thinks Scotland, for whatever that’s worth. He says the boys didn’t take any cash off Brendan, so he shoulda had enough to get him somewhere and get him set up. And if he’s got sense, he won’t be back for a while.”

Trey says, coming down heavy on the words, “But he’s alive.”

“Far as anyone knows. No guarantees—he coulda fallen off the boat on the way over, or got hit by a car, same as anyone could. But there’s no reason to think he’s anything but.”

“Then why didn’t he ring? Even once, let us know he was OK?”

The question forces its way out against her will. This is the other half of what’s been gnawing her to the bones. She wanted Brendan kidnapped because that would have been fixable.

“These are pretty scary guys, kid,” Cal says gently. “My guess is, Brendan knows you well enough to figure that if you got any smell of what went down, you might go trying to fix things so he could come home. And that would’ve just made the situation worse. For him and you both. He liked to protect you, right?”

“Yeah. He did.”

“That’s what he was doing. If you want to do the same for him, the best thing you can do is trust him and stick to what he wanted you to do. Pull in your horns, keep your mouth shut and go about your business till he figures it’s safe to come home.”

Trey looks at him for another long minute. Then she says, “Thanks.” She turns back to the table and starts sanding again, very carefully and very neatly.

Cal goes back to his toothbrush and his soapy water, even though the desk is already as clean as he can get it. Trey doesn’t say another word, so neither does he. Their side of the mountains has darkened, its great shadow bleeding across the fields towards them, by the time the kid brings the shelf over to him.

Every edge is smooth as paper. Cal passes Trey the hammer and she fits the shelf carefully into place, a tap on one side and then a tap on the other. She stands back and looks up at Cal.

“Good job,” he says. “You’ve done fine work on this, kid. Now you better get home.”

Trey nods, dusting her hands on her jeans.

“So,” Cal says. “You got your answer, near as I can come to it. Glad I could help out.” He holds out his hand.

The kid looks at it, and then up at Cal’s face, baffled.

“Case closed, kid,” Cal says. “I hope your brother comes home when things settle down. See you round Noreen’s sometime, if she doesn’t ban you.”

Trey says, “I’ll come back anyway. Finish that.” She jerks her chin at the desk.

“Nope,” Cal says. “Nothing personal. You’re handy and you’re fine company, but I came here to get away from company.”

The kid is staring at him with her face wiped blank by shock. Cal realizes, with a grief so deep and exhausting that he wants to sink to his knees and put his forehead down on the cool grass, how badly she wants to keep coming round.

He has experience in what happens if you try to make Trey Reddy give up on something she’s set her heart on. His only course is to make her want to never come back.

If she doesn’t realize what people will say, he can’t bring himself to put that into her mind. Instead he says, “You wanted me to find out what happened to your brother, kid. I did that. What else do you want from me?”

Trey keeps staring. She looks like she might say something, but nothing comes out.

Cal lets a wry grin slide onto his face. “Huh,” he says. “I did get warned about the Reddys and cash. Is that what you want? Pay for the work you’ve done? ’Cause I can probably spare fifty, sixty bucks, but if you’re thinking about taking what you’re owed when I’m not looking—”

For a second he thinks she’s going to go for the desk again, or maybe for him. He’s fine with either one. She can take the desk to splinters if that’s what she needs. He even moves back to give her a clear shot. Instead she spits, swift and vicious as a rattlesnake striking, at his feet. It lands on his boot with a splat. Then she whips around and strides off, fast and hard, towards the road.

Cal waits a minute and goes to the gate. Trey is already far away, moving fast through the blotches of light and shadow that pattern the road, with her head down and her hands jammed deep in her pockets. He watches till she reaches the upwards slant in the road and is received into the bright muddle of sun and hedge-branches at the top, and a long time after. Nothing follows her.

He carries his tools inside, and his table, and finally the desk. He puts the desk in the spare bedroom, where it won’t be always catching his eye. He would have liked to finish that desk together with Trey, before he had to send her away.

Probably he should make the rest of yesterday’s perch into dinner, but instead he gets himself a beer and takes it out to the back step. In the east the sky is deepening towards lavender; beneath it the red tractor stands still, abandoned in mid-furrow. The plowing has added a new layer to the air’s smell, something richer and darker, thick with hidden things.

See? he tells Donna, in his head. I can walk away from a case, if it’s the right thing to do. Donna, refusing to be obliging even in his imagination, rolls her eyes and makes a ferocious noise at the heavens.

Cal told Trey the truth: he does not, in fact, know why he and Donna split up. As far as he can tell, what happened was that in Alyssa’s junior year of college she got mugged and beat up pretty bad, and two years later Donna walked out, and apparently there was some mysterious connection that Cal is too dumb to understand.

At the time, there was no indication that the first of these events would lead to the second. He and Donna flew out to Seattle so fast that they got there while Alyssa was still in recovery from surgery for a smashed shoulder bone. Once Cal was sure she was going to be OK, he left Donna to sit with her and headed down to the precinct. He knew exactly what priority would be assigned to a random mugging, but the mugging of a cop’s daughter was a different matter, and the daughter of a cop who was all up in the precinct’s grille was another thing again. Over the next couple of weeks Cal harried that precinct, politely and relentlessly, till they pulled CCTV footage from every camera in a block radius. That got them a couple of grainy shots of the mugger, which Cal and the precinct guys worked—some days Cal put in twenty hours—till they dragged up a runty, redheaded junkie called Lyle, who still had Alyssa’s credit card in his jacket pocket.