Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

The shaky feeling lingers on for a couple of days, rising up to pierce Cal at random things like a dead wren in his backyard or a nighttime squeal in the hedges. A few good nights’ rest gets rid of it. It came out of Cal’s body, mainly, not his mind. The beating didn’t shock his mind deeply. Men fight sometimes; it’s in the natural course of things. What was done to Trey is a different thing, and harder to leave behind.

He knows that his duty is to take what he’s learned to Officer Dennis. There are so many reasons why he won’t be doing this, all of them so inextricably tangled together, that Cal has no idea which one is the central one and which are just underbrush. The longer he’s stuck indoors and idle, the more this question prickles at him. He starts to wish he could spend his days walking, but he needs to rest his knee, so it can heal for the journey up the mountainside. He wishes Lena or Trey would pay him a visit, but he knows that would be a bad idea; right now everything needs to be left to settle. He almost wishes he had bought himself a TV.

Once his knee can handle it, he limps down through the rain to Noreen’s and explains, over her full range of high-pitched horrified noises, about his fall off the roof. While she’s listing home remedies and people who died by falling off things, Fergal O’Connor comes in for a giant bag of potatoes and a giant bottle of some fruit cordial. When Cal nods to him, he ducks his head awkwardly and comes up with a bashful half grin, and then pays for his stuff and leaves fast, before Cal can start asking him questions again.

Cal has thought about Fergal, over the past few days. Of all the people he talked to, sweet dumb loyal Fergal is the one who could have set him on the right track. Brendan may have lacked sense in plenty of ways, but he had enough of it to talk to Fergal, rather than Eugene, when he got the urge to show off his plans. Fergal knew what Brendan was setting up—maybe not in detail, but he knew the gist of things. He knew Brendan had been caught out and was running scared, and he knew that if Brendan wasn’t scared of the local guys as well as the boys from Dublin, he should be. The only part that hasn’t occurred to Fergal is that things could have gone bad. In Fergal’s mind, nature is what turns rogue; people are reliable, or at least reliably themselves. And Brendan, who always was skittish, got spooked at the thought of a beating and took off somewhere, and he’ll come back when things settle down.

Cal isn’t going to tell him different. He’ll come to it in his own time, or he won’t, or he doesn’t want to. Fergal needs to make his own terms with his home place.

He’s not going to tell Caroline, either. She does want to know, but even if he could do it without risk, Caroline can’t be his responsibility. She’ll have to make her own terms too. Cal would like to at least tell her that it was an accident, just so those terms aren’t harsher than need be. If she comes asking someday, he might find a way.

If he’s around. The other thing he’s thought about, stuck in his house watching the silhouettes of mountains that hold a dead boy folded away somewhere among their dreamy curves, is putting his place on the market and getting on a plane back to Chicago, or Seattle maybe. In a few more days he’ll have done what Trey needs from him; there’ll be no responsibilities left to hold him here. He could be packed and gone in less than an hour.

He pays for his groceries, and Noreen talks him out the door, promising to send Lena up to him with cabbage poultices and the number of a good roofer. Cal has no way of knowing whether she believes a word he said, but he understands that, as far as she’s concerned, that’s beside the point.

Finally the rain clears. Cal, who the day before would have sworn he was going to start chewing the woodwork if he couldn’t get out and get this job done, decides it would be only sensible to let some of the rainwater drain out of the mountainside before he goes digging around in it. He stays home that day, and then the next, to be on the safe side.

He’s not shying from Brendan. He doesn’t welcome the prospect, but whatever condition the body is in, he’s seen worse. He knows what he needs to do there, and he’s ready to do it. The part that offers him no such clarity is the part after that.

Any minute now, though, Trey is going to come looking for her proof. Cal has seen nothing of her since Lena took her home. He doesn’t like the thought of her up there on the mountainside with no one but Sheila to keep an eye on how she’s doing, but he did tell her to give him two weeks, and he figures it’s probably a good thing that she’s doing it: she needs this time to take in all that’s happened, and to ready herself for what comes next. But he also figures that around about now, with the two weeks ticking away and her face hopefully healed up enough that she doesn’t flinch from showing herself, she’s going to get restless.

It’s a Thursday, but late that night Cal sits out on his step and calls Alyssa anyway. He feels dumb doing it, but he’s planning to spend the next day heading miles up a deserted mountainside with a man who’s already helped kill one person and gotten away with it, and who might reasonably consider Cal to be an unacceptable risk. It would be naïve to ignore the situation’s potential, and Cal feels he’s been plenty naïve enough already.

She picks up fast. “Hey. Is everything OK?”

“All good,” Cal says. “Just felt like checking in. How’re you doing?”

“Good. Ben had a second interview for this really great job, so fingers crossed.” Her voice has got farther away, and Cal can hear running water and clinking noises. She’s put him on speakerphone while she goes back to loading the dishwasher. “What’ve you been up to?”

“Nothing much. It’s been raining all week, but it’s cleared up, so I’m planning on going for a walk up the mountains tomorrow. With my neighbor Mart.”

Alyssa says something muffled by her hand over the phone, presumably to Ben. “Oh, wow,” she says, back to Cal. “Sounds beautiful.”

“Yeah, it is. I’ll send you photos.”

“Yeah, do. It’s been raining here, too. Someone at work said it might snow, but I think she made that up.”

Cal drags a hand down his face hard enough to hurt his bruises. He remembers how he used to put Alyssa’s whole little baby foot in his mouth, and she would laugh till she gave herself hiccups. Above his garden, the sky is a mess of high sharp stars.

“You know what,” he says suddenly. “I’ve run into something you might be able to help me with. You got a minute?”

The noises stop. “Sure,” Alyssa says. “What’s up?”

“There’s a neighbor kid who’s been coming round to my place to learn some carpentry. She just found out her big brother died, and she doesn’t have what you’d call a good support system: her daddy’s run off, and her mama hasn’t got much to offer. I want to help her get through this without going off the rails, but I don’t know the best way to do it. I figure you might have some ideas.”

“OK,” Alyssa says. There’s a note in her voice like she’s rolling up her sleeves to get down to work. “How old is she?”

“Thirteen.”

“How did her brother die?”

“Got in a fight and hit his head. He was nineteen. They were pretty close.”

“All right,” Alyssa says. “So the main thing is to let her know that whatever she’s feeling is normal, but direct her away from any action that’s destructive or self-destructive. So for example, it’s natural for her to be angry at herself, her brother, the person he was fighting with, her parents for not protecting him, whoever—make sure she knows that’s fine and she doesn’t need to feel guilty about it. But if she’s lashing out at other kids, say, she needs to know she can’t do that. Help her find another outlet for the anger. Maybe get her into martial arts, or drama. Or running. Hey, you could go running with her.”