Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

It takes a long time. Cal can’t use his injured arm with any force; all it can do is steady the spade as he drives it down. Within a few minutes his good arm is aching. Mart roots the base of his crook in the bog and rests his free forearm on its head while he smokes.

The heap of cut turf grows, and the hole widens and deepens. Sweat turns cold on Cal’s face and neck. He leans on the spade to catch his breath, and for one dizzying second he feels the full tornado force of the strangeness of it, that he should find himself on this mountainside half the world from home, digging for a dead boy.

At first he thinks the reddish tuft sprouting where the blade has been is moss or roots. It takes him a second to realize that the peat has darkened, that the smell coming from the hole has thickened into something rancid, and to understand that what he’s seeing is hair.

He lays down the spade. In his coat pocket he has a pair of latex gloves that he bought for working on the house. He puts them on, kneels down at the edge of the hole and leans in to work with his hands.

Brendan’s face rises out of the bog scrap by scrap. Whatever strange alchemy the bog has worked on him, he looks like no dead body Cal has ever seen. He’s all there, flesh and skin intact, lashes lying on his cheeks like he’s sleeping. After almost seven months, he still has enough of himself left that Cal would have recognized the smiling boy in the Facebook shot. But his skin is a strange leathery reddish-brown, and the weight of the bog on top of him has begun to misshape him like soft wax, sliding his face sideways, squashing his features out of true. It gives him an intent, secretive frown, as if he’s concentrating on something only he can see. Trey, frowning unconsciously over her sandpapering, comes to Cal’s mind.

The line of his jaw is uneven. Cal puts his fingers to it and probes. The flesh feels thickened and condensed and the bone has a dreadful rubbery give, but Cal can still find the break where the punch hit home. Gently he pulls down Brendan’s bottom lip. Two of his teeth on that side are broken.

Cal clears a space around Brendan’s head till he can see the back of it. He works slowly and with care; he doesn’t know how tightly the body is holding together, what parts of it might come away under his hands if he’s rough. Even through the gloves, he can feel the texture of the hair between his fingers, a rough tangle like a network of fine roots spreading. At the base of the skull, a great dent is nothing but give, shards shifting. When Cal parts the hair, he can still see the deep jagged gape of the cut.

“You see, now,” Mart says, behind him. “Just like I told you.”

Cal doesn’t answer him. He starts to scoop away the peat that covers Brendan’s torso.

“What would you have done if it wasn’t?”

Gradually Brendan’s jacket surfaces, a black bomber with an orange patch still bold on the sleeve, unzipped to show a hoodie that might have been gray before the bog dyed it rust-red. Brendan is lying tilted, half on his back and half on his side, his head twisted at an unnatural angle. The sun lies ruthlessly bright on him.

His arm has fallen across his chest. Cal works his way along its line, deeper into the ground. The peat close to the body has a different feel, wetter. That ripe, clotted smell fills up Cal’s nose.

“He’s not alone,” Mart says. “My daddo found a man in this bog, when he was a young lad, a hundred years ago maybe. He said the man musta been there since before Saint Patrick ran off the snakes. Flat as a pancake, so he was, and sticks twisted all around his neck. My daddo covered him back up and never said a word to the police or anyone. He let the man lie in peace.”

Cal takes Brendan’s hand from the bog. He’s afraid it might rip away from the body when he lifts it, but it holds. It has the same red-brown stain as the face, and it folds and wavers as if it’s almost boneless. The bog is transmuting Brendan into something new.

The wrist bends like a twig under its own weight. It’s the one Cal needs: when he moves back the water-heavy layers of sleeves, the watch is there. The strap is leather and has fused to the skin. Cal unbuckles it and starts to peel it away as delicately as he can, but the flesh slides and breaks apart into something unthinkable, a slimy whitish mass.

Cal’s mind moves outside him. His gloved hands look like things that belong to someone else as they busy themselves with the watch, carefully detaching it and wiping away sodden peat and worse things on the grass, as best they can. He notices very clearly that the grass up here has a harsher texture than the grass in the fields below, and that the shins of his pants are soaked from kneeling.

The watch is an old one, with heft and dignity to it: a gold-rimmed cream face, with slim gold ticks for numbers and slim gold hands. The bog has toughened the leather, but it hasn’t changed the gold; that still has its pale, serene luster. There are letters inscribed on the back: BPB , in worn, curly lettering; under that, fresh and upright, BJR .

Cal cleans his gloves on the grass and gets a Ziploc bag out of his pocket. He would like not to take any scrap of the bog away with him, but for all his cleaning, little shreds and dabbles smear the inside of the bag. He puts it away in his pocket.

He looks down at Brendan and can’t imagine how to lay those sods back over him. It goes against every instinct he has, right down to his muscles and bones. His hands want to keep working, clear away the peat and lay the boy bare to the cold sunlight. His throat is full up with the words to say into the phone to set that powerful familiar machine in motion, cameras clicking and evidence bags opening and questions firing, until every truth has been spoken out loud and everyone has been placed where they belong.

He’s pretty sure he could drop his phone without Mart noticing. GPS tracking would lead them close enough.

Cal feels that weightlessness again, the bog losing its solidity under his knees as gravity lets go of him. When he looks up, Mart is watching him; steady-eyed, head cocked a little to one side; waiting.

Cal looks back and finds himself not giving much of a shit about Mart. He can make Mart take him back down this mountain, if he needs to. He can protect himself and Trey till he can get her placed in care; she would fight like a bobcat and hate his guts forevermore, but she’d be safe. And in no time flat he would be too far away for her, or anyone else, to put a brick through his window.

What comes into his mind is Alyssa, her voice close to his ear, earnest as when she was a little kid explaining some stuffed animal’s problems to him. Your neighbor girl, she really needs consistency right now. Like, the last thing she needs is someone else disappearing on her.

Cal can’t tell for the life of him what’s the right thing to do, or even whether there is one, but he knows what comes closest. He bends down and tucks Brendan back into the earth. He would like to lay him out properly, but even if he was sure he could manage that without causing more damage, he knows why Mart and the rest didn’t do it to begin with—if some rogue turf-cutter should happen to come across the boy, it needs to look like he wound up here by accident. Soon enough, the bog will have melted his bones till no one can read his injuries on them.

Instead he places Brendan’s arm carefully back across his chest and straightens the collar of his jacket. He scoops up the turf he scraped away and packs it around the contours of Brendan’s body and head, covering his face as gently as he can, until piece by piece it’s vanished back into the bog. Then he takes up the spade again and lays the cut chunks of turf over the boy. It takes a while; his good arm has started to shake from the strain. He saves the grassy sods for last. He nudges them into place and presses them down, so that the edges match up cleanly and the grass can grow to blur the scars.