“You said he got spooked, son. Meaning someone musta spooked him. Who would that be?”
“I just meant . . . He’s like that, sure. My mam says all the Reddys suffer terrible from their nerves. He’ll be back once he’s settled.”
“Miz Reddy’s wearing herself to a thread,” Cal says, “worrying about him. How would your mama feel, if you were gone this long without a word?”
This gets to Fergal. He throws a hunted look towards the house. “Not great, I’d say.”
“She’d be down on her knees day and night, sobbing her heart out and praying for her boy to come home. Not to mention,” Cal says, pushing on the weak spot, “what would she say if she knew you were keeping another mama in that kind of pain, when you could ease her mind?”
Fergal glances wistfully at the shed. Clearly he’d like to go in there, either to sit down on a stack of feed sacks and think this over, or else to stay hidden until Cal gives up and goes away.
“If anyone can help her out, son, it’s you. You’re the one Brendan went to meet the evening he headed off. You give him a ride somewhere?”
“What? He did not!”
The astonishment on Fergal’s face seems as genuine as any Cal has ever seen, but Cal looks skeptical anyway.
“He wasn’t meeting me. The last time I saw him was two or three days before. He called in looking to borrow a few quid. I gave him a hundred. He said, ‘Sound, I’ll get it back to you,’ and he went off.”
“Huh,” Cal says. If Brendan was planning on taking off, then every little bit would help, but Cal does wonder why the sudden rush. “He say what he needed it for?”
Fergal shakes his head, but there’s a very slight shifty dip to it, and he blinks too fast. “And I didn’t see him after that,” he says. “I swear.”
“I musta misheard that part,” Cal says. “My point is, if you know where Brendan’s fetched up, you need to say something to his mama. Right away.”
“I haven’t a notion where he is. Honest to God.”
“Well, the part you don’t know isn’t gonna be much help to Miz Reddy, son,” Cal points out. He doubts it will occur to Fergal to wonder why some stranger is getting so exercised about Sheila Reddy’s feelings. “What’s the part you do know? Brendan told you what he was planning, is that it?”
Fergal moves his feet in the dirt like a restless horse, trying to get back to work, but Cal stays put.
“I dunno,” Fergal says, in the end. His face has smoothed out; he’s retreated into vacant blankness. “I just think he’ll come back in a while.”
Cal knows that look. He’s seen it on plenty of street corners and in plenty of interview rooms. It’s the look you get, not from the kid who did it, but from his buddy, the one who can convince himself that he knows nothing because he wasn’t there; the one who just got told about it, and is determined to prove himself worthy of that little bit of secondhand adventure by not being a snitch.
“Now, son,” Cal says, lifting a tolerant eyebrow. “I look dumb to you?”
“What? . . . No. I didn’t—”
“Well, that’s good to hear. I’m a lotta things, but I’m not dumb, at least not so far as anyone’s told me.”
Fergal is still holding on to the vacant stare, but it has little twitches of worry going on around the edges. Cal says gently, “And I was a wild kid myself, once upon a time. Whatever Brendan’s been up to, I probably did worse. But I never left my mama scared out of her wits for months on end. I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal with Miz Reddy yourself, but she has a right to know what’s going on. Any message you’ve got for her, I’m willing to pass it along. I don’t need to tell her where it came from.”
But he’s run into a barrier in Fergal’s mind, a mixture of confusion and loyalty that’s set like concrete. “I dunno where Brendan went,” Fergal says, more solidly this time. He’s planning to keep on saying it, and nothing else. Like most people just quick enough to understand that they lag a little behind, he knows he can beat all the quicker ones with this.
Cal has ways of chipping away at this barrier, but he doesn’t want to use them. He never liked