Trey looks baffled. “Yeah. Sometimes. Fixing things, like.”

“Could he do some rewiring in this place, if I needed it?”

Trey gives him a look that says Cal has lost his mind.

“This isn’t like my badge days,” Cal says, “when I could wade on in asking any questions I wanted. If I’m gonna go around bringing up your brother’s name in conversation, I need a reason.”

Trey considers this. “He fixed the wiring in our sitting room before. He’s gone, but. People know that.”

“Yeah, but I might not,” Cal says. “I’m just a stranger that hasn’t got the hang of who’s who around here. If I hear a name mentioned as a guy who did some electrical work, how’m I supposed to know where he is or isn’t?”

For the first time that day, a small smile lands on Trey’s face. “You’re gonna act thick,” he says.

“You think I can pull that off?”

The grin widens. “No problem to you.”

“Smartass kid,” Cal says, but it pleases him to see the drawn look dissolve. “Now get outa my hair. Before your mama wonders where you’ve gotten to.”

“She won’t.”

“Then get before I change my mind.”

The kid bounces out of his chair with alacrity, but he grins at Cal again as he does it, to show he’s not worried. He takes for granted that Cal, his word once given, won’t go back on it. Cal finds this both more touching and more intimidating than he would have expected.

“Can I come back tomorrow? See what you’ve found out?”

“Jeez, kid,” Cal says. “Give me time. I don’t want you expecting anything for at least a week or two. Maybe never.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “Can I come anyway?”

“Yeah, you can. You got an appointment with a desk and a toothbrush.”

Trey nods, a single definite jerk, making it clear he takes that seriously.

“Come in the afternoon,” Cal says. “I got places to go in the morning.”

The kid’s ears prick up. “What’re you gonna do?”

“Less you know, the better.”

“I wanta do something.”

He’s all charged up and fizzing with energy, practically bouncing on his toes. Cal likes seeing him that way, but at the same time it makes him wince. He’s already pretty sure what he’s going to find. Brendan is textbook runaway, ticks just about every box: a bored, restless, underachieving kid with a shitty home life, no job or girlfriend or close friends to root him down, no career plan, in an area that offers him no prospects and no fun. On the other side of the scales, there’s apparently nothing: no serious criminal activity, no serious criminal associates, no mental illness, nothing. Cal puts this at about five percent chance of an accident, five percent suicide, ninety percent up and gone. Or maybe eighty-nine percent up and gone, one percent something else.

“OK,” he says. “You check if any of your brother’s stuff is missing. You guys share a room?”

“Nah. He shares with Liam.”

“Who else shares with who?”

“Me and Maeve. Alanna’s in with my mam.”

And Sheila hasn’t moved her out. She’s left Brendan’s space waiting for him, even after six months. That sounds to Cal like she told Trey the truth: she thinks Brendan took off, and he’ll be back. The question is whether that’s just hope, or whether she’s got reasons.

“Huh,” Cal says. “Liam’s four, right? So he’s gonna notice if you go snooping. Wait till he’s out playing or something. You don’t get a good opportunity, leave it for another day.”

Trey gives Cal a look that says Duh. He zips his parka. That sharp wind is still rattling around the door, looking for a way in and not giving up.

“Look for stuff like Brendan’s phone charger,” Cal says, “or his razor. Stuff that could fit in pockets, that he might want with him if he was planning on being gone a couple of days. If he’s got a rucksack, or a backpack, check for that. And for missing clothes, if you know what he’s got.”

Trey has glanced up, instantly alert, from fighting with his zipper. “You think? He went somewhere on purpose, and then they kept him?”

“I don’t think anything,” Cal says. “Not yet.” All of a sudden he has that sensation he kept getting, back when Trey was an unknown quantity and Cal was deciding what to do about him: an intense awareness of the spread of the dark countryside all around his house; a sense of being surrounded by a vast invisible web, where one wrong touch could shake things so far distant he hasn’t even spotted them.

He says, “You’re sure about this, kid. Right? Because if you’re not sure, this is when you need to tell me.”

The kid throws him an eye-roll like Cal just told him to eat his broccoli. “Seeya tomorrow,” he says, and he flips up his hood and steps out into the dark.

EIGHT

The mountainside is colder than the grassland below. The cold has a different quality from what Cal gets down at his place, too, finer and more challenging, coming straight for him on a honed wind. After decades of classifying weather in broad categories of nuisance value—wet, frozen, sweltering, OK—Cal enjoys noticing the subtle gradations here. He reckons at this point he could draw distinctions between five or six different types of rain.

As mountains go, these aren’t much to write home about, a long sweep of hunches maybe a thousand feet high, but contrast gives them a force out of proportion to their size. Right up to their feet the fields are easy, gentle and green; the mountains rise brown and wild out of nowhere, commandeering the horizon.

The slope pulls in Cal’s thighs. The road isn’t much more than a track, twisting upwards between heather and rocky outcrops, weeds and wild grass leaning in from both sides. Above him, thick patches of spruce cling to the mountainside. Somewhere a bird sends up a high warning cry, and when Cal looks up he sees a raptor tilting down the wind, small against the thin blue sky.

Trey’s directions turn out to be good: a couple of miles up the mountainside, Cal comes across a low, pebbledashed gray house, set back from the road in a poorly defined yard of balding grass. A beat-up silver Hyundai Accent with a 2002 license plate sags in one corner. Two little kids, presumably Liam and Alanna, are banging a piece of rusty metal with rocks.

Cal keeps going. A hundred yards farther up the road, he finds a boggy patch of ground and sinks one foot in it up to the ankle. Pulling it out again is harder than he expected; the bog hangs on to his boot startlingly tight, trying to keep it. Once he’s free, he turns around and heads back to the house.