“What’d his mam say?”

“Well, it’s not so much what she said,” Cal explains. “It’s more what I gathered.”

“What . . . ?”

Cal waits a little, but Fergal just stares. “Let’s put it like this,” Cal says in the end, picking the words carefully and letting the care show. “When people say Brendan’s not around, they don’t mean he packed his things and kissed his mama good-bye and found himself a nice little apartment in town, and he comes back every Sunday for a home-cooked dinner. Now do they?”

Fergal is looking wary. His features aren’t constructed for this, and it gives him a comical frozen look, like a kid with a bug sitting on him. “I dunno,” he says.

“Here’s the thing,” Cal says. “Brendan’s family’s pretty worried about him, son.”

Fergal blinks at him. “Worried like what?” He hears himself, figures that was a stupid question, and goes redder.

“They’re afraid he might’ve been taken.”

That leaves Fergal utterly astounded. “Taken? Ah, God, no. Taken? By who?”

“Well, you tell me, son,” Cal says, reasonably. “I’m a stranger around here.”

“Dunno,” Fergal says, eventually.

“You’re not worried about him?”

“Brendan’s not—sure, he . . . He’s grand.”

Cal looks surprised, which doesn’t take much doing. “You’re telling me you know this for a fact, son? You’ve seen him in the last six months? Talked to him?”

All this is considerably more than Fergal was prepared for, this morning. “Ah, no, I haven’t— I haven’t talked to him, or anything. I just think he’s grand. Bren always is, sure.”

“See,” Cal says, shaking his head, “this is how I know I’m getting old. Young folks always think old folks worry too much, and old folks always think young folks don’t worry enough. Your buddy’s been missing for months, and all you think is, ‘Gee, I guess he’s OK.’ To an old guy like me, that sounds downright crazy.”

“I’d say he just got spooked, is all. Not taken. Sure, what would anyone take him for?”

“Spooked by what? Or by who?”

Fergal shifts the weight of the sack on his shoulder, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “I dunno. No one.”

“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.