Cal has ways of chipping away at this barrier, but he doesn’t want to use them. He never liked rubbing dumb people’s dumbness in their faces. It feels too much like playground picking on the weak kid, and besides, once you do that there’s no going back. He’s not looking to make an enemy in this place.

“Well,” he says, with a sigh and a shake of his head, “that’s your call. I hope you change your mind.” He can’t work out whether Fergal actually knows something that needs keeping quiet, or whether this is just reflex. He allows for the possibility that he’s overthinking things, out of professional deformation: back on the job that was always one of the main time-wasters, people keeping their mouths shut for no good reason, but Cal didn’t expect to run into it here in the land of the gift of the gab. “When you do, you know where to find me.”

Fergal mumbles something and heads off towards the shed as fast as he can go. Cal ambles along after him and asks a question about sheep breeds, which are what they talk about while they finish unloading the sacks. Fergal has relaxed a fair amount by the time they get done and Cal heads back towards the village, turning over Fergal and Brendan in his mind.

Being nineteen didn’t sit right with Cal. He thought it did at the time, when he was running wild in Chicago, giddy on freedom, working as a bouncer at skeevy clubs and playing house with Donna in a fourth-floor walkup with no air-conditioning. It was only a few years later, when they found out Alyssa was on the way, that he realized running wild never had suited him. It had been a lot of fun, but deep down, so deep that he’d never spotted it there, Cal yearned after getting his feet on the ground and doing right by someone.

He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don’t have their feet on the ground. They’re turning loose from their families and they haven’t found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They’re unknowns, to the people who used to know them inside out and to themselves.

The people who know a nineteen-year-old best are his buddies, and his girl if he has a good one. Fergal, who knows Brendan’s mind a lot better than his baby brother or his mama or Officer Dennis, thinks Brendan is in the wind by his own choice, and that he’s running not towards something but away from something, or someone.

This place has one thing in common with the tougher neighborhoods Cal used to work: in fine weather people spend much of their time outside, which is handy when you want to run into them by chance. In the driveway of the big yellow house with the conservatory, just on the edge of the village, a dark-haired young guy in skinny jeans is waxing a motorbike.

The bike is a weedy little Yamaha, but it’s pretty near brand-new, and it wasn’t cheap. Neither was the giant black SUV parked beside it, or the famous conservatory, come to that. The front garden has neat flower beds around a water feature shaped like a stone pagoda, with a lit-up crystal ball on top that keeps changing color. Cal knows from pub talk that Tommy Moynihan is some kind of big shot in the meat-processing plant a couple of townlands over. The Moynihans—like the O’Connors, although in a different way—are a whole lot better off than the Reddys.

“Nice bike,” he says.

The guy glances up. “Thanks,” he says, favoring Cal with a half smile. His features are finely modeled enough that plenty of people, himself included, probably consider him good-looking, but he’s got a skimpy jaw and no chin.

“Gotta be tough to keep it looking good, on these roads.”

This time Eugene doesn’t bother to look up from his microfiber cloth. “It’s not a problem. You just have to be willing to put the time into it.”

This guy doesn’t give Cal the same urge to hang around shooting the breeze as Fergal did. “Hey,” he says, struck by a thought. “You Eugene Moynihan, by any chance?”

At that Eugene does take the trouble to look at him. “I am, yeah. Why?”

“Well, that’s a piece of good luck,” Cal says. “I was told you were the man I should talk to, and here you are. It was the bike that gave you away. I heard you had the prettiest bike in these parts.”

“It’s all right,” Eugene says, shrugging and giving the glossy red paintwork an extra swipe. He has a light, pleasant voice with most of the local accent scrubbed off it. “I’m planning on trading up soon enough, but this’ll do for now.”

“I used to have a motorcycle,” Cal says, leaning his arms on the big stone gatepost. “Back when I was about your age. Little bitty fourth-hand Honda, but man, did I love that thing. Just about every cent I made went straight into it.”

Eugene isn’t interested, and isn’t going to bother pretending. He lifts his eyebrows at Cal. “You were looking for me?”

Cal, who is coming to agree with Trey’s assessment of Eugene’s personality, brings out his story about the rewiring and Brendan and Sheila Reddy giving him Eugene’s name. By the end Eugene doesn’t look wary, like Fergal did; he just looks mildly disdainful. “I don’t do electrical work,” he says.

“No?”

“No. I’m doing finance and investment. In college.”

Cal is suitably impressed. “Well then,” he says, “you’re right not to waste your time on odd jobs. I ain’t an educated man myself, but I know that much. If you done earned yourself an opportunity like that, why, you gotta make the most of it.”

He can see the look, wry and guarded, that Donna used to give him when he did that, slouched into the thick backwoods drawl of his granddaddy’s buddies. Rednecking up, she called it, and she hated it—she never said so, but Cal could tell. Donna was a Jersey girl from the hood, but she never leaned on her accent, or hid it either; people could take her or leave her. She thought Cal was lowering himself by playing to people’s dumb preconceived ideas. Cal has his pride, but it doesn’t run in that direction. Acting like a hick can be all kinds of useful. To Donna, that was beside the point.

Donna’s opinions don’t change the fact that Eugene’s glance has just the right dismissive flick to it. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m planning to.”

“Looks like I got the wrong end of the stick,” Cal says, taking off his baseball cap so he can scratch his head thoughtfully. “But Brendan Reddy does wiring, doesn’t he? I got that part right?”

“He did, yeah. But I don’t know where he is these days. Sorry.”

This puzzles Cal. “You don’t?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Well,” Cal says, readjusting his cap, “nobody else seems to. It’s a mystery, seems like. But folk keep on telling me you’re the big genius around these parts. I reckoned if anybody would have an idea where Brendan went, it’d be you.”