“Yeah? That’s all you want? Just to know for certain?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t work like that. If you find out for certain that Brendan skipped town, you’re gonna want to find out why, and then you’re gonna want to track him down. If you find out for certain that someone ran him off, you’re gonna want to get back at them. There’s always gonna be just one more thing left to do. You gotta know when to stop.”
“I do know. When—”
“No. When to stop is now, kid. Look at you. If they have to come after you again, what are they gonna do? When to stop is now.”
Trey’s face turns up to him like she’s drowning. She says, “I wanta stop now. I’m tired to fuckin’ death of this. At the start, when I first came here, it was like you said: I’da kept going forever. Now I just want it gone. I wanta never think about him again. I wanta go back to doing my own things that I usedta do before. But whatever happened to Brendan, he deserves for someone to know. Just one person, even, to know.”
Cal wasn’t sure, until this moment, whether she understood the size of the chance that Brendan is dead. They sit there, listening to it settle into the crevices of the room.
“Then I’ll stop,” Trey says. “When I know.”
“Well,” Cal says, “there you go. You were asking about having a code. There’s the beginning of it.” He looks at that beat-up, half-comprehending face and feels his throat thicken for all the things the kid is just starting on, all the rivers she’ll have to struggle across that she hasn’t even glimpsed on the horizon. “Finish your breakfast,” he says. “Before it gets cold.”
Trey doesn’t budge. “So are you gonna help me? Or not?”
“Truthfully,” Cal says, “I don’t know yet. First I need to track down the people who came calling on your mama yesterday, and have a talk with them. Once I’ve done that, I should either know what happened to your brother, or at least know whether we can keep looking without getting ourselves killed.”
“What if we can’t?”
“I don’t know. We’re not there yet.”
Trey doesn’t look like that satisfies her, but she goes back to scraping up egg yolk with her toast. “Tell me something,” Cal says. “You think it was Donie who got your mama to do this?”
Trey snorts. “Nah. She’d tell him to fuck himself.”
“Yeah, me neither. But these guys came calling two days after you talked to Donie. That’s not a coincidence.”
“You said if I talked to Donie, you were outa this.”
“Yeah, well,” Cal says. “Things change. How’d you get hold of him?”
“His mam goes to half-nine mass in town every day,” Trey explains, with her mouth full. “She gets a lift with Holy Mike. I waited in the hedge by Mike’s lane till I saw his car go off, and then I went across Francie Gannon’s fields to Donie’s back door.”
“You see anyone on your way in or out?”
“Nah. Someone could’ve seen me, but. From a window. Nothing I could do about that, only go fast.”
“Listen,” Cal says. He gets up and takes the plates over to the sink. “I gotta go out for a little while. Not long. You gonna be OK here by yourself?”
“Yeah. Course.”
The kid doesn’t sound entirely happy about the idea. “No one knows you’re here,” Cal says, “so you don’t need to worry. But I’m gonna lock the doors just in case. If anyone comes calling while I’m gone, don’t answer, don’t look out the window. Just sit tight till they go away. You got it?”
“You going to talk to Donie again?”
“Yeah. You gonna get bored? You want a book or something?”
Trey shakes her head.
“You could take a bath if you want. Wash last night off you.”
The kid nods. Cal figures she won’t do it. She doesn’t look like she could manage anything that complicated. Just getting up for breakfast has tired her out; all of a sudden her face has a kind of exhaustion that’s unnatural on a kid, a slack droop to her one good eyelid and deep grooves from nose to mouth. She looks, for the first time, a little bit like her mama.
“You just rest,” he says. “Eat whatever you want out of the kitchen. I’ll be back soon.”
Cal heads for Donie’s by the same route Trey took, down the back roads and across Francie Gannon’s fields. The wind has ripped branches off trees and thrown them, scraggly and splintered, into the roads; the long gold autumn light laid over them gives them the look of a deliberate, sinister harvest. Cal heaves the bigger ones into ditches on his way. He knows he must be tired, but he can’t feel it. The walk and the crisp air are shaking the aches out of his muscles, and he still has that light-headed clarity buoying him on. The only thing in his mind is Donie.
The farmers must have finished their morning rounds and gone in for breakfast; Cal encounters no one except a bunch of Francie’s sheep, who freeze in mid-chew to fix him with indecipherable stares as he passes, and keep gazing after him for a disconcertingly long time. He still gets over Donie’s back wall quicker than anyone could reasonably expect of a guy his age and size, just in case the neighbors look out a window or Francie decides to investigate what’s paralyzed his sheep.
Donie’s garden is a decrepit patch of overgrown grass, with wind-scattered plastic patio furniture that looks like it came from a supermarket giveaway. Through the window, the kitchen looks empty. Cal jimmies the back door with a loyalty card from his favorite Chicago deli, pushes it open nice and slowly, and steps inside.
Nothing moves. The kitchen is old, beat-up and ferociously clean, with an exhausted shine coming off the oilcloth and the linoleum. A slow drip falls from the tap.
Cal moves quietly through
