Chapter Three
Three
The phone drags Cal out of sleep. The room is middle-of-the-night dark. His mind shoots to Alyssa and he grabs for the phone, but the screen says Mart.
“Hey,” he says. “What’s up?”
“Rise and shine, Sunny Jim,” Mart says. “I hate to interrupt your beauty sleep, but we’ve got a bit of a situation. There’s a girl after going missing.”
“Who?” Cal sits up fast, before he remembers Trey is on his sofa bed. Not all of his mind is awake yet. He switches on his reading light and shields his eyes.
“Rachel Holohan. Never came home tonight. She’s not answering her phone, none of her pals know anything, and her mammy and daddy are climbing the walls.
They’re asking for people to go out and have a look for her.
She left her car, so she can’ta gone far if she’s on her own, but there’s an awful lotta ground to cover all the same. ”
Cal doesn’t ask whether they’ve called the police.
The Garda station up in Kilcarrow is open for a few hours a few times a week; the nearest twenty-four/seven place, in Castlerea or Roscommon or wherever, isn’t going to send a search team out here in the middle of the night because a grown woman neglected to phone home.
“Rachel,” he says. He remembers that afternoon, the blond girl drifting on the fine sweeps of rain, her face turned towards nothing; the nagging twitch, off in a corner of his mind, that said he was missing something. “She goes out with Eugene Moynihan. He know anything?”
Mart snorts. “He says not, but he’d say that regardless. Eugene hasta take good care of himself, sure; he’s awful precious. I’m meeting P.J. at my gate in ten minutes. I’ll see you there.”
It’s twenty to four. Cal dresses fast and warmly, and takes the flashlight out of his night table. He’s planning to leave Trey a note in case she wakes before he gets back, but when he opens his door she’s sitting up in bed, rumpled and blinking in the stripe of light from his room.
“What’s the story?” she asks.
“Rachel Holohan’s missing. Me and some of the other guys are gonna go look for her. Make sure your phone’s charged up, I’ll check in.”
“I’ll come.”
Cal almost says no. The night, with one girl already wrapped away somewhere inside its implacable vastness, feels unsafe; and this could turn out to be no job for a kid.
But he doesn’t like the idea of Trey here alone.
He doesn’t actually think there’s a crazed spree killer roaming the back roads looking for young girls to snatch up, but he doesn’t feel like taking anything for granted.
“OK,” he says, turning the light on. “Put on plenty of layers, and stick right by me.”
Trey starts pulling on her clothes over her pajamas, while Cal laces up his boots and finds the spare flashlight in a kitchen drawer. “Where’d you guys go tonight?” he asks.
“Mossie O’Halloran’s old byre. In case it started raining again.”
“How’d you get home?”
Trey sits on the floor to put on her runners. “Ross’s brother. He wasn’t drinking.”
“You see anyone out there? Car, pedestrian, anyone?”
“Passed a coupla the McHugh lads driving home from the pub, on our way back. And some car lights on the Knockfarraney road while we were at Mossie’s, but too far away to see who. No one else.”
“OK,” Cal says. “If you think of anything, let me know.” He zips up his jacket and tosses Trey her wool beanie. In his corner, Rip has lifted his head to watch, unsettled by the urgency in the air.
“You want me to text the others, see if they saw anything?”
“Nah,” Cal says. This could be, probably is, a dumb kid having a blowup with her boyfriend and storming off; the last thing the situation needs is every teenager in three townlands awake at this hour and firing up the Snapchat rumor machine to warp drive.
“Maybe tomorrow, if she hasn’t shown up by then. Let’s go.”
The night is cold, a thick cold that clogs the air.
The rain has stopped, but there’s still a patchy layer of cloud blocking the sky, with only a smear of dull white where the moon rides high.
Cal points his flashlight at the road and they head for Mart’s place.
Here and there among the fields, windows are lit: Ardnakelty is awake and on edge.
“Rachel’s decent,” Trey says. “Don’t know what she’s doing with that prick Eugene.”
Cal has never formed any impression of Rachel Holohan—he’s aware that such a person exists, but he couldn’t pick her out of a lineup, as long as the rest of the lineup had blond hair and fake lashes. If Trey speaks well of someone from this townland, though, it means something.
“Well,” he says, “maybe her and that prick Eugene had a fight, and she’s run off to give him a scare. And she’ll be home before morning, when she gets too cold.”
Trey ups the pace and says nothing. Cal can feel her nerves humming. When her big brother went missing, people told her he had run off, too. It didn’t end quickly or well.
The flashlight picks out Mart and P.J., waiting at Mart’s gate, long-shadowed and mismatched. P.J. is wearing so many layers that he has a fat guy’s body balanced precariously on his long skinny legs; Mart is origamied around his crook and has the sou’wester jammed well down over his ears.
“And you brought your assistant,” he says, dropping his smoke in a puddle.
“Good on you; the more pairs of eyes, the better. Tommy Moynihan’s coordinating the search, giving us the benefit of all them leadership skills.
I told him we’d take this stretch, from the main road down to the river.
We’re not searching every corner of every field—no point in spending hours on that in the dark, when we can do it quicker and better in the morning.
We’re just looking to see has the young one got hit by a car and left at the roadside, or gone for a walk and collapsed in a faint, or maybe got herself tangled up in a tree. ”
His eyes pass over Trey and meet Cal’s. Cal gets the message: the kid could end up seeing something she shouldn’t. He’s already aware of that, and not happy about it. “Makes sense,” he says, giving Mart a blank look back.
P.J. is shifting from foot to foot, glancing around like he might spot Rachel at the foot of a wall.
“ ’Tis fierce cold,” he says worriedly. “I brought the hot water bottle with me, in case we’d find her and she might need warming up quick.
” He opens his jacket to reveal one of the reasons for his bulk: his belly is bulging with something tucked inside his fleece.
“Good thinking,” Cal says.
“Myself and P.J.’ll head up this way,” Mart says, pointing his crook towards the main road, “and the two of ye can work your way down to the river. If ye find anything, or if ye find nothing, give me a bell and I’ll update His Nibs.
” He touches a finger to his hat and stumps off up the road, with P.J. loping beside him.
“How the fuck would she get stuck in a tree?” Trey demands. Tension is making her prickly. “She’s not a fuckin’ cat.”
Cal aims never to lie to Trey. “He means she could’ve hanged herself,” he says. “He didn’t want to say that in front of you.” Trey makes an irritated pfft noise and goes silent.
They have about two miles of road to cover, curving between dry stone walls and fields and the occasional farmhouse.
They head back the way they came, sweeping the flashlight beams down the verges, over long grass and tangles of dead wildflowers.
The dark is windless and silent; small things scuttle away at their approach, and watch from hiding as they pass.
The air smells, more powerfully and intricately than by day, of ripe earth, sodden leaves, and manure.
Far off, spread out across the fields, other small lights swing and zigzag.
A long call comes to them faintly, too distant to hear the name, if they didn’t already know what it is.
Cal left the living-room light on, but his place doesn’t look welcoming; it has a defensive air, fists raised to repel invaders.
He has to make himself lift the flashlight beam to sweep the big oak tree where his rooks roost—the branches are probably too high for climbing, but he doesn’t like the thought of it looming behind them swollen with the unknown.
The rooks stir on their perches and bitch him out for waking them.
Apart from them, the oak, bared for winter, is empty.
Cal can still feel the tension off Trey, in the sharp flicks of her flashlight beam and the hard pace she sets. “The Holohans live out the other side of the village,” he says. “Right?”
“Yeah. That big white bungalow off the Lismore road, with a loada flower beds out front.”
“Well then,” Cal says. “I don’t see any reason why she’d’ve wound up all the way over here.”
After a minute Trey says, “You reckon she’s OK?”
She has to know that Cal has no more information than she does.
It catches him by the heart, that she still has enough little kid left in her to look to him for impossible reassurances.
“I don’t know enough about her to make any solid guesses, kid,” he says gently.
“All I can tell you is, most people who go missing come home.”
Trey says nothing. A rustle of grass and a long sigh send them whipping their flashlight beams over the wall, into a field.
A clump of cows, still unhoused by someone aiming to scrape a bad year’s feed over the long winter, gaze back at them with mild, reproachful surprise.
Trey lets out a hiss of breath between her teeth.
“Most likely that’s all we’re gonna find,” Cal says. “Creatures that just want us to leave them in peace.”
Trey, turning back to the road, doesn’t answer. For a second her flashlight catches on a pair of eyes, low to the ground and flaring luminous white, before whatever it is whisks away.