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“Americans talk about happy as if it’s a country, like it’s a place you can go and decide to stay. But it’s only a feeling. It comes and goes like all feelings.”

Mac thought of the language lesson the original Vincent had given him so many years ago.

Still, he was curious, and knowing even a little more would settle him. But he’d already missed a week of work, and winter was coming. His highest-paying clients would ship their horses down to Florida for the winter and he realized recently that it might make sense for him to fly down there every few weeks or so. He’d have to take every hour in the NYPD stable that he could get, every hour at the Columbus Circle stable, though he hated it there—he didn’t like how the owners treated their horses. He’d have to drive upstate to the stables near Albany. And if Rian wasn’t mixing with the recent Irish in Chicago, then he’d never find him anyway, and he’d have left home again for a period of time that would come to nothing, mean absolutely nothing.

“He might track you down, still, Mac. He’s only a young man. You both are. Maybe he’s waiting for some particular reason.”

BUT NOEL AND THOMAS FELT the same way as Mac did. They felt strongly that one or two of them should go and at least take a look around, as Noel put it. So off they went to Chicago one cold December morning with a list of people to contact, pubs to stop into, Irish cultural centers. They had his photo.

“We won’t be calling,” Noel said to Mac. “We’ll just give you the news when we return.”

“Good. Fine. Okay,” Mac said.

Lillie invited everyone for a get-together the weekend after they returned. There were fourteen Joyce cousins now, not including the one Barry and Regina were expecting. The wives knew the brothers would want to talk alone, so they stuck to the kitchen, while the men stood out in the yard blowing into their cupped hands for warmth. Thomas’s wife told the women the details of Chicago, while Thomas told his brothers. Eamon and Seamus arrived late and showed up wearing the clothes they’d no doubt been out in the night before. Eamon stunk of booze and cigarettes. Vincent brought his girlfriend, Elena, a young American woman from Rhode Island, and ditched her with his sisters-in-law while he went out to join his brothers. “Is it always like this?” Elena asked. “Men out there and women in here?”

Thomas and Noel had gone everywhere on the list, and in many places people recognized Rian’s photo. Someone thought Thomas was Rian despite the different builds and the hair color, that’s how strong the resemblance was. Most were wary of their questions. Why wouldn’t they know where their own brother lived, whether he was still in the area? Some called him Liam and said he worked as a scaffolder, but some called him Rian and said he was a stonemason, supposedly a very good one, and worked for a residential construction company out near Winnetka, though they hadn’t seen him in a long time. How he got caught up in all that the paper had reported, no one could say, except maybe—one bartender ventured—it was just his personality. When he was in a certain mood he’d argue about everything and the problem was that he was bright, and well-read, and a bit showy about it. He usually won the argument. People didn’t tend to like that. Religion was a favorite topic, also the murder of John Lennon, AIDS, the assassination attempts on Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, women’s rights, Gorbachev. He’d gotten into an argument with two men who had known IRA connections and it was possible, the bartender imagined, that’s why they decided to pin the bank robbery on him. The argument and the arrest had happened in the same week and it was something the bartender had spent some time thinking about.

“And did you go out to that other place? Winnetka?”

They did, but they couldn’t find the company. Maybe the company was from a different place, and only the job had been in Winnetka.

The woman who managed the Irish cultural center in Oak Park said Rian had come in several times to see an American woman named Sarah who pitched in for fundraisers. She didn’t know if they were ever an item, exactly, but they’d definitely taken a liking to each other, and it was lovely to see them dancing together, him so handsome and light on his feet, and Sarah who had sort of a stern look most times but seemed softer with him. But in the last year or so Sarah had been coming in alone. She knew where Sarah worked, if they were interested in talking with her?

They took the address of the hospital where Sarah was a nurse and asked for her at reception. When she came down she had a cautious expression and told them they must have the wrong person, because she didn’t know them. So they explained, and when they were finished, she studied Thomas’s face.

“Yeah, you look alike. Okay, well, what do you want to know?”

“Can you tell us more about him? Anything.”

“You really haven’t seen him since he was a kid?”

They shook their heads.

She dragged on her cigarette and after a moment she said the main thing about him was that he was a fun guy when he was in a good mood but he was also a moody guy and you kinda never knew what you were going to get. Thomas and Noel spoke to her for maybe ten minutes and in that time she smoked two cigarettes down to the filter. She squinted up at Thomas and said, “I thought you were him at first. So you don’t have any idea where he is?”

“We were hoping you’d tell us.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have no clue.”

Here is where you should have asked her if he seemed happy, Mac wanted to say when they were relaying this. Who did he spend Christmas with? But they’d done their best. They’d searched high and low.

They reported that once the conversation ended, and as they parted ways, she called out to them to hang on a sec.

“You know,” she said. “You have me thinking about him now. I can tell you two things for sure. The first is—I’m just gonna be direct here: he drinks too much. I mean way too much. The second you can interpret for yourself, but it’s a story that pretty much sums him up for me. I said to him once that he must have had some education, knowing all the things he did. I assumed he was only doing physical work because he was illegal. He said to me that he’d had no education, that he was an autodidact. That’s the word he used. Autodidact.”

“What’s that?” Thomas asked.

“Well, exactly,” Sarah said. “Imagine using a word like that, considering where he was from and the work he did. It’s hard to say he’s stuck-up because he really is a hard worker but—I don’t know. It made me not want to hang around with him anymore.”

“But what is it?” Noel asked. “Did you find out?”

“A self-taught person. Eventually I looked it up. Now you tell me, wouldn’t it have been a lot less snobby to just put it that way? That he was self-taught? But that’s Liam. He knew very well that I didn’t know what that word meant and that’s why he used it. He wanted me to feel dumb. Then at other times he could be very sweet. He could build a person up who was feeling low. He really could. He did that for me a few times.”

He’d hurt her, they could see. Something about her time with him felt unfinished.

“You’re sure you haven’t seen him?” Noel asked once again.

“He left Chicago once they put his photo in the newspaper. He was really upset by that.”