“For the love of Pete,” he said, “out with it, Ellen.”

She draped the towel over his head and rubbed vigorously. She spoke as if she were discussing a lost cat. “He’s turned up at Aiden’s.”

Before Joe ran away, she’d been locked in her room, incapacitated by Danny’s nuptials. Once Joe had gone on the run, she’d emerged and launched into a cleaning frenzy, telling Thomas she was back to her old self, she was, and would he please be so kind as to find their son? When she wasn’t cleaning, she was pacing. Or knitting. And all the while, she asked him, over and over, what he was doing about Joe. She’d say it the way a worried mother would, yes, but the way a worried mother would to a boarder. He’d lost all connection with her over the years, made his peace with a warmth that lived occasionally in her voice but rarely in her eyes, because the eyes alit on nothing, seemed instead to always be tilted slightly up, as if she were conversing with her own mind and nothing else. He didn’t know this woman. He was reasonably sure he loved her, because of time, because of attrition, but time had also robbed them of each other, fostered within a relationship based on itself and nothing more, no different from that of a saloon keeper and his most frequent patron. You loved out of habit and lack of brighter options.

He had the blood on his hands where their marriage was concerned, however. He was reasonably certain of that. She’d been a girl when they wed, and he’d treated her as a girl only to wake one morning, who knew how many years ago, wishing for a woman to take her place. But it was far too late for that now. Far too late. So he loved her in memory. He loved her with a version of himself he’d long outgrown because she hadn’t. And she loved him, he supposed (if in fact she did, he didn’t know anymore) because he indulged her illusions.

I’m so tired, he thought as she removed the towel from his head, but what he said was, “He’s at Aiden’s?”

“He is. Aiden telephoned.”

“When?”

“Not long ago.” She kissed his forehead, another rarity that defied recent recollection. “He’s safe, Thomas.” She rose from her haunches. “Tea?”

“Is Aiden bringing him by, Ellen? Our son?”

“He said Joe wished to spend the night and Aiden had a meeting to go to.”

“A meeting.”

She opened the cabinet for teacups. “He said he’d bring him ’round in the morning.”

Thomas went to the phone in the entrance hall and dialed Marty Kenneally’s house on West Fourth. He placed the valise under the phone table. Marty answered on the third ring, shouting into the phone as he always did.

“Hello? Hello? Hello?”

“Marty, it’s Captain Coughlin.”

“Is that you, sir?” Marty shouted even though, to the best of Thomas’s knowledge, no one else ever called him.