“Surprise,” Cal says. If Lena didn’t know him so well, she wouldn’t have caught the flash of anger.
“Yeah. He said he owed Rushborough money—did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“And he had to make this work, or else Trey would end up either bet up or burnt, and did I want to see that happen. I’d had my fill of him by then. I told him if he gave a shite about Trey, he’d fuck off back to London and take his mess with him. We didn’t part on the best of terms.”
Cal’s eyebrows draw down. “He give you any hassle?”
Lena blows out a contemptuous puff of air. “God, no. He threw some kinda tantrum, but I don’t know the details, ’cause I shut the door on him. In the end he flounced off.”
Cal goes silent, and Lena watches his face while he thinks. The knot between his eyebrows loosens, leaving him intent and closed. “What time was he at your place?”
“Eight o’clock, maybe. Mighta been a bit after.”
“He stay long?”
“Half an hour, about. It took him a while to work round to what he was after; he had to go on about the view first, and a lovely wee pair of lambs he saw on his way over. That fella can’t go at anything straight.”
Lena was wondering whether Cal would react like this, like a cop. He got there in the end, but it came last.
“A tantrum,” Cal says. “What kind? Like sobbing and begging, or like yelling and banging on the door?”
“In between. I went in the kitchen and turned on a bitta music for myself, so I didn’t catch the whole thing, but there was drama. Loads of shouting about how it’d be my fault if the lotta them ended up burnt to death, and would I be able to live with myself. I didn’t pay him any notice.”
“You see which way he went?”
“I wasn’t looking out the window. If that little fecker’s face popped up, I didn’t want to see it.”
“Anyone else he mighta gone to, asked them to call off the dogs?”
Lena considers this and shakes her head. “No one I can think of. Most people had no time for him before this. And everyone got awful caught up in that gold: if they found out it was all a load of bollox, they’d reckon he deserved to be burnt out. There might be a woman somewhere that’s got a soft spot left over for him, but if there was, he’da gone to her before he came to me.”
“He could’ve killed Rushborough,” Cal says. “You said he was panicking. When he realized you weren’t gonna pull him out of his mess, he could’ve been desperate. Had a few drinks to console himself, maybe, enough to get dumb. Then called Rushborough, gave him some reason why they had to meet.”
Lena watches him, seeing the detective still working in him, fitting together scenarios and turning them over for examination, giving them a tap to see if they hold.
“Would he do it?” Cal asks her. “Best guess.”
Lena thinks over Johnny. She remembers him all the way back to a cheeky, angel-faced child sharing robbed sweets. The memories overlay themselves too easily on the man; he hasn’t changed, not the way he should have. For a moment she sees the full strangeness of where she is now, sitting at a foreigner’s table, considering whether he makes a suitable murderer.
“Drunk and desperate,” she says, “he might. There’s nothing in him that’d hold him back from it. I never knew him to be that kinda violent, but I never knew him backed into that kinda corner. He always had a way out, before.”
“That’s what I figure,” Cal says. “This time, he couldn’t see any way out. I’d favor Johnny hands down, except for one thing: someone moved Rushborough after he died. They coulda left him anywhere, but they left him right in the middle of the road, where he’d be found inside a few hours. I can’t see any reason why Johnny would want that. He’d just dump the guy in a bog, tell everyone Rushborough went off to London and he was gonna go bring him back, and never be seen in these parts again.”
“He would,” Lena agrees. “Johnny was never one to deal with any hassle he could avoid.”
“I’d love it to be Johnny,” Cal says, “but I can’t get round that.” He passes another peeled carrot across the table to her.
Lena knows the signs of Cal not saying something. His shoulders are hunched too hard, and his eyes spend too little time on hers. Something, beyond the obvious, is at him.
“Did you tell Nealon about the gold?” she asks.
“Nope,” Cal says. “And I told Trey to keep her mouth shut, too.”
Lena hides her surprise in a sip of her drink. She knew he wanted to leave his job behind, but she doubts he had this distance in mind, not till Trey needed shielding. His face tells her nothing about what this means to him.
“Well,” she says, “she’s good at that, anyhow.”
“According to Mart,” Cal says, “everyone in the whole townland is gonna do the same.”
“He might be right,” Lena says. “And without that, your man Nealon won’t have a lot to go on. We’ll have to wait and see what way the cat jumps.”
“He’s not gonna tell me.”
“Not Nealon,” Lena says. “This place.”
The surprise on Cal’s face, as he looks up, tells her this hasn’t even occurred to him. Just because he’s seen more than enough of what this place is willing to do, he thought he knew its boundaries. She’s caught by fear for him, so overwhelming that for a moment she can’t move. After two years in Ardnakelty, he’s still innocent, as innocent as the tourists who show up looking for leprechauns and redheaded colleens in shawls; as innocent as Rushborough, swanning in to rip off the gullible savages, and look where that got him.
“What are they saying?” he asks.
“I came here straight from work,” Lena says, “in case you can’t smell that. I’ve heard nothing, except from you. I’ll go down to Noreen tomorrow and find out.” Her impulse is to get up and head straight for the shop, but there’s no point. The whole of Ardnakelty will have headed for the shop this afternoon, to feed information and speculation into the formidable machine that is Noreen, and see what it pours out in exchange. Tomorrow, when Noreen’s had a chance to sort through her harvest, Lena can find a way to catch her alone.
Cal says, “Trey’s giving Nealon the townland.”
Lena stops cutting, more at the note in his voice than at the words. “Like what?”
“She told him she heard guys talking and moving around, middle of last night, right where the body was. Guys with local accents.”
Lena goes still again while she takes this in. “Did she?”
“Nah.”
Lena finds her breath taken away by a rush of something that’s half pride and half awe. Back when she was a teenager hating the bones of Ardnakelty, all she could think of to do was run as fast and as far as she could. It never occurred to her to stand her ground and blow the place sky-high.
She says, “Does your man believe her?”
“So far. No reason he shouldn’t. She was pretty convincing.”
“What’ll he do about it?”
“Ask a whole lotta questions. See what he digs up. Take it from there.”
Lena has her breath back. Trey may be magnificent, but she’s in dangerous territory. She’s no innocent and no blow-in, but, like Lena, she’s kept herself deliberately separate from this place. Lena is only starting to realize how much of the protective barrier this offers is an illusion.
She says, “I feel like I shoulda seen that coming.”
“How?”
“I dunno. Somehow.” She’s thinking of Trey asking her who did that to Brendan. She’s glad she didn’t share any guesses.
“Yeah,” Cal says. He gives up on his peeling and runs a hand down his face. “Probably I should’ve too. It didn’t occur to me ’cause she gave me her word not to do anything about Brendan, but I guess she figures she just got lucky and found a loophole.”
His voice is raw with too many things, anger and fear and hurt. Lena has never heard it like this before. “How far would she take it?”
“Who knows. Nealon could line up half the guys around here and pull her in for a voice ID tomorrow, and I have no idea what she’d do. Identify someone, or what. Her head, these days, I don’t have a clue what’s going on in there. Every time I think I’ve figured it out, she pulls something new, and I find out I had the whole thing ass-backwards.”
Lena says, “Should we do something?”
“Like what? If I tell her I know what she’s doing and it’s a dumbass, dangerous, shitty plan that actually could get her beat up or burned out or whatever people do around here, you think she’s gonna listen? All that’ll happen is she’ll do a better job of hiding stuff from me. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
Lena stays silent. Cal is not, under normal circumstances, a man who lets his moods spill onto other people. She’s not upset by it, but she’s deeply unsettled by the implications. She finds she can’t gauge him any more, what he’s capable of once brought to this point.
Cal says, more quietly, “You figure maybe she’d listen to you?”
“Probably not. I’d say she’s got her mind set.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He slumps back in his chair and reaches for his glass. “As far as I can see,” he says, “there’s not one single thing we could do. Not right now.”
Lena says, “Is she coming here for dinner?”
“Who knows,” Cal says, rubbing his eyes. “I doubt it. Which is probably a good thing, because what I feel like doing is giving the kid a good slap upside her head and telling her to smarten the hell up.”
Lena knows to leave it. “Whatever we make,” she says, “it’d better be something with carrots.”
Cal lowers his hands and blinks at the table like he’d forgotten what they were doing. “Yeah,” he says. “I didn’t know if they’d take; I never grew them before. I think maybe I put in too many.”
Lena lifts an eyebrow. “D’you reckon?”
“This is only half of ’em. The rest are still out there.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Lena says. “This is what you get for going all back-to-nature. You’ll be eating ’em till you turn orange. Carrot soup for lunch, carrot omelet for dinner—”
Cal comes up with a grin. “You can teach me how to make carrot jam. For breakfast.”
“Come on,” Lena says, finishing her drink and getting up. She figures tonight is a good night for an exception to her no-cooking policy. “Let’s go make a carrot fricassee.”
In the end they settle on beef stir-fry, heavy on the carrots. Cal puts on Steve Earle while they cook. The dogs wake up at the smell and come hinting for scraps. Through the music and their talk and the sizzle of food, Lena can almost hear, all around them out in the warm golden air, the rising buzz and scurry of the townland, and the steady dark pulse of Nealon moving through it.
Forty-five minutes before the shop is even due to open, Lena finds Noreen on top of the stepladder with her sleeves rolled up, in a frenzy of whipping things off the shelves and checking their best-by dates, a task that Lena knows usually gets done on Fridays. “Morning,” she says, poking her head in from the tiny back room where Noreen keeps files, problems, and the kettle.
“If you’re here to tell me who kilt that English fella,” Noreen snaps, pointing a tin of tuna at her threateningly, “you can turn yourself around and walk straight back out that door. My head’s feckin’ lifting with ideas and theories and—what’s that Bobby Feeney had?—hypothesises, what the feck is that?”
“I’d a hypothesis once,” Lena says. “Wore it to a wedding. Will I make us a cuppa tea?”
“What’re you on about? Whose wedding?”
“I’m only codding you,” Lena says. “I wouldn’t have a clue what Bobby’d be on about. Was there aliens in it?”
“What d’you feckin’ think? Your man Rushborough was a government investigator, that’s what Bobby’s got into his head. Sent down here to catch an alien and bring it up to Dublin. All that about the gold, that was just to give him an excuse for wandering about the mountains. Did you ever hear the like?”
“I’d say it’s no madder than some of the other ideas going around,” Lena says. “D’you want that tea?”
Noreen climbs with difficulty down the ladder and plumps down on a low step. “I couldn’t face a cuppa tea. Didja ever think you’d hear me say that? The state of me, look at me, I’m wringing; you’d think I’d been in swimming. And it not even half-eight in the morning.” She plucks at her blouse to fan her chest. “I’m fed up to my back teeth with this heat. I’m telling you, I’ll close up this place and move to Spain, so I will. At least they’ve the air-conditioning.”
Lena pulls herself up to sit on the counter. “Cal makes iced tea. I shoulda brought some of that.”
“That stuff’d wreck your insides, no milk in it or anything. And don’t be getting your arse on my counter.”
“I’ll get down before you open up,” Lena says. “D’you want a hand with that?”
Noreen gives the tin of tuna, which she’s still holding, a look of loathing. “D’you know what, feck it. I’ll do it another day. If some eejit walks outa here with stale custard, it’ll serve him right. Coming in here nosing for gossip.”
Lena has never known Noreen to complain about people hunting for gossip before. “Was the whole place in yesterday?”
“Every man, woman, and child for miles. Crona Nagle, d’you remember her? She’s ninety-two years of age, hasn’t left the house since God was a child, but she got the grandson to drive her down yesterday. And she’d a feckin’ hypothesis of her own, o’ course. She reckons it was Johnny Reddy that done it, ’cause one time Melanie O’Halloran snuck outa the house to meet him and came home smelling of drink and aftershave. I didn’t even remember Crona was Melanie’s granny. Not that I’d blame her for keeping it quiet. Melanie, like.”
“I’d say Crona’s not the only one betting on Johnny,” Lena says, stretching to take an apple from the fruit shelf.
Noreen gives her an odd sideways glance. “There’s a couple, all right. The only thing is, why would Johnny want your man dead? That fella was Johnny Reddy’s whatd’youcallit, the goose with the golden eggs. With him gone, Johnny’s got no fortune coming in, and he’s not the big man in town any more, no one’ll be buying him drink now and laughing at his jokes; he’s the same aul’ wee scutter that you wouldn’t trust with tenpence. And besides…” She stares at the tin of tuna like she’d forgotten its existence, and shoves it onto a random shelf among the dish scrubbers. “Dessie, now,” she says, “he says he wouldn’t wanta see Johnny arrested. Johnny’s weak as water; if that detective fella went after him, he’d spill the beans about all that nonsense with the gold. Trying to get the lads in hot water, like, to take suspicion offa himself. He wouldn’t mind what that’d mean for Sheila and the kids; he’d only care about saving his own skin. And Dessie’s not the only one. People don’t want it to be Johnny.”