Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

“For fixing a desk and frying a rabbit? What the hell—”

“You’ll give me blood pressure, so you will,” Mart says. “Honest to God. Or palpitations. Would ye Yanks not learn to listen once in a while, so everyone around ye can have some fuckin’ peace of mind?”

“Here you go,” Cal says, handing over the Ziploc. “My compliments to Malachy.”

Mart takes the bag, but he doesn’t move to leave. “The other reason I voted for the marriage yoke,” he says. “My brother was gay. Not Seamus, that lived here with me; the other fella. Eamonn. It was against the law, back when we were young. He went off to America because of it, in the end. I asked him would he not join the priesthood instead. Sure, they could do what they liked, and no one would say boo to them; I’d say half of them were riding the arse off each other. But Eamonn was having none of it. He hated all them bastards. So off he went. That was thirty year ago. Never heard another word out of him.”

“You try Facebook?” Cal asks. He’s not sure where this is going.

“I did. There’s a few Eamonn Lavins on there. One’s got no photo or nothing, so I sent him a message, just in case. He never got back to me, either way.” Kojak is sniffing at the bag. Mart palms his nose away. “I thought maybe once we got the gay marriage, he’d come home, if he’s alive. But he never did.”

“He might yet,” Cal says. “You never know.”

“He won’t,” Mart says. “I had it wrong. ’Twasn’t the laws that were the problem.” He looks out over the fields, at the pink sky. “It’s a hard aul’ place, this. The finest place in the world, and wild horses wouldn’t drag me out of it. But it’s not gentle. And if Theresa Reddy doesn’t know that by now, she’ll learn soon enough.”

SIXTEEN

What with one thing and another, Cal has been neglecting some stuff: the rooks, for example, and his daily walks around the countryside, and that desk. When he sees the morning—pristine in the sharp autumn sunlight, cold enough to chill his palate with each breath—he figures this is as good a time as any to get back to them. They’ll keep him outdoors, which is where he wants to be when Trey comes around. And he needs to herd his mind off its dusty old detective trail, back to the pretty, scenic one he was thoroughly enjoying until the kid showed up smack in the middle of it.

He starts by walking his legs sore. After that he moves on to the rooks, who have been surveilling him for long enough that they ought to be comfortable with him by now. Alyssa used to have some book about kids who had done surprising things, among them a little girl who had made friends with a crow. There were photos of the presents the crow would bring her: candy wrappers, car keys, broken earrings and Lego figurines. Alyssa spent months trying to strike up a relationship with their neighborhood pigeons, who as far as Cal could tell were too dumb even to identify her as a living creature rather than a weird-shaped food dispenser. He would really like to send her a photo of some rooks bringing him presents.

He lays out a handful of strawberries on the stump, and then a trail of them leading from the stump to the back step, where he sits down to wait. The rooks tumble down from their tree, bicker over the stumpful, get halfway along the trail, then give Cal a collective eye-roll and head back to their business.

Cal tries to find his patience, but it appears to have gone missing somewhere along the way, and the step is cold. After nowhere near enough time, he decides the rooks can fuck themselves, and goes inside to fetch the desk and his tools. By the time he comes back outdoors, every strawberry is gone, and the rooks are back in their tree laughing their asses off at him.

The desk still has tricky deposits of white paint in crevices, and Trey cracked another shelf when she went at it. Disentangling the broken shelf from all the rest looks like a pain in the rear end, so Cal goes at the paint with a toothbrush and a cup of soapy water, a job that starts to irritate him almost immediately. Despite not having touched a drop of booze yesterday, he has the same feeling he associates with hangovers, a heavy, prickly disinclination towards everything around him. He wants today over and done with.

He gives up on the paint, wrangles the shelf loose and starts tracing its outline on a fresh piece of wood. He’s finishing up when he hears the swish of feet through the grass.

The kid looks the same as always, all ratty parka and unyielding stare. Cal can’t see a girl there. For all he knows, she has bosoms of some degree, but he never had any occasion to examine that area in detail before and there’s no way in hell he’s going to do it now. It occurs to him that one reason he’s pissed off with Trey is because he would have liked at least one person around this damn place to be exactly what they seem.

“I went to school,” she informs him.

“Congratulations,” Cal says. “I’m impressed.”

The kid doesn’t smile. “You talk to Donie?”

“Come here,” Cal says. “Let’s get this fixed up. You wanna do the sawing?”

Trey stands still for another moment, looking at him. Then she nods and comes tramping across the grass.

She knows Cal has something to tell her that she doesn’t want to hear. She would never have asked for the mercy of a few extra minutes without it, but she’s taking them when he puts them in her hand. The stoicism of her, complete and unthinking as an animal’s, makes Cal feel blinded.

He wants to change his mind. But, shitty though his plan is, every other one he can think of is even worse. It feels like a vast, implacable failing in his character that he can’t come up with just one good solution to offer this scrawny, dauntless kid.

He hands her the saw and moves so she can take over at the table. “You had a snack after school?”

“Nah,” Trey says, squinting along the saw line.

Cal goes inside and comes out with a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and a glass of milk. “Say thank you,” he says automatically.

“Yeah. Thanks.” The kid drops cross-legged on the grass and aims herself at the sandwich like she hasn’t eaten all day.

Cal goes back to his paint streaks. He doesn’t want to say what he’s about to say. He would like to leave this afternoon undisturbed, let it unroll itself in its own slow time across the newly plowed fields, to the rhythms of their work and the west wind and the low autumn sun, right up until the moment when he has to wreck everything.

But, Mart’s theory notwithstanding, there are a couple of reasons Cal can think of why a girl might not want to look like a girl. If someone has been doing bad things to Trey, his plan will need to change.

“I got a bone to pick with you,” he says.

Trey chews and gives him a blank look. Cal can’t tell whether this relates to the subject at hand, or whether she just hasn’t heard the expression before.

He says, “You never told me you’re a girl.”

The kid lowers her sandwich and watches him, with fast things zipping behind her eyes. She’s trying to read in his face what this means. For the first time in a long time, she looks ready to run.

She says, “Never said I was a boy.”

“You knew I thought you were, though.”

“Never thought about it.”

Her muscles are still primed for flight. Cal says, “Are you scared I’m gonna hurt you?”

“Are you pissed off?”

“I’m not mad,” Cal says. “I’m just not crazy about surprises. Did someone do something bad to you ’cause you’re a girl?”

Her eyebrows twitch together. “Like what?”

“Like anything. Anything that might make you feel better going around like a boy.”

He’s alert for the slightest flinch of tension or withdrawal, but the kid just shakes her head. “Nah. My dad, he went easier on us girls.”