Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

“Who?”

“Lena. Noreen’s sister. You don’t need to worry about her. Out of everyone around here, she’s the best person I know for keeping her mouth shut.”

“What’ll she do?”

“Just take a look at you. Clean up your face—she’ll do it gentler than I can. Maybe stick on one of those fancy Band-Aids that look like stitches.”

Trey clearly wants to argue, but she’s got nothing left in her to do it with. The warmth from the coverings and the fire has eased her shaking, leaving her limp and slumped. She looks like she barely has the strength to keep holding the towel to her mouth.

Cal pulls over one of the kitchen chairs, so he can sit by her and catch it if she drops it. Her eye has got worse, plum-black and swollen so big that the skin is tight and shiny.

“Let’s see how that cut’s doing,” he says. Trey doesn’t react. Cal reaches out one finger and moves her hand away from her mouth. The bleeding has slackened, just slow bright drops welling up. Her teeth are all still there. “Better,” he says. “How’s it feel?”

Trey moves one shoulder. She hasn’t looked straight at him once. When she tries, her eye skids away like his hurt her.

She needs to rinse out that cut with salt water, and someone needs to take a close look and see if it needs stitches. Cal has done first aid on babies, junkies and everyone in between, but he can’t do it here. He can’t take the risk that he’ll put a finger wrong and break the kid. Just being this near to her makes his whole body sing with nerves.

“Kid,” he says. “Listen to me. I can’t make sure this situation goes nice and smooth unless I know what it is I’m dealing with. I’m not gonna say a word to anyone without your leave, but I need to know who did this to you.”

Trey’s head moves against the back of the chair. She says, “My mam.”

The fury hits Cal so intensely that for a second he can’t see. When it clears a little, he says, “How come?”

“They told her to. Said do it or we will.”

“Who told her to?”

“Dunno. I was out. Got home and she said to come out back ’cause she hadta talk to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Cal says. He makes sure he has his cop face and his cop voice in place, peaceful and interested. “What’d she use?”

“Belt. And hit me. Kicked me a coupla times.”

“Well, that’s not good,” Cal says. He wants Lena to get here so badly that he can hardly sit still. “You got any idea why?”

Trey makes a ragged twitch that Cal recognizes as a shrug.

“You been stealing from anyone who might take offense?”

“Nah.”

“You’ve been asking questions about Brendan,” Cal says. “Haven’t you?”

Trey nods. She doesn’t have the wherewithal to lie.

“Dammit, kid,” Cal begins, and then bites it back. “OK. Who’ve you been asking?”

“Went to see Donie.”

“When?”

It takes her a while to figure that out. “Day before yesterday.”

“He give you anything?”

“He just told me to fuck off. Laughed at me.” Her words are sloppy and widely spaced, but she’s making sense. Her mind is OK, depending on your definition of OK. “He said watch yourself or you’ll end up like Bren.”

“Well, Donie can say anything he likes,” Cal says. “Doesn’t make it so.” The talking has opened up her lip again; a thin trickle of blood is making its way down her chin. “Hush, now. I’ll take care of that part. All you gotta do is stay still.”

Wind slams against the windows and sings furiously in the chimney, setting the fire fluttering and sending curls of rich-smelling smoke into the room. Firewood cracks and pops. Cal checks Trey’s lip every now and then. When the bleeding stops again, he stands up.

The movement sends a jolt of panic through Trey. “What’re you doing?”

“Getting you some ice to put on that eye, and that lip. That’s all. Bring down the swelling, and ease the pain a little bit.”

He’s at the sink, popping ice cubes into a fresh towel, when he sees the sweep of Lena’s headlights across the window. “Here’s Miss Lena,” he says, putting down the ice tray with a surge of relief. “I’m gonna go warn her not to pester you with questions. You just sit tight and keep this on your face.”

Lena is getting out of her car by the time Cal comes outside. She slams the door and strides up the drive, hands shoved in the pockets of a man’s green wax jacket. The wind whips pieces of her hair free from its ponytail and the starlight turns it a luminous, eerie white. As she reaches Cal, she raises her eyebrows for an explanation.

“Kid showed up at my door in bad shape,” Cal says. “If you ask her for details she’ll freak out, so don’t ask. She’s got a black eye, a split lip, something’s wrong with her hand, and she says her side hurts pretty bad.”

Lena’s eyebrows flick higher. “Noreen told me a date with you would be different from the local lads,” she says. “She’s always right, that one,” and she walks past him into the house.

The sight of her hits Trey with another jolt of panic. She drops the towel, ice cubes scattering, and looks like she’s about to scrabble up from the chair again. “Hush,” Cal says. “Miss Lena’s here to take a look at you, remember? It’s her or a doctor, so don’t give her any hassle. OK?”

Trey sinks back into the chair. Cal can’t tell whether that’s because she’s OK with Lena or because her strength has given out. “There you go,” he says. “That’s better.” He goes to the cupboard and finds his first-aid kit.

“First thing is to get you cleaned up,” Lena says matter-of-factly, pulling off her jacket and throwing it over the back of a chair, “so I can see what’s what. Have you another cloth, Cal?”

“Under the sink,” Cal says. “I’ll be right outside.” He puts the first-aid kit in Lena’s hands and walks out the back door.

He sits down on the step, leans his elbows on his knees and breathes hard into his fingers for a while. He feels some kind of light-headed, or maybe sick, he can’t tell which. He needs to do something, but he can’t tell what that is either. “Fuck,” he says quietly, into his fingers. “Fuck.”

The wind shoves at him, trying to get around him and in the door. The treetops toss furiously and the garden has a deserted, tight-battened feel, like no creature that’s not desperate or crazy would be out in this. No sound comes from inside the house, or nothing Cal can hear through the wind.

After a while his head starts to come back together again, at least enough to fumble for something like a plan. He has better sense than to go near Sheila Reddy, but nothing on earth is going to keep him away from Donie.

He can’t do anything until he learns what Trey needs, though, and figures out how to get it for her. He considers slipping the kid a big dose of Benadryl and hauling her into the car when she gets drowsy. Even leaving aside the problematic aspects of showing up at a hospital with a drugged beat-up teenage girl, he’s uneasy about a course of action that, among its many other less predictable consequences, would likely land the kid in foster care. Maybe she’d be better off there; he can’t tell. Back when it was his job, he would have handed her over without a second thought and let the system do its thing.

Lena comes outside drying her hands on her jeans, closes the door behind her and sits down on the step next to Cal.

“She gonna make a run for it while you’re out here?” Cal asks.

“I doubt it. She’s exhausted. No reason why she would, anyway. I told her she doesn’t need a doctor.”

“Does she?”

Lena shrugs. “There’s no emergency, as far as I can tell. Her stomach’s not sore or swollen, and she’s got no bruises there—she says she curled up in a ball—so no reason to think she’s bleeding internally. I’d say she’s got a cracked rib, but there’s nothing a doctor could do about that. The hand seems like it’s bruised, not broken, but she’ll have to wait and see how it goes over the next couple of days. There’s plenty more cuts and bruises on her back and her legs, but they’re not serious.”