Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

“Go get some sleep,” Lena’s voice says quietly, from her corner. “I’ll watch.”

“I’m fine here,” Cal says. “Can’t get comfortable on that thing. Thanks, though.”

“You need sleep, after the day that’s in it.” He hears a ruffle of movement and a grumble from Nellie, and Lena’s shape rises up off the mattress and pads across the floor to him. “Now,” she says, laying a hand on his good shoulder. “Go on.”

Cal stays put. They look out the window, side by side. “It’s beautiful,” he says.

“It’s small,” Lena says. “Awful small.”

Cal wonders if things would have been any different for all those dead boys if they had had, stretching out beyond their doorsteps, one of those days-long empty highways he was dreaming of a few days back: something else to sing in their ears at night, instead of the drink and the noose. Probably not, for most of them. He’s known plenty of boys who had the highway handy and still picked a needle or a bullet. But he wonders about Brendan Reddy.

“That’s what I came looking for,” he says. “A small place. A small town in a small country. It seemed like that would be easier to make sense of. Guess I might’ve had that wrong.”

Lena lets out a small, wry puff of breath. Her hand is still on his shoulder. Cal wonders what would happen if he were to lay his hand over hers, stand up out of the chair and take her in his arms. Not that he could do it even if he was sure he wanted to, given his various injuries, but still: he wonders whether she would lie down with him, and whether, if she did, he would wake up in the morning knowing, for better or for worse, that he was here for good.

“Go to bed,” Lena says. She gives his shoulder a gentle shove out of the chair.

This time Cal moves with it. “Wake me up if anything happens,” he says. “Even if it seems like nothing.”

“I will, yeah. And just so you know, of course I can use a rifle. So you’re in safe hands.”

“That’s good,” Cal says. He drags his aching self over to the mattress and is asleep before he can pull up the duvet.

A few times during the night he half-wakes, from a burst of pain as he turns or a jerk of adrenaline out of nowhere. Every time, Lena is sitting still in the armchair, her hands resting on the Henry laid across her lap, her profile upturned as she watches the sky.

TWENTY

Cal sleeps late, and would sleep later except that Lena wakes him. His first movement rips a growl of pain out of him, but gradually his muscles loosen enough that he can sit up, wincing in half a dozen different ways. “Jesus,” he says, slowly getting a handle on things.

“Breakfast,” Lena says. “I figured you wouldn’t smell it, with that nose.”

“You were snoring,” Trey informs him, from the table.

“Anything happen?” Cal asks. He hurts in all the places he expected and then some, but at least his voice sounds a little bit clearer. “Anyone come?”

“Not a peep,” Lena says. “I saw nothing, heard nothing, Nellie didn’t even twitch, I didn’t have to shoot a single bandit. Come have your breakfast. And you snore too,” she adds, to Trey, who gives her a skeptical stare.

The table is loaded with what looks like every piece of crockery Cal owns, all of it full of food and drink: bacon, eggs, a tower of toast. Trey is already stuffing her face. It’s been so long since anyone made Cal breakfast that he finds this more touching than Lena probably intended it to be. “I only did it ’cause I didn’t know if you’d make a decent job of it,” she says, laughing at the look on his face. “For all I know, you can’t cook for shite.”

“He can cook rabbit,” Trey tells her, through a mouthful. “And fish. ’S only gorgeous.”

“I don’t eat rabbit for breakfast,” Lena informs her. The two of them appear to have established some kind of understanding while Cal was asleep. “Or fish either. And I don’t know your standards. I’d rather trust my own.”

“I’ll prove it to you sometime,” Cal says, “if you’d like. As a thank-you. When things settle down a little bit.”

“You do that,” says Lena, who clearly doesn’t care for the odds of things settling down in her lifetime, or at any rate in Cal’s. “Eat this meanwhile, before it goes cold on you.”

The breakfast is good. Cal finds himself craving rich salty things, and Lena has a lavish hand with them; she’s fried every piece of bacon he had, and the toast is buttered till it drips. It’s raining, not heavily but steadily, in long meandering sheets; out in the fields, the cows have banked themselves together under a flat gray sky and are keeping their heads to the grass. The day has a strange, unshakable wartime calm, as if the house is besieged so thoroughly that there’s no point thinking about it until they see what happens next.

“Did you talk to her mama?” Cal asks, when Trey is in the bathroom.

“I did,” Lena says, giving him a dry glance. “She’s relieved enough that she didn’t ask too many questions. All the same, but, Trey needs to go home soon enough. Sheila’s got plenty on her plate without worrying about this one as well.”

“She can’t leave here till I get things under control,” Cal says. “She’s gone and pissed off some bad people.”

“And when are you planning on getting things under control?” Lena inquires politely. “Just outa curiosity, like.”

“I’m working on it. I’m aiming for sometime today.” One good phone conversation should get Austin to rein in his boys till they can meet up and arrange matters to everyone’s satisfaction. Cal tries to think how much cash he has in the bank, just in case.

“That’ll be lovely,” Lena says. “Let me know if you need a lift to the hospital.”

“Could I ask you to stick around awhile?” Cal asks, ignoring that. “I need to go out for a little bit, and I don’t want to leave the kid alone.”

Lena gives him a long unimpressed look. “I’ve to go see to the other dogs,” she says. “Then I can come back for a bit. I’ve to be in work at one, though.”

“That’ll give me plenty of time,” Cal says. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” He feels like this is the main thing he’s said to her during their acquaintance.

Lena leaves Nellie behind to hang out with Trey, who is smitten with that dog to the point of sprawling on the floor with her, ignoring everything else. The kid seems fully recovered, mentally if not physically—although Cal isn’t about to trust this—and she doesn’t appear to find anything remarkable about the current arrangement. As far as she’s concerned, apparently, the three of them could keep on going like this for the rest of their lives.

Cal, with large amounts of caution, time and swearing, manages to change into clean clothes. When he comes out of his bedroom, Trey is using the leftover bacon to try and teach Nellie to roll over. Cal wouldn’t bet money on the outcome either way: Nellie doesn’t strike him as the smartest dog around, but Trey has plenty of persistence, and Nellie is happy to humor her as long as the attention and the bacon hold out.

“Your nose looks better,” Trey says.

“Feels better, too,” Cal says. “Sort of.”

Trey moves the bacon in a circle, which just makes Nellie bounce and snap at it. She says, “Are you gonna give up on looking for Bren?”

Cal doesn’t want to let her know that, after last night, walking away isn’t an option any more. Austin and his boys aren’t going to walk away from the fact that she shot one of them. “Nope,” he says. “I don’t take well to people trying to push me around.”

He expects the kid to come at him with a volley of questions about his investigative plans, but that seems to be all she needs from him. She nods and goes back to waving the bacon at Nellie.