Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

“I reckon you’d have better luck trying to train one of the rabbits outa the freezer,” Cal says. Her matter-of-fact trust moves him so much that he has to swallow. This morning he feels like he’s made of marshmallow. “Leave that poor dumb dog alone and come do the dishes. I can’t manage it with this arm.”

When Lena gets back, it’s almost eleven. Mart mostly takes a break around that time, for a cup of tea. Cal finds the cookies he bought yesterday and heads for the door, before Mart can take a notion to come calling. Mart had to hear those rifle shots, but with any luck he couldn’t tell where they came from. Cal wants to make it clear that they had nothing to do with him.

“Take a bath,” he tells Trey, on his way out. “I left you a towel in the bathroom. The red one.”

Trey looks up from Nellie. “Where you going?” she asks sharply.

“Got stuff to do,” Cal says. Lena, who has joined Trey on the floor to watch her patchy progress, doesn’t react. “I’ll be back in half an hour or thereabouts. You better be washed by then.”

“Or what?” Trey inquires with interest.

“Or else,” Cal says. Trey, unimpressed, rolls her eyes and goes back to the dog.

Cal’s knee has settled down enough that he can walk that far, although he has a limp that feels set to last him a while. As soon as he’s far enough up the road to be out of sight of his windows, he shelters against a hedge from the worst of the rain, changes his phone settings to hide his number, and calls Austin, who he feels can reasonably be expected to be awake at this hour. The call rings out to a snooty voicemail woman who sounds disappointed in Cal. He hangs up without leaving a message.

Mart’s house, hunkered down among the fields, looks gray and deserted through its veil of rain, but Mart and Kojak answer the door. “Hey,” Cal says, holding out the cookies. “Went to town yesterday.”

“Well, holy God,” Mart says, looking him up and down. “Look what the cat dragged in. What’ve you been doing with yourself at all, Sunny Jim? Have you been fighting banditos?”

“Fell off my roof,” Cal says ruefully. Kojak is sniffing at him cautiously, tail down; the clean clothes haven’t stripped away the reek of blood and adrenaline. “Climbed up there to check the slates, after that wind we got, but I’m not as limber as I used to be. Lost my footing and went flat on my face.”

“G’wan outa that. You fell offa Lena Dunne,” Mart tells him, cackling. “Was it worth it?”

“Aw, man, gimme a break,” Cal says, rubbing the back of his neck and grinning sheepishly. “Me and Lena, we’re buddies. Nothing going on there.”

“Well, whatever nothing is, it’s been going on two nights running. D’you think I’ve lost the use of my eyes, young fella? Or the use of my wits?”

“We were talking. Is all. It got late. I’ve got one of those, what do you call them, for guests, the air mattresses—”

Mart is giggling so hard he has to hold himself up on the door frame. “Talking, is it? I did a bit of talking to women myself, back in the day. I’ll tell you this much, I never made them sleep on an air mattress all on their ownio.” He heads into the kitchen, waving Cal after him with the cookie packet. “Come in outa that and have a cup of tea, and you can give me all the details.”

“She makes a mean bacon-and-egg breakfast. That’s all the details I got.”

“Doesn’t sound like ye did that much talking,” Mart says, switching on the kettle and rooting around for mugs and the Dalek teapot. Kojak flops down on his rug in front of the fireplace, keeping one wary eye on Cal. “Was it her brothers done that on you?”

“Uh-oh,” Cal says. “She’s got brothers?”

“Oh, begod, she does. Three big apes that’d rip your head off as soon as look at you.”

“Well, shit,” Cal says, “I might have to skip town after all. Sorry ’bout your twenty bucks.”

Mart snickers and relents. “Don’t worry your head about those lads. They know better than to get between Lena and anything she wants.” He throws a generous handful of tea bags into the Dalek. “Tell me this and tell me no more: is she a wild one?”

“You’d have to ask her,” Cal says primly.

“Come here,” Mart says, his tangle of eyebrows shooting up as a new idea strikes him, “is that what happened to you? Did Lena give you a few skelps? I’d say she’d have a fine aul’ right hook on her. Does she have one of them fetishes?”

“No! Jesus, Mart. I just fell off the roof.”

“Give us a proper look,” Mart says. He leans in and peers at Cal’s nose from various angles. “I’d say that’s broken.”

“Yeah, me too. It’s straight, though, or as straight as it ever was. It’ll heal.”

“It’d better. You don’t wanta lose your good looks, specially not now. What’s the story on the arm? Didja break that too?”

“Nah. I think I cracked my collarbone. Gave my knee a pretty good whack, too.”

“Sure, it could’ve been worse,” Mart says philosophically. “I know a fella up near Ballymote that fell off his roof, the exact same as yourself, and didn’t he break his neck. He’s in a wheelchair to this day. His missus has to wipe his arse for him. You were lucky. Didja go to the doctor?”

“Nah,” Cal says. “Nothing they could do except tell me to take it easy for a while, and I can do that myself for free.”

“Or Lena can do it for you,” Mart says, the grin creeping back onto his face. “She won’t be happy if you’re out of commission. Better rest up and mind yourself, so you can get back in the saddle.”

“Jeez, Mart,” Cal says, biting back a grin and getting very interested in his toe poking at a chair leg. “Come on.” Under the chair is a towel stiff with dried blood.

When he looks up, he looks into Mart’s eyes. He sees Mart think about saying he had a nosebleed, and then think about saying a nameless stranger staggered in with a mysterious wound. In the end he says nothing at all.

“Well,” Cal says, after a long while. “Don’t I feel like the idiot.”

“Ah, no,” Mart reassures him charitably. He stoops to pick up the towel, bracing himself on the chair-back and grunting, and stumps unhurriedly across the kitchen to put it in the washing machine. “No need for that. Sure, how would you know the lie of the land, and you a stranger?” He closes the washing machine door and looks up at Cal. “But you know now.”

Cal says, “You gonna tell me what happened?”

“Leave it be,” Mart says, gently and firmly, in a voice Cal has used a hundred times to tell suspects that they’ve come to the end, to the place where there’s no choice left, no journey and no struggle. “Go home to the child and tell her to leave it be. That’s all you need to do.”

Cal says, “She wants to know where her brother is.”

“Then tell her he’s dead and buried. Or tell her he done a runner, if you’d rather. Whatever’ll make her leave it.”

“I tried that. She wants to know for sure. That’s her line. She won’t budge off it.”

Mart sighs. He pours detergent into the washing-machine drawer and sets it going.

“If you don’t give her that,” Cal says, “she’s gonna keep on coming till you have to kill her. She’s thirteen years old.”

“Holy God,” Mart says disapprovingly, glancing over his shoulder, “you’ve an awful dark mind on you altogether. No one’s got any intention of killing anyone.”

“What about Brendan?”

“No one intended to kill him, either. Would you ever sit down there, Sunny Jim, you’re giving me the fidgets.”

Cal sits at the kitchen table. The house is chilly and smells of damp. The washing machine pulses in a slow, rhythmic trudge. Rain trickles steadily down the windowpane.