The Keeper (Cal Hooper #3)

Chapter One

One

Cal gets the first whiff of trouble when he’s in Noreen’s shop on a Saturday afternoon, buying eggs.

The shop is in fact where Cal would expect to get wind of trouble, or of anything else underway in Ardnakelty townland, from pregnancy to potato blight.

In spite of this, he more or less misses the hint altogether, because Noreen is coming at him with so much other stuff.

It’s November. The townland lies still under rain, and has for weeks: what Cal’s neighbor Mart Lavin calls a soft rain, one that doesn’t fall but hangs in the air as a fine mizzle, coating you in a layer that only feels wet once you get indoors.

The mountains, off on the horizon, are near-invisible, only a flick of outline here and there.

Cal has battled it out with the rabbits for his last parsnips, and with the squirrels for the nuts from his handful of hazel trees.

The tillage fields wait for plowing under their green cover of clover and vetch; the cows still unhoused have left behind the tail-flicking irritability of summer and lie chewing the cud in slow, somnolent rhythms under a gray sky.

To the bafflement of his neighbors, who consider bitching about the weather to be a national duty, Cal likes this time of year.

Autumn is when Ardnakelty comes into its own.

Its summers and winters are half-assed by Cal’s standards, but autumn is meant for nuance and there this place is expert, layering the air with the smells of earth and wet leaves, shading the land with every subtlety of green and gold, coding its weather hints in the slightest twist of breeze or shift of cloud.

The last geese, straggling southward, send up their forlorn clamor.

In the main street of the village, the colors of the little mismatched houses are muted; the air smells of turf smoke, and tentative piano notes weave through the rain from behind some lace curtain where a kid is practicing.

When Cal pushes the shop door open, the ding of the bell is blurred by the damp air.

The shop is small, warm, and bright, with bad country music playing cheerfully on a tinny little radio.

Noreen is kneeling on the floor, bopping her rear end back and forth in time to the music and neatly whipping fake spiderwebs off her vegetable stand.

“There’s yourself,” she says, through a mouthful of thumbtacks.

“These cobwebs are like they’re made of glue, they stick on everything; I’ll be here all day.

Next year I’m not bothering my arse, I’m just putting that witch in the window and that’s me done. ”

“Can I give you a hand?” Cal asks. Cal is six foot four; Noreen is five foot one and not constructed for climbing. He comes in here expecting to fetch things off high shelves.

Noreen spits her tacks into a Ziploc bag.

“Go on, so; get down them pumpkins. Honest to God, I feel like I only put these up yesterday, and now here’s me taking them down.

It’ll be the feckin’ reindeers and Santys before I know it.

My mammy always said that’s how you know you’re getting old: the years start flying in. ”

“You haven’t aged a day since I got here,” Cal says.

He starts taking down miniature pumpkins from where they’ve been artfully tucked into the few square inches of free shelf space between soup mix, baby wipes, canned peaches, razor blades, envelopes, and everything else that keeps Ardnakelty running.

“If I didn’t know you had all those great big kids, I’d swear you weren’t a day over thirty. ”

“G’way outa that. The wrinkles on me.”

“Thirty. Twenty-five, maybe.” Cal likes Noreen, even if some days she does make him feel like he should have had more coffee.

Noreen makes a pfft noise. “I’m telling you, this week I feel like I’m a hundred.

The kids threw a Halloween party, God help me.

All the girls dressed up to the nines as sexy fairy murdered cheerleaders, you’d get more material in a bikini, and all the lads dressed up as themselves, lucky if they bothered their holes putting on a clean pair of trackie bottoms. And me running around like a blue-arsed fly, trying to make sure no one had a pocket fulla weed vapes or was riding anyone else down the back of the garden.

I’m still recovering.” She shoots Cal a glance over her shoulder.

“Your Trey was invited. She didn’t make it in the end, but she was asked. ”

“Much obliged,” Cal says. “She was sorry to miss it, but she had to take her little brother and sister trick-or-treating.” He has no problem stretching the truth in the name of harmony.

Trey Reddy—who isn’t technically his kid, but who counts as such for most practical purposes—has a less prickly relationship with Ardnakelty than she used to, but it’s not friendly enough, and Trey isn’t sociable enough, that anything short of a hostage situation would drag her to the Duggans’ party.

“Speaking of invites,” Noreen says ominously, pointing her handful of spiderwebs at him. “Where’s mine?”

Cal is engaged to Noreen’s sister Lena, but not in the sense that either of them has any inclination to get married—they’ve both done that before, and feel once was plenty.

The summer before last, Lena told Noreen they were engaged, for reasons that made good sense at the time, but what she hadn’t taken into account was that once the reasons were gone, the engagement was still there.

Neither of them was sure what to do about it.

They couldn’t call it off without people assuming they’d quarreled, which would not only have complicated their lives but could potentially have made Noreen quit stocking Cal’s favorite cheddar.

In the end they decided to leave it be, in the faint hope that people would give up on it, but that’s not how Ardnakelty rolls.

The engagement has taken on a life of its own.

People keep introducing themselves as Cal’s new relations and asking where the wedding reception is going to be; Angela Maguire, who has a reputation for cakes, wants to know whether they prefer fruit cake or chocolate biscuit cake or a layer of each, taking into account that the young people like chocolate but it doesn’t agree with Lena’s aunt’s digestion.

Enough people hassled Lena about her ring that in the end Cal drove to Galway and bought her one, not a diamond but a tiny sapphire, since she likes blue.

When he gave it to her she started laughing, and then he did too, but she wears the ring.

“We’re still picking out the lettering,” he says. “I got my heart set on the fancy curly stuff, but Lena’s more of a straight-up-and-down kinda gal. Maybe you could talk to her, try and bring her around to my point of view.”

Noreen snorts. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I thought you’d more respect for me than that. Where would I be if I fell for that class of aul’ rubbish, and me with four kids? Besides, you tried that one on me last winter.”

“Gotta get that lettering right,” Cal explains. “Something this important, I wouldn’t want to make the wrong choice.”

“You won’t have any choices left if you don’t set a date.

Everywhere’ll be booked out for years ahead.

There’s four townlands sharing Father Eamonn, and the poor man’s still waiting on his knee replacement; he can’t be standing up for two weddings in one day.

And if you don’t get the Breggan Court for the reception you’ll be stuck with the Kilcarrow Arms up in town, and sure they gave half the county food poisoning at Georgia Healy’s baba’s christening.

D’you want to spend your wedding night puking your guts up? ”

“We were figuring on having the reception in Seán óg’s,” Cal says. “All the toasted sandwiches people can eat.”

“You,” Noreen informs him, shaking a plastic vampire bat at him, “you’re lucky I don’t believe a word outa your mouth, or I’d be taking a heart attack right here. You can’t be having your reception in a dirty aul’ pub, like some wee teenager that’s after getting his girlfriend up the pole.”

“No one ever got food poisoning from a toastie,” Cal points out. “Better safe than sorry.”

Noreen, throwing the bat into a big plastic box labeled Halloween, tuts at him. “You didn’t useta be this much of a messer. When you got here, you were well-behaved, so you were.”

“Lena’s a bad influence,” Cal says.

“Put them pumpkins in that bin liner over there, they’re going soggy already. All I’m saying is, you’d want to get a move on with the bookings. Once it gets to Christmas and New Year, there’ll be people getting engaged right and left, and then where will you be?”

Cal is saved from answering this: the bell dings, the door flies open, and Tommy Moynihan strides into the shop like he’s walking into a merger meeting. “There’s her ladyship,” he booms, rubbing his hands together. “How’s the form?”

Tommy is some kind of big shot in the meat-processing plant over towards Kilhone, which makes him Mr. Big-Balls in this townland.

This doesn’t seem like much to get puffed up about, given that the townland would just about make a good-sized yard in backwoods North Carolina, where Cal comes from; Tommy, though, either hasn’t noticed this or doesn’t care as long as he’s surrounded by the respect he deserves.

He’s got a farmer’s solid bulk, a politician’s frozen silver hair, a C-list cattle baron’s ranch house, a Range Rover the size of a buffalo, and an annual family holiday to Mexico.

Cal dislikes Tommy, although he acknowledges that this may be partly because Tommy’s kid, Eugene, is a douche and Tommy’s wife, Clodagh, looks at Trey like she’s scanning for nits.