Chapter Three #3
“Couple of hours. We’re not gonna stay out all that time.
We’ll take a look at the riverbank and go home.
I’ll head back out once it’s light.” Come daytime, if the search isn’t over, it’ll be a different thing.
Tommy Moynihan’s pull will get the whole machine up and running with no delays: lines of Guards in high-vis jackets poking long poles into undergrowth, dogs hurrying their handlers along a scent, radios crackling, journalists arranging their eyebrows and their voices into their favorite somber curves.
Cal has been here long enough to feel the extra dash of urgency that prospect brings to the situation.
This is Ardnakelty business, and Ardnakelty has a strong preference for dealing with that itself, without any contribution from outsiders.
A couple of years back, Cal would have slept through this night like a baby and heard the story the next day when he went into Noreen’s for his shopping, or when Mart felt like a gossip break.
The shift still has the power to startle him: it seems almost unthinkably strange that he should be here, his flashlight one point in the constellation that spans the townland, searching this low cold landscape for a girl he doesn’t know.
The river, coming into view between the slants of tree trunks, is running high and fast. In the flashlight beams it’s a cold white, slashed with black.
Trees lean low enough that the current drags at their branches.
The flashlights catch nothing worth checking out, which is what Cal expected.
With the river in this mood, anything that went in there would be swept straight down to the Shannon and out to sea.
He’s turning away, ready to say something about heading home, when he hears the shout from upriver again. It has a different note this time.
“Come on,” Cal says.
They wade through the undergrowth like they’re wading through bog, in a ludicrous broken waddle that never makes it to a run. Trey, built for this terrain, starts to overtake Cal, but he waves her back behind him. The shout rises again and he yells, “We’re coming!”
Above the bend in the river, a white shape hangs in the water, ragged black streaks radiating where it splinters the current. On the side of the bank, a light bobs wildly, and something dark is scrabbling. It’s a man, clambering awkwardly down the steep bank, flashlight between his teeth.
“Wait!” Cal shouts, and the light stops moving. Cal pulls his phone out of his pocket and passes it and his flashlight to Trey. “Point one so I can see where I’m going,” he says, “and one at whatever that is in the water. If we both fall in, you call Mart for help. Don’t come in after us. Got it?”
“Yeah,” Trey says. She shoves his phone in her pocket and aims the flashlights.
Cal starts down the bank, steadying himself on branches and dodging the ones that grab at his face.
The earth is boggy with rain, which helps him dig in for footholds under the layers of slippery leaves.
He just hopes the whole damn bank doesn’t slide into the water.
The man is Francie, braced precariously at the river’s edge, hanging on to a bush and panting. “It’s her,” he says.
She’s face down in the water, hair streaming wide, one hand outstretched towards them and wavering like a signal.
Her jacket has snagged on some hidden thing that juts out from the bank at the bend, a root or a branch.
Without it she would be gone, halfway to the Shannon on this sinuous, unstoppable movement.
Close up, the noise of the river is chaotic, a relentless roar crammed with mutters and trills.
“OK,” Cal says. She’s far enough from the bank that one of them will have to step in. He’s heavier and stronger than Francie. He hooks one arm around a leaning willow and reaches to grab Francie’s wrist with the other hand. “I got you.”
Francie is knee-deep at the first step. He rocks when the current hits his legs, but Cal’s grip holds and he finds his balance.
He leans out, his shadow rippling and breaking on the water, to catch Rachel’s hand.
Twice the water moves her and he misses.
His wrist is taut and shaking with the effort and the cold.
Cal knows they don’t have long before the water numbs his legs to uselessness.
Trey, on the bank above them, stays silent and trains the lights on the white shape.
Francie shakes himself and leans out again. This time his fingers hook around Rachel’s wrist. Slowly he backs towards the bank, tugging her with him, her body careening wildly between his pull and the current’s.
When Francie’s footing is solid, Cal lets go of him and grabs Rachel’s arm. Her jacket is thick and slippery, and at first the snag holds her fast, but finally they rip her free and tow her in. Waterlogged, she’s impossibly heavy and unwieldy, stubbornly resisting them.
“Flat bit here,” Trey says, indicating with one of the flashlights. She’s moved closer, down the bank. Cal wants her not to be there, not to see them manhandling Rachel through these ludicrous, humiliating sprawls. He wants to cover her eyes.
They drag Rachel to the flat stretch of bank and lie her on her back. Cal tilts her chin, sweeps her mouth with his finger, and feels at her neck for a pulse. There’s nothing. Her throat is as cold as the water. Her eyes, half open, stare up at the sky.
Cal pulls her jacket open and starts compressions, blocking her face from Trey with his body.
Rachel smells of river water and the unimagined things hidden deep beneath it.
A rush of thick froth bubbles out of her mouth and he feels ribs snap under his palms. It’s been a million years since he did this and he knows he could be doing it wrong, but there’s no one here to do better.
He stops, heaving for breath, and presses his fingers into her throat again. Francie, on one knee beside him, dripping, says nothing. Trey’s torch beam flattens his face to a featureless white mask, dark holes for eyes.
There’s no pulse. Cal lifts his head and shouts up to the treetops, with the full power of his voice behind it, “Here!”
After a moment he hears, wordless over the jumble of the river, men’s voices taking up the call and passing it on, growing farther and fainter across the trees and the fields. He bends back to the compressions.
Francie says, close to him so Trey won’t hear, “She’s gone, man.”
“I know,” Cal says through his teeth, between compressions. He doesn’t look up when he hears voices coming closer, underbrush breaking. Francie shouts back, and Trey sweeps one of the flashlights as a guide.
“Her father,” Cal says. “Keep him back.” Francie nods and scrambles up the bank. Cal keeps going till a hand grips his shoulder and Senan’s voice says, “Take the child home.”
In this weather there’s no sunrise. The black sky pales slowly through gradations of gray, and the fields match it, blurred under a thin shifting mist. The lights ranging the roads have gone out, but the ones in house windows are still on, weak against the growing day.
The landscape feels unreal, ready to vanish at any instant.
Cal’s body, trudging home down the muddy road, feels the same way: something that’s had all the solidity leached out of it, leaving it at the mercy of any wind that might come blowing.
“She’s dead,” Trey says. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. It strikes him that he doesn’t even know how old Rachel was, maybe twenty or twenty-one. That seems like something he should have known, like maybe then he could have done better CPR and brought her back.
“You worked like mad on her all the same.”
Cal can’t tell whether she’s asking why, or looking for reassurance that they did their best, or offering that comfort to him. He doesn’t want that. His feelings aren’t Trey’s job. “Yep,” he says. “I went all out. It wasn’t gonna make any difference, she’d been gone a while, but you gotta try.”
Trey nods and goes silent. Their feet crunch on the muddy road; Cal’s shoes, sodden with river water, squelch at every step. Over the walls, in the fields, the winter-sparse grass is weighed down with dew.
When they shoot rabbits for dinner, Trey takes the deaths in her stride; what she can’t handle is anything wounded and suffering. “From all I hear,” Cal says, “drowning’s about the most peaceful death there is. No pain or anything.”
Trey nods, but she doesn’t come out of her silence. Cal asks, “You know Rachel?”
“Nah. Seen her around, just. She was dacent to me, even back when everyone else was shite. Bought Alanna an ice lolly one time, when we were down the shop.”
“Well,” Cal says. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but Trey’s bar is low when it comes to the village. “She sounds like a good kid, all right.”
Trey says, “You reckon Eugene kilt her?”
The thought has occurred to Cal, but he discarded it. “Nah,” he says. “Eugene’s a jagoff.” He doubts Trey knows what a jagoff is, but he doesn’t have it in him to rummage for a better word. “He talks big, but he couldn’t kill anyone. By pushing a button, yeah, sure, but not like that.”
Trey considers that and acknowledges it with a tilt of her head. “Someone else coulda,” she says.
Most kids would have gone straight to accident or suicide, but Trey has known people to die by violence before. Cal feels like, no matter how hard he works, he can never get her assumptions to go back where they should be.
“The Guards’ll look into that,” he says. “But mostly, when someone dies young, no one killed them. Mostly they had an accident, or things got to be too much for them and they couldn’t think of another way out.”
“That’s stupid,” Trey says flatly.
Cal doesn’t have the wherewithal to get into mental health and empathy tonight.
All he wants to know is that Trey’s not going to go stirring up the townland with hints about murder, and that she’s going to be able to get some sleep.
Everything else can wait till after that.
“Maybe,” he says. “I’m just telling you, that’s what mostly turns out to have happened.
If you’ve got other ideas, don’t go around saying them. To anyone. You got that?”
Trey rolls her eyes. “Wasn’t gonna.” Cal believes her. Not saying things is one of Trey’s main skills.
The kid seems like she’ll sleep just fine.
He can’t be certain—she has an ironclad aversion to showing any kind of upset—but her walk, hands in her coat pockets, head tilted back to scan for the outline of the mountains amid the cloud, looks OK.
Trey likes to know she’s done everything she could.
They did that tonight; it didn’t work out.
They round the bend and Cal’s place comes into view, rising gray out of the gray mist around it.
The light in the window is pale and watery.
For a fatigue-tangled second Cal expects to find the house the way it was the day he first got here, weeds crowding the doorstep waist-high, streaked paint on bubbling wallpaper, broken furniture tumbled in corners and saints askew on the walls.
Then the waking rooks start shuffling their feathers and asking hoarse questions, and Rip catches the signal and sends out a barrage of welcoming barks.
Trey, at Cal’s elbow, yawns hugely and shudders all over like a dog coming out of water.
“Come on,” Cal says, picking up the pace. “Let’s go get warm.”