Chapter Four
Four
The next days are strange. Cal is waiting for half the townland to find excuses to stop by: deaths are prime conversation material, and the people who found the body are going to be the juiciest cuts off the joint.
Besides, Ardnakelty expects the benefit of his professional expertise, whether he has any that’s relevant or not; he’s ready to field questions about what the Guards are likely to be doing and thinking.
But no one shows up. A nice Guard with a countrywoman’s broad, good-tempered face comes to take Cal’s and Trey’s statements, and goes away again.
There’s no funeral, and no plans for one; Rachel’s body is in Galway or somewhere, being examined and tested and autopsied.
Out in the fields, men trudge back and forth and whistle to their dogs—livestock and land take death for granted and move on, leaving no room for pauses—but the townland lies under a new layer of silence, heavier than the cloud and the fitful rain.
Trey answers the Guard’s questions readily and doesn’t bring up the subject again.
Cal leaves her plenty of open spaces, while they put the last coat of varnish on Michelle Healy’s shoe cupboard, but the only things she drops into them are ordinary comments about school and her buddies—Aidan and Ciara have apparently managed to establish that they’re going out, and are now trying to organize their first date, a process that sounds like it could take months and a trained negotiator.
Once or twice the silences have a finely balanced quality, like Trey is on the edge of saying something, but nothing comes out.
If the kid is still having thoughts about murder, she’s keeping them to herself.
Cal wonders, at first, whether the lack of talk about Rachel is due to the likelihood of suicide.
She could have gone into the river by accident, except he can’t see what she would have been doing out there in the first place; by day the river is all wholesome pleasures, fishing and pretty scenery, but he can think of only one thing it would have had to offer her by night.
People might be keeping their mouths shut to spare her family’s feelings, till the official verdict comes in.
When he goes down to Noreen’s for his shopping, though, the shop is full of women who stop in mid-sentence when they see him; some of them turn away to hide red eyes. He grabs a few necessities and pays as fast as he can. People are talking, they’re just not talking to him.
Although it probably shouldn’t, it comes as a chilly surprise to find there are still doors that shut in his face.
That was fine and dandy back when he saw Ardnakelty as a wayside inn, somewhere pretty to rest and recover while he figured out the next thing.
But he’s here now. There is no next thing; instead there’s Trey, and Lena, and Rip, and the nursing chair Con McHugh wants to give his missus for Christmas.
Something about this death means that Ardnakelty is subtly changed by its shadow.
Cal, who knows how this place can run wild on rumors, hopes it hasn’t gone down the same line of thought as Trey and decided that Rachel Holohan was murdered.
Suicide is bad enough, and hard enough to get past, but it happens, especially in the dark dregs of the year: old guys up the mountain whose shotguns won’t stop whispering to them, lost boys taking ropes out to the trees they used to climb.
Murder is different. Even a hint of it shakes a place to the bone, setting in motion things that can’t be predicted or controlled.
Suicide requires nothing but grief, which is hard enough; murder makes demands.
He doesn’t ask Lena what she thinks. She’s staying silent too: she told him Rachel came to her place that evening, something about a hurt cat, but she offered no commentary beyond that and hasn’t mentioned Rachel since. Cal knows her well enough to know when there’s no point in asking questions.
Truth be told, Cal doesn’t think all that much about Rachel herself.
The cold creature he pulled from the river, or the crack of her ribs under his palm, hits him in the gut now and again, but he didn’t know her and has no sense of the life she lost. The ones who won’t leave his mind are her parents, although he doesn’t know them either, beyond the occasional scrap of small talk in Noreen’s.
There were times, when Alyssa was younger, when he feared for her.
The thought of that fear solidifying, changing from a corrosive shadow to the rest of someone’s life, makes him get up from wherever he is and go find stuff to do.
He’s been staying away not only from Noreen’s but from Seán óg’s, picturing a somber silence where he’ll count as an intruder.
When he finally gets fed up and heads down to the pub, though, he finds it precisely its usual weeknight self.
It’s maybe two-thirds full, guys in for a couple of pints and a chat after their dinner, rather than a serious session.
One corner has brought out the cards and has a ferocious game of Fifty-Five in progress; three guys at the bar are having their usual argument about the merits of various sheep breeds, which has been going on at least since Cal moved here, without anyone altering his position an inch; in the alcove, Mart and his posse are enjoying Senan being outraged about something.
Cal was planning on just buying his own pint, in case he’s not welcome to stick around.
Instead, he gets a round in and joins them.
“Thank fuck,” Senan says. “You’re the only one that’d know what I’m on about; this shower are living in nineteen fuckin’ eighty, they’re looking at me like I’m speaking Swahili. Your young one has a smartphone, hasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Cal says, passing out the glasses. Apparently he was right to buy a round. He’s not an intruder after all, at least not here and not today.
“Has she got the Snapchat?”
“Yeah. Is that bad?” Raising a teenager has got even more fun since Alyssa was coming up.
Donna would probably say it just feels that way because Cal is doing more of the hard part this time, but he disagrees.
When Alyssa was sixteen, neither he nor Donna had to figure out what the hell a Snap streak was and whether it could do her any harm.
“Has she got an AI on it?”
“Don’t think so,” Cal says. “She doesn’t use Snapchat much, from what I know. It has AI?”
“They give you one. Like a fuckin’ pet parrot or something. My young fella comes in to me—”
“Which one?” P.J. asks. P.J. likes to have things clear in his mind.
“Finbarr. The one that’s thirteen, or fourteen, or whatever he is now. He sits his smelly self on the sofa next to me, and he tells me he’ll have his AI rate my rizz. The fuck is a rizz?”
“Sounds dirty,” Francie says.
“That’s what I thought. I tell him I’m not letting that yoke anywhere near my rizz, and the little bollocks rolls his eyes at me. Then he tells me to give him my best chat-up line.”
“Pay attention, now,” Mart tells Bobby. “You can try these out on the lovely Róisín, if you run short of conversation.”
“We don’t,” Bobby says smugly. “We could talk for hours, so we could, and never get bored once.” Francie mimes retching.
“What’d you give Finbarr?” Cal asks Senan. He’s kind of taken aback by the level of normality going on. He wonders if this is Ardnakelty’s way of announcing, obliquely, that it’s decided Rachel fell in the river by accident.
“I’m not giving that little gobshite my good lines,” Senan says.
“They’re too powerful to be put into inexperienced hands.
He’d have half of second year pulling each other’s hair out over him by Christmas.
So I tell him to ask the AI yoke, ‘Are you a terrorist?’ And it says—hang on.
” He pokes at his phone. “It says, ‘I’m sorry if there was any confusion, but I am not a terrorist. I’m just here to chat and help you out with anything you need.
Is there something else you’d like to talk about? ’ ”
“Your Finbarr’s on a list now,” Mart tells him.
“Everyone’s getting their knickers in a twist about this yoke taking over the world,” Senan says, “and it’s so thick it can’t even tell when it’s pulled.
So I have the young fella type in, ‘Because you’ve hijacked my heart.
’ And that fuckin’ yoke says, listen to this, ‘Haha, that’s a classic pickup line!
I’d give it a solid seven out of ten for effort.
It’s always fun to use cheesy pickup lines to break the ice.
’ The cheeky little—” Words fail Senan: he stares around the alcove, holding up the phone at them like an exhibit.
“I got patronized by something that doesn’t even fuckin’ exist. Your man Zuckerberg or someone pulled it straight outa his hole, and now it’s giving me shite. ”
“That’s your pickup line?” Cal says. “How the hell are you married?”
“He’s got a hundred acres,” Francie reminds him.
“And a ten-inch mickey,” Senan says. “And at least my missus never divorced me.”
“Yet,” Cal points out. “She know you’ve been hitting on AIs?”
“Angela’ll be only delighted,” Francie says. “She’s no need to worry about him doing the dirt on her; even the fuckin’ internet won’t have him.”
“Ah, now,” P.J. says consolingly. “Seven outa ten isn’t bad.”
“Don’t you go patronizing me as well,” Senan tells him. “Let’s see you do better, go on. Give us your best shot and see do I ride you.”
“I haven’t got a chat-up line,” P.J. says, startled. He’s blushing at the thought. “I never needed one yet.”
“Course you’ve got chat-up lines. Everyone has chat-up lines. When we were young fellas going to the disco, what did you do to get the shift? Did you just stand next to a one and hope she’d plant the lips on you?”
“Well, God almighty, lads,” Mart says, putting down his glass. His eyes have gone over Cal’s shoulder. “Wouldja look what just sauntered in.”