Chapter Eight #3
Lena has no doubt that she’ll do it, and do it well.
A couple of years back, or even a couple of weeks, that would have accomplished nothing except getting Sheila shunned for slandering the great Moynihans, but things are different now.
Things are finely balanced, and shifting in ways she can’t predict.
“I’ll say it to Cal,” she says. “I don’t know whether it’ll ease his mind or not, but I’ll give it a go.”
“Would you back me?” Sheila asks.
The words reach Lena strangely, like a forgotten language out of a vanished life. She can’t remember the last time anyone asked her to back them on anything; everyone knows better.
“I would, actually,” she says. She would love to ask Noreen whether this qualifies as doing her bit.
Sheila grins at her the way she used to grin before Johnny or Sean or any of it, back when they were sixteen and about to climb in the jacks window of the disco in town. “I thought that, all right,” she says, and she gives Lena the last éclair.
When Cal moved here, it took him a while to get back into the swing of only making the trip into town every couple of weeks, to stock up on a while’s worth of needs.
He had got used to Chicago, where just about anything he forgot would be less than ten minutes away.
Once he got reminded, though, this routine settled on him with the familiarity of childhood, when town was a monthly event that involved good pants and a spit-comb.
He likes the advance thought it requires, the way it obliges you to see life in broad stretches rather than in urgent, unpredictable snippets.
He went to town just last week, but he could use another can of varnish, and Noreen doesn’t stock the ice cream Trey likes.
While he’s there, he might as well drop in to the station and shoot the shit with Garda Dennis O’Malley for a while.
Cal has always got along well with Garda Dennis, but it’s occurred to him that his relationship with the local Guards might not stay the same now he’s pissed off Tommy Moynihan.
If he wants to shoot the shit with Garda Dennis, he should probably do it fast.
What Sheila told Lena gave him a certain amount of reassurance—at least Tommy doesn’t appear to have anything personal against the Reddys. But the other things she threw into the mix have added enough complications that Cal could use a little police-level clarity on some facts.
He buys the varnish first, as an indicator that Garda Dennis is just a collegial afterthought. With the can swinging from his hand, he heads for the Garda station.
He gets lucky and finds it open. The station is a tiny, boxy building, painted white and blue and set down neatly amid a row of boxy little painted houses, like something out of a kid’s toy set.
The street is empty, all the houses huddled against the rain, which sweeps in sheets against the station’s front wall and flows down the yard in a layer deep enough to soak Cal’s pants cuffs.
Garda Dennis is at the front desk, and he’s spilled something on his keyboard.
He’s dabbing it carefully with a paper towel and saying minor cuss words at it in a reproachful undertone.
He matches the station: in his spotless uniform, with his rosy cheeks, he’s round and neat as a figurine.
He looks like he spends his work hours getting himself into humorous predicaments involving rascally stray mutts.
“Afternoon,” Cal says, wiping his feet on the mat. “I catch you at a bad time?”
Tommy hasn’t got to Garda Dennis yet: his face lights up when he sees Cal.
Being a Chicago PD detective would horrify Garda Dennis, who is a man in the right place and happily aware of it, but hanging out with someone who used to be one is apparently the next best thing to meeting Clint Eastwood.
“Ah, God, no,” he assures Cal. “ ’Tis great to see you.
I’m after making a mess of this yoke, lookit; I had the cuppa tea and the biscuit in the same hand, and it all went wrong. ”
“Been there, done that,” Cal says ruefully, pushing back his jacket hood. “A few months back I got a text when I was making stew, figured I could answer it and stir the stew at the same time. I’ve got a brand-new phone now.”
“I’ll leave this to dry for a bit,” Garda Dennis says, eyeing the keyboard doubtfully, “and then we’ll see.” He pushes it away and wipes his fingers on the paper towel. “What can I do for you?”
“Not a thing,” Cal says, “except pass the time if you’re not too busy.
” He puts down his can of varnish on the floor and rubs rain off his face.
“My fiancée, she asked me to pick up her shoes that were getting resoled, since I’m in town.
But they’re gonna be another half-hour, so I figured I’d drop in, get outa the rain and say hi. ”
Garda Dennis’s eyes widen. “You’ve a fiancée?”
“Yep,” Cal says, a little sheepishly. “Me and Lena Dunne, we’ve been together a while now, we figured we might as well make it official.”
“Ah, God, congratulations,” Garda Dennis says, his face splitting into a huge grin.
He gets up and leans across the counter to give Cal a heartfelt, slightly sticky handshake.
“Being married is great; I know some fellas complain about it, but I’m not joking you, ’tis the best thing I ever did. You won’t know yourself.”
“Thanks,” Cal says, grinning back. “I’m a lucky man.”
“Lena Dunne,” Garda Dennis says. “She’d be a local woman, am I right? Her sister’s Noreen Duggan that runs the shop in Ardnakelty?” Garda Dennis takes pride in knowing the people on his beat, wide though it is; he needs to redeem himself for having overlooked Cal’s engagement.
“That’s right,” Cal says. “Ardnakelty born and bred.”
“Born and bred and buttered,” Garda Dennis says comfortably, settling back into his chair.
“Fair play to you. There’s fellas that go mad for the foreign ones—and I’m not saying they’re wrong, we’ve a loada Brazilians here in town and every one of them’s a fuckin’ stunner.
But for settling down with, like, you can’t beat an Irish girl.
Them Brazilians’d be a bit much for every day.
You’d be moithered the whole time, just looking at them; you’d never get a word out.
You can have the crack with an Irish girl. ”
“Well,” Cal says, with a grimace. “Mostly I do. Right now, I gotta say, not so much.”
“Wedding jitters, hah?” Garda Dennis asks sympathetically.
“The weddings is hard on the women; all the mammies and aunties and sisters sticking their oar in, ’twould wreck anyone’s head.
She’ll be grand once ’tis all done and dusted.
Take her somewhere nice for the honeymoon.
Somewhere with a bitta sun, to make up for all this. ” He waves at the door and the rain.
“It’s not that,” Cal says, ducking his head and rubbing the back of his neck, uneasy. “The wedding, we haven’t even set a date yet. It’s…You heard about Rachel Holohan, right? The girl that drank antifreeze, jumped in the river?”
“Ah, God, that was a terrible thing,” Garda Dennis says. His round face creases with upset. “ ’Tis always worse when ’tis a young one; specially a lovely-looking young one like that. I’d say I’m not supposed to think that any more, it’d be sexist, but all the same.”
“It’s shaken up Ardnakelty pretty bad,” Cal says. “And Lena, she’s shaken up worse’n most.”
“Did she know the young one well?”
“Sort of,” Cal says. “Rachel dropped in to Lena, just a few hours before she went into the river; around five-thirty that evening. Lena’s working herself up thinking maybe Rachel had already drunk the antifreeze, and if she’d got her to a doctor, everything would’ve been fine.
” A thought strikes him. “You might know, is that true? Or can I tell her the antifreeze came later, she’s worrying over nothing? ”
Garda Dennis puckers up his face and rubs his nose with the effort of trying to remember.
“God,” he says. “Your man did say what time she took it, the medical examiner, but I can’t…
Come here to me, I’ve the report right in the back.
” He starts extracting himself from his chair, which is a snug fit.
“You just hang on there a sec, and we’ll see what we can do. ”
The posters on the station walls haven’t changed since Cal first came in here, more than three years ago; a little yellower and more tattered now, they’re still begging people to wear their seatbelts, follow these ten farm safety tips, and quit running diesel across the border.
Cal reads over them and listens to the rain and to Garda Dennis, in the back room, peacefully discussing with himself where that report might have gone.
Garda Dennis isn’t a dumbass, he’s not dishing the dirt on the investigation over pints in his local; but in his mind, if nowhere else, Cal is still a police officer, and there’s nothing wrong with sharing information with him.
Cal doesn’t like himself very much right now, using Lena as a pry tool, but he couldn’t think of any other way to get the info, short of claiming to be unhealthily obsessed with a girl he barely knew, which would have been more moral but definitely not smarter.
He especially doesn’t like the realization, which only came to him as he said the words, that they’re partly true.
Lena is different, since Rachel died. She’s always had a remoteness somewhere in her, but now it’s spread, like color spreading slowly through water.
Even with her head on his chest, she feels miles away.
In some way he doesn’t understand, Rachel’s death has done something to her.
“Here we go,” Garda Dennis says, reappearing from the back room with a file held up victoriously in both hands. “We’ll see now can we settle your missus’s mind.”
“I’m much obliged to you,” Cal says. “I appreciate this more’n I can say.”