Chapter Eleven #3
Cal needs to get off the phone before he starts yelling, or something, out of pure desperation.
“Just so’s you know,” he says. “He’s probably gonna ask whether you’ve been stressed out about Rachel Holohan.
What I told him is you were a little bit unsettled about being the last person to see her, but now you know there’s nothing you could’ve done, that’s put your mind at ease. ”
There’s another brief silence. “That makes sense, yeah,” Lena says. “I’d better go put on decent gear, if he’s on his way. Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Come for dinner,” Cal says, “we’re gonna make a stir-fry,” but she’s already hung up.
He gets up from the table and walks circles around the room, so he won’t throw his phone.
He needs to get himself under control by the time Trey comes back with the dogs, but every thought that crosses his mind just makes him angrier.
Someone was watching while they walked the dogs last night.
Some little shit, Eugene or Donie or whoever else Tommy keeps on a string, watched while Cal tucked Lena’s hand through his arm and looked for ways to make her laugh.
Probably he was watching the house all evening, while they sat around the table and while Cal and Trey figured out cosecants and while Cal kissed Lena good night on the doorstep, picking out the moment that best served his purpose.
This was a pulled punch, carefully gauged.
Garda Dennis has to investigate, but once he gets his full set of denials, he can go away.
He doesn’t have to bring Cal into the station, put him in the system, interview him under caution, call in various agencies who will never go away, the way he would if Tommy had used Trey instead of Lena.
Cal had it wrong. Trey’s living arrangement isn’t a gift to Tommy; it’s a hostage. This was a warning. Tommy has spelled out his message nice and clear: Next time, I go for the knockout.
The back door bangs open, and Trey and the dogs come in on a gust of cold air. “What’d that muppet want?” Trey demands.
“Nothing much,” Cal says. “Just shooting the breeze. You want to eat now, or you want to wait till that’s out of the oven and we can go into town?”
Trey’s eyes stay on Cal for a second and he thinks she’s going to push for more, but she just shrugs and squats down in front of the oven to check on her walnut burl.
Tommy, when he hits, hits home.
By Monday afternoon, Cal is going stir-crazy.
He needs to do something about Tommy, but he’s working in the dark, and he can’t think of any action that wouldn’t make things worse.
Nothing new has happened on the Garda Dennis front, except a text from Lena saying it all went grand and hopefully that’ll be the end of that.
Cal is less optimistic: every muscle in his body is twitchy with waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He feels like he’s been stuck in this house, watching rain trickle down the windows and wasting brain cells on a guy he can’t stand, for most of his life.
He squelches down to Noreen’s, in the hope that she might have picked up some indicator of what Tommy is playing at or at least some inkling of what’s going on with Lena.
To his irritation, he finds himself bracing for the ordeal of going into his own damn local store.
He has no way of guessing who, besides Garda Dennis, Tommy has been talking to; anyone Cal runs into could look at him and see a fiancée-beating psycho.
Noreen ought to know him well enough to know that’s bullshit, but minds are off balance right now.
People are primed to believe that anything, or anyone, is treacherous.
As it turns out, Noreen doesn’t appear to have heard any unsavory rumors, but apart from that reassurance she’s not much help to Cal.
Noreen is all worked up because someone threw a rock through Long John Sharkey’s kitchen window.
“I’m not saying we’re feckin’ Shangri-la,” she informs Cal, over the angry rhythm of her scrubbing the living daylights out of the shop counter.
“You’d get that kinda thing the odd time, same as anywhere, but it’d be kids, maybe over from Kilhone or down from town, someone robbed someone’s girlfriend or there was a row at the disco, kids are feckin’ fools and always were.
But this fella, ’twas too dark to see his face but Long John says he ran like a grown man.
The only grown man round here that oughta be doing something like that is Donie McGrath, and sure if ’twas that lazy lump, Long John woulda caught him and bet the shite outa him before he got to the garden wall.
This was someone who should have better sense. ”
Noreen gives the counter another vicious squirt of cleaner.
Cal moves back a step. “This is on the back of that loada nonsense in the hotel last week, is what this is. Grown men acting like childer that need a smack. Rachel Holohan’d be horrified, d’you know that?
She’d a heart of gold, that girl. She couldn’t stand to see anyone upsetted.
If she knew people were using the way she died to have a go at each other, she’d—I was going to say she’d die all over again, that sounds terrible, but you know what I mean.
She’d never have done it if she’da known it’d lead to this. ”
Cal says nothing. Wherever Rachel’s death is leading, this is nowhere near the end of it.
“And now Long John’ll pick someone to blame,” Noreen says, “God knows whether he’ll get it right or not, he won’t give a damn.
You tell Senan to watch his windows, and his tires.
” She points the spray bottle threateningly at Cal, like this is somehow his responsibility to fix.
“And then what?” she demands. Cal, aware that the question is rhetorical and that his chances of changing the subject are low, pays for something at random and heads back out into the rain.
By the time he gets home it’s dark, the November-afternoon dark that still feels unnatural to him, and all his windows are blazing. Cal turned off all the lights but one on his way out, and locked the doors.
For a moment he stands still, evaluating.
Then he moves quietly around the house, keeping a good distance so Rip won’t alert, assuming he’s able to.
He’s aware that most likely he’s about to feel like a prize dumbass when he finds Lena curled up on his sofa.
A few weeks ago he would have taken that for granted and strolled cheerfully up to the door, but these days the townland is something other than its usual self, in ways he doesn’t feel safe ignoring.
The kitchen is bright and empty, so is the living room. In the back bedroom Trey is at the worktable, sanding an arm of Con’s nursing chair with the same all-out ferocity as Noreen scrubbing her counter.
On Mondays Trey stays at her mama’s. Cal hears, clear as day, the neat thud of Tommy dropping the other shoe.
He lets himself in at the back door and makes his way through the dogs’ delighted welcome to the workshop. Trey doesn’t look up. Sawdust hangs in the air.
“Hey,” Cal says, and waits for it.
“Some little fucker from the council called in to my mam,” Trey says, without breaking her hard rhythm. She’s so furious she’s practically throwing off sparks. “Scrawny little specky fuck, I coulda taken him down with one hand behind my back. I shoulda done it.”
“OK,” Cal says. “What’d he want?”
“Fuckin’ inspection. On our house. He said ’cause we’re only renting, he can swan in and have a look around any time he wants.” A few years back, the kid would have flipped the worktable right about now. “My mam shoulda told him to shove it up his hole. That’s our house.”
“Well,” Cal says. He knows where this is going. “That’s meant to be for your good. So the landlord can’t rent out some pigsty with no running water to people who can’t afford to argue.”
“We’ve got water. We don’t need some council shitebag sticking his nose in for our own good.”
“OK,” Cal says. He’s just as angry as Trey is, but his anger will have to wait till he has hers managed. “What’d the guy say?”
“There’s slates off the roof and there’s no carbon monoxide monitor and we’ve got rising damp in the walls.
He was going around with his moisture meter, moving our beds outa his way and all—little prick asked me did I know what the meter was, like I was five.
” Trey flips over her piece of wood with a bang and goes at the other side with her sandpaper like she wants to pulverize it.
“And if Rory Dunne doesn’t fix the place up, he won’t be allowed rent to us any more, and he could get a fine and go to jail. ”
“Right,” Cal says. “Well, that all sounds pretty fixable.”
“Rory already charges us low rent. Now he’ll haveta spend a ton on this shite. He’s gonna be raging.”
“We’ll do it ourselves,” Cal says. “Carbon monoxide monitor is like twenty bucks, and I meant to take a look at your roof anyway. We can read up on rising damp online. You tell your mama to give Rory a call, say it’s all being taken care of.”
Trey stops sanding, finally, and shakes out her cramped hand. She says, “Then Tommy Moynihan’ll find something else.”
“Maybe,” Cal says. He’s unclear on whether Rory has been reporting Sheila’s rent to the Revenue, and on whether the low amount counts as some kind of gift that someone should be paying tax on. “Then we’ll fix that.”
Trey turns to look at him. “You said we were gonna do something about Tommy,” she says. “When?”
“Soon. I just need to know what I’m dealing with.”
“So find out. Do him like you did Donie. Give him a few slaps, make him tell you what he’s fuckin’ at. Or do Eugene. He’d crack like that.”
“Kid,” Cal says, “I would love to. Believe me.”
“Then why not? He’s only a piece a shite. We could take him, no bother to us.”