Chapter Eleven #6
“You’re right, o’ course,” Bobby says, looking at least half reassured. “There’s some awful eejits out there; you wouldn’t want to mind them.” He moves up to the bar, to watch the racing and swap the occasional peaceful comment with the old guys while he finishes his pint.
What’s enraging Cal is the ease of this, casual and quick as a man whacking misbehaving puppies on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
Trey sassed Tommy, Cal refused him, Lena poked around: out comes the newspaper, no, no, no, bad dogs, and they’re all cringing in their corners.
Bobby is right that rumor is one of Ardnakelty’s primary weapons, the glinting flip side of its dark silences, and that Cal has been on the wrong end of it before, but that was different.
The rumors about him, like the hints about Eugene cheating on Rachel, were collective, coalesced almost unconsciously out of the place’s communal need.
This is one man’s cold, deliberate strategy to show his power over all that, by taking an expert grip on the townland’s weapon and aiming it at his own personal targets.
Cal drives home very carefully, thinking of Eoin Duggan, and the Boss Moynihan’s woman, and all the other people who have lived out their lives here feeling this same rage and unable to do a single thing about it.
He leaves the Pajero at home, gets Rip, and starts walking. It’s not raining, but clouds hang heavy and the air has a hard damp chill that digs through his jacket. Rip, aware that something is wrong, sticks close and trots to keep up.
Cal can’t imagine why Lena would have been asking around about Rachel Holohan’s love life.
He figures this has to be connected to her weird mood, but he can’t see how that would work, either.
Whatever her reasons, she’s given Tommy everything he could want.
Not that that makes much difference. Tommy is an expert in his field; regardless of what he was given, he would have found something to use.
Cal finds himself heading for the riverbank, like it’s a crime scene that might yet offer up some overlooked scrap of evidence to make everything crystal-clear.
Brambles drag grimly at his pants, and trees dump their loads of rain down the back of his neck.
The place where they dragged Rachel from the water is still a brutal mess, branches snapped and layers of leaves scrabbled up all around.
It looks like the scene of a brawl, or a fight to the death between wild animals.
In summer, new growth would be smoothing the scar by this time, but nothing is growing now.
Bobby is right, this will blow over, but the dust of it will stick.
Cal grew up in the backwoods, he knows how small places roll.
Whenever people look at him and at Lena, they’ll see this, whether they believe it or not.
The place where they’ve lived till now is gone; Tommy Moynihan has transformed it to suit himself.
Normally the bridge looks like something off an old postcard, but today it has a sly air, too low-walled and too slippery, hunched waiting for a traveler it can pitch into the water below.
The rain has swollen the river to a thick brown muscle, humped up in the middle by its own force; its roar, crammed with variations too quick for the ear to catch, makes thinking difficult.
Cal has fished this river maybe a hundred times, by himself or with Trey, when they’re in need of peace—the river, if it’s in the mood, can come up with a couple of perch at any time of year.
He has a hard time imagining ever fishing it again.
He starts searching, beginning at the bridge and working his way back along the path Rachel would have taken to get there.
He shoulders through snarls of branches, shines his phone light into bushes, gropes in tree-trunk holes, rakes up layers of dead leaves with his hands, hunting for an antifreeze container or a note or a message carved on a tree or whatever the fuck.
He’s aware that he looks like a crazy man, crashing through brush, down on his knees among the creepers wrist-deep in muck with twigs in his hair and scratches on his face, but the thought only makes him work harder.
He ends up with a disintegrating cigarette packet, a bedraggled fishing lure, and a little kid’s rubber boot. Rip, trying to help, rustles around in the undergrowth and digs out a chewed-looking tennis ball. A rich smell of rot rises from beneath the raked-up leaves.
The light through the branches has been dimming, so gradually that Cal didn’t notice until he finds himself standing, breathing hard, in half-darkness.
His fingernails are broken and his feet are numb with cold.
All around him and high above his head, everything is as still as if it’s been frozen in place; anything alive in there is watching him.
Only the river keeps endlessly charging on.
Pushing his body this hard has cleared his mind.
It comes to him, for the first time, that Tommy shouldn’t be doing this.
Siccing the inspector on the Reddys and Garda Dennis on Cal, sure.
But Tommy should be aiming to move people on from Rachel as fast as he can, not stir them up even more.
If Tommy is pushing a brand-new high-scandal story to explain why Rachel died, it’s because there’s something he needs it to paper over; something he’s afraid Lena might have dug up, while she was asking questions.
For the first time Cal thinks, as a plain clear statement rather than as a flicker to be brushed off: Tommy killed Rachel Holohan.
He feels like a part of him has been waiting for this ever since Mart’s phone call.
The cop in him said suicide; it was straightforward, it all added up.
But somewhere along the way, the patterns of Ardnakelty, strange intricate weaves invisible or meaningless to any outsider, have embedded themselves in his mind, twisting through the neat cop-think grids.
He felt the snag in the pattern, the web tugging around it, and he knew.
If he had a badge and an interview room and a tech department at his disposal, he has no doubt that he could slap a pair of handcuffs on Tommy before Christmas. But he’s not a cop any more. The part of his mind reaching for cuffs and badges is a vestigial thing.
Tommy may not have done it himself. Tommy operates at a CEO’s remove from the manual labor; he could have delegated the messy stuff. Regardless, this is his work.
Cal needs to find out what the hell Tommy is playing at that would give him a motive to feed young girls antifreeze, but there’s no one to ask.
Noreen and Mart between them know everything around here, but neither of them knows this.
Tommy is running his game on some level to which they have no access.
What Cal wants to do is waylay Eugene and beat the tar out of the little shitbird till he comes clean, and maybe for a while after that. If he does it, he’ll come home to Child Services on his doorstep, Trey will come home to an eviction notice, and God only knows what Lena will come home to.
Rip, uneasy, nudges his nose into Cal’s hand. “Yeah,” Cal says, taking a breath. He rubs Rip’s ears. “Good boy. Let’s go home.”
They start walking, their feet sinking into the wet leaves.
Cal is going to have to talk to Lena. She has a right to know this. He badly wanted to have something more to offer her, some answers or a plan or some kind of hope, before he dumped this reeking mess in her lap.