Chapter Eighteen #5
“How were you supposed to know?” Julie demands, leaning across the table to squeeze Yvonne’s arm. “And sure, it probably wasn’t even her.”
Yvonne shakes her head. “No, it was her. I couldn’t swear to it in court or anything, but I’m sure in my own head.”
It was Rachel; and Lena, who knows how Rachel was spending her evening, knows what she was doing there.
She didn’t miss Ella, or Noreen. She deliberately waited till she knew they weren’t home, and left her car behind so no one would see it outside the door.
When neither Lena nor Sheila gave her what she needed, Rachel went to see Mrs. Duggan, looking for something that would stop the Moynihans, and then she died.
“Only now,” Yvonne says to Lena, “if your Cal thinks Tommy done something…He was a detective, sure; he’d see clues where we wouldn’t notice them. It could mean something to him, Rachel being there.”
“Yeah,” Lena says. “It could, I suppose.” Cal would find some use for that, all right, or Mart Lavin would once Cal turned it over to him. Deep down, Mart is no different from Tommy, doing whatever it takes to get his way, using anything or anyone he can get his hands on.
“I don’t know him well enough to turn up on his doorstep—I’ve barely even talked to him, only ‘God, it’s awful rainy, isn’t it?’ down in Noreen’s. He wouldn’t know whether I’m reliable or whether I’m Doireann Cunniffe, like, making up bollocks to be important. Would you say it to him?”
Out of nowhere, Lena finds her hands shaking with rage.
“The girl’s dead,” she says. “Can no one even leave her that? She was meant to have a whole life, and that’s been taken off her.
Her death is all she’s got left. And here’s Tommy Moynihan trying to rob it off her to use for his land deals, and Mart Lavin wanting it for himself so he can scupper Tommy’s plans.
And I was as bad, wanting it to use for Trey. ”
Yvonne’s eyebrows are up in surprise; Julie’s face is puckered with unhappy bewilderment.
Lena can’t tell if she’s making sense, or if the gin’s taken over, or if Tommy has got to her and her mind is gone.
She’s seeing the bodies, leathered and twisted by thousands of years, that turf-cutters find in the bog a few times a century.
They come up hands tied, hearts stabbed, heads split, ropes or willow rods still round their necks from when their deaths were offered in exchange for a good harvest, an end to plague, victory in battle, some communal need long forgotten and gone.
Since before history started, this place has never changed.
“I’m saying nothing about Rachel to anyone,” she says. “I’m leaving her be.” If any of them hint that she owes them a hand, that she’s being ungrateful, she’ll throw them all out of her house and take her chances with Tommy and Breege and the shotgun.
“Right,” Yvonne says, after a second. Her eyebrows are still up. “If I’da known it was this big a deal, I wouldn’t’ve asked.” She takes a sip of her drink.
“If Tommy Moynihan kilt me,” Julie says tentatively, “I’d love if someone used that to get him.”
“That’s you,” Lena says. “It wouldn’t be me. And it mightn’t be Rachel. I’ve no way of knowing. None of us do.”
“Being blunt about it,” Yvonne says, “it’s not like you can do her any damage either way.”
The wall of incomprehension on her face and on Julie’s makes Lena’s anger rise higher. She looks to Sheila for backup. If anyone should be on her side here, it’s Sheila.
“When Johnny needed stopping,” Sheila says, “I done it. A child woulda sat there saying she wouldn’t do it ’cause it’d upset her feelings. Or a man, maybe. We’re grown women.”
“No,” Lena says. “That’s not the same. Johnny was your man. Tommy Moynihan isn’t my problem. You said you’d never lift a finger, remember? You said themens could look after themselves.”
“I did, yeah,” Sheila agrees. “Only then Tommy went after you, and Trey started going on at me, and look at me now.”
“I never fuckin’ asked for any of this,” Lena says. Her voice is rising. “All I ever wanted was to be left to mind my own fuckin’ business.”
Sheila shrugs. “I know, yeah. You’re here now, but.”
Lena comes up against that hard enough to jolt her right out of her anger. She stares at Sheila. Sheila looks back, eating cake, her blue eyes untroubled.
Lena feels like the room has gathered itself together, given itself a shake, and thumped into solidity.
This isn’t a fairy-tale haven. The warm glow of it is real, and so is everything else it carries, the ties and the weights.
No one dragged her here. By whatever strange knotted route, this is where she’s come to.
“Right,” she says, after a minute. “Right; fair enough. I’ll tell Cal.”
Things are rearranging themselves in ways that are going to take her a while to absorb.
This should feel like defeat, but it doesn’t.
It only feels like a change, as matter-of-fact as the changes in the season or in her own body.
She thinks she might be starting to understand, only a small bit, how Trey can live here.
“Great,” Yvonne says briskly. “Thanks. It’s probably nothing, anyhow, but just in case.
” She reaches for the gin bottle to top up Lena’s glass.
“And while we’re here,” she says, “we’ve a ton of catching up to do.
Noah has my fuckin’ head melted, and if I don’t get it off my chest I’ll have a stroke or an aneurysm or something, so ye can listen whether ye like it or not. ”
“Oh Jesus,” Julie says, her face scrunching up in sympathy. “Did he get another detention?”
“They’re not human beings at that age,” Yvonne says.
“Honest to God, they’re not. They’re bloody—baboons or something.
The school rings me up, right, and says they caught him sniffing glue—” Julie claps a hand to her mouth.
“No, hang on. So I’m practically having a panic attack, I’m picturing him expelled, brain damage, rehab, the lot.
Only then I say, stupid question but I’m freaking out enough that I don’t even know what’s coming outa my mouth, I say, ‘What kinda glue?’ And the teacher says”—Yvonne shuts her eyes for a second before she can make herself come out with it—“ ‘Pritt stick.’ The little gobshite was picking bits off his glue stick and snorting them up his nose.”
All four of them burst out laughing. “Why?” Julie wants to know.
“Don’t ask me. Maybe he heard about glue-sniffing and he wanted to look like a hard man for the other lads, or maybe he was just bored. Now he’s not allowed have glue any more, he has to ask the teacher if he needs some, and they’re all calling him Sticky.”
“He’ll never shake that,” Sheila says. “He’ll be Sticky McCabe when he’s eighty.”
“I know, yeah. You might even say he’s stuck with it.”
“Speaking of kids,” Lena says to Sheila, through the laughter. “The cake’s gorgeous.”
Once the rain clears, Cal climbs over the wall to Mart’s place.
Mart is in his near field, replacing the ballcock on a water trough, observed by a clump of mildly interested sheep.
“Jean-Claude,” he says, raising his head to nod to Cal.
“I hear your car was loitering on the Kilhone road this morning. Tell us: did it go for a stroll all on its ownio, or didja have business there?”
Cal updates him. Mart doesn’t stop working, but his eyebrows do go up once or twice.
“Wouldn’t that warm your heart,” he says, when Cal’s finished.
“The young one following in your footsteps, like a wee duckling.” He tightens the ballcock another fraction and considers it, head on one side.
He’s used what looks like a worn-out grinder disc for a washer.
“What’s your guess?” he inquires. “Will the bold Eugene hand over the goods?”
“Maybe,” Cal says, “or maybe he’ll go running to Daddy. Or both, if he runs to Daddy and doesn’t like what he hears. Either way, we’re gonna get some movement.”
Mart glances up and smiles at Cal. “I’d say we’ll get that, all right,” he agrees. “Sure, isn’t that what we were looking for? The aul’ movement.”
“You got any thoughts on what kinda thing we should be watching out for?” Cal asks.
Mart examines his handiwork and gives the ballcock an experimental wiggle. “D’you know what Senan reckons?” he says. “He reckons that stylish hairdo of Tommy’s is a toupee. Would you say he’s right?”
“Can’t say I ever had the urge to look that close,” Cal says. He gathers that he’s not getting an answer.
“I’m not in favor of the notion,” Mart says. “ ’Twould be awful hard on the aul’ self-esteem, to find out I spent all this time tiptoeing around some gowl with a dead hamster stuck to his head. I won’t believe it unless I’ve proof. Could your Theresa put that next on her list to investigate?”
Before it gets dark, Cal bites the bullet, gets in his car, and drives over to Lena’s.
His reluctance doesn’t matter any more: he’s poked the bear good and hard, and he has no way of guessing what Tommy might come up with in response.
He’s not sure what he’s planning to do at Lena’s—even if she opens the door to him, he can’t imagine she’ll agree to come over to the safety of his place—but at least she should have some warning about what they’re dealing with, and the offer of company while they wait for it to come knocking.
It turns out Lena already has company. There are two extra cars in her front yard: Sheila Reddy’s beat-up silver Hyundai, and a red seven-seater that Cal recognizes as Yvonne McCabe’s.
Maybe Sheila and Yvonne are bringing Lena up to speed, or maybe they have some crucial piece of info to pass on, or maybe she just feels like shooting the breeze with them.
Regardless, Cal is clearly surplus to requirements.
He keeps driving, and hopes no one happened to be looking out the window to see him pass.