“Kid’s not much of a talker, all right,” Cal says. “She lets me know she’s hungry, now and again.”

“Send her packing,” Mart says. There’s a finality to his voice that makes Cal look at him. “Give her the few bob, tell her you won’t be needing her no more.”

Cal opens his kill bag and scoops up a couple of perch. “I might do that,” he says. “How many would Malachy eat? He got a family?”

Mart hits the door with his crook, making a raw whack that echoes startlingly loudly in the half-bare room. “Listen to me, man. I’m looking out for you. If this place finds out Theresa Reddy’s hanging round here, people’ll talk. I’ll tell them you’re a sound man, and I’ll tell them you thought she was a young fella, but there’s only so far they’ll listen to me. I don’t want to see you bet up, or burned out of it.”

Cal says, “You told me I didn’t need to worry my head about crime round here.”

“You don’t. Not unless you go asking for it.”

“You afraid you’re gonna lose your twenty bucks?” Cal asks, but Mart doesn’t smile.

“What about the child? D’you want the townland talking about her the way they’ll be talking if they find out?”

This had not occurred to Cal. “She’s a kid learning to be handy,” he says, keeping his voice even. “Is all. If a few dumb fucks would rather she was out on the streets making trouble—”

“She’ll be on the streets all right, if you don’t get sense. They’ll have her hunted out of here by Christmas. Where d’you think she’ll go?”

“For fixing a desk and frying a rabbit? What the hell—”

“You’ll give me blood pressure, so you will,” Mart says. “Honest to God. Or palpitations. Would ye Yanks not learn to listen once in a while, so everyone around ye can have some fuckin’ peace of mind?”

“Here you go,” Cal says, handing over the Ziploc. “My compliments to Malachy.”

Mart takes the bag, but he doesn’t move to leave. “The other reason I voted for the marriage yoke,” he says. “My brother was gay. Not Seamus, that lived here with me; the other fella. Eamonn. It was against the law, back when we were young. He went off to America because of it, in the end. I asked him would he not join the priesthood instead. Sure, they could do what they liked, and no one would say boo to them; I’d say half of them were riding the arse off each other. But Eamonn was having none of it. He hated all them bastards. So off he went. That was thirty year ago. Never heard another word out of him.”

“You try Facebook?” Cal asks. He’s not sure where this is going.

“I did. There’s a few Eamonn Lavins on there. One’s got no photo or nothing, so I sent him a message, just in case. He never got back to me, either way.” Kojak is sniffing at the bag. Mart palms his nose away. “I thought maybe once we got the gay marriage, he’d come home, if he’s alive. But he never did.”

“He might yet,” Cal says. “You never know.”

“He won’t,” Mart says. “I had it wrong. ’Twasn’t the laws that were the problem.” He looks out over the fields, at the pink sky. “It’s a hard aul’ place, this. The finest place in the world, and wild horses wouldn’t drag me out of it. But it’s not gentle. And if Theresa Reddy doesn’t know that by now, she’ll learn soon enough.”

SIXTEEN

What with one thing and another, Cal has been neglecting some stuff: the rooks, for example, and his daily walks around the countryside, and that desk. When he sees the morning—pristine in the sharp autumn sunlight, cold enough to chill his palate with each breath—he figures this is as good a time as any to get back to them. They’ll keep him outdoors, which is where he wants to be when Trey comes around. And he needs to herd his mind off its dusty old detective trail, back to the pretty, scenic one he was thoroughly enjoying until the kid showed up smack in the middle of it.

He starts by walking his legs sore. After that he moves on to the rooks, who have been surveilling him for long enough that they ought to be comfortable with him by now. Alyssa used to have some book about kids who had done surprising things, among them a little girl who had made friends with a crow. There were photos of the presents the crow would bring her: candy wrappers, car keys, broken earrings and Lego figurines. Alyssa spent months trying to strike up a relationship with their neighborhood pigeons, who as far as Cal could tell were too dumb even to identify her as a living creature rather than a weird-shaped food dispenser. He would really like to send her a photo of some rooks bringing him presents.

He lays out a handful of strawberries on the stump, and then a trail of them leading from the stump to the back step, where he sits down to wait. The rooks tumble down from their tree, bicker over the stumpful, get halfway along the trail, then give Cal a collective eye-roll and head back to their business.

Cal tries to find his patience, but it appears to have gone missing somewhere along the way, and the step is cold. After nowhere near enough time, he decides the rooks can fuck themselves, and goes inside to fetch the desk and his tools. By the time he comes back outdoors, every strawberry is gone, and the rooks are back in their tree laughing their asses off at him.

The desk still has tricky deposits of white paint in crevices, and Trey cracked another shelf when she went at it. Disentangling the broken shelf from all the rest looks like a pain in the rear end, so Cal goes at the paint with a toothbrush and a cup of soapy water, a job that starts to irritate him almost immediately. Despite not having touched a drop of booze yesterday, he has the same feeling he associates with hangovers, a heavy, prickly disinclination towards everything around him. He wants today over and done with.

He gives up on the paint, wrangles the shelf loose and starts tracing its outline on a fresh piece of wood. He’s finishing up when he hears the swish of feet through the grass.

The kid looks the same as always, all ratty parka and unyielding stare. Cal can’t see a girl there. For all he knows, she has bosoms of some degree, but he never had any occasion to examine that area in detail before and there’s no way in hell he’s going to do it now. It occurs to him that one reason he’s pissed off with Trey is because he would have liked at least one person around this damn place to be exactly what they seem.

“I went to school,” she informs him.

“Congratulations,” Cal says. “I’m impressed.”

The kid doesn’t smile. “You talk to Donie?”

“Come here,” Cal says. “Let’s get this fixed up. You wanna do the sawing?”

Trey stands still for another moment, looking at him. Then she nods and comes tramping across the grass.