The Hunter

Trey has stopped moving again. She’s staring Lena out of it, unconvinced. “Then why’s everyone saying you are?”

“Because I told them so. I was trying to get the place off Cal’s back. It woulda worked, only for you setting Nealon on them, getting them all stirred up.”

Trey shuts her mouth. She walks on more slowly, her eyes down, thinking. Insects buzz and zip in the heather around them.

“If we hadda been getting married,” Lena says, “do you not think you’da heard about it before Noreen did?”

Trey glances up sharply at that. Then she goes back to trudging along, scuffing up dust with the toes of her runners. Her silence this time has lost its quality of stubborn resistance; all her mind is on working this through.

“I was an eejit,” she says gruffly, in the end. “Thinking ye were getting married, like. Not the rest.”

“You’re all right,” Lena says. “Everyone’s an eejit now and then. Now’s not the moment for it, but.”

Trey goes back to her silence. Lena lets her have all she needs. Things are shifting in the layers of Trey’s mind: plates grating across each other, crushing old things and heaving new ones to the surface, faster and more painfully than they should have. There’s nothing Lena can do about that; it’s a demand of the circumstances and the place, neither of which has any truck with mercy. All she can do is give Trey these few minutes to get her bearings amid her new landscape.

Trey asks, “How’d you know it was me that said it to Nealon? About men on the mountain that night?”

“Cal. And he said it was a load of shite.”

“He knew I made it up?”

“He did, yeah.”

“Then how come he didn’t say it to me? Or to Nealon?”

“He reckoned,” Lena says, “God help us all, that it was your choice to make. Not his.”

Trey digests that for another while. “He know you were coming here?”

“No,” Lena says. “I don’t know whether he’da argued with me or not. I’da come either way. You’ve a right to know what you’re in.”

Trey nods. That much, at least, she agrees with.

“I don’t blame you for wanting revenge,” Lena says. “But you haveta take into account where it’ll lead, whether you like it or not. That’s what I mean when I tell you not to act like a child. Children don’t take things into account. Adults have no choice.”

“My dad doesn’t,” Trey says. “Take into account where things’ll lead.”

“Right,” Lena says. “Your dad’s not what I’d call an adult.”

Trey turns her face upwards. This high on the mountainside, what’s around them is mostly sky, with a wide rim of heather that gives the air a wild, expansive sweetness. A hawk, tilting on currents, is only a flick of black against the blue.

“I had every right,” she says. A deep note of sadness weighs down her voice. “To get back at them. Whatever way I could.”

“Yeah,” Lena says. She understands that she’s won. “You did.”

“It was going great,” Trey says. “I done everything right. It woulda been good. And then some fucker went and kilt Rushborough, and ruint it all.”

Something in the way her head falls back, the skid of her eyes across the sky, looks like she’s worn too thin: she’s done too much trying, come too long a road, she’s relinquishing too much. Lena doesn’t regret asking it of her, but she wishes with all her heart that she could drive Trey straight to Cal’s and send the pair of them out to get a rabbit for dinner, instead of bringing her into town and aiming her into a detective’s hands. She wishes, for the thousandth time, that Johnny Reddy had never come home.

“I know,” she says. “I reckon you’re better off this way, myself, but I can see where you’d be pure pissed off.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “Well.”

Lena finds herself grinning. “What?” Trey demands, instantly prickly.

“Nothing. You sound like Cal, is all.”

“Huh,” Trey says, the way Cal says it, and the two of them actually laugh.

—

Trey—settled in the back office of the shabby little Garda station with a Coke and a packet of crisps, in front of a chewed-looking MDF desk with a discreet voice recorder in one corner—plays a blinder. Lena, tucked away on a lopsided chair beside a filing cabinet, is watching for missteps, ready to shift in her chair as a warning, but there’s no need. She didn’t really expect there to be. When she asked Trey to do this, she didn’t overlook the fact that the undertaking would spook many a grown adult. She’s also aware that Cal would never have asked such a thing of Trey, who he feels has already dealt with more than enough in her life. Lena thinks differently. In her view, Trey’s hard-edged childhood has left her capable of more than the average kid her age. If she makes use of that when it’s needed, then at least all she’s been through has a point to it.