The Hunter

Trey says, “Why Rushborough? Why not my dad?”

“I married your daddy. I made him promises. Rushborough was nothing to me.”

“You shoulda gone for my dad. He was the one that brought Rushborough.”

Sheila flicks her head, dismissing that. “That woulda been a sin,” she says. “I’da done it if I had to, but there was no need. Rushborough was good enough. I mighta done different if I’da known you were going to come up with that loada shite about men up the mountain, maybe. I don’t know.”

She considers this for a moment, chewing, and shrugs. “What stopped me at first,” she says, “was the little ones. Cal would take you, if I went to prison, but he couldn’t take the lotta ye; he wouldn’t be let. I wasn’t having them go into care, and I wasn’t having your sister give up the life she’s made in Dublin and come back here to look after them. I was stuck.”

Trey thinks of the last weeks, her mam cutting potatoes and ironing her dad’s shirts and washing Alanna’s hair, and all the time steadily working at this. The house was nothing like Trey thought.

“Only then,” Sheila says, “Lena Dunne came here telling me she’d take us in. The lot of us. She’s the last woman I’da expected that out of, but Lena was always a woman of her word. If I hadda been taken for this, she’da had the little ones till I could come back for them.”

Trey sees Cal solid beside her at his kitchen table, while she lied her arse off to the detective. The thought of him has such force that for a second she can smell him, wood shavings and beeswax. She says, “And me. Cal wouldn’t want me.”

Sheila says, with no sharpness but with finality, “He’d do what needs doing. Same as I done.” She smiles across the table at Trey, just a small flicker and a nod of approval. “No need now, anyhow. Not after what you said to the Guards. They’ll take your da, if he comes back here. If he doesn’t, they’ll go after him.”

Trey says, “They’ll be able to tell it was you. Not him.”

“How?”

“Cal told me. They have people that look for evidence. Match things up.”

Sheila swipes a dab of jam off her plate and licks her finger. “Then they’ll take me,” she says. “I thought they would anyhow.”

Trey’s mind is moving again, gaining a steady, cold momentum that feels beyond her control, ticking through the things Cal said. If there’s Sheila’s hair and fibers from her clothes on Rushborough’s body, those can be explained away; they could have come off Johnny. The wandering sheep trampled her footprints.

She says, “How’d you do it?”

“I called the man,” Sheila says, “and he came. Not a bother on him. He never saw me there, either.”

Cal said the Guards would check Rushborough’s phone. “Called him when? Offa your phone?”

Sheila is watching her. The look in her eyes is strange, almost like wonder; for a second Trey thinks she’s smiling.

“The same night I done it,” she says. “Once your daddy was asleep. Off your daddy’s phone, in case your man wouldn’t answer a number he didn’t know. I told him I’d money saved, only I didn’t wanta tell your daddy or he’d take it all off me. But your man Rushborough could have it, if he’d leave this place and take your daddy with him.”

She thinks back, biting a crust. “He laughed at me,” she says. “He said your daddy owed him twenty grand, and did I have that saved outa my dole? I told him I’d fifteen that my granny left me, and I’d been keeping it for you to go to college. He stopped laughing then. He said that’d do, it’d be worth leaving the other five to get outa this shitpit, and he’d take the rest outa your daddy one way or another. He talked different,” she adds. “He didn’t bother with the posh accent for me.”

Trey says, “Where’d you meet him?”

“Out at the gate. I brought him up to the shed—I said the money was hid there. I’d the hammer in the pocket of my hoodie. I said the money was in that aul’ toolbox on the shelf, and when he bent down to get it, I hit him. I done it in the shed in case he shouted or fought, but he went down easy as that. That big bad bastard that had your daddy terrified: not a peep outa him.”

If Rushborough didn’t fight, then there’s none of Sheila’s blood on him, no trace of her skin under his nails. His body, somewhere beyond reach in Nealon’s hands, is harmless.

“I’d put the kitchen knife ready in the shed,” Sheila says. “That sharp one that we’d use for the meat. Once he was dead, I got him in the wheelbarrow and brought him down the road.” She examines the last crust of her toast, thinking. “I felt like there was someone watching me,” she says. “I’d say ’twas Malachy Dwyer, or Seán Pól maybe. Them sheep didn’t let themselves out.”

“You coulda thrown your man down the ravine,” Trey says.

“What good would he have done there? I needed your daddy knowing he was dead, so he’d go. I woulda left him on the doorstep, only I didn’t want ye seeing him.”

Sheila wipes the last of the jam off her plate with the crust. “And that was the end of it,” she says. “I done right by you then, even if I never did before. That time, I done what you needed.”