It takes Sheila a long time to come to the door. She holds it a foot open and looks at Cal through the gap. He can’t tell whether she recognizes him. From somewhere inside the house comes faint, bright cartoon laughter.
“Afternoon, Miz Reddy,” he says, staying well back. “Cal Hooper, who you helped out with dry socks a couple of days back, remember?”
She keeps looking at him. This time the wariness doesn’t dissolve.
“I brought you these,” he says, holding out the socks. “With my thanks.”
That brings a spark of life into Sheila’s eyes. “I don’t need them. I’m not so poor that I can’t afford to give away a pair of old socks.”
Cal, taken aback, ducks his head and shifts his feet on the step. “Miz Reddy,” he says, “I didn’t intend to give any offense. You saved me a long wet walk home, and I was raised not to be ungrateful. My gramma would sit up in her grave to yell at me if I didn’t bring you these.”
After a moment the resentment fades and she looks away. “You’re grand,” she says. “Just . . .”
Cal waits, still abashed.
“I’ve the children. I can’t be letting strange men call round.”
When Cal lifts his head, startled and affronted, she says almost angrily, “It’s nothing to do with you. People are fierce talkers, round here. I can’t give them an excuse to say worse about me than they already do.”
“Well,” Cal says, still being a little miffed, “I apologize. I don’t mean to cause you any trouble. I’ll get out of your hair.”
He holds out the socks again, but Sheila doesn’t take them. For a moment he thinks she’s going to say something more, but then she nods and starts to close the door.
Cal says, “You hear anything from your boy Brendan?”
The flash of fear in Sheila’s eyes tells him what he was looking to know. Sheila’s been warned, too.
“Brendan’s grand,” she says.
“If you do,” Cal says, “you might let Caroline Horan know,” but before he’s finished the sentence, Sheila has shut the door in his face.
On his way home Cal drops off the cookies at Mart’s place, as a thank-you for last night and an indication that he spent today behaving himself. Mart is sitting on his front step, watching the world go by and brushing Kojak.
“How’s the head?” he inquires, shoving Kojak’s nose away from the cookies. He looks perky as ever, although he could do with a shave.
“Not as bad as I expected,” Cal says. “How ’bout you?”
Mart throws him a wink and a finger-point. “Ah, you see, now, that’s why we love Malachy. His stuff’s pure as holy water. It’s the impurities that’ll destroy you.”
“Here I thought it was the alcohol,” Cal says, rubbing behind Kojak’s ears.
“Not at all. I could drink a bottle of Malachy’s finest, get up in the morning and do a day’s work. But I’ve a cousin over the other side of the mountains, I wouldn’t touch his stuff with a ten-foot pole. The hangover’d last till Christmas. He does always be inviting me to call in for a wee drop, and I’ve to find a new excuse every time. It’s a social minefield, so ’tis.”
“P.J. see anything last night?” Cal asks.
“Not a sausage,” Mart says. He pulls a fluff of fur out of the bristles and tosses it onto the grass.
Cal says, “That guy Donie McGrath isn’t too fond of you right now.”
Mart stares at him for a second and then bursts into high-pitched giggles. “Holy God,” he says, “you’ll be the death of me. Are you talking about that wee kerfuffle in the pub? If Donie McGrath went around killing sheep on every man who put him back in his box, he’d never get a night’s sleep. He hasn’t got the work ethic for it.”
“P.J. put him back in his box lately?” Cal inquires. “Or Bobby Feeney?”
“If it’s not one thing with you, Sunny Jim, it’s another,” Mart says, shaking his head. “Never mind that telescope; what you need is a game of Cluedo. I’ll buy you one myself, and you can bring it down to Seán Óg’s for us all to play.” He gets rid of the last of his giggles and snaps his fingers for Kojak to come back to the brush. “Will you be in tonight, for a straightener?”
“Nah,” Cal says. “I gotta recover.” He doesn’t feel any desire to go to Seán Óg’s, tonight or in general. He always liked the glint and speed of the men there, of their talk and their shifting expressions, but now, when he thinks back, all that looks different: light flashing on a river, with who knows what underneath.
“A fine strong fella like you,” Mart says, more in sorrow than in scorn. “What’s the younger generation coming to, at all?” Cal laughs and heads back to his car, with the pebbles of Mart’s driveway crunching under his feet.
When he gets home, he takes out his notebook and settles himself in the armchair to read through everything he’s got. He needs to order his thoughts. He’s never much liked this phase of an investigation, when things are messy and layered, forking off in multiple directions, and too many of them didn’t actually happen. He hangs in there for the part when, if he’s lucky, he gets to strip away the misty theories and take hold of the solid things hidden among them.
This time the process has a personal quality that he’s not accustomed to. The fear in Sheila’s eyes, and Caroline’s, told him that last night’s warning wasn’t a general caution against being a busybody. It was about Brendan.
Cal would love to know what or who, exactly, he’s supposed to be scared of. Brendan appears to have been frightened of the Guards, and Sheila might well be wary of them either on his behalf or by reflex. But Cal has a hard time finding a reason why Caroline, or Mart, or he himself should be terrified of Garda Dennis, unless the whole townland is up to its neck in some vast criminal enterprise that could be blown sky-high if he goes asking too many questions, which seems unlikely.
The obvious alternative, in that they seem to be the only threat anyone can point to, is the drug boys from Dublin. Cal assumes that, like drug gangs everywhere else, they wouldn’t think twice about getting rid of anyone who caused them inconvenience. If Brendan became inconvenient one way or another, and they disappeared him, they wouldn’t be best pleased about some nosy Yank poking around. The question is how they would know.
Cal feels it’s getting close to time for him to talk to Donie McGrath. Now, at any rate, he has an unimpeachable reason for doing that. Mart knows Cal was feeling protective after the pub argument. It would be only natural for him to go rattle Donie’s cage a little bit about that sheep. That wouldn’t violate last night’s warning; not unless Mart thinks the sheep have something to do with Brendan. Cal is interested to see what happens after he talks to Donie.
He sits with his notebook for a while, looking at the map and considering where Ardnakelty, rightly or wrongly, thinks Brendan has gone, and why.
Outside the window, the clouds are still holding their rain, but the green of the fields is dimming as the light starts to fade. Evening has its own smell here, dense and cool, with a heady tinge of plants and flowers that play no part in the daytime. Cal gets up to turn on the light and put his shopping away.
He was planning to send the woolly sheep to Alyssa, but now he’s not sure whether that would be a dumb idea. She might think he’s treating her like a little kid, and take offense. In the end he unwraps the sheep from its green tissue paper and stands it on his living-room mantelpiece, where it leans wearily to one side and gives him a sad reproachful stare.