I didn’t move. “It’s almost dark.”
“We’d best make a fire then.” He stood, tried to look cheerful. “Well, now, hmm, I’m no expert but that looks like a fire pit, and this, over here, is no doubt firewood. If I put this in here, then—”
I took the hickory log from him. “Kindling first.”
“And where would I find that?”
“You make it.”
“I see. And how do I go about doing that?”
His forehead glistened. He knew me, what I might do if he pushed too hard. Something was so important to him that he thought it worth the risk; I would have to hurt him or listen. Briefly, I hated him. “Bring the bottle.”
Inside the trailer, I turned on lights and opened cupboards.
“Well, would you look at this! You do yourself proud.” He ventured in, patted the oak cabinets and admired the Italian leather upholstery, then stepped through the galley to the dining area. “A satellite television!” He pushed buttons. “It doesn’t work.” I had never bothered to connect it. “And a real bathroom.” The trailer, a fifth-wheel rig, was a treasure trove of hidden, high-tech delights. I let him wander about while I assembled plates, bowls, cutlery. “I had no idea these things could be such little palaces,” he said when he came back. “There’s even a queen bed.”
After five months of solitude, his prattle was almost unbearable. I handed him a chopping board and knife, and he frowned.
“So where’s the food?”
I picked up a cast-iron pot. “Bring that flashlight.”
“There’s no electricity?”
Only when I ran the generator, and I preferred the peace and quiet. He followed me to the water pump, where I handed him the pot. “Fill this. Less than a third.”
While he pumped inexpertly I jerked the hatchet from the chopping stump, split the hickory into kindling, and carried it to the fire pit. Beneath the ash, the embers were sluggish. I blew them to a glow. When the kindling caught I added a couple of logs and went to the bearproof hogpen to get the food. The sky was now bloody, the trees behind us to the north and east a soft black wall.
Dornan handed me the pot and I hung it over the fire.
“Pumping’s thirsty work,” he said, and uncorked the bottle. He drank and gave it to me. The poteen smoked in my mouth and burned my gullet. I shuddered. We passed the bottle back and forth until the water came to a boil. My forebrain felt strange, as though someone were squeezing it. I added rice, and opened plastic tubs of sun-dried tomatoes, green olives, olive oil, and cashew nuts.
“No meat I see.”
“You’re the café owner. Next time call ahead.”
“I tried. Do you even know where your phone is?”
It was around somewhere, battery long dead. The fire burned hotter. I drank more whiskey. When the rice was done I handed him the slotted spoon. “Scoop the rice into the big bowl. Don’t throw away the water. It’s good to drink cold.”
He gave me a sideways look but spooned in silence. Sudden squealing from under the trees made him jump. “Mother of god!”
“Wild pigs,” I said. The rice he had spilt in the fire hissed and popped.
“Would they be dangerous?”
“Not to us.”
He handed me a bowl of rice. I added the dried ingredients and olives, a little oil, and salt and pepper.
We sat on the log side by side and ate quietly while the sky darkened from dull red to indigo. Firelight gleamed on my fork and, later, when we set the plates aside, on the bottle as we passed it back and forth. I rubbed the scar that ran from my left shoulder blade and along the underside of my arm to the elbow.
“Still hurt?”
Only inside. “Tell me why you came, Dornan.”
He turned the bottle in his hands, around and around. “It’s Tammy. She’s missing. I want you to find her.”
He had disturbed me for this. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
“I think she’s in trouble.”
Overhead, the first star popped out, as though someone had poked a hole in a screen.
“Now, look, I’m not a fool. I know you’re hiding up here, eating this, this rabbit food, because you want to be left alone. But I’ve tried everything, phoned everyone: police, family, her friends”—Tammy didn’t have friends, only male lovers and female competition—“and I’ve nowhere else to turn.”
His face was drawn, with deep lines etched on either side of his mouth, but I turned away. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to care. Stay in the world, Aud, Julia had said from that metal bed in that white room.
“It started in July. Tammy changed jobs, left those engineers she was doing business development for and joined some new outfit. Something to do with shopping complexes.”
Stay alive inside. Promise me. And I had promised, but I didn’t know how.
“So off she goes down to Naples, Florida, to talk to some people who are putting in a new mall. Said she’d be gone a week or ten days. Then I get a phone call saying no, it’ll be another three weeks, or four. But just when she should have been coming home, she calls again. From New York. She’s learning a lot, she says, and she’s decided to spend a bit of time in New York learning firsthand from the consultant who was advising the Naples group. His name is Geordie Karp. He’s one of those psychologists that study shoppers and shopping. You know: how to design the front display to get shoppers inside, where to put what so they’ll buy it.”
He waited. When I said nothing, he sighed.
“She called at the beginning of August, and she sounded happy. So now you’re probably thinking: Tammy met someone and decided to leave me. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time she’s seen other men, would it? No, you don’t have to answer that.”
The bottle in his hands turned round and round.
“The thing is, you see, I know Tammy; I know who she is, what she’s like. I know you don’t like her, and you’re not the only one. But I love her anyway. Maybe I’m a foolish man, but there it is. So I gave her the ring. I can’t help hoping that one day she’ll look at that ring, she’ll recall I have money in the bank and I’ve promised to take care of her, and love her, and she’ll think, You know, maybe Dornan isn’t so bad, and she’ll come home and marry me.”
He drank, wiped his mouth, remembered me and passed the bottle.
“She was so happy when she called. Do you know what that’s like? That she was happy with someone else? But I’ve been through it before—she drops them as quickly as she picks them up, and she always comes home. But it’s different this time—never lasted as long before, for one thing. For another, she didn’t give me an address, or a phone number. And she hasn’t called again. It’s been two months. That’s not like her.”
Dornan’s voice was an irritant. The need to push him away was becoming harder to ignore.
“I tried directory assistance. Unlisted, they said. So I went to the police. They wouldn’t help me: they don’t have the time to go chasing down every woman who leaves her boyfriend.”
I drank some more. Irish whiskey, even the illegal kind, has a rough beginning but a smooth end, quite unlike most Scotch whiskeys. Which would Julia have preferred?
“Those first few weeks in Florida she couldn’t stop talking about this Geordie Karp and his bloody mall. ‘Geordie this, Geordie that.’ You’d have thought he was god himself. On and on, then nothing.”
I should really put some more wood on the fire.
“This silence isn’t like her. Something’s happened. I just don’t know what.” He ran a hand through his hair. Waited. “Well, say something.”
I added a log, pinewood that spat as the resin ignited. The flames burned more yellow.