The Hunter
(Cal Hooper #2)
by Tana French
Also by Tana French
The Searcher
The Witch Elm
The Trespasser
The Secret Place
Broken Harbor
Faithful Place
The Likeness
In the Woods
For David, who now has to be nice to me forever
One
Trey comes over the mountain carrying a broken chair. She carries it on her back, with the legs sticking out round her waist and held over her shoulders. The sky is a blue so hot it looks glazed, and the sun is burning the back of Trey’s neck. Even the faint pin-sharp calls of birds, too high up to be seen, vibrate with heat. The woman who owns the chair offered Trey a lift back with it, but Trey has no inclination to let the woman into her business, and neither the inclination nor the ability to make conversation for the length of a car journey over the potholed mountain roads.
Her dog Banjo lollops in wide circles off the path, snuffing and burrowing among the thick heather, which is too brown-edged and heavily scented for July. It makes crisp rattling sounds as he pushes through it. Every few minutes he comes bounding back to tell Trey, with small happy puffs and moans, what he’s found. Banjo is a mutt, black and tan, with a beagle’s head and body set on the legs of something stubbier, and he’s a lot more talkative than Trey is. He got his name from a banjo-shaped patch of white on his belly. Trey wanted something better for him, but her mind doesn’t run easily to fancy things, and everything she came up with sounded like what some tosser out of a schoolbook would call a dog. In the end she left it at Banjo. Cal Hooper, the American who lives down near the village, has Banjo’s litter-mate and named him Rip, and if a plain name is good enough for Cal’s dog, it’s good enough for Trey’s. Besides, she spends much of her waking time at Cal’s place, meaning the two dogs spend much of their time together, and it would sound stupid if they didn’t match.
Cal’s place is where Trey is taking the chair, later on. Cal and Trey mend furniture for people, or make it, and they buy old wrecked furniture and fix it up to sell at the Saturday market in Kilcarrow town. One time they picked up a side table that to Trey looked useless, too little and spindly to hold anything worthwhile, but when Cal went on the internet it turned out to be almost two hundred years old. When they got through with it, they sold it for a hundred and eighty quid. The chair Trey is carrying has two stretchers and one leg in splinters, like someone gave it the kind of kicking that takes time and dedication, but once she and Cal get done with it, no one will be able to tell it was ever broken.
She’s going home first, for lunch, because she wants to eat dinner at Cal’s—Trey is growing fast enough, this summer, that she marks out her days mainly in terms of food—and her pride shies from turning up on his doorstep looking for two meals in the one day. She watches her boundaries extra hard because, if she had her wish, she’d live there. Cal’s place has peace. As far up the mountain as Trey’s house is, and as far from any other, it ought to be peaceful enough, but it crowds her. Her oldest brother and sister are gone, but Liam and Alanna are six and five and are mostly yelling for one reason or another, and Maeve is eleven and is mostly complaining and slamming the door of the room she shares with Trey. Even when they accidentally go a few minutes without making a racket, the buzz of them is always there. Their mam is silent, but it’s not a silence with peace in it. It takes up space, like some heavy thing made of rusted iron built around her. Lena Dunne, who lives down below the mountains and who gave Trey the dog, says her mam used to be a talker, and a laugher too. Trey doesn’t disbelieve her, exactly, but she finds the image inaccessible.
Banjo explodes out of the heather, delighted with himself, carrying something that Trey can smell coming a mile off. “Drop it,” she orders. Banjo gives her a reproachful look, but he’s well trained; he drops the thing, which hits the path with a sodden flop. It’s narrow and dark, a young stoat maybe. “Good dog,” Trey says, taking a hand off the chair to rub his head, but Banjo isn’t mollified. Instead of galloping off again, he trudges along beside her, drooping at both ends, to show her his feelings are hurt. Cal calls Banjo a big old baby. Rip is the kind of scrapper who could get a leg chopped off and keep on coming, but Banjo likes people to appreciate his suffering.
The downward slope gets steep in places, but Trey’s legs are accustomed to this mountain, and she keeps her stride. Her runners raise small spurts of dust. She lifts her elbows to let the air dry her armpits, but there’s not enough breeze to make a difference. Below her, the fields sprawl out, a mosaic of varying greens in odd-angled shapes that Trey knows as well as the cracks on her bedroom ceiling. The haymaking is underway: tiny baling machines trundle back and forth, deftly tracking the unexplained curves of the stone walls and leaving yellow cylinders in their wake like droppings. The lambs are white scraps skittering across the grass.
She cuts off the path, over a drystone wall tumbledown enough that she doesn’t have to help Banjo clamber it, across an expanse of thigh-high gnarled weeds that used to be a field once, and into a thick band of spruce trees. The branches sift and scramble the sunlight into a confusing dazzle, and their shade cools her neck. Above her small birds are drunk on summer, zipping back and forth, all trying to be the loudest. Trey whistles a trill up at them and grins when they freeze into silence, trying to figure her out.
She comes out of the trees to the cleared ground behind her house. The house got a fresh coat of butter-colored paint and some patches to the roof a couple of years back, but nothing can paper over its air of exhaustion. Its spine sags, and the lines of the window frames splay off-kilter. The yard is weeds and dust, blurring into the mountainside at the edges, scattered with things Liam and Alanna were using for toys. Trey has brought each of her school friends here once, to show she’s not ashamed of it, and hasn’t asked them again. Her default position is to keep things separate. It’s made easy by the fact that none of her friends come from this townland anyway. Trey doesn’t hang around with people from Ardnakelty.
As soon as she steps inside the kitchen door, she knows the house is different. The air is taut and focused, with no scattering of movement and noise. Before she has time to do more than register that fact and the smell of cigarette smoke, she hears, from the sitting room, her father’s laugh.
Banjo lets out a preliminary huff of a bark. “No,” Trey says, low and fast. He shakes off heather and dirt, his ears flapping, and lunges for his water bowl.
Trey stands still for a minute, in the wide band of sunlight falling through the door onto the worn linoleum. Then she goes into the hall, moving quietly, and stops outside the sitting room. Her father’s voice runs clear and merry, tossing out questions that get back an excited babble from Maeve or a mumble from Liam.
Trey thinks about leaving, but she wants to see him, to know for sure. She pushes open the door.
Her dad is sitting smack in the middle of the sofa, leaning back and grinning, with his arms spread wide around Alanna and Maeve. They’re grinning too, but uncertainly, like they just got a great big Christmas present that they might not want. Liam is squashed into a corner of the sofa, staring at their dad with his mouth open. Their mam is sitting on the edge of an armchair, with her back straight and her hands flat on her thighs. Even though she’s been there all along and their dad hasn’t been there in four years, Sheila is the one who looks like she can’t feel at home in the room.