Lena came as a complete surprise to Cal. When his wife left him, he planned on being done with women for good. He had been with Donna since he was twenty; she was the only woman he had ever wanted, and the last thing he intended was to ever start wanting another one. He was planning on being one of those guys who are happy to have a good-natured flirtation in the bar, maybe a one-night stand every now and then, but nothing more. He knows from Lena that she felt a little differently, maybe because her husband died rather than walking out on her. It wasn’t that she was set against ever taking another man; it was just unimaginable. And yet, somehow, here they are, wherever here is. The fact of them still startles Cal sometimes. He feels like he has no right to it, after how adamantly he ruled out anything of the kind.
“Hey,” he says. “Everything OK?”
“Grand,” Lena says, which lets Cal take a breath. “I let Rip out, before he et the door off the hinges; he’s down the back field, with mine. And I’d murder a glass of that tea, if you’ve any in the fridge.”
This summer has finally converted Lena to Cal’s sweet tea, which previously both she and Trey viewed with extreme suspicion. Cal fixes each of them a tall glass, with ice and a wedge of lemon, and picks sprigs of mint from the pot on the porch.
“I heard this was the big day,” Lena says, raising her glass to thank him. “All of ye down at the river, getting the gold back out from where ye put it yesterday. The circle of life.”
“Does the whole place know?” Cal asks, dropping into his chair.
“Noreen had it from Dessie, and myself and herself are speaking again, so I had it from her. I wouldn’t say she’s told the world, but; she only said it to me because she reckoned I’d already have heard it from you. How’d it go?”
“Went according to plan, I guess. That Rushborough guy, he had all kinds of equipment—a pan and a screen thing to go over it, and a magnet and a thing that puffed air and I don’t know what-all. He talked the whole time. Placer gold, re-stratifying, alluvial channels. I felt like there was gonna be a pop quiz at the end.”
Cal sinks half his glass and wishes he had put bourbon in it. Mart is right, it was a longer day than he’d bargained for. The sun struck off the water at bewildering angles, so that he had to keep squinting and turning, trying to make sense of it. He suddenly feels a little bit heat-sick, or sun-sick, or something-sick.
“The whole time,” he says, “I was thinking: maybe we did something wrong. Like we put the gold at the wrong depth, or in the wrong part of the river, or whatever. And Rushborough would catch it and back out; shut down the whole thing and take off back to London. If he went, Johnny’d go too, before the guys give him a beat-down for making them waste their money.” He presses the cold glass to his temple and feels the blood throb against it. “I guess Mart must know his stuff too, though, ’cause Rushborough acted like everything was perfect. Gabbing away about how proud his grandma would be. Happy as a pig in shit.”
Lena says nothing. She’s turning her glass in her hands, watching the ice cubes swirl. Cal can feel her examining the best ways to tell him something. His muscles are tightening again. Like most guys he knows, he finds few things as nerve-racking as a woman with something on her mind. He knocks back more of his tea, hoping the cold will brace up his brain for whatever’s on the way.
“I went to see Mrs. Duggan,” Lena says. “D’you know her? Noreen’s mother-in-law. The big woman that sits at her window all day watching the street.”
“I’ve seen her,” Cal says. “Never met her.”
“She doesn’t get out much, only for mass. Sciatica, she’s got. Up until maybe fifteen years back, but, she ran the shop. She knew everything that went on around here. Even more than Noreen does. You could get up to some mischief with no one but your best mate, that’d never say a word to anyone, but the next day Mrs. Duggan’d know.”
Lena is rocking the chair easily and her voice is level, but Cal can hear the charge in it. Going to see this woman cost her.
“There was one of them around where my granddaddy lived,” he says. “Most places’d be better off without them.”
“Mostly I’d say the same,” Lena says. “Today, I’m not sure yet. Mrs. Duggan says she never heard a word about any gold around here. She’s eighty, so she never knew your woman Bridie Feeney that was Rushborough’s granny, but she woulda known Bridie’s brothers and sisters. And Michael Duggan, that Rushborough said found that bitta gold along with his granny, he was Mrs. Duggan’s uncle-in-law. If she never heard of any gold, then neither did any of them.”
Cal sits still, trying to fit this in among the other things he knows or suspects or fears. The sickly haze has seared right off him; he’s as alert as he’s ever been in his life. “You figure she’s telling you the truth?” he asks.
“Ah, yeah. That’s the worst about Mrs. Duggan: she’s always right. There’s no point being the one that knows everything, unless people know to believe what you tell them.”
“Then where the hell—”
Cal can’t stay put. He gets up and walks a circle around the porch. “Where the hell did all that crap come from? Rushborough just pulled the gold straight out of his ass, threw in a bunch of stuff his gramma told him about this place, and used that dumb shit Johnny to get him in the door?” He could kick himself for not figuring this out days ago. Rushborough never looked like a sucker; always, from the first glance, he looked like the guy fleecing the suckers for all they were worth. Everyone else has an excuse for missing that. Cal has none.
“No,” Lena says. “I reckon there’s the two of them in it. I’ll tell you one other thing: when Johnny got back here, he needed a haircut. That’s a little thing, but it wasn’t like him. He always liked making a fancy entrance. I thought then, he came running. ’Cause he was in trouble.”
Cal says, “You didn’t tell me that.”
“No,” Lena says. “I didn’t. It mighta been nothing.”
“So Johnny and this Rushborough guy,” Cal says. He makes himself sit down again, to hold his thoughts to a steady pace. “They ran themselves into some kinda hot water, over in England. They cooked up this story and came over here to scam a few quick bucks, to get themselves outa trouble.”
He doesn’t underestimate the level of trouble Johnny could be in. By nature Johnny is clearly small-time, but he’s made up of nothing but a shit-ton of talk and a useful smile; he’s light. If he got caught up by something with force, he could roll a long way from where he naturally belongs.
“How, but?” Lena says. “They pulled, what, a grand or two worth of gold outa the river today? It wouldn’t be worth their while doing all this just for that.”
“Nope,” Cal says. He remembers Mart, in the pub, gabbing about psychology. “This was just the start. Now they’ve got the guys all worked up, they’re gonna come up with some reason they need more money. Mining licenses, or equipment, or something. The guys, Mart and P.J. and the rest, have they got enough cash to make them worth scamming?”
The movement of Lena’s rocking chair has stilled. “They’d have a bit put away, all right,” she says. “Maybe not Con McHugh, he’s only young, but the rest. And they’ve the land. Sixty or seventy acres each—Senan has a hundred. That’s family land, all of it, owned free and clear. Any of them could walk into a bank tomorrow and mortgage a few of those acres for maybe five grand each, or put them up as collateral for a loan.”
“Those guys are knee-deep in this thing already,” Cal says. He never worked Fraud, but he had buddies who did; he knows how it goes. “If Johnny talks a good enough game, they’ll figure it’d be a waste not to go that one step deeper.”