In the end Cal gives up on trying to sleep and starts making bacon and eggs, with the iPod speaker playing the Highwaymen good and loud, trying to distract his mind. The breakfast is just about ready when Rip jumps up and bounds to the door. Trey and Banjo are up early, too.
“Hey,” Cal says, aiming to keep the rush of glad astonishment out of his voice. He wasn’t expecting to see the kid again till after her dad left town, if ever. “You got good timing. Fetch another plate.”
Trey doesn’t move from the doorway. “Your man Rushborough’s dead,” she says. “Up on the mountain.”
Cal feels everything inside him go still. He turns from the stove.
He says, “Dead how?”
“Someone kilt him.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. His head’s bashed in, and I reckon he was stabbed as well.”
“OK,” Cal says. “OK.” He goes to the iPod and turns it off. The things speeding in his mind don’t include surprise; he feels like some part of him has been taking this moment for granted, just waiting to get word. “Where?”
“Below ours, where the road splits. He’s there on the road.”
“The Guards there yet?”
“Nah. No one knows, only me. I found him. Came straight here.”
“Right,” Cal says. “Good call.” He turns off the stove. He’s breathless with relief that the kid came to him with this, but he can’t gauge from her face how much she’s not telling him, whether she came to him for refuge from the shock or for defense against something much bigger. She’s had a shock, regardless, but that’s going to have to wait. He feels a spurt of anger at the fact that, all Trey’s life, any gentleness to her has had to wait till other business is dealt with.
“OK,” he says, dumping the bacon and eggs into Rip’s dish, where the two dogs dive on them joyfully. “We’ll let these boys handle this here.” He opens the cupboard under the sink and pulls out a fresh pair of the latex gloves he uses occasionally for gardening or carpentry. “Let’s go see what we’ve got.”
In Cal’s rickety red Pajero, Trey fishes a paper-towel bundle out of her back pocket, unwraps it to reveal several squashed slices of bread and butter, and gets to work. She seems surprisingly OK: not shaky, not white, shoveling food into her face. Cal doesn’t entirely trust this, but he welcomes it anyway.
“How you doing?” he asks.
“Grand,” Trey says. She offers him a slice of bread and butter.
“No thanks,” Cal says. Apparently he and Trey are back to normaclass="underline" all the complications between them appear to have been wiped away, like they never existed or like they’re no longer relevant.
“It’s a shock,” he says, “seeing someone dead. I’ve done it plenty of times, and it still doesn’t come easy. Specially when you’re not expecting it.”
Trey considers this, methodically biting the crust off her bread to leave the soft middle for last. “It was weird, all right,” she says in the end. “Not like I woulda expected.”
“What way?”
Trey thinks that over for a long time. A few farmers are out in their fields, but the road is still empty; they’ve only passed one other car, some guy in an office shirt starting off early on a long commute. There’s a good chance no one else has come across Rushborough yet.
When Cal’s stopped waiting for an answer, Trey says, “I thought it’d be worse. I’m not being hard or nothing, not like ‘Ah, no big deal to me.’ It was a big deal. Just not in a bad way.”
“Well,” Cal says. “That’s good.” He’s finally put his finger on how she seems: calm. She’s calmer than she’s been since the day her dad showed up. He can’t interpret this.
“He was only a shitehawk anyway,” Trey adds.
Cal swings the car off the road onto the mountain track. It’s unpaved, narrow and gritty; gorse whips at the car windows, and puffs of dust rise around his tires. He slows down.
“Kid,” he says. “I gotta ask you something, and I don’t want you flying off the handle.”
Trey looks over at him, chewing, her eyebrows twitching down.
“If you had anything to do with this—anything at all, like even if you kept watch for someone and you didn’t know what he was gonna be doing—I need to know now.”
Trey’s face shutters over instantly. Her wariness makes Cal sick to his stomach. “How come?”
“ ’Cause,” Cal says. “We’re gonna do things differently, depending on that.”
“Differently how?”
Cal figures maybe he should tell her a lie, but he’s not going to do it. “If you had nothing to do with it,” he says, “we’re gonna phone the Guards. If you did, we’re gonna load the guy into the back of this car, take him up the mountain, dump him in a ravine, and go on about our day.”
To his utter surprise, when he takes a sideways glance at Trey, her face has cracked into a huge grin. “Some cop you are,” she tells him.
“Yeah, well,” Cal says. Several layers of relief flood through him with such force he can hardly drive. “I’m retired; I don’t have to behave myself any more. Lemme hear you say it: did you have anything to do with this?”
“Nah. Found him, just.”
“Well, damn,” Cal says. The relief has left him almost giddy. “You gotta go and make things complicated. It would’ve been a lot simpler to dump the motherfucker up the mountain.”
“I can say I done it if you want,” Trey offers obligingly.
“Thanks, kid,” Cal says, “but no thanks. I’ve got a little good behavior left in me. I’ll take a look, and then we’ll hand him over to the Guards.”
Trey nods. The prospect doesn’t seem to bother her.
“You’re gonna have to tell them about finding him.”
“No problem,” Trey says. “I wanta tell them.”
The promptness and certainty of that make Cal look over at her, but she’s gone back to her breakfast. “I know you don’t want me sticking my nose in,” he says. “But maybe, when you talk to the cops, don’t say anything about gold. They’re gonna hear about it sooner or later, but they don’t need to hear that you were involved, at least not outa your own mouth. I’m not even certain what kinds of illegal were going on all up in there, what with everyone and his gramma trying to rip off everyone else, but I’d rather you didn’t find out the hard way. I’m not saying lie to the police, kid”—when he catches Trey’s widening grin—“I’m just saying. If they don’t bring it up, you don’t need to either.”
The advice is almost definitely unnecessary—not bringing things up is one of Trey’s main skills—but Cal feels like making sure. Trey eye-rolls so hard that her whole head gets involved, which reassures him.
They’ve come within view of the fork, with the unidentifiable huddle at its center. Cal parks the car. The road here is a double dirt track, dry and pebbly, divided by a patchy line of dying grass.
“OK,” he says, opening the car door. “Stay on the grass.”
“I went on the dirt before,” Trey says. “Right up close to him. Are the Guards gonna give me hassle?”