Lena knows to leave it. “Whatever we make,” she says, “it’d better be something with carrots.”
Cal lowers his hands and blinks at the table like he’d forgotten what they were doing. “Yeah,” he says. “I didn’t know if they’d take; I never grew them before. I think maybe I put in too many.”
Lena lifts an eyebrow. “D’you reckon?”
“This is only half of ’em. The rest are still out there.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Lena says. “This is what you get for going all back-to-nature. You’ll be eating ’em till you turn orange. Carrot soup for lunch, carrot omelet for dinner—”
Cal comes up with a grin. “You can teach me how to make carrot jam. For breakfast.”
“Come on,” Lena says, finishing her drink and getting up. She figures tonight is a good night for an exception to her no-cooking policy. “Let’s go make a carrot fricassee.”
In the end they settle on beef stir-fry, heavy on the carrots. Cal puts on Steve Earle while they cook. The dogs wake up at the smell and come hinting for scraps. Through the music and their talk and the sizzle of food, Lena can almost hear, all around them out in the warm golden air, the rising buzz and scurry of the townland, and the steady dark pulse of Nealon moving through it.
Seventeen
Forty-five minutes before the shop is even due to open, Lena finds Noreen on top of the stepladder with her sleeves rolled up, in a frenzy of whipping things off the shelves and checking their best-by dates, a task that Lena knows usually gets done on Fridays. “Morning,” she says, poking her head in from the tiny back room where Noreen keeps files, problems, and the kettle.
“If you’re here to tell me who kilt that English fella,” Noreen snaps, pointing a tin of tuna at her threateningly, “you can turn yourself around and walk straight back out that door. My head’s feckin’ lifting with ideas and theories and—what’s that Bobby Feeney had?—hypothesises, what the feck is that?”
“I’d a hypothesis once,” Lena says. “Wore it to a wedding. Will I make us a cuppa tea?”
“What’re you on about? Whose wedding?”
“I’m only codding you,” Lena says. “I wouldn’t have a clue what Bobby’d be on about. Was there aliens in it?”
“What d’you feckin’ think? Your man Rushborough was a government investigator, that’s what Bobby’s got into his head. Sent down here to catch an alien and bring it up to Dublin. All that about the gold, that was just to give him an excuse for wandering about the mountains. Did you ever hear the like?”
“I’d say it’s no madder than some of the other ideas going around,” Lena says. “D’you want that tea?”
Noreen climbs with difficulty down the ladder and plumps down on a low step. “I couldn’t face a cuppa tea. Didja ever think you’d hear me say that? The state of me, look at me, I’m wringing; you’d think I’d been in swimming. And it not even half-eight in the morning.” She plucks at her blouse to fan her chest. “I’m fed up to my back teeth with this heat. I’m telling you, I’ll close up this place and move to Spain, so I will. At least they’ve the air-conditioning.”
Lena pulls herself up to sit on the counter. “Cal makes iced tea. I shoulda brought some of that.”
“That stuff’d wreck your insides, no milk in it or anything. And don’t be getting your arse on my counter.”
“I’ll get down before you open up,” Lena says. “D’you want a hand with that?”
Noreen gives the tin of tuna, which she’s still holding, a look of loathing. “D’you know what, feck it. I’ll do it another day. If some eejit walks outa here with stale custard, it’ll serve him right. Coming in here nosing for gossip.”
Lena has never known Noreen to complain about people hunting for gossip before. “Was the whole place in yesterday?”
“Every man, woman, and child for miles. Crona Nagle, d’you remember her? She’s ninety-two years of age, hasn’t left the house since God was a child, but she got the grandson to drive her down yesterday. And she’d a feckin’ hypothesis of her own, o’ course. She reckons it was Johnny Reddy that done it, ’cause one time Melanie O’Halloran snuck outa the house to meet him and came home smelling of drink and aftershave. I didn’t even remember Crona was Melanie’s granny. Not that I’d blame her for keeping it quiet. Melanie, like.”
“I’d say Crona’s not the only one betting on Johnny,” Lena says, stretching to take an apple from the fruit shelf.
Noreen gives her an odd sideways glance. “There’s a couple, all right. The only thing is, why would Johnny want your man dead? That fella was Johnny Reddy’s whatd’youcallit, the goose with the golden eggs. With him gone, Johnny’s got no fortune coming in, and he’s not the big man in town any more, no one’ll be buying him drink now and laughing at his jokes; he’s the same aul’ wee scutter that you wouldn’t trust with tenpence. And besides…” She stares at the tin of tuna like she’d forgotten its existence, and shoves it onto a random shelf among the dish scrubbers. “Dessie, now,” she says, “he says he wouldn’t wanta see Johnny arrested. Johnny’s weak as water; if that detective fella went after him, he’d spill the beans about all that nonsense with the gold. Trying to get the lads in hot water, like, to take suspicion offa himself. He wouldn’t mind what that’d mean for Sheila and the kids; he’d only care about saving his own skin. And Dessie’s not the only one. People don’t want it to be Johnny.”
Lena finds some change in her pocket, waves fifty cents at Noreen, and leaves it on top of the till to cover the apple. “Then what do they reckon?”
Noreen blows out air. “You name it, I’ve had someone in here saying it. And then they get their ideas mixed in together, till you wouldn’t know who thought what—there’s Ciaran Maloney came in saying it musta been just some roola-boola with drink taken all round, but then didn’t he get talking to Bobby, and he’s not fool enough to believe Bobby’s blather, but he ended up wondering was Rushborough maybe some kinda inspector sent down to look for people claiming grants they oughtn’t to be getting…” She shakes her head, exasperated. “There’s a few that think ’twas over land. They reckon the gold was only a whatd’youcallit, a cover story; your man Rushborough had a claim on some land, through his granny, and he was over here sussing it out, and someone didn’t take well to that. I know the Feeneys do be awful pushovers, but they wouldn’t hand over their land to some blow-in without a fight. Give me one of them apples, go on; maybe it’ll cool me down.”
Lena tosses her an apple and puts another fifty cents on the till. Noreen rubs the apple clean on the side of her slacks. “Clodagh Moynihan’s convinced—dead certain, now—that Rushborough stumbled on young people doing drugs, and they put him outa the way. I don’t know what kinda notion Clodagh has of drugs, at all. I said to her, why would anyone be at that carry-on in the middle of the night on a mountain road, and would they not just do a runner when they heard him coming, but there’s no talking to her. If she hadn’ta been such an awful Holy Mary in school, she’d have more of a clue.”
It occurs to Lena that she, apparently alone in the county, has no hypothesis about who killed Rushborough. She doesn’t particularly care. From her perspective, there are a number of other questions that are considerably more pressing.
“Ah well,” she says, biting off another piece of apple, “ ’tisn’t our problem to solve, lucky for us. That detective fella—Nealon, Cal says his name is—he’s stuck with it. Didja meet him yet?”
“I did. He came in at lunchtime looking for sandwiches, if you don’t mind. I nearly asked him does this place look like a feckin’ deli, but in the end I sent him next door to Barty for a toastie.”