After a moment Trey sits back down. Her hands on the table feel different, humming with strange new kinds of power.
“Cal knew what you were at, as well,” Sheila says. “That’s why he bet up your dad: he wanted him gone as much as I did. Only your dad wouldn’t go. In the heel of the hunt, Cal woulda had to kill him. Or kill Rushborough, one or the other.”
She considers her piece of toast and reaches for the knife to add more jam. Sun catches in the jar, lighting it the rich purple of a jewel.
“He woulda done it,” she says. “I knew by your dad, by how afraid he was: Cal almost done it that night. The next time, or the next, he’da done it.”
Trey knows it’s true. Everyone around her is changing, layered with things barely held in check. The scrubbed grain of the table looks too sharp to be real.
“Cal’s your chance,” Sheila says. “At having more than this. I couldn’t have him ending up in prison. You can do without me, if you haveta.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, like she’s saying something they both know well. “So I reckoned I’d haveta do the job instead.”
Trey says, “Why Rushborough? Why not my dad?”
“I married your daddy. I made him promises. Rushborough was nothing to me.”
“You shoulda gone for my dad. He was the one that brought Rushborough.”
Sheila flicks her head, dismissing that. “That woulda been a sin,” she says. “I’da done it if I had to, but there was no need. Rushborough was good enough. I mighta done different if I’da known you were going to come up with that loada shite about men up the mountain, maybe. I don’t know.”
She considers this for a moment, chewing, and shrugs. “What stopped me at first,” she says, “was the little ones. Cal would take you, if I went to prison, but he couldn’t take the lotta ye; he wouldn’t be let. I wasn’t having them go into care, and I wasn’t having your sister give up the life she’s made in Dublin and come back here to look after them. I was stuck.”
Trey thinks of the last weeks, her mam cutting potatoes and ironing her dad’s shirts and washing Alanna’s hair, and all the time steadily working at this. The house was nothing like Trey thought.
“Only then,” Sheila says, “Lena Dunne came here telling me she’d take us in. The lot of us. She’s the last woman I’da expected that out of, but Lena was always a woman of her word. If I hadda been taken for this, she’da had the little ones till I could come back for them.”
Trey sees Cal solid beside her at his kitchen table, while she lied her arse off to the detective. The thought of him has such force that for a second she can smell him, wood shavings and beeswax. She says, “And me. Cal wouldn’t want me.”
Sheila says, with no sharpness but with finality, “He’d do what needs doing. Same as I done.” She smiles across the table at Trey, just a small flicker and a nod of approval. “No need now, anyhow. Not after what you said to the Guards. They’ll take your da, if he comes back here. If he doesn’t, they’ll go after him.”
Trey says, “They’ll be able to tell it was you. Not him.”
“How?”
“Cal told me. They have people that look for evidence. Match things up.”
Sheila swipes a dab of jam off her plate and licks her finger. “Then they’ll take me,” she says. “I thought they would anyhow.”
Trey’s mind is moving again, gaining a steady, cold momentum that feels beyond her control, ticking through the things Cal said. If there’s Sheila’s hair and fibers from her clothes on Rushborough’s body, those can be explained away; they could have come off Johnny. The wandering sheep trampled her footprints.
She says, “How’d you do it?”
“I called the man,” Sheila says, “and he came. Not a bother on him. He never saw me there, either.”
Cal said the Guards would check Rushborough’s phone. “Called him when? Offa your phone?”
Sheila is watching her. The look in her eyes is strange, almost like wonder; for a second Trey thinks she’s smiling.
“The same night I done it,” she says. “Once your daddy was asleep. Off your daddy’s phone, in case your man wouldn’t answer a number he didn’t know. I told him I’d money saved, only I didn’t wanta tell your daddy or he’d take it all off me. But your man Rushborough could have it, if he’d leave this place and take your daddy with him.”
She thinks back, biting a crust. “He laughed at me,” she says. “He said your daddy owed him twenty grand, and did I have that saved outa my dole? I told him I’d fifteen that my granny left me, and I’d been keeping it for you to go to college. He stopped laughing then. He said that’d do, it’d be worth leaving the other five to get outa this shitpit, and he’d take the rest outa your daddy one way or another. He talked different,” she adds. “He didn’t bother with the posh accent for me.”
Trey says, “Where’d you meet him?”
“Out at the gate. I brought him up to the shed—I said the money was hid there. I’d the hammer in the pocket of my hoodie. I said the money was in that aul’ toolbox on the shelf, and when he bent down to get it, I hit him. I done it in the shed in case he shouted or fought, but he went down easy as that. That big bad bastard that had your daddy terrified: not a peep outa him.”
If Rushborough didn’t fight, then there’s none of Sheila’s blood on him, no trace of her skin under his nails. His body, somewhere beyond reach in Nealon’s hands, is harmless.
“I’d put the kitchen knife ready in the shed,” Sheila says. “That sharp one that we’d use for the meat. Once he was dead, I got him in the wheelbarrow and brought him down the road.” She examines the last crust of her toast, thinking. “I felt like there was someone watching me,” she says. “I’d say ’twas Malachy Dwyer, or Seán Pól maybe. Them sheep didn’t let themselves out.”
“You coulda thrown your man down the ravine,” Trey says.
“What good would he have done there? I needed your daddy knowing he was dead, so he’d go. I woulda left him on the doorstep, only I didn’t want ye seeing him.”
Sheila wipes the last of the jam off her plate with the crust. “And that was the end of it,” she says. “I done right by you then, even if I never did before. That time, I done what you needed.”
Trey says, “Didja wear gloves?”
Sheila shakes her head. “I wasn’t bothered,” she says.
Trey sees the shed blazing up with evidence like marsh fire: fingerprints on the hammer, the wheelbarrow, on the door, the shelves, in blood, footprints tangled on the floor. Rushborough’s body is nothing; the danger is here.
“The clothes you were wearing,” she says. “D’you remember what ones?”
Sheila looks at her, the strange look in her eyes strengthening to a half-smile. “I do,” she says.
“D’you still have ’em?”
“I do, o’ course. I gave them a wash. They needed it.”
Trey sees her mother’s familiar faded T-shirts and jeans alight with tiny incandescent trails, Rushborough’s hairs, wisps of shirt cotton, spatters of blood, matted deep into the fabric. Once Sheila had set this in motion, she never even tried to move out of its way; she just stood still and waited for it to hit her or miss her. Trey can’t tell whether this was exhaustion or a defiance deeper than any she’s known before.
“Get ’em anyway,” she says. “And the shoes.”
Sheila pushes her chair back and stands up. She’s smiling full-on at Trey, her head going up like a wild proud girl’s. “Now,” she says. “Like I said: we do what needs doing.”
—
The sun is sinking. Out in the fields, the light still turns the grass gold, but here at the foot of the mountains the shadow is deep as dusk. The heat is different, not the naked blaze from the sky, but the thick accumulated heat of the day seeping up from the earth. The men stand silent, waiting. Sonny and Con are shoulder to shoulder. P.J. shifts from foot to foot, rustling the dry brush; Francie smokes; Dessie whistles a shapeless tune between his teeth, and then stops. Mart leans on a spade. Francie has a hurley tucked under his arm, and P.J. is absently swinging a pickaxe handle. Cal watches them without seeming to, and tries to gauge what they’ve come here aiming or willing to do.