Every edge is smooth as paper. Cal passes Trey the hammer and she fits the shelf carefully into place, a tap on one side and then a tap on the other. She stands back and looks up at Cal.
“Good job,” he says. “You’ve done fine work on this, kid. Now you better get home.”
Trey nods, dusting her hands on her jeans.
“So,” Cal says. “You got your answer, near as I can come to it. Glad I could help out.” He holds out his hand.
The kid looks at it, and then up at Cal’s face, baffled.
“Case closed, kid,” Cal says. “I hope your brother comes home when things settle down. See you round Noreen’s sometime, if she doesn’t ban you.”
Trey says, “I’ll come back anyway. Finish that.” She jerks her chin at the desk.
“Nope,” Cal says. “Nothing personal. You’re handy and you’re fine company, but I came here to get away from company.”
The kid is staring at him with her face wiped blank by shock. Cal realizes, with a grief so deep and exhausting that he wants to sink to his knees and put his forehead down on the cool grass, how badly she wants to keep coming round.
He has experience in what happens if you try to make Trey Reddy give up on something she’s set her heart on. His only course is to make her want to never come back.
If she doesn’t realize what people will say, he can’t bring himself to put that into her mind. Instead he says, “You wanted me to find out what happened to your brother, kid. I did that. What else do you want from me?”
Trey keeps staring. She looks like she might say something, but nothing comes out.
Cal lets a wry grin slide onto his face. “Huh,” he says. “I did get warned about the Reddys and cash. Is that what you want? Pay for the work you’ve done? ’Cause I can probably spare fifty, sixty bucks, but if you’re thinking about taking what you’re owed when I’m not looking—”
For a second he thinks she’s going to go for the desk again, or maybe for him. He’s fine with either one. She can take the desk to splinters if that’s what she needs. He even moves back to give her a clear shot. Instead she spits, swift and vicious as a rattlesnake striking, at his feet. It lands on his boot with a splat. Then she whips around and strides off, fast and hard, towards the road.
Cal waits a minute and goes to the gate. Trey is already far away, moving fast through the blotches of light and shadow that pattern the road, with her head down and her hands jammed deep in her pockets. He watches till she reaches the upwards slant in the road and is received into the bright muddle of sun and hedge-branches at the top, and a long time after. Nothing follows her.
He carries his tools inside, and his table, and finally the desk. He puts the desk in the spare bedroom, where it won’t be always catching his eye. He would have liked to finish that desk together with Trey, before he had to send her away.
Probably he should make the rest of yesterday’s perch into dinner, but instead he gets himself a beer and takes it out to the back step. In the east the sky is deepening towards lavender; beneath it the red tractor stands still, abandoned in mid-furrow. The plowing has added a new layer to the air’s smell, something richer and darker, thick with hidden things.
See? he tells Donna, in his head. I can walk away from a case, if it’s the right thing to do. Donna, refusing to be obliging even in his imagination, rolls her eyes and makes a ferocious noise at the heavens.
Cal told Trey the truth: he does not, in fact, know why he and Donna split up. As far as he can tell, what happened was that in Alyssa’s junior year of college she got mugged and beat up pretty bad, and two years later Donna walked out, and apparently there was some mysterious connection that Cal is too dumb to understand.
At the time, there was no indication that the first of these events would lead to the second. He and Donna flew out to Seattle so fast that they got there while Alyssa was still in recovery from surgery for a smashed shoulder bone. Once Cal was sure she was going to be OK, he left Donna to sit with her and headed down to the precinct. He knew exactly what priority would be assigned to a random mugging, but the mugging of a cop’s daughter was a different matter, and the daughter of a cop who was all up in the precinct’s grille was another thing again. Over the next couple of weeks Cal harried that precinct, politely and relentlessly, till they pulled CCTV footage from every camera in a block radius. That got them a couple of grainy shots of the mugger, which Cal and the precinct guys worked—some days Cal put in twenty hours—till they dragged up a runty, redheaded junkie called Lyle, who still had Alyssa’s credit card in his jacket pocket.
When Cal told Alyssa, she was still too shaken up even to show relief; she just looked at him and then turned her head away. Cal understood: he had hoped she would be pleased, but he had seen enough victims to understand that trauma shapes feelings into forms you would never expect.
Over the next while, he and Donna were mostly taken up by worrying about Alyssa. She wouldn’t let them stay with her, after the first couple of weeks, and she wouldn’t come home, so they had to do their worrying long-distance. The attack had cracked her mind all over, like a dropped mirror where the pieces are still in place but the whole doesn’t function right any more. Cal never did figure
