Sometimes when Trey has Cal stymied, he asks Alyssa, who works with at-risk youths, for advice. She’s pointed him in the right direction plenty of times. This time he can’t even imagine where he would start.
“Where’s the guy from?” he asks. “I couldn’t place the accent.”
“Dublin. They think they’re great.”
“Are they?”
“Dunno. Never knew anyone from Dublin. He didn’t seem that great.”
“Don’t make that mistake,” Cal says. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Trey shrugs, carefully brushing wood stain onto the sleeper.
Cal says, “Kid.” He has no idea what should come next. What he wants to do is slam the door so hard she jumps out of her skin, rip the paintbrush out of her hand, and roar in her face till he gets it into her damn head what she’s done to the safe place he busted his ass to build for her.
Trey lifts her head and looks at him. Cal reads her unblinking stare and the set of her chin, and knows he’ll get nowhere. He doesn’t want to hear her lie to him, not about this.
“I done a load of these,” she says. “Look.”
She’s gone all out: nine or ten perfect stripes of subtly different shades. Cal takes a breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Good work. This one and this one here, they look like pretty close matches. We’ll take another look once they dry. You want some lunch?”
“I oughta go home,” Trey says. She presses the lid back onto the wood-stain tin. “My mam’ll be worrying. She’ll know about Rushborough by now.”
“You can phone her.”
“Nah.”
She’s turned unreachable again. Her ease with Cal up on the mountainside was just a brief respite she allowed herself, before she bent her back to the task she’s chosen. That, or else it was her making sure she could stay with him until she’d told her story to Nealon unhindered. He can’t be sure, any more, what she’s capable of. When he thought she had none of the artifice other teenagers develop, he was wrong again. She’s just been saving it, and tailoring it, for when it matters.
“OK,” he says. He wants to lock the doors, board up the windows, barricade the two of them in here until he can make the kid grow a working brain or at least until all this is done and gone. “We’ll clean up here, and I’ll drive you.”
“I’m grand walking.”
“No,” Cal says. He welcomes finding a spot where he can finally put his foot down. “I’m taking you. And you be careful out there. Anything happens to worry you, or you just feel like coming back here, you call me. I’ll be right there.”
He expects Trey to roll her eyes, but she just nods, wiping her brush on a rag. “Yeah,” she says. “OK.”
“OK,” Cal says. “There’s more turps on the shelf, if you need it.”
“I wrote out how I mixed those,” Trey says, tilting her chin at the sleeper. “Next to them.”
“Good. Make our lives easier when we come back to ’em.”
Trey nods, but doesn’t reply. There was a note of ending in her voice, like she doesn’t expect to be here for that. Cal wants to say something, but he can’t find the right thing to say.
Sitting there on the floor in an unselfconscious tangle of legs and sneaker laces, with her hair all rucked up on one side, she looks like a little kid again, the way he first remembers her. He doesn’t know how to stop her heading down the path she’s created, so he has no choice but to follow her, in case she should need him, somewhere up ahead. She’s calling the shots now, whether she ever intended that or not. He wishes he could find a way to tell her that, and to ask her to do it with care.
The mountainside is sticky-hot; Banjo spent the whole time in the car moaning loudly, to make the point that this weather is animal cruelty. Cal brought them the long way round, up the far side of the mountain and over, to stay clear of the crime scene.
As his car disappears in a cloud of dust, Trey pauses at her gate to listen, ignoring Banjo’s dramatic gasping. The sounds rising up the road from the fork seem ordinary: unworried birds and deft minor rustles, no voices or clumsy human movement. Trey reckons the Guards must have finished up and taken Rushborough away, to scrape under his fingernails and pick threads off his clothes. She wishes she had known about all that stuff earlier, when she had a chance to do something about it.
She turns her head at the crunch of a footstep. Her dad appears out of the trees at the edge of the yard and heads towards her, waving like it’s urgent.
“Well, there’s my sweetheart at last,” he says, giving her a reproachful look. He has a twig in his hair. “About time. I was keeping a lookout for you.”
Banjo, ignoring him, squeezes his belly through the bars of the gate and heads for the house and his water bowl. “ ’S only lunchtime,” Trey says.
“I know that, but you can’t be going off without telling your mammy, not on a day like this. You had us worried there. Where were you, at all?”
