Johnny laughs. “There you go. See? Everyone’s dying for a hand in this, except your mammy, and we’ll get her there in the end. You just tell Mrs. Cunniffe and Tom Pat that Mr. Rushborough appreciates their interest, and he’ll keep them in mind. And you keep on telling me who comes looking to get in on this, just like you’ve done now. Can you do that?”
“Yeah,” Trey says. “Sure.”
“Good girl,” Johnny says. “Where would I be without you?”
Trey says, “When are you gonna put the gold in the river?”
Johnny takes another swig of the whiskey. “It’ll arrive sometime tomorrow,” he says. “Not here—sure, the courier’d get lost on the mountain, amn’t I right? He’d end in a bog, him and the gold, and we don’t want that. It’s going to Mart Lavin’s. The next day, first thing in the morning, we’ll put it in. Then we’ll be all ready for Mr. Rushborough to go treasure hunting.” He cocks his head at Trey quizzically. The whiskey has braced him up. “Do you want to come along, is that it? You’re going to give us a hand?”
Trey definitely doesn’t want to go along. “What time?” she asks.
“We’ll have to go bright and early. Before the farmers are up, even. We don’t want anyone spotting us, sure we don’t? It’ll be daylight by half-five. We’ll want to be down at the river by then.”
Trey makes a horrified face. “Nah,” she says.
Johnny laughs and ruffles her hair. “My God, I should’ve known better than to ask a teenager to get up outa her bed before noon! You’re grand; you get your beauty sleep. There’ll be other ways you can give me a hand, won’t there?”
“Yeah,” Trey says. “Just not that early.”
“I’ll find you something,” Johnny assures her. “Sure, with the brains on you, there’ll be a million things you can do.”
“I can keep an eye on Rushborough for you,” Trey says. “Tomorrow. Make sure he doesn’t go down to the river before you have it ready.”
Her dad turns from his glass and looks at her. Trey watches him, slowed by the drink, trying to assess this idea.
“He won’t see me,” she says. “I’ll stay hid.”
“D’you know something, now?” her dad says, after a moment. “That’s a great idea. I’d say all he’ll do is wander around seeing the sights, and you’ll be bored to bits—but sure, no need to put your whole day into it. I’m bringing him to see Mossie O’Halloran’s fairy hill in the afternoon; you just mind him for the morning. If you see him heading down towards the river, you go up to him and say hello, nice and polite like, and offer to show him that aul’ bit of a stone tower off the main road. You tell him it belonged to the Feeneys, and he’ll go along with you like a lamb.”
“OK,” Trey says. “Where’s he staying?”
“He’s in that gray cottage over towards Knockfarraney, on Rory Dunne’s farm. You go down there first thing tomorrow morning, once you drag yourself outa the bed, and see what Rushborough does with himself. Then you can come tell me all about it.”
Trey nods. “OK,” she says.
“That’s great,” her dad says, smiling at her. “You’re after doing me a power of good, so you are. That’s all I needed: my own wee girl on my side.”
“Yeah,” Trey says. “I’m on your side.”
“You are, o’ course. Now go get some sleep, or you’ll be fit for nothing tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll get up,” Trey says. “Night.”
This time he doesn’t try to hug her. As she turns to close the door behind her, she sees his head go back again and his fingers pinch at his nose. She reckons possibly she should feel sorry for him. The only thing she feels is a cold spark of victory.
Trey is not, by nature, one to go at people or things sideways. Her inclination is to go in straight, and keep going till she gets the job done. But she’s open to learning new skills when the necessity arises. She’s learning them from her dad. The part that surprises her isn’t how fast she’s picking this up—Cal always says she’s a quick study—but how easily her dad, who’s never gone at anything straight in his life, can be taken in.
Until Trey shows up at his door on Wednesday afternoon, Cal doesn’t realize how much of him has been fretting that Johnny would keep her away. He feels bad for not having more faith in her, when he has personal experience of how hard it is to keep Trey away from anything she wants; but then again, he would have to be a serious dumbass to assume that he knows what Trey wants right now, when she might not even know that herself. Cal’s own daddy bounced in and out of his life a bunch of times, when he was growing up. He was funnier and a lot less dapper than Johnny Reddy, and he made more of an effort when he was around, but he gave the same impression that his actions had surprised him as much as anyone, and that it would be both uncouth and unfair for anyone to rake them up. By the fifth or sixth go-round, Cal and his mama would have had every right to tell the guy to get fucked, but somehow it was never that simple. He had enough bad habits that Cal presumes he’s dead by now.
