They’ve finished cleaning the fixer-upper chair, which under all the layers of dirt and grease turns out to be a muted, autumny golden-brown. They dismantle it carefully, taking photos on Cal’s phone as they go, and measure up the broken pieces for replacements. Cal leaves plenty of silences where Trey could bring up her dad and Rushborough and the gold, but she doesn’t.
Cal tells himself this is normal. She’s fifteen, right around the age when Alyssa stopped telling him stuff. Trey has very little in common with Alyssa, a gold-hearted girl who sees potential good in the most unlikely people and has solid, methodical plans for letting them see it too, but in some ways fifteen is always fifteen. When Alyssa stopped talking to him, Cal reckoned at least she was talking to her mama, and let it be. He’s no longer sure that was the right call, but even if it was, he has no such easy out when it comes to Trey.
Nothing, of course, says he can’t bring up the subject himself and just tell her straight out that he knows the story—which presumably the kid has already guessed, Mart’s mouth being what it is—and that he’s bought in on the gold; but that has the feel of a bad idea. Trey is unlikely to believe that Cal feels any urge to scam money out of some random Brit, and he’s nowhere near convinced that she’ll appreciate the thought of him getting involved in order to look out for her. And if she’s ashamed of the stunt Johnny is pulling, or if she just wants to keep her time with Cal separate from his shenanigans, she won’t welcome Cal prying the topic open. Trey has various levels of silence. The last thing Cal wants to do is nudge her into a deeper one.
“That’ll do for today,” he says, when they’ve cut and planed pieces of the oak sleeper to roughly the right sizes, ready for turning. “Spaghetti Bolognese sound good?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, dusting her hands on her jeans. “Can I borrow your camera?”
Not long after Cal moved to Ireland, he splashed out on a high-end camera, so he could send Alyssa photos and videos. His phone would have done the job just fine, but he wanted better than fine: he wanted to offer her every shade and detail, the full fine range of subtleties that make up the place’s beauty, so he could maybe tempt her to come see it for herself. Trey used the camera for some school project on local wildlife, last year. “Sure,” Cal says. “What for?”
“Just for a coupla days,” Trey says. “I’ll look after it.”
Cal has no desire to push her till she comes up with a lie. He goes into his bedroom and finds the camera, on one of the neat array of shelves they built into the closet.
“Here,” he says, coming back out to the living room. “You remember how to use it?”
“Sorta.”
“OK,” Cal says. “Let’s find you something good to practice on. We’ve got a while, unless you’re about to starve to death.”
Trey turns out to have definite ideas about what she wants to photograph. It needs to be outdoors, and at a distance of about fifty yards, and she needs video, and she needs to know how to adjust the camera for low light. Cal can’t provide the low light—at past five o’clock, the air is still swollen with sun—but they head out to his back field and use the scarecrow for a model. Someone has been bringing out its hidden potential again. It’s been out hunting: it has a water pistol in one hand and a big teddy bear dangling upside down from the other.
“Mart,” Trey says.
“Nah,” Cal says. He starts to count off fifty paces from the scarecrow, which, activated by their approach, is growling at them and brandishing the teddy bear menacingly. “Mart would’ve told me. He likes to take credit.”
“Not P.J.”
“Hell no. Senan, maybe, or his kids.”
“We could get a security camera. The Holohans have one they can watch off their phones. Lena said Noreen said one time Celine Holohan stayed home from mass ’cause she said she felt sick, and halfway through the homily Mrs. Holohan looked at her phone and saw Celine in the garden shifting her fella. Let such a squawk outa her that the priest lost his place.”
Cal laughs. “Nah,” he says. “I don’t wanna scare off whoever it is. I’d rather see what they come up with next. How ’bout here? This far enough?”
The dogs, with a rawhide bone each to keep them from getting restless, gnaw and mumble contentedly in the grass. While he shows Trey how to move her autofocus point and how to switch between stills and video, Cal tries to figure out what Johnny could want her to photograph. The best theory he can come up with is that Johnny wants footage of the guys planting the gold in the river, in case at some point he needs to do a little arm-twisting to keep them on board. Cal doubts he’ll even stir his scrawny ass to take his own footage; it looks like that’s going to be Trey’s responsibility, specially since he doubts her personal moral code would allow for putting his camera in Johnny’s hands. And of course Johnny wouldn’t bother to consider what might happen to her, if she should get caught.
