This summer has finally converted Lena to Cal’s sweet tea, which previously both she and Trey viewed with extreme suspicion. Cal fixes each of them a tall glass, with ice and a wedge of lemon, and picks sprigs of mint from the pot on the porch.
“I heard this was the big day,” Lena says, raising her glass to thank him. “All of ye down at the river, getting the gold back out from where ye put it yesterday. The circle of life.”
“Does the whole place know?” Cal asks, dropping into his chair.
“Noreen had it from Dessie, and myself and herself are speaking again, so I had it from her. I wouldn’t say she’s told the world, but; she only said it to me because she reckoned I’d already have heard it from you. How’d it go?”
“Went according to plan, I guess. That Rushborough guy, he had all kinds of equipment—a pan and a screen thing to go over it, and a magnet and a thing that puffed air and I don’t know what-all. He talked the whole time. Placer gold, re-stratifying, alluvial channels. I felt like there was gonna be a pop quiz at the end.”
Cal sinks half his glass and wishes he had put bourbon in it. Mart is right, it was a longer day than he’d bargained for. The sun struck off the water at bewildering angles, so that he had to keep squinting and turning, trying to make sense of it. He suddenly feels a little bit heat-sick, or sun-sick, or something-sick.
“The whole time,” he says, “I was thinking: maybe we did something wrong. Like we put the gold at the wrong depth, or in the wrong part of the river, or whatever. And Rushborough would catch it and back out; shut down the whole thing and take off back to London. If he went, Johnny’d go too, before the guys give him a beat-down for making them waste their money.” He presses the cold glass to his temple and feels the blood throb against it. “I guess Mart must know his stuff too, though, ’cause Rushborough acted like everything was perfect. Gabbing away about how proud his grandma would be. Happy as a pig in shit.”
Lena says nothing. She’s turning her glass in her hands, watching the ice cubes swirl. Cal can feel her examining the best ways to tell him something. His muscles are tightening again. Like most guys he knows, he finds few things as nerve-racking as a woman with something on her mind. He knocks back more of his tea, hoping the cold will brace up his brain for whatever’s on the way.
“I went to see Mrs. Duggan,” Lena says. “D’you know her? Noreen’s mother-in-law. The big woman that sits at her window all day watching the street.”
“I’ve seen her,” Cal says. “Never met her.”
“She doesn’t get out much, only for mass. Sciatica, she’s got. Up until maybe fifteen years back, but, she ran the shop. She knew everything that went on around here. Even more than Noreen does. You could get up to some mischief with no one but your best mate, that’d never say a word to anyone, but the next day Mrs. Duggan’d know.”
Lena is rocking the chair easily and her voice is level, but Cal can hear the charge in it. Going to see this woman cost her.
“There was one of them around where my granddaddy lived,” he says. “Most places’d be better off without them.”
“Mostly I’d say the same,” Lena says. “Today, I’m not sure yet. Mrs. Duggan says she never heard a word about any gold around here. She’s eighty, so she never knew your woman Bridie Feeney that was Rushborough’s granny, but she woulda known Bridie’s brothers and sisters. And Michael Duggan, that Rushborough said found that bitta gold along with his granny, he was Mrs. Duggan’s uncle-in-law. If she never heard of any gold, then neither did any of them.”
Cal sits still, trying to fit this in among the other things he knows or suspects or fears. The sickly haze has seared right off him; he’s as alert as he’s ever been in his life. “You figure she’s telling you the truth?” he asks.
“Ah, yeah. That’s the worst about Mrs. Duggan: she’s always right. There’s no point being the one that knows everything, unless people know to believe what you tell them.”
“Then where the hell—”
Cal can’t stay put. He gets up and walks a circle around the porch. “Where the hell did all that crap come from? Rushborough just pulled the gold straight out of his ass, threw in a bunch of stuff his gramma told him about this place, and used that dumb shit Johnny to get him in the door?” He could kick himself for not figuring this out days ago. Rushborough never looked like a sucker; always, from the first glance, he looked like the guy fleecing the suckers for all they were worth. Everyone else has an excuse for missing that. Cal has none.
“No,” Lena says. “I reckon there’s the two of them in it. I’ll tell you one other thing: when Johnny got back here, he needed a haircut. That’s a little thing, but it wasn’t like him. He always liked making a fancy entrance. I thought then, he came running. ’Cause he was in trouble.”
Cal says, “You didn’t tell me that.”
“No,” Lena says. “I didn’t. It mighta been nothing.”
