The Searcher - Tana French Page 0,170

better.”

“Getting there.” Cal puts the cake on the counter and takes the watch from a drawer. “I got you what you need.”

He holds the watch out to Trey. It’s clean; he put it in boiling water for a while and then left it to dry out on the heater overnight. He knows that probably fucked it up beyond repair, even if the bog hadn’t managed that already, but it needed doing.

Trey turns the watch over and looks at the inscription on the back. There are little marks on her hands, pink and shiny, where the scabs have fallen away.

“That’s your brother’s watch,” Cal says. “Right?”

Trey nods. She’s breathing like it takes an effort. Her skinny chest rises and falls.

Cal waits, in case there’s something she wants to say or ask, but she just stands there, looking at the watch. “I cleaned it,” he says. “It’s not working, but I’ll find a good watch-repair store somewhere and see if they can get it running for you. If you want to wear it, though, you gotta make sure to tell people Brendan left it behind.”

Trey nods. Cal isn’t sure how much of that she heard.

“You can tell your mama the real story,” he says. No matter what Sheila’s done, she deserves that much. “No one else.”

She nods again. She rubs the back of the watch with her thumb, like if she rubs hard enough the inscription might have mercy and disappear.

“Whoever gave you this,” she says. “They could still have been bullshitting you. About what happened.”

“I saw his body, kid,” Cal says gently. “The injuries were consistent with the statement I was given.”

He hears the hiss of Trey catching a breath. “You sound like a Guard,” she says.

“I know.”

“Is that where you got this? Off his body?”

“Yeah,” Cal says. He has no idea what he ought to do if she asks about the body.

She doesn’t. Instead she says, “Where is he?”

“He’s buried up in the mountains,” Cal says. “I couldn’t find the place again if I tried all year. But it’s a good place. Peaceful. I never saw a graveyard that was more peaceful.”

Trey stands there looking down at the watch in her hands. Then she turns around and walks out the door.

Cal watches her through the windows as she goes around behind the house and down the garden. She climbs over the gate into his back field and keeps walking. He watches till he sees her sit down at the edge of his woods, with her back against a tree. Her parka blends in with the underbrush; the only way he can pick her out is by the red flash of her hoodie.

He finds his phone and texts Lena. Any chance you still have a pup looking for a home? The kid could do with a dog. She’d take good care of it.

There’s a pause of a few minutes before Lena gets back to him. Two of them are sorted. Trey can take her pick of the rest.

Cal texts her, Could me and her come over sometime and see them? If that runt is still free I should get to know him better before I take him home.

This time his phone buzzes straightaway. He’s no runt now. He’s eating me out of house and home. I hope you’re a rich man. Come tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be home by 3.

Cal gives Trey half an hour out by the woods. Then he starts bringing his desk equipment out to the back garden, piece by piece: the drop sheet, the desk, his tool kit, wood filler, scrap wood and brushes and three little cans of wood stain that he picked up in town. He brings out the cake, too: when he was a kid, shouldering the weight of heavy emotions always left him hungry. It’s another beautiful wintry day, with wispy brushstrokes of cloud in a thin blue sky. The afternoon sun lies lightly on the fields.

He upends the desk and takes a good look at the broken side. It’s not in as bad shape as he thought. He figured he was looking at disassembling the whole thing and replacing the side panel, but while a few pieces of the splintered wood are beyond repair, plenty of it can be slotted back into place and glued. The gaps should be small enough for wood filler. Carefully, kneeling on the drop sheet, he starts picking away the unsalvageable shards. He cleans the dust off the others with a paintbrush and then starts painting glue onto them, one by one, and delicately easing them back where they belong. He keeps his shoulder turned to the woods.

He’s clamping a long shard into place when he hears the swish of feet in the grass. “Check this out,” he says, without looking up. “Seems to me it’s working OK.”

“Thought we were going to take it apart and put in a new side,” Trey says. Her voice comes out rough around the edges.

“Doesn’t look like we’ll need to,” Cal says. “We can find something else to take apart, if you want. I could use another chair.”

Trey squats to take a closer look at the desk. She’s stashed the watch away in some pocket. Or maybe she’s thrown it away somewhere in the woods, or buried it, but Cal doesn’t think so. “Looks good,” she says.

“Here,” Cal says. He points at the cans of wood stain. “You try these out on some scrap wood, see which one’s the best match. You might have to do some mixing to get it right.”

“Need a plate or something,” Trey says. “For mixing.”

“Get that old tin one.”

Trey lopes off to the house and comes back with the plate and a mug of water. She arranges herself cross-legged on the drop sheet, lays out her equipment around her and sets to work.

In their tree the rooks are peaceful, tossing scraps of conversation back and forth, occasionally soaring across to a neighboring nest to pay a visit. One skinny young one is hanging upside down from a branch to see what the world looks like that way. Trey mixes stain colors on the plate, paints a neat square of each mixture onto a stray piece of two-by-four and labels it in pencil, in some code of her own. Cal coaxes splinters of wood into place and clamps them there. After a while he opens the cake, and they break off a chunk each and sit on the grass to eat it, listening to the rooks exchange views and watching the shadows of clouds drift across the mountainsides.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe huge thanks to Darley Anderson, the most magnificent agent I can imagine, and everyone at the agency, especially Rosanna, Georgia, Mary, Kristina, and Rebeka; my amazing editors, Andrea Schulz and Katy Loftus, who in the middle of a pandemic somehow found the time, focus, and patience to make this book so much better; the wonderful Ben Petrone, Nidhi Pugalia, and everyone at Viking US; the extremely skillful and extremely sound Olivia Mead, Anna Ridley, Georgia Taylor, Ellie Hudson, and everyone at Viking UK; Susanne Halbleib and everyone at Fischer Verlage; Steve Fisher of APA; Jessica Ryan, for being my North Carolina dictionary (any mistakes are mine); Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, for filling in the gaps in my rusty Irish (ditto); Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for making sure I kill people off accurately; Ciara Considine, Clare Ferraro, and Sue Fletcher, who set all this in motion; Kristina Johansen, Alex French, Susan Collins, Noni Stapleton, Paul and Anna Nugent, Oonagh Montague, and Karen Gillece, for the usual priceless combination of laughs, talks, support, creativity, and all the other essentials; David Ryan, clinically proven to cure gout, improve broadband speed, reduce hangovers, and eliminate aphids; my mother, Elena Lombardi; my father, David French; and, as always, the finest man I know and the one I’d pick to be stuck in lockdown with any day, my husband, Anthony Breatnach.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tana French is the author of seven previous books, including In the Woods, The Likeness, and The Witch Elm. Her novels have sold over three million copies and won numerous awards, including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Dublin with her family.

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