The Scorpio Races (26 page)

Gabe appears beside me with a lead rope. “Hold it out the window.”

“But —”

“Now.”

And just as he says that, I hear the same cluck that I heard earlier, only now it comes from somewhere in the paddock where we just were. Distantly, I hear it echo back through the mist, an answering sound. I clip the lead onto Dove’s halter and scramble into the car. Tommy Falk’s already behind the wheel, and Gabe slams the door after himself.

Then we’re off down the narrow road, the headlights reflected in the mist and rain as they jump back up from the ground. Beside us, Dove trots and then canters. I roll up the window to leave just enough room for the lead to fit through. Tommy Falk is utterly focused on his driving — checking the mirrors constantly, making sure that we’re not being followed, taking care to make it easy for Dove to keep up with us — and the intensity of it makes me remember, suddenly, that I saw him on the beach just earlier today.

The car is silent and hot; the heater was turned up all the way and no one’s thought to turn it down. The entire car smells, not unpleasantly, of the inside of a new shoe. Beside me, in the backseat, Finn is insensible because of Puffin.

The only thing that’s said is when Gabe turns his face to Tommy and asks, “Your place?”

Tommy says, “Not with the pony. Has to be Beech’s.”

Then Finn pinches me and points out the front window. Just illuminated by the headlights is a dead sheep. It’s mutilated and strung out all the way from the ditch to the middle of the road.

I can’t stop seeing its torn body, even after we have left it far behind. That could have been us. Tommy and Gabe don’t comment on it, however. They don’t comment on anything, actually. They sit in grim, familiar silence, Gabe looking out windows and communicating to Tommy that it’s all clear without saying a word.

Tommy doesn’t take the road to Skarmouth as I expected, but rather the one toward Hastoway. He slows at the crossroads but doesn’t stop, and both he and Gabe peer anxiously out in all directions until we get going once more. I press my face to the glass, to make certain that Dove is not having a hard time keeping up.

“I could ride her and follow you,” I say.

Gabe’s voice leaves no room for negotiation. “You’re not getting out of this car until we’re well clear.”

And then there’s silence again, nothing but night and stone walls and the rain.

“Finn,” Gabe says, finally, his voice raised to be heard over the sound of the engine. “This storm that’s coming — how long will it last?”

Finn’s eyes are bright in the backseat, and he’s so incredibly pleased to have been asked that it hurts me. “Just tonight and tomorrow.”

Gabe looks at Tommy. “One day. That’s not long.”

“Long enough,” says Tommy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

PUCK

Tommy Falk takes us to the Grattons’ house, which is near Hastoway, though how near I can’t be sure, because everything looks the same in the spitting rain and narrow yellow of the headlights. Beech meets us, his shoulders hunched against the wind, and shows me where I can leave Dove. He swings his torch around to reveal a little four-stall stable with a low ceiling and no electric lights. One of the stalls is occupied by damp goats, another by chickens, and one by a gray cob gelding who stretches his head over the unbarred stall door when Dove comes in. Dove flattens her ears back by way of an ungrateful hello, but I put her in the stall next to him anyway. I want to spend more time with her, but it feels rude to linger while Beech stands there illuminating the stall with the light. So I just pat her neck and tell Beech thank you. He grunts and points back toward the house with his flashlight.

Back in the house, Gabe and Peg Gratton are talking easily while Tommy Falk peers under the lid of a pot on the stove. I don’t see Finn.

The kitchen itself reminds me of the butcher shop, if the butcher shop was made into a house. Despite the dark outside, the kitchen is all bright whitewashed walls and pots and knives hung up on them. The image of clean whiteness isn’t at all diminished by the fact that the floor is filthy with footprints. There are knickknacks on a half-dozen shelves, but they’re entirely different from our sort of knickknacks: crude wooden statues that could be either horses or deer, a broom of grass with a red ribbon tied around it, a piece of limestone with the name
PEG
written on it. None of the painted glass figurines or charming landscapes dotted with sheep and cheerful women that Mum liked. Stuff but not clutter. The room smells piercingly and wonderfully of whatever is cooking on the stove.

“They’ll have your room,” Peg says to Beech as soon as he comes in. In the light, I can see that Beech has grown into a great, ruddy creature who clearly takes after his father. He looks a little like he’s made of wood, and because wood is fairly inflexible, it takes him awhile to change his expression. When he does, it’s not pleased.

“They never will,” Beech replies.

“And where, then, would you like them to stay?” Peg Gratton asks. It’s strange to see her in this context, not in the butcher’s as someone who will cut your heart out, not in our yard telling me not to race, not in a headdress cutting my finger with a knife. She is smaller, somehow, neater, though her ginger curls are still unruly as ever. I’m bewildered at how easily she and Beech and Gabe go around and around about where we will sleep, and I realize that some of the time that Gabe was gone must have been spent here. Maybe a lot of it. It makes me realize we’ve come here because this is where Gabe feels safe. It makes me feel strange and sad, like we’ve been replaced with another family.

“Where’s Finn?” I break in.

“Washing his hands, of course,” Gabe says. “It may be decades.”

I feel weird about that, too, the rather free admittance of Finn’s foibles, though I’ve always thought it was something private, something only Connollys knew about. Gabe didn’t say it like he was making fun of Finn, but it feels like it.

“Where is the toilet?”

Tommy, not Peg or Beech, gestures toward the stairs on the other side of the kitchen. It’s like it’s everyone’s house, not just the Grattons’. Feeling sulky, I head out of the room. There’s a tiny, dark hallway with three doors off it up at the top of the stairs, but only one of them has light coming from underneath it. I knock. There’s no response until I say Finn’s name and then, after a pause, the door opens. It’s a tiny room, just big enough for a tub and a toilet and a washbasin if they’re very good friends and don’t mind rubbing shoulders, and Finn sits on the toilet with the lid down. There are big manly footprints on the small tiles of the floor.

I shut the door behind me and check to make certain that the tub is dry before stepping into it and sitting down.

“He comes here all the time,” Finn says to me.

“I know,” I reply. “I can tell.”

“This is where he’s been.”

The betrayal sits thick between us. I want to say something to make this better for Finn, who idolizes Gabe, who would do anything for him, but I can’t think of anything.

“Do you think Puffin’s dead?” Finn asks.

“No, she got away,” I say.

He studies his hands. They’re a little chapped on the knuckles from all the washing he’s been up to. “Yes, I thought so, too.”

I look away, to the shiny handles of the bathtub, so shiny that they remind me of the grille of Father Mooneyham’s car. “So,” I say, “one day?”

Finn nods solemnly. “One day. The worst will be early tomorrow morning, I think.”

“Sure, of course. How do you know?”

He looks impatient. “Everything. If people used their eyeballs, everybody would know.”

The door swings open then, without a knock, and Gabe stands in the doorway. He looks in better humor than I’ve seen him for a long time. “Is it a party you’re having in here?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s started in the tub and then it spread to the loo. All that’s left is the sink if you want it.”

“Well, everyone’s wondering where you are. There’s lamb stew in the works, but only if you come out of the toilet.”

Finn and I exchange a glance. I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking: that Gabe can’t just pretend that there’s no bad feeling, that he hasn’t been gone, that things will just go back the way they were. I thought, before, that a word from him would be enough, but now I know that I want him to court my good graces. If I can’t have a groveling apology, I don’t want anything at all.

As we head down the stairs, Gabe says, “You have the couch, I’m afraid, Finn, because you’re the shortest.”

“Under whose measure!” I say.

Gabe shrugs. “Well, you’re the shortest, technically, but Peg thinks you should be in a room with a door. So we’re in Beech’s room.”

“Where is Beech, then?”

“He and Tommy are on a mattress in the living room. Peg says it’ll work this way.”

Back in the kitchen, the boys are loud and talking over each other. Beech and Tommy have ahold of something and are trying to keep it out of each other’s reach, and a sheepdog’s appeared from nowhere and is trying to get it as well. Peg holds a spoon in one hand and a cat by its scruff in the other. She’s swearing at both of them.

“Put that out,” she says to Gabe, and he takes the cat from her and puts it on the other side of the door. She scowls at me. “I don’t cook. Cats make it worse.”

Before I have a chance to answer, Gabe asks, “Where’s Tom?”

It takes me a moment to realize that he means Thomas Gratton. I’d never considered that Thomas Gratton became Tom under his own roof.

“He went out to see if the Mackies were doing all right. Beech, get out. All of you, out. Go into the living room while I get this done.
Out.
”

Beech and Tommy obey and take their noise with them, and Finn files after them, interested because of the appearance of the dog.

I turn to go, but in the doorway, I hesitate and look back over my shoulder. Peg Gratton has turned back to the great black range to stir the pot, and Gabe stands just behind her, saying something into her ear. I just catch him saying “strong enough” and —

“Puck, catch it!” Tommy shouts.

I turn my face toward the living room in time to catch a sock full of beans in the mouth.

Beech guffaws but Tommy looks aggrieved and apologizes. The collie is now frolicking around my feet with great friendliness, very eager to have the sock, and I realize that this is what Beech and Tommy were fooling around with earlier.

“You should be sorry,” I say sternly to Tommy, who still looks beaten, standing on the other side of the worn green couch that will be Finn’s bed. And then I hurl the sock back to him.

Pleased to be so easily forgiven, he grins and whips it without pause to Beech, who loses it to the dog. Tommy has no qualms about making a fool of himself, scrabbling after the collie as she leads him on a merry chase, and even Finn’s laughing. I find myself wondering what drives Tommy to leave the island; he doesn’t have the brooding of Gabe or the sulkiness of Beech. I’ve never seen him when he doesn’t seem perfectly content, perfectly a part of island life. On the floor, Tommy snags the sock, finally, and around and around it goes to all of us, even the dog again, until Finn says, “Where’s Gabe?” and we realize that he hasn’t come out of the kitchen.

I start toward the kitchen, but Tommy takes my arm. “I’ll go.”

He peers around the door frame and I can’t hear what he says. Then he turns back to us, and he has a smile pinned on for us. “Good news. Food’s done.” Gabe appears in the doorway beside him and they exchange a look that infuriates me, because it’s yet more of the secret language of men.

Finally, Peg appears and addresses all of us. “If you want it, you have to serve yourself. And if you don’t like it, blame Tom. He did it.”

There’s not much conversation as we eat — maybe, like me, they’re all reimagining the events of the evening. But it’s a quiet without demands. The storm’s not loud enough to make itself known and it’s easy to pretend that we’re just over for a social visit. The only time Peg Gratton addresses me is to tell me that I’m welcome to give Dove more hay if she needs it before the end of the night, before the storm gets bad.

And she’s right about the storm. By the time we go to bed, the wind has become fitful and furious, shaking the windowpanes. The sheets on the bed are clean but the room still smells like Beech, who smells like salt ham. Before we turn off the lights, I see that there are no personal effects in the room, nothing to say that it is Beech’s. Just this bed and an austere desk with an empty vase and some coins on it, and a narrow dresser with well-worn corners. I wonder if there used to be more of Beech here, but he packed it all away to take with him to the mainland.

I consider this as I try to sleep. I lie on one side of the bed and Gabe lies on the other, but it’s a twin bed, so the two sides are really one side, and his elbow is kind of in my ribs and his shoulder is mashed against mine. It’s warmer here, too, than at our house, and having Gabe here makes it warmer still, so I’m not sure how I’ll sleep. Gabe’s breathing doesn’t sound like he’s sleeping, either.

For a long moment we lie there in the dark, listening to the rain on the roof, and I think about the broken fence back home and the last sound I heard out of Puffin and that long, long black face looking into the lean-to.

Because I’m tired, I say exactly what I’m thinking, without a lick of tact to make it go down easier.

“Why did you come back for us?” Even though I’m whispering, my voice is loud in the little bedroom.

Gabe’s reply from the other side of the bed is withering. “Honestly, Puck, why do you think?”

“What does it matter to you?”

Now he’s indignant. “What kind of a question is that?”

“Why are you answering all of my questions with other questions?”

Gabe tries to shift to put space between us, but there’s no more mattress for him to move to. The bed groans and creaks like a ship at sea, only the sea is the bare floor of Beech’s ham-scented room. “I don’t understand what you want me to say.”