The Hunter by Tana French

Author:Tana French [French, Tana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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Trey knows she’s not the only one still awake. Everyone else has gone to bed, Liam is snoring softly and Maeve is sleep-muttering her annoyances, but Trey can hear her mother moving about the bedroom, and the occasional loud heave and sigh as Alanna turns among the sheets, hoping someone will come see what’s wrong. The house isn’t at rest.

Trey is sprawled on the sofa, automatically rubbing Banjo’s head propped on her knee. Banjo’s paw is better, but he’s still holding it up and looking pathetic when he wants treats and fusses. Trey is giving him plenty of both.

She’s listening for her father to come home. She reckons most likely he’ll be pleased with her, but with him you can never be sure. She’s left her bedroom window open, in case he’s raging and she needs to run.

She considered doing what he said, showing Noreen or Mrs. Cunniffe the piece of gold and letting them talk. It wouldn’t have worked. Trey, like anyone from Ardnakelty, has a gut-deep understanding of the ferocious power of talk, but it’s the wrong kind of power for this: fluid, slippery, switchbacking, forging twisting channels you can’t predict. She can see why her father went that way without a second thought. He’s all those things distilled; regardless of what either he or the townland might like to think, he’s Ardnakelty to the bone. Trey isn’t and doesn’t want to be, which means she sees angles that he misses. A solid thing appearing in front of the men’s faces, brazen and undeniable, has a different kind of power, to which they’re unaccustomed and against which they have few defenses. She let the gold do its own talking.

Banjo jerks in his sleep, eyebrows twitching and paws starting to work. “Shh,” Trey says, running his soft ear between her fingers, “it’s grand,” and he relaxes again.

She went to Cal’s in the morning, to warn him. She wasn’t clear on exactly how to do that, because she doesn’t want Cal knowing too much about what way she’s thinking; there’s a chance he might consider this to be a breach of her promise to do nothing about Brendan, and tell her to back off. It made no odds in the end, anyway, because Cal wasn’t home. Trey waited on his back porch for hours, her and Banjo eating the ham slices she’d brought to make sandwiches for lunch, but he didn’t come. He was out with the men, going about the business he doesn’t want her to know. In the end she left.

She doesn’t underestimate what she’s got into. The things she’s done before, robbing off Noreen and breaking into abandoned houses with her mates and drinking their parents’ booze, those were baby stuff. This is real. It feels good.

When she hears her dad at the door, she thinks at first, from the sounds of fumbling and staggering, that he’s drunk. Then he comes into the sitting room, and she sees his face. She stands up, spilling Banjo off her lap.

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