She still holds a thread of hope that her dad will actually get his plan back on track. Like she told Cal, making up stories and getting people to believe them is what Johnny is good at, and he’s got desperation to spur him; he might pull it off. The thread is a thin one, and it frays every time she remembers the column of flame in the yard, but it’s what she’s got, so she keeps hold of it.

The bleating she heard in the night was real: a few black-faced sheep, each with a splotch of red spray paint on its right hip, are straggling around the yard, eating what they can. Malachy Dwyer’s herd have found or made a gap in their paddock wall again. At Banjo’s delighted howl, they startle and bound off into the trees. Trey revises her plans. She likes Malachy, who always gave her messages to do when she was a kid and who has the mountainy men’s rule of asking no questions. Instead of shiteing around till people are awake, she’ll go up the mountain and tell Malachy his sheep are out. By the time she’s helped him round them up, it’ll be late enough to head down to Noreen’s.

Before she’s out the gate, she’s sweating. The sun is barely up, but today even the mountain breeze has been tamped down to a twitch, and the air is so heavy Trey can feel it pressing at her eardrums. What they need is a thunderstorm, but the sky is the same mindless blank it’s been for weeks.

As they near the fork where their road merges with the one twisting from higher up the mountain, Banjo stiffens and stretches his nose forward. Then he gallops off ahead, around the bend and gone.

Trey hears his siren howl, the one that means he’s found something, rise through the trees and the webs of sun. She whistles for him, in case he’s run into more of Malachy’s sheep, but he doesn’t come back. When she rounds the bend, there’s a dead man lying across her way.

Fourteen

The dead man is lying at the fork where the two paths meet. He’s on his left side, his right arm and leg flopping awkwardly, with his curled back to Trey. Even though she’s ten paces away and can’t see his face, she has no doubt that he’s dead. Banjo stands over him, legs planted wide, nose high, howling up into the trees.

“Banjo,” Trey says, not moving closer. “Good boy. You done great. Come here, now.”

Banjo’s howl fades to a moan. This time, when Trey whistles, he dashes over and presses his nose into her hand. She rubs him and talks softly to him, and looks past him at the dead man. There’s something wrong with the back of his head. The shadows bend into it strangely.

Her first assumption, taken for granted without question, was that it’s her dad. The narrow build is right, and the shirt is white and crisp. It’s only on this longer look that she stops being sure. The crisscrossing shadows of branches and the low slant of dawn light make it hard to tell, but the hair looks too fair.

“Good boy,” Trey says again, giving Banjo one more pat. “Sit, now. Stay.” She leaves him behind and moves cautiously, in a wide arc, around the dead man.

It’s Rushborough. His eyes are half open and his top lip pulled up, so he looks like he’s snarling at something behind Trey. The front of his shirt is dark and stiff.

Trey has never seen a dead person before. She’s seen plenty of dead animals, but never a human being. Ever since she found out what happened to Brendan, she’s had a deep, fierce need to see one. Not Brendan’s. She needs to find where he’s laid, but not in order to see him; so that she can go to the place, and so she can mark it, as a signal of defiance to whoever put him there. She’s needed to see a dead body in the same way: so that she can place Brendan clearly in her mind, where she can lay her hand on him.

She squats by the body for a long time, looking at it. She understands this as a part of the interchange between her and whatever brought first Cal and then Rushborough to Ardnakelty. She didn’t turn away from it, and in response it put this in her path.

The birdcalls and the light gain force as the day expands. It seems to Trey that the thing at her feet shouldn’t be considered as a person any more. As a person, as Rushborough, it’s incomprehensible, wrong in ways that her mind can barely take in without ripping. If she looks at it as just another thing on the mountain, it becomes simple. After a while the mountain will absorb it, as it does fallen leaves and eggshells and rabbits’ bones, and transmute it into other things. Seen in this way, it makes clear and uncomplicated sense.

She stays put until the body has become natural to the mountain, and she can look at it without her mind bending. A few more of Malachy’s sheep wander at the edge of the upper path, steadily crunching weeds.

The sound of a phone ringing goes off like a fire alarm. Trey and Banjo both leap. It’s coming from Rushborough’s pocket.