CHAPTER ONE

Cal gets the first whiff of trouble when he's in Noreen's shop on a Saturday afternoon, buying eggs. The shop is in fact where Cal would expect to get wind of trouble, or of anything else underway in Ardnakelty townland, from pregnancy to potato blight. In spite of this, he more or less misses the hint altogether, because Noreen is coming at him with so much other stuff.

It's November. The townland lies still under rain, and has for weeks: what Cal's neighbor Mart Lavin calls a soft rain, one that doesn't fall but hangs in the air as a fine mizzle, coating you in a layer that only feels wet once you get indoors. The mountains, off on the horizon, are near-invisible, only a flick of outline here and there. Cal has battled it out with the rabbits for his last parsnips, and with the squirrels for the nuts from his handful of hazel trees. The tillage fields wait for plowing under their green cover of clover and vetch; the cows still unhoused have left behind the tail-flicking irritability of summer and lie chewing the cud in slow, somnolent rhythms under a gray sky.

Cal has been in the West of Ireland long enough that he discounts this level of rain and walks to the shop. His house, an undistinguished 1930s cottage that he's gradually retrieved from dilapidation, is only a couple of miles from the village, and the road is in decent enough shape that he won't get himself too muddy. He leaves his door unlocked, a laxness that still gives him a spark of pleasure. Cal's previous neighborhood, in Chicago, wasn't a bad one, but it had plenty of action, and some of that action would definitely have appreciated an unlocked door. Here, any form of action would have to be lost to end up at his place, and someone would notice it along the way and spread the word. If by some remote chance it does come calling, Cal's dog, Rip, can probably scare it off. Rip is a stubby little beagle cross, but he hasn't noticed that: he has both the bark and the self-esteem of a Rottweiler.

To the bafflement of his neighbors, who consider bitching about the weather to be a national duty, Cal likes this time of year. Autumn is when Ardnakelty comes into its own. Its summers and winters are half-assed by Cal's standards, but autumn is meant for nuance and there this place is expert, layering the air with the smells of earth and wet leaves, shading the land with every subtlety of green and gold, coding its weather hints in the slightest twist of breeze or shift of cloud. The last geese, straggling southward, send up their forlorn clamor. In the main street of the village, the colors of the little mismatched houses are muted; the air smells of turf smoke, and tentative piano notes weave through the rain from behind some lace curtain where a kid is practicing. When Cal pushes the shop door open, the ding of the bell is blurred by the damp air.

The shop is small, warm, and bright, with bad country music playing cheerfully on a tinny little radio. Noreen is kneeling on the floor, bopping her rear end back and forth in time to the music and neatly whipping fake spiderwebs off her vegetable stand. "There's yourself," she says, through a mouthful of thumbtacks. "These cobwebs are like they're made of glue, they stick on everything; I'll be here all day. Next year I'm not bothering my arse, I'm just putting that witch in the window and that's me done."

"Can I give you a hand?" Cal asks. Cal is six foot four; Noreen is five foot one and not constructed for climbing. He comes in here expecting to fetch things off high shelves.

Noreen spits her tacks into a Ziploc bag. "Go on, so; get down them pumpkins. Honest to God, I feel like I only put these up yesterday, and now here's me taking them down. It'll be the feckin' reindeers and Santys before I know it. My mammy always said that's how you know you're getting old: the years start flying in."

"You haven't aged a day since I got here," Cal says. He starts taking down miniature pumpkins from where they've been artfully tucked into the few square inches of free shelf space between soup mix, baby wipes, canned peaches, razor blades, envelopes, and everything else that keeps Ardnakelty running. "If I didn't know you had all those great big kids, I'd swear you weren't a day over thirty."

"G'way outa that. The wrinkles on me."

"Thirty. Twenty-five, maybe." Cal likes Noreen, even if some days she does make him feel like he should have had more coffee.

Noreen makes a pfft noise. "I'm telling you, this week I feel like I'm a hundred. The kids threw a Halloween party, God help me. All the girls dressed up to the nines as sexy fairy murdered cheerleaders, you'd get more material in a bikini, and all the lads dressed up as themselves, lucky if they bothered their holes putting on a clean pair of trackie bottoms. And me running around like a blue-arsed fly, trying to make sure no one had a pocket fulla weed vapes or was riding anyone else down the back of the garden. I'm still recovering." She shoots Cal a glance over her shoulder. "Your Trey was invited. She didn't make it in the end, but she was asked."

"Much obliged," Cal says. "She was sorry to miss it, but she had to take her little brother and sister trick-or-treating." He has no problem stretching the truth in the name of harmony. Trey Reddy—who isn't technically his kid, but who counts as such for most practical purposes—has a less prickly relationship with Ardnakelty than she used to, but it's not friendly enough, and Trey isn't sociable enough, that anything short of a hostage situation would drag her to the Duggans' party.