CRONIN HAD LEFT ALICE in the kitchen, on her hands and knees giving the floor a good scrubbing. The mess was his fault, but it couldn’t be helped. The people here called the time between winter and spring mud season, but this year the mud just wouldn’t end. The snow had been late in melting, then came a month of rain, and then out of nowhere it was as hot as the middle of July, and here it was barely the first of June. Alice insisted on a clean house, and she wouldn’t take any lip about clean enough. The plates were kept to a high polish, and the pans scoured with steel wool until they shone like they were newly bought from the store. Alice was house-proud, and Cronin might tease her about it but he wouldn’t think of saying a word against her. She had saved his life. Simple as that. The house, the farm, the boy, and now the baby—all of it he owed to her. Without her he would be a broken-down man, a stranger in this land piling one day on top of another with no hope of it ever adding up.
Cronin was a man who still woke, stricken, in the middle of the night, wrestling ghosts he had thought he could outrun by putting an ocean between them and himself. The old stories said that fairy folk couldn’t cross water, and he was a fool for thinking that ghosts were bound by the same rules. Now he knew better. Your ghosts were always with you. They rode you like a jockey rides his mount, and if you ever got half a mind to throw them, that’s when they dug in their heels and went to the whip.
He should have known when Alice came to the barn that he was seeing the whip hand of the ghosts being raised. He had gotten too comfortable. He had begun to feel—what? Contentment, was it? Happiness, even? He knew that was asking too much—not after all he’d done in the years before Alice—but sometimes he wanted to believe that he deserved a little peace of mind. That he might even have earned it. There he was in the barn looking at the new calf, born just last month to one of the Holsteins. He had the boy with him, like his own little calf. Henry was five and wanted to know everything and God help the lad but he thought Cronin had all the answers. Tom, how does the calf know where to find the milk? Tom, can I ride the calf like a pony? Tom, who’s the calf’s daddy? The boy had first known him as Tom and that had stuck, but a part of Cronin hoped that once the baby started talking—once she started calling him Daddy—maybe Henry would pick up the habit, too.
At the sight of Alice in her heavy boots scuffing through the hay that lay loose on the concrete floor, the boy brightened and said, “Mommy, come and see the calf!”
Cronin gave Alice a look because it was hours until lunch and hadn’t she just told him to stay out of the house and keep the boy with him—this for tracking in mud not an hour before?
She held up her hand, half a wave, and arched an eyebrow. “There’s a man here to see you.” She was trying to be calm for the boy’s sake but Cronin could tell she was unsettled.
“Who is he?” Cronin said.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s he want?”
“He won’t say. Says he needs to speak with Tommy Cronin.”
A ghost name. No one had called him Tommy in years, not in his waking life.
Alice told him the man was dressed like a banker or a mayor. It wasn’t often that they had visitors to the farm, and Alice was a champion for sending mischief-makers packing. For her to haul on her boots and hurry down—right in the middle of scrubbing the kitchen floor, a task she attacked with the fury of a holy martyr—meant that she was spooked. Cronin was going to make a joke about winning the lottery or inheriting a castle from a rich uncle back in Ireland, but he saw in her eyes that she was deadly serious. He wiped his hands on his trousers and said, “Let’s go see what he wants.” He nodded in the direction of the boy. Henry was Cronin’s shadow but the shadow needed to stay put.
While Alice asked Henry to show her the calf, Cronin left the barn, turning over in his head who it might be that had come to see him.
THE MAN IN the driveway stood with his back to the barn. With one hand he shaded his eyes, as if surveying the wooded hills that ringed the property. Mountains, some people called them, but they were too beaten down to be mountains. The man wore a dark suit and a large gray hat with a black band, and he was old: his hair was white, and he stooped over a cane. A little ways up the driveway a car idled, sleek and black. Cronin’s feet crunched the gravel and before the old man turned Cronin knew it was Gavigan.
“What are you doing here?” Cronin had to keep himself from shouting. “How did you—”
“I came to see you about a job, Tommy. Everyone’s looking for a little extra work these days, aren’t they?”
Cronin could only glare at the man.
“I need you to find someone for me.”
“Get one of your boys to do it.”
“Come on, Tommy. There’s none better than you. And he’s a danger. Already killed three of our own outside Cork. Blew them to pieces and stole a pile of money—money that was meant to support the cause.”
“Don’t talk to me about the cause.” The words were acid in his mouth.
“Don’t you want to know his name?”
“What difference does—”
“Francis Dempsey.”
Cronin flinched.
“I thought that might get your attention.”
“It can’t be the same—”
“It is and it isn’t. It’s his son. And if he’s anything like his father… well, you can see why I need my best man on it.”
“I’m not your man.”
“Think of it as unfinished business, Tommy.”
“I’m done with all of that.”
“Well now, I’m sure there’s plenty who don’t see it that way—Francis Dempsey among them. And plenty more who’d pay dearly to find out where Tommy Cronin lives.” With the tip of his cane, Gavigan worked a large white stone loose from the driveway. “Wouldn’t they be surprised to find that he has such a nice, happy family by his side.”
Cronin stared hard at the smaller man.
“I’ve protected you all these years. I’ve known where you are and I haven’t told a soul.”
Cronin’s hands were gathered into fists. Had Alice and the boy stayed in the barn? Could they see him with this man? And the baby, was she still asleep in the house?
Gavigan let out a low, light chuckle. “Don’t get any ideas. You could take me, sure, but Jamie behind the wheel is a deadeye shot, and even if he missed you… well, he’d be sure to hit something around here.” He reached into his breast pocket and produced an envelope. “For expenses. I even put in a little something extra—think of it as a gift for the missus.”
Cronin held his ground. He looked at the envelope. At Gavigan’s wet rheumy eyes, his palsied sneer. At the man in the car—Jamie, was it?—sizing him up from a distance.
“Of course, if you’d prefer to think of it as volunteer work…”