“Not surprised with this halfwit jumping on boats at all hours. I’m Peg, by the way. The prodigal son’s favourite aunt.”
“Favourite aunt” bore little resemblance to the Aunt Peg Brix had described, but despite knowing the crates of contraband in Brix’s garden had been her doing, Calum couldn’t help instantly warming to her. She had Brix’s smile, and Calum had been under its spell for as long as he could remember. “Do you want me to wake him?”
“Too late.”
Brix’s smoky voice startled Calum. He turned to find Brix behind him, looking—albeit dishevelled—a million times better than he had this morning when Calum had left him in bed. They stared at each other, a thousand things to say, but no words to say them.
John cleared his throat. “What you been doing with that chook fence, boy? Looks like you drove the van over it.”
Brix blinked. “What?”
John pointed. “It’s all over the place.”
“That’s my fault,” Calum said. “There was a hole in it when I got up. That’s my city boy attempt at fixing it.”
Brix regarded it over his shoulder, then turned back with a smile that seemed suspiciously kind. “It ain’t half bad.”
Calum snorted. “Liar.”
The collective Lusmoores seemed to agree. John put his hand on the gate, and Calum stepped aside as he let himself in. “You need to move that post for starters. Come on. I’ll show you.”
John strode across the garden without waiting to see if Calum followed. Taken aback, Calum glanced at Brix, whose only answer was an amused shrug. Great. Calum had a feeling he was about to get schooled.
He joined John at the fence, trying to ignore Peg’s soft laughter as she and Brix went inside. In hindsight, his work on the fence was a heap of shit, and he couldn’t say what had possessed him to try to fix it. “Sorry. I was worried about foxes.”
“Don’t be sorry, lad,” John said. “They’re everywhere, even this close to the sea, and they won’t take one gal, they’ll kill ’em all. Bastards, they are.”
Calum had always thought foxes beautiful, almost mystical creatures, the very essence of nature, but he held his tongue. He remembered his Roald Dahl well enough to know foxes liked to kill chickens, and the thought of anything happening to Bongo made him feel slightly sick. “Do you think it was a fox that made the hole?”
“Not likely. They don’t leave none alive when they get in. You’ve lost a few nails in the storm. See ’ere?”
John pointed to a series of holes in the nearest post, holes that, on closer inspection, were so bloody obvious Calum wanted the ground to swallow him up. Not that John seemed to care much for Calum’s woodwork shortcomings. He unpicked Calum’s wayward nails and tossed them aside, then replaced them with his own.
“Do you right, boy, it ain’t as bad as I thought. I can see where you were goin’, and it might’ve worked if you’d secured the post properly.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but securing the post never occurred to me.”
John laughed, a deep rumbling chuckle that eclipsed his surly demeanour. “Jesus wept. Your face. I’m not telling you ya killed a dog or summit. You think that boy in there built this thing on his own? No, these bare hands did all the bloody work while he heckled me from that bench over there.”
“Really?”
John shrugged. “Well . . . he mighta hammered in a few nails when I told ’im to. Ain’t none of us born knowing how to build the ark.”
The obtuse biblical reference caught Calum off guard, but John wasn’t looking at him. Calum followed his gaze to the kitchen window, where he could just about make out Brix and Peg sitting at the table.
“He’s so like Peg,” Calum mused as much to himself as John.
John grunted. “Aye, he is, without the gob on him, though. Abel’s like his mother—pretty and daft.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Miss ’em?” If John was surprised Calum had asked a question so personal, it didn’t show. “I miss my boys—both of ’em when him in there goes off on one—but their ma can fall in the sea for all I care, if the sea weren’t too good for the likes of her.”
The brutal sentiment was softened by a gleam in John’s eyes that Calum had seen in Brix. Perhaps they were more alike than anyone knew. “Is the fence safe now?”
“Aye, it is. Help an old man up, will ya?”
Calum stood and helped John to his feet. He turned up the path, but John’s hand on his arm stayed him.