So Far Into You (17 page)

‘He remembers you.' Seth's voice spun her around, Occhy's chain rattled on the metal tray and her nerves took off like ducks in hunting season.

He opened the clipboard, took out an A4 sheet and handed it to her, all business. ‘This is a spec sheet outlining our fruit requirements. You'll need to liaise with me nearer harvest so we time the fruit delivery right.'

She scanned the page. ‘When will I know what rate you pay? Does this tell me?'

‘Always interested in the money, aren't you, Rem?'

She ignored the sarcasm. ‘I have commitments, Seth. You heard what they said at the meeting. Most grapegrowers have bank managers on their case. I know I do.'

‘Okay. I should know more about tonnage rates in another week. We've just about finished all the initial vineyard visits.'

‘So you'll let me know?'

He nodded. ‘I'll let you know.'

She gave Occhilupo a final pat and stepped back from Seth's vehicle, noting with a certain satisfaction that there were at least two sap stains on his paintwork.
Good on you, Redwood Pine.

‘I'll be in touch,' he said, climbing into his car.

***

After her meeting with Seth, Remy changed into her gardening gear then drove straight to Dottie Howlett's place, feeling like she was fighting the car the entire way. She turned corners too sharp, braked too hard, drove too fast and she made the journey in record time, not that it was a record she'd ever want to repeat.

Dottie lived in Woodside in a small group of single-storey units built in reddish-brown brick with cream window trims. She sat in a chair on her front porch with a scruff-ball of white dog in her lap, near a doormat that said welcome and meant it.

‘Lovely day for gardening, Rem dear. Not too hot. The side gate's open,' she called, as Remy climbed out of her car.

‘Don't wish summer away on me just yet, Dot, winter is long enough up here, thanks very much.'

‘I've had the most lovely tomatoes this year,' the old lady prattled, following Remy as she dragged a shovel from her ute, and carried them into Dottie's back yard. ‘I've had to give some to the lady in number 6, I had so many. So much flavour. So much better than what you can buy in the shops. Taste like cardboard.'

Remy took a few minutes to check the vegie patch she'd built Dottie last spring. The plot wasn't big. Dottie didn't have the space, but no-dig gardens were good like that. It was amazing what could be done with twelve square feet of earth, newspaper, compost and a few bales of pea straw.

Dottie's tomato bushes were still going strong but the spinach had bolted to seed, along with the coriander. The zucchinis had mildewed leaves and Remy pulled them out first, throwing the plants to one side.

‘I'm going to leave the tomatoes a bit longer, Dot, but the rest can all come out. I've brought broccoli, new spinach, climbing beans, and a pot of parsley for your window box.'

By the time Remy had re-layered the no-dig garden, planted and watered everything in—Dottie filling her ears the entire time—she felt far more relaxed. Gardening did that for her. She loved making these no-dig gardens for the older people around the Hills. It was her way of contributing to their quality of life.

Sometimes she accepted payment for the gardens, if they could afford it or if their families wanted to foot the bill, like Dottie's daughter did. Often she did it freely. She had a pantry stocked with wonderful jams and preserves that the oldies offered her in return, and she was rarely short of sides of meat in her freezer, or firewood in the winter, or all those things that people who didn't always have money could find to trade.

Every third Sunday she held a stall at the Williamstown market where she sold her cacti teapots and containers of fresh herbs. A lot of her commissioned vegetable patch work came from that stall.

No matter how desperate she got for money, one thing Remy had sworn she'd never do was phone sex, ever again. That, she'd put to bed the day Seth overheard her on the phone.

White Knights had caused her nothing but trouble.

Chapter 14

‘The problem with owning an old house,' Remy said to Breeze the next day, ‘is that nothing's ever bloody straight.'

She was trying to re-lay the front steps to fix broken, rickety bricks, because her mother was very likely to want photographs stepping up or down those bricks, or sitting there with Bernie. She didn't want her mother to trip in her wedding dress, and she didn't want to spend years contemplating wedding photos where all she'd see would be the steps she should have fixed.

She'd mixed cement, chiselled out the dodgy bricks, and had the replacements all ready to go. Like most things, a simple job in theory was never quite as simple in practice. It was hot, and the cement kept going off that little bit too fast, adding to her pressure to try to get everything done too quickly. To compensate, she'd added too much water to the cement mix, which made it too squishy, and it was hard to get a good depth of mortar to match the other steps.

So she'd chiselled the entire row of bricks out, painstakingly chipped off the old mortar, and tried re-laying the entire step again with a new batch of cement.

The good news was: she was nearly finished.

The bad news was: she probably should have bitten the bullet and paid someone who knew what they were doing.

‘I make a lousy brickie,' she said to Breeze, who yawned in response and sat on the grey bag of dry cement, making it puff like a sleeping dragon.

That's when Remy glanced toward Red Gum Valley Road and saw the black ute winding its way up the driveway, coming fast, dust flying from the wheels.

Occhilupo had his head hanging out the side of the ute, so Remy's first instinct was to drop her trowel, grab Breeze by the collar and haul the dog safely behind the garden gate.

Then she tried patting her shorts and wiping her face to get the cement dust off. Then she gave up. He could take her as he found her, or not at bloody all.

Once again, he parked under the Redwood Pines. Once again, Remy didn't bother mentioning the sap.

‘Hi,' he said. ‘I'm glad I caught you at home.'

‘I don't go very far this time of year,' she said. ‘There's always too much to do leading into vintage. What's up?'

He was in uniform again, but khaki shorts today instead of trousers. He wore a cap, and sunglasses, and he hadn't lost that red clipboard. It was tucked between his arm and his ribs. He hadn't shaved.

Straight off the bat, the dogs started their two-way whine-fest between Occhilupo in the back of the ute and Breeze in Remy's garden.

Seth ignored them. ‘I had a few more questions to ask you.'

‘Fine. Go for it. I hope you don't mind if I keep doing what I'm doing here, though. I'm at a critical point.'

‘Please.'

Remy slathered mortar on her trowel and transferred that to the brick. Scraped it bottom, back, and two sides, then slotted it in place.

It fit first time. ‘Well whaddaya know,' she said to herself, to Seth, and to anyone else listening. ‘It's about time something went right.'

She tapped the brick with the rubber mallet she'd borrowed from Zac. Satisfied she had it level, she stood, stepped back, and admired her work from a distance.

‘Not bad.'

‘Looks good,' Seth said, waving his clipboard at her bricks.

Remy wiped her palms on her thighs. ‘So what questions did you have, Seth?'

‘What row spacing is your vineyard, Remy? What row width?'

She looked at him. ‘You came out here to ask me that? I'm sure it's in Max's file.'

‘Hate to break it to you, but Max doesn't have much by way of files.'

‘Oh.' She released the elastic band on her hair, shook cement dust out, and scooped her hair into a tidier mess at the base of her neck. ‘You could have texted me or something.'

‘It's fine. I had to get out to the Hackett's place again too.' He opened the clipboard, found his pen. She got stuck looking at his hands. He'd always had nice hands. Big. Strong. Capable. She bet he'd lay a mean set of bricks.

‘Remy?'

Stop ogling his hands.
‘Pardon?'

‘What's the row spacing and width?'

‘Three-metre row spacing. Two point four-metre row width.'

‘And what clone of sauvignon blanc is it?'

‘
Hell and Tommy,
Seth. I don't know. Do I need to get an ampelographer out here?'

‘Nah. It's all good info to know if we can. Don't worry about it.'

‘Okay. Anything else? Do you have any news for me on price?'

His gaze skipped away and returned. ‘I'd say, depending on quality and our production needs, absolute max would be $3000. It could be anywhere from $1500.'

‘Max paid $3300 last year.'

‘That was last year. I'm not certain we'll be making Chameleon this year. Rina and I have been discussing it with Lewis Carney.'

‘Not making it?' Remy's heart missed a beat. ‘You can't not make it. That wine is Max's flagship.'

‘Yes. And Max doesn't own Montgomery anymore.'

Remy fell silent. There wasn't much that could be argued on that.

Seth closed the clipboard, but Remy had the sense he wasn't finished. He took a moment to grope for the words, and whatever she'd expected him to say, it wasn't this: ‘Why did my mother write you two cheques?'

Remy tapped the mallet a couple of times, wishing conversations about his mother didn't make her so nervous. ‘What did Ailsa say?'

‘I'm not asking her. I'm asking you.'

She'd bet her last dollar Ailsa had told Seth something entirely different, but for her, it was time for the truth. She had nothing left to hide, and no reason to hide it.

‘Do you remember how you offered me an advance on my pay that night in your office? I told you I owed some money and you said Lasrey had a policy that might assist staff in financial hardship?'

‘I remember. You didn't take me up on it. I also told you to trust me, and that I'd do whatever I could to help you. You didn't take me up on that.'

Remy ignored the latter part. ‘When your mother offered me the $100 000 to resign and to leave, I told her there was someone I couldn't leave Margaret River without paying.'

He started to speak, changed his mind. ‘Who did you owe $20 000 too?'

‘When he died, my father had debts to a loan shark called Doug Mulvraney. Dad was into Doug for $18 000. Mulvraney made me and my mother responsible for those debts.'

Seth let out a long, slow, breath. He bounced the clipboard on his thigh, like he'd seen a mosquito there to squash, then tucked it beneath his arm.

‘Ailsa wrote me that first cheque so I could pay Mulvraney and pack up the house. The second cheque she dated two weeks later. I had to call her and prove that I was out of West Australia or she said she would cancel it.'

‘
Christ on a stick.
What was your father into, Remy, that he owed $18 000?'

‘Greyhounds. Shares. Horses. You name it. When he died, Mum and I had bills coming from all over the place. Liquor store bills. He had fuel accounts set up at service stations from Augusta to Capel. He was drunk when he crashed the car, so the insurance wouldn't pay up. He and Mum were already mortgaged to the eyeballs when Mum had to sell the house.'

‘This is why you were doing the phone sex?'

‘That's why. It's the only thing that kept us afloat. It's the only way we could pay Mulvraney's interest, and bring the loan down.'

‘Did your mother know?'

Remy bristled. ‘Of course not. That's not the kind of thing you tell your only parent. I used to log in for phone times when she was at work, when she was out of the house. I was very careful about that.'

‘Didn't she ever ask where the extra money was coming from?'

Remy hesitated before she met Seth's eye. ‘I kind of, um, elaborated, when I told her what my wage was with you.'

‘Ah,' he said.

Breeze let out another of her glass-breaking squeals.

‘What the heck sort of hellhound have you got around there anyway?' Seth glared at the front of her cottage like he expected to see claw marks in the stone. ‘Occhy. Shut up.'

Occhy cut his barks to whines, then whimpers. He shifted on his front paws, alternating between one paw on the rim, then two, then back to one again.

Seth scratched the side of his head, and even through the sunglasses Remy could see him squinting at her, trying to work it all out. Then he tossed the clipboard on to the bonnet of his ute. It didn't land flush. It skidded across the polished metal before it dropped to the ground.

‘I have to wash out my wheelbarrow, Seth, or it'll set.'

He was nearer the hose and he turned the tap on for her, kinking the hose to save water when he passed it to her.

‘Thanks,' Remy said, tipping the wheelbarrow and washing it so the dirty water flowed into the agapanthus. They were tough. They could handle it. When she finished, he turned off the tap and coiled her hose into a neat figure eight near the new steps.

‘I bet you hang all your shirts beautifully, Seth. Not a crease to be seen.' It popped out before she thought about it, and she regretted it straight up. It felt intimate and she couldn't afford to get intimate with Seth. ‘Sorry.'

‘What are you sorry for?'

‘It's none of my business what you do with your shirts.' Then she thought: maybe he isn't staying at a hotel at all. Maybe he's staying with one of those girls from the social pages. Maybe
she
irons his shirts.

The thought hit her so hard and so heavy, she almost dropped the wheelbarrow. He didn't seem to notice how she had to wrestle to keep it straight.

‘My mother said the first 20 000 was to stop you taking allegations to the police that I'd sexually harassed you, that night in my office.'