The House at the Bottom of the Hill (8 page)

‘Did you hear me?’ Sammy said. ‘Saturday, dinner, our place, and I’ve told Ethan to make sure no animals get sick after five p.m. otherwise they’ll be answering to me.’

Charlotte smiled. ‘Does he always do what you say?’

‘I wear the pants around Burra Burra Lane. He knows it and the animals know it.’

‘I hope you don’t mind my asking again, Sammy—but is it just me and Daniel, or will you have other guests?’

‘Just you two.’

Charlotte lifted her eyes to the street as the man in question took the steps from the walkway outside Kookaburra’s two at a time and walked across the road towards the stock feeders’. Lucy trotted at his side. Traitorous four-legged friend.

Charlotte stepped back and behind the door.

‘You still there?’ Sammy asked. ‘You keep going quiet.’

Charlotte nodded.

‘Look, Charlotte,’ Sammy said, admonishment in her tone, ‘I know it’s hard but the only way you’ll get yourself accepted is to accept people first. Believe me, I know how this is done.’

‘If you say so.’ She hadn’t wanted to make friends but neither had she expected to be disliked. Having to befriend the townspeople was a setback but without doing so there’d be no progress.

‘Six o’clock. Don’t be late or I’ll get Dan to drive back and pick you up—in fact, that’s a brilliant—’

‘No, thank you,’ Charlotte said quickly. ‘I don’t need a lift from Hotshot. I’ll drive myself.’

Silence.

Charlotte nipped at her bottom lip with her teeth. ‘Sammy, are you planning on trying to push Daniel and me together?’

‘Yep.’

‘Oh.’ She paused. ‘The air bristles between us every time we meet,’ she argued. ‘You noticed that the other night.’

‘Yep.’

‘You’re not going to believe me when I say, again, that we don’t get on. We don’t like each other.’

‘Nope.’

Charlotte sighed. ‘You’re incorrigible.’

Sammy laughed—a merry chirrup. ‘Yep. See you Saturday if not before.’

Charlotte put the telephone and the screwdriver on the hall table. It seemed ungracious not to accept the blossoming of a friendship with Ethan’s wife, and Charlotte had a hankering for a friend, but she hadn’t intended to latch onto the hand Sammy was offering. Get in, crack on and get out had been her plan, although she’d known what she was getting into by buying the B&B and how much effort it might take to resell it. Not that she needed the money from the sale; she had enough money to see her through two lifetimes, courtesy of those hotel executives, and would return every penny to have her old life back—but that wasn’t possible.

Finding the B&B for sale had been fortuitous—she had no idea how she’d have stayed in town during her investigations otherwise, or what excuse she could have given for popping back every day if she’d booked into one of the neighbouring towns’ guest houses or hotels. But then she hadn’t thought her plans through properly. She’d simply waltzed into the real estate office in Canberra waving her cheque book and smiling at the amazement on the saleswoman’s face as she made a cash settlement, just below the already reduced asking price, for a property that had been on the market for over two years. Given the list of renovations she planned, including some that weren’t necessary but would certainly give the house a genuine sparkle, perhaps she’d also bought it for the challenge of bringing it back to life.

Disappointment at her lack of judgement thrust a wedge into her resolve to be unflinching and stubborn. She turned from the door, walked halfway down the hall and stopped. She leaned her forehead against a flocked peony on the wallpaper and braced herself against the wall. ‘You came here to get answers,’ she whispered. She’d never intended to charge in and ask Ethan the questions straight out—she’d hoped to discover more about him and how he was involved first. Now she knew the people in Swallow’s Fall, she understood her cautious approach had been the right approach. But she should be getting on with finding those answers—before she got too deeply enmeshed in the lives of the townspeople.

An image of Olivia Simmons’s caring face shone through Charlotte’s unease and she had a sense of her gran hovering around her in a cloud of comfort. She’d clung to the safety of Gran’s hand every day for the first three months after being whisked from Australia to that foreign place. Gran walked her around the village, introducing her to the pond where they fed the ducks and named each one, playing a guessing game the next time they visited to see if they could pick out Griselda from Giuseppe or Mozart from Miranda. And eventually, after months of counselling—walking with Gran to the red-brick Victorian junior school. Being handed over to the principal and left there for six hours, during which time Charlotte had learned with startling alarm how dissimilar she was from other children.

Face the fear, the counsellors and psychologists told her as she’d grown to teenage years. Remember the event without reliving it. They taught her to delve into her psyche and evaluate, almost as an outsider, the events that had harmed her and left her motherless, but nothing would erase the vision of the pictures she’d drawn as a six-year-old: stick figures in pools of blood; dark hands curling around wardrobe doors, ready to grab her …

‘No dream,’ she whispered. ‘Not in daytime.’ All the psychologists in the world could go to hell. She wouldn’t be over the nightmare until she knew the truth about Thomas O’Donnell.

She didn’t have her answers from Ethan yet, shouldn’t make any judgements, but when you faced the man whose father had killed your mother, the man who was probably your halfbrother—there were undoubtedly going to be a few shaky moments and any number of dilemmas.

‘Hi.’

Charlotte jumped.

‘Knock knock.’ Daniel rapped his knuckles on the open door. ‘What are you doing? Taking a closer look at that fancy wallpaper, huh?’ He ran his gaze over it. ‘Please tell me you plan to steam it off.’

Charlotte moved from the wall. She planned a lot of things and none of them were his business. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, crossing her arms beneath her breasts.

He gave her a lazy salute. ‘Mediation duties. Thought I’d start right in.’

‘How generous.’

‘Don’t mention it. Great to see you so enthused.’ He put one foot on the step to the house and a hand high on the doorframe. His height and the self-assured grin on his handsome face blocked the daylight.

Handsome? Had she decided on that? Sporty, lean, charm-mongering, six-foot-two Hotshot with incredible dancing lights in his eyes. She sighed inwardly. Yes. That’s what handsome was and it was standing in her doorway framed by sunlight.

‘I nearly brought you a coffee,’ he said, ‘then figured you might like to see inside Kookaburra’s instead.’

He must have his coffee machine up and running already, or perhaps he’d been handling the beans, because the aroma of Ethiopian mountain coffee emanated from him.

‘Arabica?’ she asked.

‘Sweetest coffee berries there are.’ He took his hand off the doorframe and stepped inside. ‘Smell like blueberry jam and cocoa.’

She inhaled, clamping her lips together and sucking in her cheeks but the taste of a dark, strong, milk-topped flat white swirled in her mouth.

He pulled the door to behind him and did a double take at the bolt on the top, the brass chain in the middle and the bolt on the bottom. ‘Did the Cappers do this?’ He touched the new brass chain plate she’d just re-fixed to the door and wiped some of the flaked red paint off. ‘You did this?’ He turned, smiling. ‘You hiding the crown jewels in here? Is that why you left Britain?’

Charlotte put one foot behind her to ensure an even distribution of weight and to stop herself from stepping away from the waft of coffee and aftershave that was becoming too recognisable as heady. Sex and coffee. The combination and lack of both could make a girl giddy. ‘What sort of coffee machine do you have?’

‘Deluxe,’ he said with a caress in his tone. ‘Eighty-three kilos of metallic black, chrome-panelled action.’

Boasting now, was he?

‘Two steam wands.’

Show-off.

‘Five-thousand-watt power rating.’

Coffee. Real coffee. ‘So how does this mediation thing work?’

‘Atta girl.’ He stepped from the door.

Charlotte unfolded her arms, tipped her head and took a breath.
Get this done
. That was the way forwards. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you some notes on what I’m going to do, you take them to the committee and get back to me tomorrow. How does that sound?’

‘Tomorrow? It could be a whole year before they give you the thumbs-up.’

He had to be joking. ‘I don’t have to listen to what anybody says,’ she told him. ‘I own Bottom of the Hill Bed and Breakfast. I can do what I like as long as it’s within building regulations.’

‘Bottom of the what?’

‘Hill.’

‘You’re giving the place a name?’

Well, of course she was, although she hadn’t meant to tell him. It had slipped out, but as anyone in business should know— as coffee Hotshot himself should know—the key factor when selling involved credibility. And a seemingly innocuous little something extra would tip the scale for a prospective buyer. ‘I was considering it.’ Giving the B&B a name suggested it was a lucrative, ongoing business and a good exit strategy always gave the best return. She’d learned that in Starfoot.

Except that regarding Swallow’s Fall, it was a lie. There was no good faith and no steady stream of customers, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be.

‘Why bottom of the hill?’ he asked. ‘You’re set on the entrance to town facing Main Street and we’re on the flat.’

‘And there’s a hill on the eastern side of town. The one I run on, the one you don’t like squashing wildflowers on, and my B&B sits at the bottom of that hill.’

‘The hill you
jog
on—you’re not up to running yet, you’re still getting in shape.’ He paused, but not long enough for Charlotte to respond to yet another of his teases. ‘Let’s keep the new name quiet for the moment, shall we? We’ve got enough on our plates.’

‘We?’

He slid his fingers into the pockets of his jeans. ‘We don’t want to rub the committee the wrong way with too many ideas. I don’t know how things work in England, but out here, life is slow.’ He pulled a hand out of his pocket and skimmed it across the air, palm down. ‘We glide, we take things easy, we
re
lax.’

‘I’m happy to relax but I’m not waiting a year before I …’ She faltered.
Sell
—she’d been about to tell him she planned on selling up. ‘Before I paint the weatherboard.’ The second slip-up in front of him.

‘You’ve got to back down, Charlotte, in order to go forwards.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you’ve got to chill. Get them on your side first. Do something for them. Show them a gesture they’ll appreciate.’

‘Like what?’ What did they want—a bunch of flowers? She’d been here three weeks and hadn’t got further than fixing the veranda and laying new turf.

He shrugged. ‘That’s up to you. But you can’t run them over with your stubborn streak. That’ll get their backs up even more.’

‘They started it.’ She’d been nothing but friendly from the moment she arrived; had baked pastries and cakes every time they turned up on her doorstep. They’d eaten her fare but hadn’t returned the bonhomie. If they now thought her terse and non-communicative, that was their problem—and their fault.

‘Look. I’ll give you an example. When I first got here, the wall behind the bar was putrid green. I waited three months before I repainted it a darker green. That didn’t get noticed, so the month after I painted it a shade of green with dark blue tones. That got noticed, but people liked it because it was still greenish.’ He took a breath. ‘The next month I took the green out and painted it a deeper blue. People liked that because they’d got used to the blue. They forgot about the green. Two months later I painted it navy. Everybody patted me on the back for a job well done.’

He
had
to be joking. ‘It took you seven months to change the colour from green to blue? That’s nutty.’

‘That’s Swallow’s Fall.’

Green and blue were almost the same colour, in certain lights. Changing pink to yellow was … nothing like the same.

She breathed deeply and took her gaze away from his scrutinising expression.

Why was she so keen on yellow anyway? What did it matter when she’d be leaving as soon as she’d found the courage she hadn’t realised she lacked to talk to Ethan privately? She could agree to paint it a softer rose colour and let it be. Pink wasn’t too bad, as long as it wasn’t flamingo pink.

She straightened and looked Daniel in the eye. It was the principle, not the colour. Yellow. She would paint her little house sunflower yellow if it killed her. If it meant she had to stay here right through summer into autumn. Which meant she’d have to pretend to be getting along famously with her mediator.

‘What do you need to know?’ she asked.

He smiled, took a step towards her. ‘First off, don’t worry about the committee. I’ll handle them. My role in this is to help them, and you.’

‘I thought I’d make a start on the inside first,’ she said, looking around the wide but shabby hallway. ‘Then get around to the weatherboard colour later, when I get a better footing in town.’

‘Now you’re talking. I knew you’d see sense.’

She fired him a look. ‘You know nothing about me.’

‘I know you’d like a coffee. You’ve got that “hanging out for caffeine” look in your eyes.’ He put a hand on the banister. ‘So where shall we start? Upstairs?’ He took a few steps up the stairs. ‘You’ll need to get the bedrooms sorted first, if you want guests soon.’ He paused, smiled down at her. ‘I know a couple of guys who might be your first customers.’

She wouldn’t be having customers.

He gripped the banister in one of his big hands and shook it. ‘Bit wobbly.’ He bent to inspect something and pulled the carpet back from the stairs. ‘Dry rot creeping in.’ He straightened. ‘They’ll probably last a year, but you ought to tend to them sooner rather than later.’

She’d be long gone in a year; she’d be gone in two months if they’d just let her paint the damn weatherboard. ‘I’ll deal with the banister but the stairs can wait.’