It was even possible that an important news story had broken and he hadn’t been able to get away. But under those circumstances, wouldn’t any reasonable editor have sent his new journalist a message?
Really, Chloe knew she only had one option. She texted her new boss.
Have arrived in Cairns. Awaiting instructions. Kind regards, Chloe Brown.
An hour later, having received no reply and then having tried to ring through to Finn Latimer, only to receive a growling voice message, Chloe stood in line at the car-hire desk. It was a move she probably should have taken much sooner. If she was honest, she’d never really felt comfortable with the idea of her boss driving all the way from Burralea to collect her from the airport, but she had supposed it must be the way things were done in the country.
Now, she could only assume that the well-meaning Emily, who hadn’t shared her own phone number and wasn’t answering emails, had got her wires crossed. At least the hire car queue wasn’t long, but Chloe wished she felt more confident about driving solo up into those big green mountains.
In Sydney, Jason had hardly ever allowed her to drive his car and she’d mostly used public transport to get to and from work. At work there’d been taxi vouchers. In fact, the last time she’d driven a car had been last Christmas, when she’d taken her parents home from a party at her sister’s place, using their vehicle, because they’d had a few drinks.
Of course, in her new job, Chloe would be required to drive about the countryside to gather stories. Emily had told her that the Bugle had its own vehicle, which she could share with Finn. That prospect had been a tad daunting, until Chloe told herself it would be pleasant to drive on rural roads, even with the odd pothole, far better than fighting heavy city traffic.
As the queue shuffled forward, Chloe smiled at the woman behind her. She was young, with a wide-eyed baby in her arms – a cute little girl with dark hair and a round face and rather solemn grey eyes. The woman was tall and slim, with tawny hair pulled tightly back from her face into a ponytail. She had a luggage trolley beside her piled with suitcases and a folded pram and what might have been a dismantled high chair bandaged in bubble wrap. She had the kind of unremarkable face that signalled common sense and reliability, until she smiled back at Chloe, and suddenly she seemed to light up and look unexpectedly pretty.
‘It’s even warmer up here than I expected,’ she said conversationally.
‘Yes,’ Chloe agreed. ‘I’ve already shed two layers. Where have you come from?’
‘Sydney.’
‘Me too.’
They smiled in the way strangers do when they discover a small coincidence.
‘I’m heading up to the Tablelands, though,’ the woman said next. ‘It probably won’t be as hot up there.’
‘I hope not,’ said Chloe. ‘I’m going that way, too. To Burralea.’
‘No way.’ The woman laughed. ‘So am I.’ She looked down at her little baby, then grinned at Chloe. ‘Perhaps we should share a car?’
It seemed, quite simply, the obvious thing to do.
CHAPTER SIX
Chloe’s travelling companions were Jess and Willow. Jess was going to start a new job in Burralea, too, as a waitress in the Lilly Pilly café. Willow was her daughter, but Jess made no mention of Willow’s father and Chloe didn’t like to ask. Given her own postponed plans for motherhood, however, she was a little envious.
Willow, clutching a garish purple and green–spotted elephant, settled quite cooperatively into her special seat in the back of the hire car. As they headed out of the city, she stuck her thumb in her mouth and obligingly nodded off to sleep. Before long the road wound upwards, climbing through semi-open eucalyptus forests that were replaced, as they got higher, by monstrous rainforest trees, giant ferns and clumps of ginger.
Between patches of surprisingly comfortable silence, Chloe and Jess – who was driving, much to Chloe’s relief – enjoyed a quiet chat. It seemed neither of them knew a great deal about the town they were heading for. Jess had accommodation organised: she and Willow would be sharing a house with another woman called Hannah who worked at the café.
‘Have you been able to find childcare for Willow?’ Chloe couldn’t help asking.
‘Amazingly, there was a vacancy at the centre right in the middle of Burralea,’ said Jess. ‘I was so lucky. And I’m hoping that by sharing the house, I’ll be able to afford to work just three days a week.’
‘Sounds perfect.’ Chloe said this with perhaps a little more enthusiasm than was warranted, but the idea of a single mother and her little daughter settling down and making a new life in a country town seemed incredibly appealing. Again, she felt a twinge of envy. ‘So what made you choose Burralea?’
To her surprise, a tide of pink rose up Jess’s neck and into her cheeks. ‘I searched on the internet and it – it just looked like such a pretty place. A nice size. And Hannah, the woman I’m sharing with, is a distant relation. Her grandmother and my grandmother were cousins.’
‘So you won’t be living with a complete stranger. That’s even better,’ Chloe said warmly.
‘Yes, fingers crossed it all works out. What about you?’ asked Jess. ‘Where will you stay?’
‘I don’t have anywhere permanent yet. I’m going to be working at the little Burralea newspaper.’
‘Really? As a journalist?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s so cool. Emily Hargreaves owns that paper, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Chloe said, surprised. ‘Do you know her?’
‘No.’ Again, Jess’s face grew quite pink. ‘I – I met someone who mentioned they knew her.’
Chloe waited, expecting Jess to expand on this, but instead she tightened her lips and stared rather glumly ahead, almost as if she wished she hadn’t spoken up. Which was rather puzzling.
When it was clear the topic of Emily was closed, Chloe said, ‘I’m just booked into the pub for now. I thought I’d suss out the job before I look around for somewhere to rent.’
Jess nodded. ‘Fair enough.’ Then she flashed Chloe another of her unexpectedly brilliant smiles. ‘So we’re both making fresh starts.’
‘Good for us.’ Chloe was grateful, actually, that her travelling companion was as cautious as she was about sharing too much info about the whys and wherefores of their decisions.
If Jess had been the super chatty kind, she might have wanted to offload her personal history, and Chloe might have felt compelled to share some of her sorry saga with Jason. The arguments and tears, the hurt of Jason’s final, brutal admission that he probably didn’t totally love her.
In many ways she’d been grieving. Breaking up was a kind of death.
Now, Chloe was leaving behind everything that was familiar, as well as everything she wanted to forget. So she was relieved that Jess was happy to chat about their conventionally boring families instead. Jess’s father had been in the Air Force, so they’d moved around a lot.
‘I’ve had plenty of experience at being the new kid,’ she said with a rueful smile.
‘And I’ve had no experience,’ Chloe admitted. ‘I’ve always lived in Sydney. I went to the same school for twelve years. This is my first big move.’
‘A big move to a very small town.’
‘Yeah.’
Before Chloe had time to wonder afresh if her decision had been way too rash, the winding road emerged from the rainforest, opening out to a vista of rolling green farmland.
‘Wow,’ Jess exclaimed. ‘Look at that.’
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ If Chloe had been driving, she might have allowed herself a moment to pull over, to stop and drink in the spectacle, the rippling spill of tablelands, the sweep of cattle-dotted pastures, of ploughed fields, of valleys and hills and a distant cluster of rooftops where a small town nestled.
‘Toto,’ she said, in a fake American accent, ‘I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.’
‘And we’re most definitely not in Sydney, thank God,’
said Jess.
Chloe tried to imagine the red-tiled rooftops of Sydney filling every gap in this tranquil rural landscape that stretched before them to the far green horizon.
No way.
Right in this moment, she was more than happy to swap busy city suburbs for winding back roads and paddocks of black and white cows. ‘I think I just might be able to manage living in a place like this,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ Jess agreed with a grin. ‘Me too.’
Chloe might have felt completely relaxed if she hadn’t been concerned about the unexplained silence from her new boss at the Burralea Bugle.
Burralea’s main street consisted of a row of quaint shops, circa 1920s, many of which were painted in pretty pastels and fronted by footpaths adorned with pot plants and hanging baskets that spilled bright flowers. The Burralea Bugle, housed within one of these shops, was like no other newspaper office Chloe had seen.
Her previous office at Girl Talk had been on the fourth floor of a multi-storey glass and steel building and protected by a huge Polynesian guard at the front door, while the inner doors had coded keypads. By contrast, the Bugle’s pale blue and white–panelled door was closed but not locked, and when Chloe gave it a tentative push, it swung open with an ominous creak, not unlike the sound effects in a horror movie.
A tremor whispered down her spine. She turned back to Jess who sent her a cheery wave and drove off.
So. It was early afternoon, a grim, grey afternoon. The clouds had rolled in as Chloe and Jess approached Burralea, bringing a misty, drizzling rain that created a sense of gloom. To add to the weirdness, there were no lights on inside the newspaper office, but Chloe could see a lone figure in the middle of the room. A man. Slumped at a desk, folded forward, his head resting on his arms.
Dear God.
Alarmed, she flipped the nearest switch and light flooded the otherwise empty office. Instantly, an agonised groan erupted from the apparently comatose man. ‘What the —!’
Chloe’s spirits, which had been rapidly sinking, now took a headlong dive through the floorboards. What the hell had she got herself into? Cautiously, she closed the door, set down her suitcase and laptop and unhappily stepped forward.
The room reeked of alcohol, probably whisky, and, to make matters worse, she recognised the slumped figure. There was no mistaking the shock of black shaggy hair and the forbidding, stubble-covered visage that somehow seemed threatening even when he appeared to be asleep.
Somehow, some-crazy-how, Finn Latimer, the famous foreign correspondent, was here. At the Burralea Bugle. Dead drunk, judging by the almost-empty bottle of scotch, plus the greasy tumbler on the desk beside one of his outstretched hands, as if he’d passed out before he could pour the final snifter.
Chloe’s first instinct was to turn and run. This was also her second instinct, which was damned disappointing considering the gusto with which she’d embraced the whole idea of heading north to a new job and a new life.
She might have acted on her new escapee impulse, if Finn Latimer hadn’t stirred at that moment. With another groan, he lifted his head and squinted as if the light was blinding.
From beneath an untidy fall of black hair, he took a cautious sideways glance in Chloe’s direction and winced, as if any small movement hurt. ‘Who are you?’ he growled, his voice as deep as a gravel pit.
Chloe lifted her chin and pushed her shoulders back. ‘Chloe Brown.’
He shook his head and winced again. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell. What do you want?’
‘I believe I’m expected to start work here today.’ She was probably foolish to have admitted this. Surely a wise woman would have left immediately, while she still had a fighting chance.
Frowning at her, Finn Latimer took his time to respond. ‘So you’re Dolly?’ he said at last.
‘Um – no. My name’s Chloe. Chloe Brown. Emily Hargreaves interviewed me for a job as a journalist with this paper.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ He let out a heavy sigh, then rubbed at his grizzled jaw with a large, long-fingered hand. He was wearing scruffy blue jeans and a white business shirt, rather crumpled and grubby, with the sleeves rolled back to the elbows. ‘Emily warned me, of course. She said she’d signed up a reporter from Dolly.’ He glared at Chloe through dishevelled strands of hair. ‘You are from one of the women’s magazines, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Chloe said, although she was rather proud of the fact that Girl Talk, despite its frivolous sounding name, catered for a far more serious and mature audience than this man obviously imagined.
‘I’m sorry,’ Finn Latimer said next. ‘You’ve caught me on a bad day.’
The apology surprised Chloe. She wondered how many bad days Finn Latimer normally experienced in any given week. If he had a drinking problem, she supposed that might explain why he’d left his high-profile post as a foreign correspondent to work on a tin-pot weekly in a tiny country town that no one had ever heard of.
Perhaps he’d had no option?
Finn was now looking glumly at the bottle and glass on the desk in front of him. ‘Shit,’ he said, almost, but not quite, under his breath. ‘Is it —’ He paused for a moment and frowned again, as if he was struggling with a difficult problem. ‘Is it Tuesday?’
‘Yes,’ said Chloe.
‘Shit,’ he said again. ‘Was I supposed to collect you from the airport?’
‘I – I think so.’
‘Damn. How did you get here?’
‘A hire car.’
Finn closed his eyes, propped his elbows on the table and let his head sink into his hands. The pose seemed to draw inappropriate attention to how wide his shoulders were.
‘How late is it?’ he asked.
‘Well, it’s afternoon.’ Chloe pulled her phone from her jacket pocket. ‘2.53 p.m. to be exact.’
He let out another ragged sigh, ran a large hand over his face. He looked terrible, his face too pale in contrast with the midnight hair, his cheeks lined by deep parallel creases that disappeared into dark stubble flecked with grey. ‘I’ve got to get this bloody paper out.’
Chloe was aware that the Bugle was a weekly, but Emily Hargreaves hadn’t mentioned which day it came out. ‘When’s your deadline?’ she asked.
‘Tonight. Six o’clock.’
Gulp. Chloe had no idea how much work still needed to be done, but after almost a decade at Girl Talk, her instincts to meet a deadline were deeply ingrained. Pushing aside any lingering tiredness from her early start and long journey from Sydney, she said, ‘Perhaps I can help?’ Not that this oaf deserved her help.
‘Thanks. Be a good girl and get me a coffee?’
At this, she bristled and, again, she was tempted to walk out. Her days as a junior and general office dogsbody were well behind her, although this probably wasn’t a useful time to try to set Finn Latimer straight.
Still smarting, she scanned the office, but she couldn’t see anything that looked remotely like coffee-making facilities. ‘Is there another room with a kettle?’
His mouth tilted in what might have been a grotesque attempt to smile. ‘Café on the corner. They know how I like it. Put it on my tab.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘And make sure you get a coffee for yourself, too.’
‘How kind.’ This time, the sudden gleam in Finn’s dark eyes showed that he hadn’t missed her sarcasm. ‘Would you like anything to eat?’ she asked as her stomach gave a small rumble. It felt like ages since she’d had a coffee and croissant at Cairns airport.
Finn placed a tentative hand against his stomach, which Chloe couldn’t help noticing was surprisingly flat. But then, alcoholics didn’t eat much, did they? He grimaced. ‘No, no food, just coffee.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
I’m an idiot, Chloe told herself as she unearthed an umbrella from the outside pocket of her suitcase and headed down the street through the drizzling rain. Why on earth had she even dreamed it might be fun to work on a little country newspaper? Shouldn’t she have known
that no self-respecting journalist would want to take up such an ignominious post? Of course her boss would be a Neanderthal. Or a drunk. And no woman in her right mind would hang around in this job.
Emily Hargreaves had conned her well and truly, waxing lyrical about the wonderful community spirit in Burralea, the beauty of the surrounding countryside, the wide range of activities to report on, the opportunities to focus on women’s stories. Pity she hadn’t mentioned the alcoholic, misogynist editor. Working with Finn Latimer would be about as pleasant and fulfilling as walking the plank.
Chloe didn’t have time to give full vent to the depth of her distress before she reached the end of the street and discovered the café on the corner, another quaint building surrounded by greenery and pot plants. It was, in fact, the same Lilly Pilly café where Jess was going to work.
Delicious smells of coffee and baking, along with hearty gusts of laughter, greeted her as she entered through a side door.
Half the space inside the café was taken up by an open-plan kitchen where smiling women in floral aprons were madly gossiping or telling jokes as they made sandwiches, cut up freshly baked quiche slices or worked the coffee machine.
Perhaps the stories about friendly country folk weren’t just urban myths after all? At least Jess would have a cheerful workplace.
The counter that separated this noisy kitchen from the customers’ tables and chairs held large glass jars filled with tempting cookies and beside these a framed sign: Unattended children will be given an espresso and a kitten.
Chloe laughed, surprising herself. She hadn’t laughed nearly enough in recent weeks.
Yet another smiling woman standing at the counter asked, ‘How can I help you?’
‘I’d like a coffee for Finn Latimer,’ Chloe said. ‘I believe you know how he has it?’
‘Sure.’ The woman took an extra not-so-subtle look at Chloe from beneath long mascara-darkened lashes, before writing a few hieroglyphics on a pad. ‘Takeaway long black, two sugars.’
The Summer of Secrets Page 4