The Summer of Secrets

by Barbara Hannay

  Chloe swallowed an urge to smile. ‘Yes, I know that, Bree, and I wouldn’t ask you to write the lead story for the front page, but there’s bound to be something you can tackle with a little guidance.’

  ‘That’s so cool.’

  Chloe knew Bree’s happy grin wasn’t merely because their hamburgers had arrived.

  ‘I need to grab a few things from my flat, while we’re in town,’ Chloe said, as they finished lunch. She felt a bit guilty about admitting this. It wouldn’t have been necessary if she hadn’t slept over at Finn’s.

  Bree was obviously curious as she followed her into the Progress Association’s office, which was fortuitously closed to the public after 1 p.m. on a Saturday, so they escaped Moira’s eagle eyes.

  ‘This is nice,’ the girl said when they’d climbed the stairs and she was looking around at the red lounge chairs and the neat little kitchen. She seemed happy enough to wait, while Chloe ducked into her room to grab extra clothes and toiletries.

  When Chloe returned, Bree was at the sink, filling a glass with water. ‘Your maidenhair fern is looking pretty sick,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, God.’ Chloe had forgotten all about the pot plant. She’d been so preoccupied this past week, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d watered it. Now she could see that a vast quantity of its delicate green leaves had turned brown and dry.

  ‘It’s not too late to save it,’ said Bree with impressive gravity, as she carefully poured water into the pot.

  ‘You sound like an expert.’

  ‘My gran’s an expert with ferns. She’s always nursing her friends’ maidenhairs back to life.’

  ‘Wow, that’s a handy skill. What does she do?’

  ‘Cuts off the dead bits and soaks the pots in a bucket of water, and then she uses a little bottle with a spray pump to mist them every day.’

  ‘Sounds logical,’ said Chloe. ‘Then I guess we’d better do that. I’d rather not risk this plant dying, so I’ll take it back to your dad’s place. Do you mind carrying it?’

  Bree didn’t mind at all and back at Cedar Lane, they duly used Chloe’s manicure scissors to tidy the dead fronds and she found a bucket to soak the pot. Miraculously, after that, their Saturday continued with relative ease.

  Bree unpacked and set up her bedroom the way she wanted it, and then Chloe took her to Lake Eacham for a swim in the deliciously deep, crystal clear rainwater. Back at the cottage, they cooked spag bol together, with Chloe showing Bree how to tear basil leaves and to crush garlic with the side of a knife blade and a little salt.

  While the sauce was simmering, Bree rang her grandmother and she didn’t disappear into her room to do so. She happily related details of her day, including Finn’s interior decorating skills and his fan club at the Lilly Pilly café, as well as Chloe’s inadequacies in the pot plant department. She sounded happy enough as she spoke, much to Chloe’s relief.

  When Finn rang from Singapore airport at around seven, however, Bree did go through to her room and close the door.

  Nervous now, Chloe tried to keep busy, grating parmesan cheese for their spaghetti and choosing colourful bowls to eat from. She found half a bottle of red wine and poured herself a glass. She was taking a first sip when she heard Bree’s bedroom door open.

  The girl came into the kitchen, looking somewhat down in the mouth. She held out her phone. ‘Dad wants to speak to you,’ she said in the subdued voice of a child who’d been told off.

  ‘Okay.’ Chloe squared her shoulders as she took the phone. ‘Hello, Finn.’

  ‘Chloe.’ His voice was clipped and businesslike, with no hint of the seductive lover of the previous night. ‘What’s this Bree’s telling me about you letting her write for the Bugle?’

  Chloe sighed. The last thing she wanted was an argument with Finn in front of his daughter, especially when said daughter was the subject in question and was watching her with big, worried eyes.

  In her smoothest voice, she said, ‘Yes, I’m delighted that you have so much faith in me. Thanks.’

  ‘Chloe, don’t play games. Be sensible. The kid’s twelve, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘I know.’ Chloe bristled. What right did Finn have to lecture her? He’d kept the girl at arm’s length in a boarding school, and then abandoned her, breaking his promise to his daughter and, consequently, her heart.

  ‘It’s amazing what they teach them at school these days,’ Chloe said. ‘How to write haiku, book reviews, little news stories. I’m always amazed at what my nieces and nephews produce.’

  A frustrated harrumph sounded in her ear. ‘You’re determined, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I think I am,’ Chloe said sweetly.

  Another, heavier sigh. ‘I can only hope you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Thank you, Finn. And all the best to you, too.’ Chloe sent Bree an encouraging wink.

  ‘By the way,’ he said as she was about to disconnect. ‘I rang Tammy again.’

  ‘Oh, good. I meant to ring her, but I’ve been rather distracted. How is she? Has she seen the TV news yet?’

  ‘No, but someone else rang her about it.’

  ‘Is she freaking?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s pretty tense. She told me to be careful.’

  Chloe’s heart gave a strange little clunk. Until this moment, she hadn’t allowed herself to think of Finn being in danger. It was big of Tammy to consider his welfare when her own worries were so huge. ‘Well, I’m sure that’s good advice,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  As the plane began its descent into Bangkok, Finn watched the pattern of blue and green rectangles way below delineating fish farms and rice paddies. Before long, these gave way to buildings, scattered at first, and then gradually denser, criss-crossed by expressways and overpasses. Finn’s stomach tightened.

  With every metre’s drop in altitude, the painful memories he’d been fighting forced their way back. Sweat broke out on his skin.

  Sarah and Louis had died in this country, in Thailand’s southern city of Betong. And he hadn’t been with them. A car bomb had exploded outside their hotel, just as they were leaving through the front doors.

  They’d died alone.

  He should have been there.

  If he’d accompanied them, he might have seen something, alerted them, saved them.

  Guilt struck again, as it had a thousand times, and Finn tortured himself by replaying those final days. Sarah had been desperate to get away from the heat and drenching humidity of Bangkok. She decided they needed a few days in Betong, a city surrounded by mountains and mist.

  He could remember her shining-eyed smile as she’d showed him the tourist brochure. ‘They call it the City in the Fog with Beautiful Flowers. Isn’t that gorgeous, Finn? We can take Bree out of school for a day or two. It can be a birthday treat. We all need a break.’

  At the last minute, Finn had received word that an Australian federal minister would be passing through Bangkok on his way back from trade talks in Europe. Finn was certainly overdue to take leave, but the chance to interview the minister about the latest changes to the Thailand–Australia Free Trade Agreement was too good to pass up.

  Disappointed, and more than a little fed up with him, Sarah had travelled alone to Betong, taking Louis but leaving Bree in school after all, because the girl didn’t want to miss a swimming carnival. Finn flinched now, as he remembered collecting Bree from school and giving her the heartbreaking news.

  Bree. The surviving daughter he’d now deserted.

  Fresh emotion whacked him. What the hell had he been thinking? What if something happened to Bree now, while he was away? How had he ever imagined that looking for Ben Shaw was more important than keeping his promise to his daughter?

  To Finn’s horror, his eyes filled with tears. Abruptly, he closed them, willed himself to get a grip. If he wasn’t careful, the friendly American businessman seated beside him would notice something was wrong an
d try to help.

  To calm himself, Finn replayed the phone conversation with Bree from Singapore in his mind. She’d sounded so different from the forlorn pre-teen who’d landed in Cairns. On this second call, his daughter had been super excited, talking fast as she told him everything she’d done that day, everything that she and Chloe planned to do.

  Then Chloe. Wow. She’d refused to argue with him on the phone in front of Bree and had instead, politely, smoothly, put him in his place.

  Chloe was obviously managing just fine. Bree was once again happy, and excited about being in Burralea, and his damn newspaper wasn’t going to collapse if she had a hand in writing one little story.

  Having reassured himself on this point, Finn found, to his surprise, that he could smile. Damn it, before Chloe Brown had arrived in Burralea, he’d been smugly convinced that the woman would be a lightweight.

  And yet, Chloe had not only proved to be a valuable work colleague, but a beguiling temptress who’d unwittingly lifted a corner on the blanket of grief that had shrouded him for the past three years. And now, it seemed, she’d also rescued his daughter from the hugest of disappointments.

  No question, Finn owed Chloe big time. But, in his own defence, his rash impulse to jump on a plane to find Ben Shaw was only partly crazy.

  He still had good contacts here in Thailand and he was confident he could track Ben down. So, yeah, he had set himself a mission and, for now, he had no choice but to file away his personal issues and get the job done.

  As always, the taxi ride from the airport was a nerve-jangling business of dodging tuktuks, motorbikes, lorries and the other brightly painted taxis. Eventually, Finn checked in to his hotel, then headed straight for Bangkok’s ABC office.

  He’d known Doug Brady, an ageing journo, formerly from Melbourne, for many years. Doug still headed the Bangkok office and his face broke into a deeply creased grin when Finn walked in.

  ‘Good to see you, old son,’ he said as he gripped Finn’s hand. Doug knew, of course, all about Finn’s history and the reasons he’d left Thailand. ‘How are you faring these days?’

  If there was anyone Finn could talk to comfortably about what had happened in Betong, that person was almost certainly Doug. The men agreed to catch up for a good chinwag, later in the day, at their favourite watering hole, a rooftop bar on Ratchadamnoen Klang Road.

  ‘But right now,’ Finn said, ‘the person I need to speak to, if possible, is the young female reporter who covered a story about the new smoking bans on tourist beaches.’

  Doug’s shaggy white eyebrows rose. ‘No kidding?’

  ‘Dead serious,’ Finn replied.

  ‘It was a young stringer, Tania Moore, who reported that story.’ Doug couldn’t hide his curiosity. ‘But why would you come all this way just to sniff around a little piece like that?’

  There was no point in beating about the bush. Finn showed Doug a photo of Ben Shaw. ‘This man went missing in the rainforest in Far North Queensland. They’ve been searching for him for weeks without any luck. His girlfriend’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and suddenly he turns up in your footage on Kata Noi beach.’

  ‘Blow me down.’ Doug took the photo and studied it hard. ‘You know we got word from Sydney to kill that story?’

  Fine hairs lifted on the back of Finn’s neck. ‘Sydney killed it?’

  ‘Yeah. Word came from head office within hours of it going to air.’

  ‘You have any idea why?’

  Doug shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t or couldn’t say. I doubt our mob really knew the guts of it, but I’m guessing some government agency doesn’t want people to know where your boy is. Probably the AFP.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ said Finn. And if the Australian Federal Police were involved in this, he knew exactly where he had to go next.

  Jack O’Brien, known to almost everyone as Jacko, didn’t look like a federal agent. A small man with a narrow foxy face, he could easily be mistaken for a bank johnny or an accountant, but he’d worked for the Feds in Southeast Asia for the past decade.

  He was predictably cagey when Finn rang, but he agreed to a meeting. The address he gave was for a café in the ground floor of an apartment block in the Ekkamai district.

  When Finn arrived, Jacko was already there, seated at a table that afforded him a view of the entries to both the café and the apartment block’s foyer.

  ‘Long time no see,’ he drawled as he shook Finn’s hand. Then with a wave, he summoned a waiter. ‘Get yourself a coffee or something,’ he told Finn. Jacko had always been a man of few words.

  Finn ordered a pot of jasmine tea and while it was being prepared, he pulled Ben’s photo from his wallet and set it on the table between them.

  Jacko was outwardly calm as he picked up the photo between two fingers, but after a quick glance, he dropped it again and fixed Finn with a stony-eyed glare.

  Okay, so the Fed wasn’t happy. Finn expected a comment, however, and he waited. Jacko merely took a sip of his coffee and then lit a cigarette.

  The jasmine tea arrived in a pot shaped like an elephant with a trunk for a spout. Finn poured it into a small white cup, savouring the remembered scent. In Australia, even in good Thai restaurants, the tea never smelled quite the same.

  He shot another glance to Jacko. The man was playing hardball, but Finn hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and he was fast losing patience. ‘You know who this is, don’t you?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘What the fuck’s going on, Jacko?’

  A fine stream of smoke was exhaled before the policeman spoke. ‘You tell me your story first.’

  ‘Fine.’ Finn shrugged and kept it brief. ‘This guy’s a friend,’ he said, tapping Ben’s photo. ‘His name’s Ben Shaw, a popular baker from a little town in North Queensland. About six weeks back, he went missing under mysterious circumstances. No sign of him anywhere, despite big-scale searches. Then two days ago, there’s a news story from Thailand on Aussie TV with a visual of Ben in the background.’

  Jacko’s foxy face remained blank.

  ‘And now I hear that story’s been killed.’ Finn returned the other man’s steady stare. ‘That sounds to me like your mob.’

  Time crawled as Jacko tapped his cigarette, letting the ash drop into his saucer. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he asked. His voice was raspy, the voice of lifelong smoker.

  Finn decided that two could play at this game. Leaning forward, elbows on the table, he spoke with cool determination. ‘Unless you come up with a rational explanation, I’d be of a mind to contact my old colleagues at The Australian or the Fairfax press. I reckon they’d be intrigued to hear my story.’

  At last, a reaction. Jacko tilted back in his chair, gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Jesus wept, Latimer. Give me a break.’ A coughing fit followed and Jacko used a handkerchief to wipe his mouth.

  When he was finished, Jacko glared at Finn with watery eyes. ‘Just my bloody luck. You, of all people, end up in Far North Queensland, poking your nose into the biggest investigation of my career.’

  Finn sat straighter as Jacko glared at him.

  ‘You have no bloody idea how much is at stake here,’ Jacko growled. ‘The undercover agents I’m running back home have been on this case for years. And now, Hawk, my man in Far North Queensland, is in a high-risk situation.’

  ‘I – I see. But what does this have to do with my friend?’

  Jacko rolled weary eyes to the ceiling, then let out a heavy sigh. ‘Who have you spoken to about this?

  ‘Doug Brady.’

  ‘Who in Australia?’

  ‘No one. Well, I rang Ben’s partner, Tammy Holden, to see if she’d seen the story.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She hadn’t, but it had only just aired. She seemed too it stunned to say much.’

  ‘What about your local coppers?’

  Finn shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. I didn’t speak to them. It was pretty obvious that Ben hadn’t contacted them, so
I thought it would be best if I acted independently.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jacko said quietly. ‘That all lines up with our intel.’

  ‘So you’ve spoken to Cameron Locke in Burralea?’ Finn asked, surprised.

  Jacko nodded. ‘He knows to keep right out of this.’

  ‘Right.’ Finn inhaled as he digested this interesting information. ‘And Ben?’

  Jacko didn’t answer. Instead, he picked up his phone, scrolled till he found what he was looking for, and pressed.

  ‘Mate,’ he said when the phone was answered. ‘It’s time for you to make an appearance.’

  Finn found himself sitting on the edge of his seat and, scant moments later, he saw Jacko’s gaze flick to the doorway behind him. Finn turned and Ben was there.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Chloe took a while to get to sleep in Finn’s bed with Bree in the other room at the far end of the hallway. She couldn’t help remembering the previous night, and now she was worrying that she and Finn had been reckless to jump into bed for a second time.

  Surely the excuse that it was only sex could not hold indefinitely? And what about the murmured conversation afterwards, in the dark? Surely that had indicated a deepening sense of intimacy?

  Chloe suspected she was in danger of falling hard for Finn. But falling for a man who was emotionally unavailable was not part of her plan. She had already wasted far too many years with the wrong guy. Her time was limited if she wanted to have a baby, her own little Willow or Bree – or Brad, for that matter – and getting entangled with her boss would not be helpful.

  She would have to be super careful when Finn returned from Thailand. At least there would be no more leaping into bed while Bree was staying here with him, so that was a good thing.

  And at least she could feel okay about the way Finn’s daughter was settling in. Bree’s transformation in a matter of hours from a sullen pre-teen to a pleasant companion was a huge source of relief.

  Tonight, Chloe and Bree had rather enjoyed eating their spaghetti from bowls on the couch, while watching a rerun of The Princess Diaries. Chloe told herself she’d be fine as long as she stopped worrying about the future and concentrated on the twin tasks for the next few days of supervising the Bugle and Bree.