by Lily Malone
‘I like her hair,’ Ella commented a few beats later.
Abe added her hair to the list because he liked it too. It was short, shaped around her ears, with a longer fringe pushed to the left above her eye. It didn’t sound right to call it a pixie-cut, because the woman sure wasn’t pixie-ish and the cut was sophisticated. So was she. But she did have a pretty face, all soft curves, with understated make-up highlighting the swell of her cheekbones.
It looked like a face you could trust. Except, of course, you couldn’t.
You couldn’t trust anyone these days, not till you got to know them, and sometimes not even then. The world was full of scammers and liars, and women who’d sell their own child if it netted them enough cash.
* * *
Taylor Woods took a moment to freshen her lipstick and wondered how much longer she could get away with holding up the table. It was getting late and the restaurant was empty, except for the woman inside who wouldn’t leave. Abel would want to close up shop soon.
She glanced through the glass windows, but the woman was still there. Honestly, she was taking forever to fix up her bill.
Taylor’s gaze returned to the pretty bridge about fifty metres downhill from the café, the brown creek rushing under it. She could hear the water from here.
That was about all she could hear, which was a tad disconcerting. Where were the distant ambulance sirens, planes overhead, traffic, disgruntled drivers’ car horns?
It was her second night in the area and she hadn’t got used to the quiet. Just when the silent country lulled a girl into relaxing, those kookaburras would laugh out loud and she’d jump near out of her skin.
Taylor pulled her coat more tightly around her shoulders because not only was it too quiet, it was cold in the country too. She wished the customer in the restaurant would hurry up and leave because her courage was fading fast as the afternoon sunlight.
Then again, Abel Honeychurch was a good-looking guy. Taylor really couldn’t blame any woman for staying to chat. She shivered again. Especially when that chat could take place in a café that smelled of country cooking and polished timber, and had a roaring wood fire.
She’d chickened out yesterday. There’d been one moment where she’d had an opening. Abel had come out to collect her lunch cutlery, and he’d hunkered down on one knee to give Bruno a rub behind his ears, managing to find the exact spot Bruno loved. He’d complimented her on how well behaved Bruno was … said he was the best behaved dog he’d seen at his café.
Taylor had taken a deep breath, steeled herself to ask him about Amanda, and whether he’d been scammed by her too, and whether he’d known about William Woods, her brother … but then all she’d said was: ‘Could I have another double shot soy latte? Please.’
Chicken.
She’d spent last night in a cabin at the only dog-friendly caravan park in Mount Barker, kicking herself for being such a scaredy cat, and today—come what may—would be the day she’d broach the subject of Amanda. Today, she’d ask Abe if he could help her get justice against the woman who’d scammed her brother and ruined Will’s life.
How many other men had Amanda robbed?
Taylor had tried for months to get Will to pursue Amanda for the money, go to the police—report Amanda as a scammer—and he wouldn’t do it. He was too embarrassed. Too worried about what it would do to his career. The only thing she’d been able to get Will to do was write a formal Letter of Demand.
‘You tell me how it looks if word gets out that William Woods, Financial Adviser, Chartered Accountant with a heap of fancy letters after his name, got scammed out of more than thirty thousand dollars? Hey, Tayls? You tell me how that looks? I’d be laughed out of Perth.’
Her brother had always been a happy kind of guy, the type of guy people knew they could count on. He was the guy who stopped to help someone change a flat tyre, the man who gave up his seat for the old lady on the bus.
Not anymore. All this year, Will had been broken.
At the heart of it, there was a big part of Will that wanted to give Amanda the benefit of the doubt. There was a bigger part of him that remembered how happy he’d been, and wanted to be happy again.
That was why Taylor stopped pressing him. That was why enlisting Abel Honeychurch’s help was Plan B.
A car chugged to a stop in the restaurant carpark and Taylor sighed. More customers, and the lady in the restaurant might as well be a structural timber the way she was holding up the service counter.
Taylor checked her watch. It was almost four. The drive into Mount Barker took the best part of half an hour and, at this rate, it looked like she and Bruno were in for another night in the dog-friendly park. She couldn’t broach the topic of Amanda and Will if she couldn’t get Abel on his own.
‘Whaddaya think, mate? Shall we make tracks?’ Taylor asked, and Bruno’s black ears pricked at the question in her voice. ‘I’ll go pay our bill. Stay there.’
The new customer, a blonde girl in her early twenties, put a spurt on when she saw Taylor get up from her chair, so it didn’t surprise her when the girl got through the doors and up to the service counter first.
Taylor trailed behind, reaching into her handbag for her purse.
‘Could I have a flat white and a regular latte to go, please?’ the new customer ordered.
Abel got busy with the coffee machine, making up the order, all efficient arms and smooth movement. The smell and noise of grinding beans filled the café.
Taylor noticed the other woman, the customer who’d been there most of the afternoon, appraising her quite openly from where she sat.
Taylor smiled tentatively, and the woman returned her smile.
‘Visiting friends down here, are you?’ the woman asked.
City-girl Taylor was a bit shocked to be addressed directly by a stranger in a café, and she glanced about to make sure the question was indeed meant for her. In the end, she touched her chest with a finger and checked: ‘Me?’
The woman nodded.
‘Um. No. I’m not visiting friends. I don’t know anyone here.’
‘Oh.’ The woman frowned. ‘Then where are you staying? Abe said you were here yesterday and there’s no accommodation in Chalk Hill. There will be soon.’ The woman tipped her chin to indicate to her right. ‘The house next door is going to be converted into a backpacker lodge and country cottages, but it’s not built yet.’
‘I’m staying in Mount Barker at the caravan park. The one that will let you have dogs.’
Abel put two coffees on the counter in front of the blonde customer and rang up the charges. The girl took the lids off, stirring sugars into the takeaway cups and then hunted through her shoulder bag as the cash drawer opened into Abe’s tummy with a rattle.
She put her shoulder bag on the counter and opened the bag wider, rummaging through it.
‘I’m so sorry. I think I must’ve left my purse in the car,’ the girl said, smiling. ‘I’ll take these to my friend and be right back with the money.’
Abel came out from behind the counter, smiling broadly in the navy and white striped apron that covered his clothes. ‘It’s okay. I’ll come out with you.’
‘Oh please, you don’t need to do that. I’m so embarrassed. I’ll only be a minute.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ he insisted.
‘It’s okay. Really, I’ll be right back.’
Abel replaced the lids on the two cups of coffee that the girl had now sweetened. He picked the cups up. ‘I’ll carry them for you.’
‘But you have other customers.’ She waved towards Taylor and the lady sitting on the bar stool near the counter.
‘They’re fine,’ Abel said, not looking at either of the other ladies, concentrating on the blonde.
‘I hate putting you out.’
He wasn’t having it. ‘It’s no trouble. Save you the trip.’
His words got more and more brisk, the sentences shorter, his smile tighter, and by the time he said ‘save you the trip�
� he was pretty much marching in front of the girl, out the door, with the coffees gripped in each hand like truncheons.
Taylor and the friendly stranger watched the entire thing.
The door chimed behind them, leaving the two women alone in the café. Taylor leaned across the service counter and hooked her hand on the cash drawer, pushing it shut.
‘Sorry about that. It’s just Abe being Abe,’ the other woman said, letting out a sigh. The spark had gone from her eyes, and the set of her chin spoke of sad times and trouble.
What she couldn’t have known was that Taylor could take a pretty good stab at exactly what Abel’s trouble was, and what had caused it.
She’d seen Will go through the exact same thing.
Trust was such a bugger when it got broke.
CHAPTER
3
‘Keep the change,’ the woman shouted at him as the car, with its two occupants and two takeaway coffees inside, sped away, leaving Abe with ten bucks in his pocket but otherwise broke, all stripped out.
That’s what being scammed did to you. Ate trust like rust.
He stuffed the money in his pocket and checked his watch. Almost time he could put out the sign.
He really was losing it. He’d pretty much called that last customer a liar.
Maybe she was the type to leap in her car and do a runner or maybe she was honest as the day was long. Who knew? He certainly didn’t. His radar was way off.
Trudging back up to the café, movement on the verandah to his left caught his eye. A tail whacked the chrome leg of a chair and the black dog stretched to its feet.
Did the animal need a drink? There was a bottle of water on the table. He reached for it and upended the water in a slow stream in front of the dog’s nose, giving it time to lap.
It wasn’t an old dog, barely out of the puppy stage, shining black fur and a twitching, inquisitive nose. Abe checked the bright red tag hanging from his collar, and said, ‘Howdy, Bruno.’
The dog’s tail wagged harder.
‘Thirsty, were you, boy?’
The name ‘Bruno’ stirred some kind of recognition deep in his brain. Something about Bruno, or a dog named Bruno. But where had he heard that? For a few seconds he tried to recall the context, but it slipped from him like flour through a sieve.
He gave the dog a final pat before clearing the remaining cutlery as well as the bottle of water from the table and heading inside.
‘Sorry to keep you,’ he said to both women, rubbing hand sanitiser on his palms from the dispenser near the coffee machine.
‘It’s okay,’ the redhead said. ‘I’m not in any hurry. Can I fix up my bill please?’
Abe rang it up and told her the amount. She’d paid cash yesterday but today she handed over her card and said, ‘That’s on credit, please.’
Abe turned the card over to put it in his EFTPOS machine and noticed her name. Ms Taylor Woods.
She’d removed her sunglasses and he registered big hazel eyes with more than a hint of mint green speckled through. Lipstick a browner shade of red than her hair, soft, round cheekbones, eyelashes long and curled. You could take those lashes out to Pickles’ new water ski park. Launch yourself off the curved ends.
Abe handed the EFTPOS machine across the counter so Taylor could enter her PIN. She had soft, round-looking fingers, her fingernails the same shade as her lipstick.
In all that, Abe realised Ella had slipped off the bar stool. Her heels clacked across the jarrah floorboards as she moved towards the windows, looking out. Something in Ella’s posture triggered an alert in his head, and Abe’s gaze followed her.
His big brother’s Landcruiser rolled to a jerky stop on the only bit of grassed verge that remained at the front of Nanna’s old house. The rest had gone when they landscaped the new parking lot for the café.
Abe frowned. ‘It’s a bit early for Jake to be knocking off work, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’ Ella pushed through the café doors and both Abe and the customer, Taylor, watched her skip down the steps.
Jake was out of the car by the time she reached him, and then it was all Ella staring up, Jake staring down, like they were the only two people on the planet, and the planet was in dire straits. Asteroid gonna hit. Armageddon.
‘Is something wrong?’ Taylor murmured, and Abe realised the EFTPOS machine had timed out while he’d been watching Ella and Jake. Damn thing beeped at him.
‘Ah, bugger. Sorry, we’ll have to do this again. I wasn’t concentrating.’
‘It’s okay,’ Taylor said, as he cancelled out of the first transaction and started the process again. He kept half an eye on Jake and Ella, but he didn’t want to make another mistake with Taylor’s card. She was watching like a hawk.
Couldn’t really blame her. So far today she’d seen him hound a customer for coffee money and chase her from his café. Now he’d mucked up Taylor’s credit card transaction. She probably thought he was about to accuse her of not having sufficient funds and make her start washing dishes.
‘Let’s try that again,’ Abe said, holding out the machine.
Taylor punched in her PIN. Jake pressed enter.
The paper roll spun and the receipt kicked out. ‘It’s happy now,’ he said.
Abe tore off his retailer’s copy, then the customer’s copy, handed her the tail of printed receipt with her card and felt the gentle warmth of her fingers brush his skin.
She looked like she wanted to say something.
What now? Didn’t she like the focaccia? Had her coffee been cold?
‘Um … I wondered if I could ask you something, Mr Honeychurch?’
Mr Honeychurch?
And then he understood.
Quite a few people came into the café and asked him if he had any work. Waitressing, or in the kitchen. Ms Taylor Woods wanted a job. That’s why she’d spent the last two afternoons eating at his café, trying to garner courage to ask.
Abe was about to apologise that he wasn’t in the position to take any staff on until business picked up (unfortunately because he’d like nothing better than to escape to the kitchen and not have to talk to people), but then Ella pushed the glass entry door open. She leaned her shoulders and head inside and her words rattled across the deep, rich, old-as-the-hills space: ‘Abe? Excuse me, I’m so sorry to interrupt. Something’s come up with Jake. Would you mind going to my place when you knock off and checking on Sam for me? I won’t be long, but I have to go with Jake right now. Make sure he’s okay.’
Abe glanced beyond Ella to where Jake climbed into the Landcruiser.
‘Nothing’s happened to Mum and Dad, has it?’ Abe asked Ella.
‘No.’
‘Brix is okay?’
Ella nodded, but her gaze slipped to Taylor and he realised she wouldn’t say anything more.
‘No worries. Do what you have to do, Ella. I’ll go round and check on Sam,’ Abe said, knowing that was what Ella wanted him to do and whatever Ella wanted he was pretty sure that was what Jake needed right now.
‘Thank you,’ Ella said gratefully. Then she said again, ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ and shut the café doors.
‘I hope everything’s okay. It sounds a bit serious,’ Taylor said, slotting her credit card into the holder in her purse and dropping her purse into her handbag.
Over her shoulder, he saw Ella run to the passenger side door, clamber in and Jake gun the engine, manoeuvring the four wheel drive from the kerb.
‘Yeah. Hope so too,’ Abe said, shuffling receipts in the cash register drawer, thinking about closing up a few minutes early so he could go find Sam. He would wait at Ella’s place till they came back with news.
‘Well, thank you for a lovely lunch,’ Taylor said, shifting her weight to the other foot, fiddling with the shoulder strap of her handbag.
Abe remembered his earlier thought. ‘Look, I don’t have any jobs going at the moment I’m sorry. But I know the town pool committee is looking for a swimming instructor. Does that help?’
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She faced him blankly. ‘Pardon?’
‘Wasn’t that what you were about to ask me before? If I had any jobs?’
Her confusion gave way to a smile that broke dimples in each soft round cheek. ‘I wasn’t going to ask you for a job. I’ve already got a job. Thank you.’
Abe stopped tidying the counter and gave the redhead, Taylor, his full attention. ‘What did you want to ask me then?’
‘It’s okay. It can wait. Your friends need you.’
‘That was my brother in the car. Ella, the chick who was just here, she’s like my sister-in-law, just not technically.’
‘Family then. Family comes first. It does to me, anyway. It’s okay, I’ll come back tomorrow when you’ve got more time. It’s nothing that can’t wait. My name’s Taylor, by the way.’
‘I know. I read it on your card.’
She held out her hand. After a second of consideration he took it. ‘Abel. Abe.’
‘Nice to meet you.’
‘You’re not selling anything, are you? I’m not in the market for a timeshare apartment or a house in Vegas or a new vacuum cleaner …’
‘I promise I’m not selling anything.’
‘But you want something from me?’
She looked at her feet. ‘I do, but I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow.’
Another alarm bell ticked sideways in his head. Not with the clang from the drama of whatever was up with Ella and Jake, just a small dull dong that warned him here was a pretty woman who wanted something. From him. Again.
‘Okay, Taylor. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Shall I reserve your table?’
‘Thank you. That would be nice.’
She walked to the front door, a nice sway in her hips, and the bell chimed as she shut the café door behind her and stooped to untie her very well behaved dog.
Abe added nice bottom to his list.
Taylor’s bottom. Not the dog’s.
CHAPTER
4
Abe finished cleaning up the café, turned the dishwasher on for its second run of the day, got the till to balance and then drove to Ella’s. Sam hadn’t batted an eyelid about having someone other than his mother or Jake rock up to check on him, and they’d spent a good half-hour flying Ella’s cockatiel, Perkins III, in the living room between them till Sam turned on the Playstation and challenged Abe to LEGO Marvel something-or-other.