by Susan Napier;Kathryn Ross;Kelly Hunter;Sandra Marton;Katherine Garbera;Margaret Mayo
‘I don’t mind buying rough stones.’ Erin was sufficiently intrigued by the notion of gloriously coloured rough sapphires to want to see them. Even if they were hard to cut. ‘Do you still have any?’
‘You know, I think I might,’ said the woman. ‘Mind you, I have no idea where they are. Take a seat.’ She gestured towards two stools on the customer side of the counter. ‘This could take a while. My memory’s not what it used to be. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve misplaced since Edward died. Gems, scissors, even the fish food…Why, if it wasn’t for Roger I’m sure all the fish would be dead.’
‘Who’s Roger?’ asked Tristan.
‘A young work-experience boy we had here a few years back.’ She was rifling through drawers as she spoke. ‘He used to help us out in the school holidays when we were busy. Since Edward died he’s been coming in every week to do the fish. He’s due any minute and not a moment too soon. Those fish are starving. Ah, here they are. I’d filed them under “T”. Probably for “Tragedy Waiting To Happen”. Did I mention they were hard to cut?’
‘Yes,’ said Erin as the woman emptied the packet of stones onto the counter. ‘But I’m feeling very optimistic about these stones.’
‘What about the cutting of them?’ asked Tristan.
‘I’m optimistic about that too.’ Rough sapphires were nothing like the finished stone. It took a discerning eye to predict the final colour of the stone and an even more discerning one to figure out how to cut it. She’d lose up to seventy-five per cent of the original weight of the stones in the cutting, but these stones were big. They’d still cut out at over half a carat and that was exactly what she wanted. Provided she could cut them.
The bell on the entry door tinkled and a young man in unironed clothes and a shabby baseball cap entered, carrying buckets, aquarium equipment, and a bag of multicoloured pebbles under one arm. This, decided Erin, was Roger.
‘Afternoon, Mrs Wal,’ he said, his cheerful nod encompassing them all as he headed for the fish tank. ‘Afternoon, Lucinda.’
‘Who’s Lucinda?’ asked Tristan.
‘Lucinda’s an angelfish,’ said Roger, tapping the tank. ‘This one here. Hello gorgeous.’
‘Edward’s pride and joy,’ said the woman.
‘Edward being Mrs Wal’s deceased husband,’ muttered Erin before Tristan could ask.
‘I knew that,’ he said.
‘I got you some more fish food pellets,’ said Roger, setting a small tin on top of the tank.
‘Darling boy. How much do I owe you?’
‘It’s all right, Mrs Wal; it didn’t cost much.’
‘I wish you’d let me pay you,’ she said, and Erin was in full agreement. Roger didn’t look as if he had a lot to spare. ‘How’s the baby?’
‘Fever’s down and she’s on the mend. She’ll be right again in no time. I’ll bring her out with me next week if you like,’ he said as he set to work scooping pebbles from the tank. Mrs Wal’s eyes brightened.
‘She’s such a dear little poppet,’ she told them. ‘You hardly know she’s here.’
‘You mentioned you’d misplaced some stones,’ said Tristan as Erin positioned the magnifying glass over the sapphires and started sorting them with an eye to clarity, colour and shape. Her ears, however, were on the conversation.
‘Seems to be happening a lot lately,’ said Mrs Wal. ‘I’ll have them out and be showing them to customers one day and the next time I go looking for them I can’t find them. I’ve been running this shop for thirty years. You’d think I’d know where to put everything by now.’
‘Maybe you’re not misplacing them,’ said Tristan. ‘Maybe someone’s stealing from you. Low-level theft on a regular basis happens a lot.’
Erin looked sharply at Tristan. Tristan was looking at Mrs Wal. Mrs Wal was watching Roger clean the fish tank, and her eyes were sad.
‘It’s usually an employee,’ said Tristan gently.
‘It’s possible,’ she said as she dragged her gaze away from the fish tank to bestow on Tristan a wry and faded smile. ‘But you know I think I’d rather believe I’ve misplaced them.’
Erin got an excellent deal on the sapphires. Two dozen rough stones of her choice and six smaller ones thrown in for free for cutting practice. ‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you,’ said the older woman as she bagged the stones. ‘If you can cut them you’ll have some beautiful stones.’
‘If I figure out the knack before I’ve used up all my practice stones I’ll send those ones back to you, cut,’ said Erin.
‘You will not!’ said Mrs Wal. ‘Use them in your competition pieces and mind you let me know when you win.’
‘If I win.’
‘Is that one of your designs?’ Mrs Wal gestured towards the tiger-eye pendant at Erin’s throat.
Erin nodded.
‘You’ll win. The combination of those sapphires and those opals will be magnificent. You’ll see.’
Erin did see. And lost herself in the vision.
‘She’s gone,’ said Mrs Wal. ‘I know that look.’ Tristan smiled, and Mrs Wal blinked. ‘My, you’re a handsome one when you lose the sternness, aren’t you? You should smile more often.’
‘She’s right,’ Erin told him, coming back to the conversation with a sigh. ‘You really do have the sweetest smile, but unlike Mrs Wal I’ll not encourage it. Brood, be stern. You save those smiles.’
Tristan’s smile widened.
Damn.
‘You think Roger’s stealing from Mrs Wal, don’t you?’ she said as they walked across the car park towards the car. Tristan’s questions were rarely questions for the sake of small talk. He’d sensed something amiss back there in that shop. She knew he had.
‘I think someone’s stealing from her,’ he said, shooting her a sideways glance. ‘I don’t necessarily know that it’s Roger.’
‘She could just be misplacing them, you know.’
‘She didn’t strike me as particularly forgetful. It took her all of two minutes to find those stones for you and I’m betting she hasn’t had them out for years. No, she knows her stock and I suspect she knows she’s not forgetting where she left it.’
‘But that’s terrible!’ she said. ‘Why doesn’t she do something about it? You could do something. We could go back tomorrow and work through it with her.’
‘What happened to forgetting about work for a while and chasing rainbows instead?’
‘This is different.’
‘No.’ Tristan’s smile was grim. ‘It’s just the same. There’s a victim—in this case Mrs Wal—and there’s a perp. Let’s for argument’s sake say that Roger is the perp. Roger’s been helping out at Wallace Sapphires for years, possibly being paid for it, maybe not. He doesn’t have much but he doesn’t need it either. He makes do. And then one day he gets into a bind with money and the banks won’t touch him and no one in his family’s got it to give. He borrows a few thousand from the wrong kind of people and all of a sudden life takes a turn for the worse. He can’t get work, his lenders want their money back, and he has a kid of his own and she’s a sickly little thing, which means medicine and it ain’t cheap. And there’s Mrs Wallace with more sapphires than she can sell in a lifetime and surely she won’t miss one little stone…So he takes one. And then another,’ said Tristan savagely. ‘Before he knows it he’s thieving regularly and vowing that one day, one day, he’ll give it all back. Meanwhile he’ll give it back in help and somehow try to convince himself that he’s not really hurting anyone, that it’s not such a crime as far as crimes go, and that it’s the only way he can survive. Who’s the victim, Erin?’ said Tristan bleakly. ‘And how the hell are you going to go back in there tomorrow and fix it?’
She’d wanted this, she remembered belatedly. She’d wanted Tristan to open up and talk about his work. Well, now he had.
‘It might not be like that,’ she said in a small voice.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It might not.’ But it was clear that his faith in the justice sys
tem he’d sworn to uphold was badly damaged.
‘This is what happens when you go undercover, isn’t it? You get too close, too involved.’
Tristan was silent, his features grim.
‘And then you have to turn around and make impossible decisions about impossible situations and it doesn’t always make things right, does it? Sometimes all it does is make things worse.’
Nothing.
‘It can’t always be like that,’ she said a touch desperately. ‘Sometimes you make things better.’
‘Yeah,’ he said with a weary smile that pierced her to the core. ‘Sometimes we do.’
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, thought Erin grimly. She wasn’t supposed to stare at him in dismayed silence because his problem was too big and there was no fixing it. She should have been able to comfort him. With wise words and compassion or whatever it was that he needed. She should have been able to help.
A bad call. Maybe even the right call but the wrong result. This was what Tristan dealt with on a daily basis. This was why the nightmares and the disillusion, and she had no answers other than for him to step back and not care so much and let someone else enforce society’s rules, at least for a little while.
She wanted to help him. Needed to think that she could.
She simply didn’t know how.
They got in the car in silence. Tristan the driver and she in the passenger seat. It was her turn to drive but she didn’t push the issue. He’d broken his silence and would see it as weakness. And curse himself for letting her see it.
His features were stern and forbidding as he started the car and pulled out of the car park. The rain had stopped but there would be no sunset this night. No hot pools or mud fights to ease the tension. She wanted it gone. Contrary woman that she was she desperately wanted to win a smile from him. But how? She stared out the window at the passing landscape, thinking.
They were in granite country, sheep country for the most part, and that meant rolling grassland punctuated by the occasional stockyard and shearing shed. No inspiration there, she thought glumly. Unless…‘Hey, there’s an old bomb just like the one you bought off Frank.’
‘Where?’ Tristan slowed the car.
‘Over by the shearing shed. To the left. Half buried in grass.’ Now that she looked more closely it didn’t really resemble the car he’d bought from Frank at all.
‘It’s an FJ Holden ute,’ said Tristan. From the tone of his voice, this was a good thing.
‘We’ve stopped.’
‘We have to take a closer look at it.’
She got out of the car willingly enough and followed Tristan towards it. There was something in his eyes when he looked at that old wreck that she wouldn’t destroy for the world. It was hope.
‘Look at the lines on her,’ he said when they were standing beside it.
The lines that remained were lovely. The rest were the product of an impressive imagination.
‘I could restore it,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it runs?’
Erin was wondering if it had an engine at all.
It didn’t.
‘I could put a BBQ under the bonnet,’ he said, in no way deterred. ‘Or a pizza oven.’
‘You could turn it into a garden ornament,’ she said. ‘A water feature with water sheeting down the windscreen and the wipers wiping it off. The neighbours would love it.’
‘I could use it for storage,’ he said, sticking his head inside the body of the car. ‘Like Frank was using the Ford.’
‘You’d need doors, of course,’ she said. ‘But the lack of seats would be a definite advantage.’
‘I could turn it into a dog kennel.’
‘I didn’t know you had a dog.’
He walked around the old truck a few times and finally stood back to admire it from afar. ‘I think I’ll make an offer on it,’ he said.
Erin nodded, flashed him a grin. ‘I think you should.’
‘Dinner,’ said Erin, ‘should be about celebration.’
‘You mean balloons?’ said Tristan. He’d tried to retreat, tried to pull back when they’d returned to the motel, but Erin was blocking him every step of the way.
‘I mean good food, good wine, a pleasant atmosphere and lively company. But I’ll take three out of four.’
‘You don’t think the food will be any good?’
‘Ooh, a joke. I’m very impressed. I’m thinking we should eat at the pub. Best char-grilled steaks and pleasant atmosphere in town. It says so right here on the flyer.’
‘It’s called promotion,’ he said dryly.
‘And it’s very effective,’ she said. ‘Because my mouth is watering as we speak. What do you say?’
She was in his room again, perched on the edge of the table and wielding sunshine like a sword. ‘I’m really tired,’ was what he said.
‘And so you should be. Which is why we’re heading down there now rather than later. Imagine how well you’ll sleep on a stomach full of steak and potatoes.’
He did like steak and potatoes. ‘Do I need to get changed?’
‘No, perfection is fine.’ She eyed his jeans and T-shirt and sighed. ‘How do I look?’
‘Fine.’ She was wearing a sky-blue sundress, strappy little sandals, and half a dozen thin gold bracelets at her wrist. She was beautiful.
‘You know how you were saying you liked to keep the sweet talk for later? I’m guessing you like to save the compliments for later too.’
‘You want a compliment?’
She nodded firmly. ‘And sweet talk too.’
‘I like your shoes,’ he said.
‘I’m taking that as the sweet talk. Now for the compliment.’
Tristan stifled a smile. ‘May I think about it over dinner?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Certainly. But I have to warn you, I’m not a patient woman.’
‘I noticed that,’ he said amiably. ‘Good thing you’re so beautiful.’
‘That wasn’t a compliment.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m still working on that.’
‘Good thing you’re so beautiful,’ she muttered. ‘Shall we go?’
The Brasserie at the pub was all dark carpet, wooden panelling, and comfortably mismatched furniture. The lighting was friendly rather than intimate and the bustle from the bar and the thoroughfare to the poker machines and gaming area gave it a relaxing informality. It was just what Tristan needed, Erin decided.
Sometimes it was nice to sit back and watch the world go by.
‘I’m for the rib fillet and salad,’ she said after examining the blackboard menu. Tristan chose rump and three veg. ‘Shall we argue about who’s paying for this now or later?’ she said.
Tristan shrugged. ‘I’m easy.’
That he wasn’t.
‘We can argue about it whenever you like.’
She chose now. ‘I’d like to thank you for coming on this trip with me,’ she said earnestly. ‘For your time and effort. I would like to buy you a meal. This meal. And the drinks.’
Tristan regarded her steadily. ‘You never give up, do you?’
‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘I’m fairly focussed on what I want to achieve, yes, but the truth is my resolve has never really been tested. I’ve never, for example, been in a burning building and had to pull out even though I knew there were still people inside. Rory was the one who had to do that.’
‘Nothing else he could have done,’ said Tristan.
‘Try telling him that.’ She wasn’t finished yet. ‘Nor have I ever lost two men in a mine clearing operation and the following day sent another team in to replace them. My father has. I think I’d have given up and gone home.’
‘Your father’s been trained to make tough decisions.’
‘He has, and he does. It’s the living with them afterwards that’s the problem. My father’s a good man. A strong man. So’s Rory. I’m proud of them both. But sometimes they hurt in places that I can’t reach, and I can’t help them and it drives
me nuts.’ She took a deep breath and said it plain. ‘I look at you and you’re just the same. Hurting in places I can’t reach. And it drives me nuts.’
‘You help,’ he said quietly. ‘By being there. By being you.’
God! If they didn’t change the topic soon she was going to cry. ‘Was that your compliment?’
‘No. Still working on that.’
‘Work faster—I’m feeling a little fragile.’ There was a folded newspaper on the chair beside her. She picked it up, opened it out. Horoscopes. Tristan, if she remembered correctly, was a Scorpio. ‘It says here that you’ll be receiving a boon, and that power mixed with love will give you grace.’
‘Humph.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘You’ve already got the grace thing covered.’
She moved on to the Virgo section. ‘It says here that my power this week lies not in understanding but in giving. It says that rich rewards will come to Virgos who learn this lesson. Well, I guess that settles it.’
‘Settles what?’ he asked warily.
‘I am definitely paying for this meal.’
The food was good, the wine was excellent, and the atmosphere was indeed very pleasant. Erin was halfway through her meal when she saw Roger the fish-tank cleaner walking into the room carrying a little blonde poppet who couldn’t have been more than a year old. He nodded to the barman, who angled his head towards the pokermachine room. Roger said something to the tot, who nodded and gave him a watery smile and then the pair of them disappeared into the gaming room. ‘Was that Roger?’ she said to Tristan.
Tristan nodded.
Five minutes later, Roger reappeared. He still had the little girl cradled in one arm, but walking beside him, holding his other hand, was a young woman with big sad eyes and a pinched face. She looked defiant. Dejected. Roger looked resigned. They were halfway across the room when Roger spotted them. Recognition crossed his face before he quickly looked away.
She thought that was it, that he wouldn’t look back, but then Roger’s eyes sought Tristan’s again and something passed between them. A question maybe, or an answer. She didn’t know.