by Sarah Barrie
She didn’t. And despite the ice cream sitting in the small esky in the back of her car, Ally made herself call in at the hospice, mentally armouring herself for the battle ahead. If Mavis was prepared to allow Gus to take on the animals, Ally would go see him, talk to him about it.
The same nurse was on the desk and greeted her with a friendly smile. ‘Back again?’
‘That’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, if she’s not having a good day …’
‘Quite chipper actually. She tells me you’re staying on.’
Ally blinked in confusion, shook her head. ‘News to me. Thanks.’
Mavis was sitting up, a copy of the latest Woman’s Day in a hand that shook just a bit. When she spotted Alissa, she closed the magazine and put it down, then took a sip of water from a plastic container with a bendy straw. ‘Alissa, good. Sit down, girl. I need to tell you a few more things.’ She adjusted her position. ‘I’ve been thinking about what to do with all my stuff.’
Cautiously Alissa perched herself on the edge of the chair. ‘Oh, well, that’s good.’
‘You’re gonna take care of Montrose. You got nothing else, nowhere else to be. You’re gonna keep the animals on, and you can have my stuff – there’s not much worth anything, just a couple of bits and pieces Gus might like, that’s all. He’ll help if you need him, whenever you need him.’
‘But – I …’
Mavis’s face screwed up, and her face lost any hint of colour as her whole body tensed.
‘Mavis, are you okay? Should I call someone?’
Before Ally could do a thing, Mavis slumped a little, waved at her to sit back down and took a few deep breaths.
‘Not much you need to know,’ she continued. ‘Everything you need is in the shed. Phone number on the fridge for the produce place when you need more feed. Old Ian will deliver it for you. How’s my pup?’
‘She’s lovely.’ Mavis still didn’t look comfortable. ‘Does she have a name?’
‘Not yet. You call her something. Just don’t make it too fancy. She’s a working dog after all. Bess okay?’
‘Yes, she won’t come in the house, though.’
‘She has her bed on the veranda, always has. You don’t spoil working dogs. The cat’s name is Tom. He has biscuits, but he’s supposed to be eating rats, so don’t put too many in his bowl. And leave the upstairs window open a bit, he has to come and go that way else the pup drives him mad. The cows don’t need feeding, but I throw them a bit so they come up to the fence each day – easiest way to keep an eye on them. Gotta watch Violet, she’s prone to foundering. Keep her thin. Poppy pig’s partial to apples for a treat …’
Ally closed her eyes as Mavis went on. The woman was obviously in pain, and she really did care about her animals. Whatever else she was, Mavis was scared and dying and trying to make sure the things she loved were all right. And Ally knew, just looking at her, just listening, she’d get nowhere trying to talk the woman around. She didn’t have the heart. Maybe it was meant to be. Would it hurt her to spend a bit of time here? She could keep working on her own issues. This morning’s feeding victory was still a pleasant buzz in her system.
When Mavis finished, Ally put a smile on her face. ‘Okay, I’ll take care of it.’
Mavis’s nod was satisfied. ‘And would you bring me some books? These magazines are rubbish. Any will do. Just a few off the bookshelf. And my bible. The hospital one isn’t the same.’
‘All right. Goodbye, Mavis.’
‘You make sure you follow the rules.’
‘Sure, Mavis, no problem.’
‘I’m glad you never got to have the babies you wanted with David. Really glad.’
The comment knocked the wind out of her. It was inexplicable, this talent the woman had for wounding with words. For a few minutes she’d sounded quite normal, almost friendly, so this left-field attack had caught Ally completely unawares.
‘Well, as much fun as this has been –’
‘They would have been rotten to the core. You understand me?’
A million retorts ran through her head, but what was the point? Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I’ll never understand you. Goodbye, Mavis.’
‘You bring me that bible.’
Not likely. But she did tell the nurse about Mavis’s pain, and was assured she’d get straight in there to make her more comfortable.
By the time she pulled into her driveway, Ally was pretty sure her ice cream was going to be a disaster. Her hand hovered over the key, hesitating to turn off the engine, as she noticed a white Hilux parked beside the house.
She frowned, glanced around. Of its owner, there was no sign. Who would be snooping around the house? Remembering Clint’s talk of girls going missing and Cam’s mention of intruders, she considered her options. Maybe she should just drive out again, hope that whoever it was would be gone when she got back. Chances were whoever it was had already heard her car. In all likelihood, their reason for visiting was legitimate. Leaving would be rude.
Cautiously she stepped out, keys pointing out from between her fingers like a weapon, just as the sound of boots on the veranda brought her gaze to the side of the house. The man was scowling, one large hand running over untidy brown hair that looked overdue for a cut, a day’s growth shadowing his jaw. His jeans were well worn, his shirt was filthy, sleeves carelessly rolled to the elbows. Checking out his tall, athletic body, she decided she’d have little hope if he was foe not friend. He looked up, met her stare and his face split into a grin.
‘Pretty little thing with big blue eyes – you must be Alissa?’
‘Yeah. And you are?’ As he approached, she edged closer to the car.
He stopped, puzzled, looked down and checked out his appearance. Understanding washed over his face and he laughed. ‘Filthy. I’ve just been under your house.’
‘For what purpose exactly?’
He wiped a hand on his jeans and offered it. ‘I’m Lee Dalton.’
‘Clint’s son?’ Her relief was immediate and she took the offered hand, shaking it briefly. ‘I wasn’t expecting you so quickly.’
He shrugged. ‘I was out this way – on the search.’
‘Did you find her?’
‘Not a trace.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘It’s possible she’s left of her own free will. A couple of her friends did the same thing – hitched out with the interstate trucks – but her family doesn’t believe it.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Honestly? It’s a worry. I’m not a parent, but I’ve got to think you’d have some idea if your kid wasn’t happy, or if they might have run off on purpose. Maybe I’m wrong.’
‘Your dad said her car was left on the side of the road.’
‘They all are.’
‘And they’ve all vanished at night, out here?’
He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. ‘Yeah. Look, I don’t want to freak you out. We don’t know what’s happened. Just be careful. Just in case. Okay?’
‘Of course.’
‘Right, well, Dad said you were in desperate need of hot water, which is why I’m here. Took me five seconds to figure out you’re not going to be getting any with your hot water system. It’s completely shot. I didn’t think you’d be far away, so I checked out the rest of the house while I was waiting.’
‘Well, thanks. What’s the verdict?’
‘To be honest, the place is a disaster. You need a new pump for the water as well as the new hot water system. You’ve got termites in the foundations. The roof is pretty much useless, and the veranda’s dangerous.’
‘It’s mostly just the water – especially the hot variety – I’m worried about.’
‘Surely whoever’s bought the place would be thinking a knockdown rebuild? To be honest, I reckon you should ask them what they plan on doing before putting any money into it.’
‘Why would you –’ Ally sent a sharp glare up the hill towards Cameron’s place, shook her head. ‘It�
��ll be more than a couple of weeks. It looks like I’m staying until Mavis passes.’
Lee followed the direction of her gaze and grinned, then dragged a hand along the back of his neck. ‘I might be able to get my hands on a second-hand hot water service from a reno we’re starting in the morning, and I’ve got a pump. It’s not a big one, but it will do for what you need. That’ll save you some money.’
‘I appreciate it, thanks.’
‘You must have some understanding buyers, happy to wait on old Mavis.’
‘I guess this is where I should tell you that, despite the rumours,’ she said, her gaze again sliding up the hill, ‘the place isn’t sold.’
‘You know, the way you keep glaring up at Cam’s place, it’s a wonder deadly beams of electricity aren’t shooting from your eyes.’ She grinned wryly. ‘He misinterpreted a phone call. And he was … upset.’
‘So was I. I was after him to put in a good offer on the place when you put it on the market.’
‘You want it?’
‘The place has potential. We could make quite a bit on it.’
‘We? Clint told me you had a business partner. I thought Cameron was a lawyer or something.’
‘Used to be. He’s still got a few clients but nothing much.’ He looked up at the sky as rain began to spit. ‘Looks like the rain’s not done.’
‘Don’t farmers like that kind of thing?’
‘Yeah, builders, not so much. I’ll try and source that secondhand hot water system, be in touch in a day or two.’
‘Thanks.’ A quiet meowing had them both glancing at the door. ‘I closed the upstairs window on him,’ she commented. ‘Now he thinks I’m going to let him through the front door.’
‘No offence, but that cat stinks. He visited me under the house.’
‘He needs to be desexed. You don’t know a good vet do you?’
‘You haven’t met Cam’s sister yet?’
‘There’s another Blakely?’ she asked, unimpressed.
His grin was a mile wide. ‘Ebony’s clinic is the big green building just off the main street behind the park.’ He pulled out his mobile and scrolled through his contacts. ‘I’ll give you her number.’
The rain was pelting down and the front door was swinging in the breeze when she awoke the following morning. She rushed to the kitchen, got a hand on the door. Apparently it wasn’t enough that the upstairs window opened itself, now the door was doing it. She tested it, noticed not for the first time that the entire frame was warped. She grimaced. Maybe she should buy some new locks. A moat had formed in the low ground around the house, and as she watched it creep up, the puppy bounced out to play in it.
‘Stuff going out in that,’ she muttered. She’d feed later. The puppy made a quick pit stop in two inches of water. Ally intercepted her on the way back into the house and, after towel drying her, snuggled back in for a lazy morning. It occurred to her she’d been missing having a reason to get up in the morning, but right then she couldn’t make herself care.
The television was boring, so Ally checked her emails and Facebook. Still it rained, so she put off doing the feeding a bit longer, and decided to start some cooking. She put together the ingredients for muffins and prepared to experiment with the old oven. While they cooked, she accepted an invitation from a Facebook friend to play Candy Crush, got a bit caught up and almost burned them. But they didn’t turn out too bad, so she took one out onto the veranda to watch the rain, and with it, the rising water level. Steam poured out of the muffin as she broke into it, and she tossed it between her fingers to cool. Over the noise of the relentless rain, she registered the sound of cattle bellowing. They must be impatient for their feed. Damn it, wasn’t there enough grass? Maybe they couldn’t find it under all the water.
At the end of the veranda she leant out.
‘No. No, no, no! Shit!’
A cow had managed to get through the fence and was grazing on the grass in front of the shed. The others were milling around, the wire fence creaking and groaning as they tested it. As she watched, one ducked its head and pushed through, lifting a star post from its position.
‘Hey!’ She slipped on her shoes and dashed out into the rain, waving her arms frantically as yet another escaped. ‘Get back! Get inside!’
The herd scattered, the fence dissolving underneath them. Some began greedily grazing on the grass around her while others wandered towards the front gate.
‘Would you stop?’ She chased them down the driveway. Her attempt to get around them set most of them off into a loping run, only making things worse.
Completely soaked, her feet squelching and her pyjamas sticking to her like a second skin, she finally caught up with the cows in the long grass just outside her front gate. Uncomfortable and shivering despite the exertion, she moved around them, waving and clapping, attempting to drive them back down the driveway. But the grass outside the fence was lush, and the cows broke off in different directions, refusing to head back in.
There was no way she was getting them all the way back to the paddock beside the house. In any case, the fence was destroyed. All she could do was try to get them inside the front gate and get that shut – keep them off the road and deal with the rest when the worst of the weather was over.
After several desperate attempts, she manoeuvred all the cattle inside the double gates and quickly tried to close them in. But one of the gates wouldn’t budge. Its hinges were frozen with time and its bottom rung was vacuum sealed in several inches of mud. She hefted, struggled, wrenched at it uselessly, and all the while the rain continued to blind her and chill her to the bone. Her temper skyrocketed. As long as she held one gate shut she could block the cows’ escape, but she had to let that go to try to budge the broken side and then the other blew open and – it was hopeless. Tempted to just let the damn cows go and hope they never came back, she tried the gate one more time, putting her back into it. She slid, only just managing to keep her feet underneath her.
Coffee in hand, Cam watched from his sheltered veranda as Alissa struggled with the cattle. A few broke past her and she abandoned the gate to shoo them back through. The herd bull made a move. Cam tensed, expected her to leap out of its way, but she dug in, blocked its path. Surprise and something suspiciously akin to reluctant admiration crept over him. Was this the same woman he’d found passed out at her kitchen table?
Inch by difficult inch, she coaxed the herd back through the gates while the wind and rain pounded them. One gate closed easily enough, but blew open again as she went for the other. The broken one, he knew, wouldn’t give easily. He saw her nearly slip when she put her back into it, only just recovering in time to shoo the cattle back as they made another break for it. It was obvious, even from this distance, that she was soaked through to the skin. Surely she owned a coat. Come to think of it, just what the hell was she wearing?
‘Doesn’t do animals, huh?’ he muttered to himself as she yet again put herself between the cows and their freedom.
There was no way around it – he was going to have to go out in the revolting weather and offer some assistance. Not because he liked her – he was still anything but impressed by her behaviour – but he’d be pretty unimpressed with his own if he didn’t get himself down there and help her. With a resigned sigh, he got to his feet and headed for his coat.
She was still in much the same position when he arrived. As he stepped from his ute, the rain pelted against his shoulders and poured off his hat. Unimpressed, he bounded over to where she was bluffing a cow into heading back inside the gate.
‘Alissa!’ he called over the noise of the deluge.
She tossed a quick glare over her shoulder. ‘What are you doing here?’
For a moment he was stunned by the sheer fury in the flashing blue eyes, and was further stunned when he got a close-up view of her body in the wet satin pyjamas plastered to her.
‘Are they pyjamas?’
Her look was complete disbelief. ‘You came down here in
the middle of the storm of the freaking century to ask me that? Seriously?’
‘I came down to help.’
‘Did I ask for any?’
‘Well, that’s gratitude.’
‘Where are my manners? Thanks anyway, get lost.’
‘Alissa –’
‘Despite your personal beliefs on what I am and am not up to, I can do this myself.’
‘And despite your best intentions, I doubt you’re going to move that gate, and I don’t particularly feel like coming back out in this weather again in half an hour when you decide to give up.’
She laughed, but there was no hint of amusement in it as she continued to wrench at the gate. ‘Okay, how’s this? I would rather drive into town, buy a tractor, learn how to use it and pull the damn gate right off its stuffed bloody hinges than ask for your help. If it meant buying the parts from China and assembling the stupid machine first, I would do that before opening my mouth and requesting your assistance. Do we understand each other?’
‘Perfectly.’ He studied her in silent amusement. She was sexy as hell, fired up like this.
Maybe he liked her a little bit.
She leant on the gate again, and as he stepped in to help, she shoved harder, lost her footing, and landed heavily in the mud. She scrambled to get up, nearly losing her pyjama pants due to their soaked, muddy weight. He bit back the laugh, his shoulders convulsing with it.
The expression on her face turned genuinely murderous. ‘Oh, don’t you laugh, don’t you dare laugh, number three. Not if you harbour any hopes of a number four!’
He couldn’t help the snort of laughter. He’d tried. Really tried. ‘Are you volunteering?’
‘Are you medicated? Because I can give you something. Damn it!’ Two more cows crept up and would have slipped past but he stepped up and chased them back.
‘That’s it. Alissa, move. You’re going to end up with pneumonia.’ He shoved her aside, then hefted the gate out of the mud. In seconds it was secured.
He knew she’d be pissed at that, didn’t bother to hide his grin at her growled, ‘Show off!’