Hearts in the Land of Ferns

by Jude Knight

  “You girls are off down to set up for the fair, right?” he said, when the two women stood. “Hope the weather holds off.”

  Three storms were converging on the lower central North Island, and talk in the valley wavered from worry that none of the rain would fall on Mangatehapu to concern that it all would.

  Cheryl was hunting on the bench for her keys. “It looks pretty good out there at the moment. We’ll be okay at least till after the fair, but in the morning, I’ll move the stock out of the bottom paddock. Aha!” She pounced with her hand and held up the keys.

  “Odd for you, this, Lee,” Old Trev commented. “Christmas in summer. It’s not what you’re used to.”

  It sure wasn’t Boston. Or any of the other places she’d spent Christmas over the years. In the apartment with a replacement nanny from the agency sent to fill in while the current nanny spent Christmas with family. When she was older, at a camp or on a cruise, tucked away making streamers and icing Christmas cookies with strangers whose families also had money but no time to spend with children too young to be useful. In the apartment again, during her university years, studying for exams on Christmas Day because the highest possible grades were her pass into the world of her elusive brother.

  “It’s nice,” she told Old Trev. “Strange, but nice.”

  She followed Cheryl out to the ute which they had already packed with the boxes of baked goods for the Christmas Fair. She and Cheryl had been working for weeks, first on sewing then on baking. The gingerbread castle was the crowning glory, and would be a prize for one of the raffles. It was turreted, towered, iced to within an inch of its life, and covered with candies, and if Lee could get it down to the school hall in one piece, it should sell a few tickets.

  The Mangatehapu Christmas Fair was always held on the Saturday immediately before Christmas so that the children and grandchildren who had scattered to the four winds of New Zealand in search of work and education could spend their money to benefit the community before they settled into a family Christmas with whatever relatives had retained the farm.

  Friday night was setup night, and the little primary school was seething like an ant farm with people coming and going from utes, four-wheel drives, and cars.

  A chorus of voices greeted them as they entered the school hall. Cheryl was needed immediately to solve a problem with the pageant; with the threat of rain, should it move from the stage set up at the end of the basketball court? And if so, where? The school hall wouldn’t be big enough for all those expected, and it was already full, besides.

  Lee left the committee to argue the options and commandeered a few of the older school children to carry boxes from the car. She’d got to know all the locals in the past five months, since Cheryl stopped hiding her away on the top of the hill like a guilty secret. She’d even made friends among the volunteers with whom she’d worked to set up the Christmas Fair. At the first planning meeting she’d attended, Cheryl had boasted of Lee’s administration and event management skills, to politely bland expressions of insincere interest. But they were a kindly crowd, and when they realized that the foreign interloper wasn’t trying to take over, they were soon found her jobs to do.

  And if she did have to sometimes bite her tongue over the way things ‘had always been done’, not all battles are worth fighting. Mostly, they were pretty efficient, and she’d been able to make a few quiet changes, especially to the records that stall holders were to keep of goods donated and income that would be received, as long as the bad weather held off long enough.

  Trevor’s gmail address for family and friends had long since reached the service’s storage limit, so recent emails had fallen into a black hole. When he wasn’t so tired, he’d delete thousands of begging letters offering web services and investment opportunities, and send out an email to the score or so people he wanted to hear from to let them know he was back.

  He wandered around social media for a while, trying to guess what had happened to people based on their latest posts. He couldn’t find Kirilee, under the name Lee Greenshaw or any other name, but his sister had posted about lambing, shearing, the weather, the preparations for the Christmas Fair. She mentioned her sister several times, which must mean Kirilee, because there had always been only Leaf and Lily. My sister baking and icing biscuits for the Christmas Fair, with a photo of boxes of what the Yanks called cookies, iced in red, green, and white. My sister feeding an orphan lamb. The camera focus was over the feeder’s shoulder, with an urgently sucking lamb filling most of the frame. My sister knitting baby bootees. A pair of hands with very fine needles, and soft fine wool in a pale, pale shade of lemon. He recognized the plain wedding band. He had put it on Kirilee’s finger on the morning of the last day he saw her.

  His sister’s sister. His wife? Did she think of herself as his wife? For close to nine months, the thought of her had been a lamp in the darkest corners of his mind, an icon made from the year he’d worked alongside her, and especially the few desperate days they’d spent fleeing her brother.

  Somehow, he hadn’t considered the implication of dropping her into his family. Kirilee was in Mangatehapu, accepted by his sister and presumably by everyone else. Working for the Christmas Fair, for crying out loud. Did he think of her as his wife?

  The Christmas Fair was tomorrow so that’s where he’d go. He’d reach Wellington mid-morning, take the next flight to Palmerston North, then hire a car and drive home. He should be in the valley by two o’clock, and he’d find his family at the Mangatehapu Christmas Fair.

  5

  The gingerbread castle was a hit. Lee had to do a few fast repairs, but she’d brought a box full of extra candies and pipettes of royal icing, and soon it took pride of place on the raffles table, where it could be admired by anyone waiting to pay their entry fee for any of the contests.

  “It looks great, Lee,” Jamie said, startling Lee as she stepped back to check that the tower roof she had just replaced was on straight. “Cheryl sent me over with a mug of tea. She said to tell you to take a break.”

  “Hold it for me for a minute?” Lee asked, carefully piping a rosette of icing on the very top of the tower and placing in it the liquorice flag that had fallen off on the way down the hill. She nudged it with one fingernail until it was completely upright. “There.”

  “You’ve done a great job.” Jamie leaned back against the table and watched her pack away her equipment.

  “You, too.” Lee had been around earlier to admire Jamie’s stall, on which he displayed his paintings. Animals and flowers, mostly, on the sides of plant pots made from all sorts of unlikely household items, but also some rather fine landscapes. Lee had asked him to set aside a canvas of the Greenshaw house nestled among its sheds and trees, to give to Old Trev for Christmas.

  Jamie was a good-looking man, in a rugged sinewy entirely Kiwi kind of a way; a lean bony face with a beak of a nose under close cropped hair, his active life on a hill farm baking in a tan and sculpting strong shoulders, powerful legs, and lean hips. He’d been friendly from the first time they’d met, outside the little Union church at which Old Trev was a lay preacher, and later over Sunday lunch.

  She had wondered if it was a come-on, had taken pains to talk about her husband as a clear signal she was unavailable. But it hadn’t taken long to realize two things. He approached the whole world with genial amiability, with never an unkind word for anyone. And the lifelong friendship between him and Cheryl, the girl from the neighbouring farm, had, on his side, long since turned to something warmer.

  She accepted the mug, and leant her own rear back against the table, using the other hand to rub the ache in the small of her back. “What happened about the pageant?”

  “Cheryl got it sorted. We’ll start it outside and put the final tableau in here. We’ve shifted the stage to this end of the court, and tomorrow morning we’ll stretch a canvas over the top. People will say their piece, then move into the hall. A couple of the guys are setting up a platform at that end of the ro
om,” he waved vaguely, “and a group of ladies from the village are going to come down early to decorate it. Cheryl says the Holy Family and their visitors can stay put up there for about fifteen minutes so people will have time to file through and see the finished effect.”

  That should work. The pageant cantered, of course, on the Christmas story. Mary and Joseph come to Bethlehem and find a stable where the baby is born. In Mangatehapu’s pageant tomorrow, this central event would be heralded, witnessed, and celebrated not just by angels (dressed in as motorcycle couriers), shepherds (in shorts, gumboots and black sleeveless tops), and wise men from the East, but by travellers from all over the world. Singly and in groups, they would have a few words to say about why they had come, and at the end, they’d all form a tableau: a static scene with everyone gathered around the crib.

  Jenny Bartlett from the general store brought over a plate of iced cookies: Christmas cut-out shapes with piped decoration. “These are pretty, Jenny,” Lee said, taking a large bell that was missing a corner.

  “These are my rejects,” Jenny said, “so I figured I’d better get rid of them tonight, before George and I ate them all.” She patted at the shape that strained the confines of her jeans. “It’s still a waste if it goes on your waist. Am I right? And do we expect to see Trevor tomorrow, Lee? He’ll be home for Christmas, of course.”

  Lee had been asked that question so often that she turned it off with barely a thought. “We hope so, of course, but he wasn’t certain. The need is so great—we mustn’t be selfish.” Trevor Greenshaw, as far as his neighbours knew, was doing some vaguely unspecified but terribly important humanitarian work in the hotspots of Africa. Or possibly Central Asia. The family couldn’t say more, for the sake of the safety of the whole team.

  This time, the answer didn’t turn Jenny from her purpose. “But surely, with the baby coming…”

  Cheryl spoke over Jenny’s shoulder, making her jump. “I need to get you home, Lee. It’ll be a busy day tomorrow.”

  They were almost to the car when Lee realized she’d left her decorating box behind. “Get it in the morning,” Cheryl said. But Lee said it could go missing in the general tidy up, and she might need it tomorrow.

  So, they entered the hall again just in time to hear Jenny say, “Trevor Greenshaw’s poor wife! She puts a good face on it, but it’s clear that man is just like his mother. Everyone knows she abandoned those children on poor old Trev while she swanned off around the world doing whatever she liked. And here is her son doing the same thing to his baby.”

  Jamie, meeting Lee’s eyes over Jenny’s shoulder, said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Jenny. Jenny’s an idiot, Lee.”

  Tired as he was, Trevor lay in the dark thinking about Kirilee. They were married. Before turning out the light, he’d found the New Zealand Marriage Act on the web, and it said, quite clearly that errors in the license and registration didn’t make the wedding invalid, as long as the identity of the people on the license was clear. Intent was all. His alias was the name he went by at the time, so his identity was clear, right? A fee to change the register, maybe a bit of legal argy bargy, and everything would be above-board and legal.

  Or they could claim coercion and go the annulment route.

  What did Kirilee expect? What, for that matter, did Cheryl and Old Trev expect, and the friends and neighbours who had apparently accepted Kirilee as his wife? And why hadn’t he thought about this before? He’d gone through with the brief ceremony, passed her to colleagues to keep her safe, and more or less—no, not forgotten her, never that—parked her; froze her mental image in time while he finished the job of dismantling the threat against her.

  And all the while she had been carrying on with her life. Or actually, with his life.

  He recognized that his irritation was irrational, but it didn’t much help. Cookies and knitting! And Cheryl calling her ‘sister’. He settled his head more firmly on the pillow, trying to reconcile his memories of Kirilee the global executive assistant with life in Mangatehapu.

  It seemed a long time before he drifted off to sleep.

  In his dreams, he wandered the floors of the Pritchard Corporation office tower in Auckland, restless, feeling the approach of something, but uncertain what. His dream-self found the boss’s sister where she shouldn’t be, hovering over the quarantined computers; the shadow setup where the real records were kept, guarded in locked secret rooms and protected by multiple layers of cyber and physical security. Clever computer software constantly laundered the data and fed only legal deals and activities to the acknowledged systems kept for reporting to auditors, and for administration and management staff who had no idea of the criminal funding streams that underpinned the corporate’s wealth.

  In the dream, Kirilee was drinking the data, and fled when she saw him coming. He gave chase along corridors that stretched to impossible lengths between them, up echoing stairwells, down lift shafts. The sense of doom clipped at his heels, driving him on, desperate to catch her, to save her.

  Until the floor dropped from beneath him and he landed in a pit, Kirilee beneath him, naked but for the string of USB sticks she wore as a necklace. Above their heads, a row of security officers in Pritchard livery circled, firing semi-automatics into the pit, and Trevor curled himself over Kirilee to protect her as best he could. Then the doom fell in after them, huge and howling, driving madness before it, and Trevor woke, slick with sweat, his heart racing.

  Three in the morning, according the illuminated face of the motel alarm clock. By the time he’d emptied his bladder, washed his face, and helped himself to a drink from the minibar, his heart rate had dropped to normal, but he was wide awake.

  The details of the dream were fictional, but the underlying story was accurate.

  Somehow, Kirilee had discovered the shadow computers and worked out a way to hack into them. Trevor sat back in the typically uncomfortable motel chair and imagined himself back to the night she stole some of that hidden data.

  That night in April, a sense of unease drove Trevor to go looking for his boss’s sister. Something about the nervous energy she had been giving off during the day bothered him. When she didn’t answer the door of the apartment she kept on an upper floor of her brother’s Auckland high-rise, he used his master pass key, an apology ready on his lips. She wasn’t there, but nor was a reason for his vague disquiet. Her toothbrush was still in the bathroom; her bed was turned down for the night with her slippers by the bed.

  When his phone rang, and the security officer on duty reported that she’d taken her car out of the basement garage, he acted on instinct, telling the man, “Log it. She should have told us if she was going out, but I guess she forgot. Log it, and I’ll check up on her.”

  For the form of the thing, so it was on the record, he phoned her mobile, but wasn’t surprised when it went straight to voice message. Then he spent a frustrating hour reviewing the camera feeds to see what she’d done before she left the building. He was tempted to delete the shots of her putting a USB stick into a computer, typing for a while on a keyboard, waiting—her fingers tapping—and then tucking the stick away into a zip pocket of her handbag. But a gap in the record would be as bad. He’d have to find her and retrieve the evidence before somebody else did.

  And they would. A New Zealander would go bush, but a foreigner? A city girl? She’d leave tracks, and Pritchard’s people would follow them. Trevor—no, Jason—Jason had to be first. He had to be the one to track her down and bring her back, or she’d not make it out of this mess alive.

  He had one lead, one tenuous chance. He had bugged her mobile phone months before. If she’d thrown it away, that wouldn’t help him. If she’d turned it off, then sooner or later she was likely to turn it on again, and he’d be able to figure out at least the general area to search. If he was really lucky, she’d have muted it and it would still be transmitting her whereabouts.

  Ah. There she was. Heading north up the motorway, just past Albany. Wit
hin minutes, he was in his own car and on her trail, which he’d blue-toothed to the screen on the dashboard. He might even have her back by morning, none the wiser.

  But as she cruised out of Warkworth, with him no more than fifteen minutes behind, she shut down her phone.

  It took him another day to find her, and by then Pritchard’s thugs were on their heels.

  6

  Sleeping through the night was a thing of the past. Lee would arrange herself around a bed full of pillows and sink into oblivion, then wake in the early hours of the morning with an ache in her back or a cramp in her foot or the baby playing rugby on her bladder.

  The best thing was to get up, make herself a hot drink, and read for a while. Lee and the kitchen kettle had become familiar friends this last six weeks.

  She had gone to sleep thinking of all the smart things she might have said to Jenny Bartlett. If she could tell the truth, she’d soon have shut the woman’s nasty mouth. Cheryl said the best thing to do was ignore her, and that the community would see all they needed to know when Trevor arrived home.

  Cheryl was convinced that Lee and Trevor had a love match, and that Trevor would be over the moon to find out about the baby. She remained convinced even after Lee had confided to her the circumstances of the baby’s conception and Lee’s wedding. Cheryl, for all her tough no-nonsense manner, was a romantic.

  A hot cocoa would be nice. Lee put a jug of milk into the microwave and set it going.

  Trevor would be kind. He would be responsible. But it wasn’t his responsibility; it was hers. Two people had been in the cabin, but only one had been here during her pregnancy. She had loved the baby from the first, and once Old Trev and Cheryl found out, they loved it, too. But she wouldn’t expect Trevor to feel the same way. She and the baby would be fine without him. Lee had always wanted someone who loved her because she was family. Someone of her own. She patted her abdomen with a smile.