On the Market (The Ballard Brothers of Darling Bay Book 1)

by Rachael Herron

  The hotel rooms were set back, built into the hill above the saloon in a half-circle. Rooms one through four were on the left, rooms five through eight were straight ahead, with the remaining four on the right-hand side. Shallow steps led up to the three sides, and a long porch ran right around. Somehow Molly had forgotten the porch swings, but as soon as she saw them – unmoving in darkness – the phantom sound of them filled her head like a melody she’d almost lost, all wooden creaks and happy groans.

  As if reading her mind, Adele spoke over her shoulder, ‘Don’t sit in any of them except this one here. I fixed it up after it fell with me still in it.’

  Of course she had. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t fixed the others.’ Two hung sideways, their chains rusted, and one of the old swings was resting on the porch itself.

  ‘Girl,’ Adele shook her head as she opened the door to the room, ‘you have no idea how much there is to fix. Come on in. It’s safe in here, at least.’

  The bed had been moved, Molly thought, and the room felt smaller. The curtains were dingy off-white, but it smelled the same – of oak hardwood floors and something citrusy, and something that smelled exactly like Adele. ‘I’d forgotten you love orange-scented soap.’ Molly’s two suitcases, battered by mileage and a thousand different cabins, had already been placed at the foot of the bed.

  Adele patted a pillow, fluffing it. ‘Your detective nose. Yeah, when I was staying in here I used my own stuff instead of the old hotel soaps. You know there are about a million of them in the maid’s closet? Like, he must have bought them at cost in the sixties or something. A gazillion tiny slivers of paper-wrapped soap. It doesn’t go bad, right? If we ever open the hotel again, we could probably still use them, you think? Would antique soap add to the charm or take away from it?’

  Molly shrugged. ‘I don’t know much about hotel soap. Oh. Except for this one guy we had on an Aegean cruise. Or was it a Mediterranean one? Can’t remember. He ate soap.’

  Adele pulled back a curtain. ‘See, I know most of the – wait, what?’

  ‘Pica disorder. He came to see me on board because he wanted to make sure the housekeepers didn’t put any in his room. He had a bottle of liquid soap that he wasn’t tempted by. He just couldn’t be in the same room as solid bars. He also ate paper. He had to buy a Kindle to keep himself from chewing pages as he read.’ Being a nutritionist on a cruise ship was like being the ship’s priest: only there in case of emergency. The onboard chaplain was just in case someone died. (Which people had done, actually, at a rate that had surprised Molly until she’d factored in the average cruiser’s age along with their dietary habits. Young, healthy, active people tended to book trips to Nepal or Iceland or the Scottish Highlands – they didn’t usually book all-you-can-eat week-long cruises to Mazatlán where the highlight was the early-bird tequila-fuelled bingo game.)

  Adele laughed. ‘Let’s hope he never comes here, then. He could be the one thing that would threaten our soap stash.’ She pointed out the window. ‘Look. Some of the path lighting still doesn’t work, but that makes the saloon even prettier, I think.’

  ‘Oh, Adele.’ Another thing Molly had forgotten was this view down the low rise. The garden was mostly dark, but from here they could see the twinkle lights in the arbour. To the left side was the staircase that led up to Uncle Hugh’s old apartment that made up the top floor of the saloon. White lights were strung around the railing, and multi-coloured holiday lights blinked on and off around a sun umbrella. Tall, dark shapes made up the trees on the far side of the building.

  Molly reached past Adele and slid the window open a crack. ‘There we go.’ The sound was barely audible, just loud enough to hear if she listened hard: a burst of music as someone opened the back door of the saloon, a clap of laughter, a woman’s voice asking a question whose words they couldn’t quite make out. Someone yelled, ‘Merry Christmas!’ Other people might visit Darling Bay to hope for the sound of the ocean’s waves. Instead, Molly had been longing for the sound of the saloon. ‘We fell asleep to that noise.’

  Adele looked so pleased. ‘We did. Our favourite lullaby, ?’

  Molly remembered what it felt like to make her sister happy, and she swallowed the lump that rested in her throat. ‘So.’ She sat on the bed, testing it with a small bounce. She flopped backwards. ‘Still a crappy mattress.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know. It’s on the list.’

  ‘Nah. I’ve slept on way crappier.’

  ‘I’m so glad you’re –’

  Molly cut her off. ‘So the hotel’s closed except for this room.’

  Adele bit her bottom lip and nodded.

  ‘And the café’s closed. For how long?’

  ‘Years now.’

  ‘Holy crap.’

  ‘But I thought, if you came home –’

  ‘This is only a visit.’ Maybe. Probably. She wasn’t willing to make a decision, not yet.

  Adele nodded. ‘I know. But you’re such a good cook. With your culinary-school experience, and you being a nutritionist, I can’t imagine anyone more capable of taking over the café . . .’

  Molly waited.

  ‘I mean, I could show it to you. You could think about it.’

  Molly tried to keep her voice soft. ‘Don’t push, Adele.’

  ‘I know, I know. But, really, how long can you stay? Give me a hint.’

  ‘A couple of weeks.’

  ‘Oh!’ Adele’s cheeks were so pink, exactly the same way Molly’s got when she was excited. ‘That’s wonderful. I can’t wait to show you everything.’

  ‘From what you’ve said, it’s a steaming pile of bull hooey.’ The vodka had made her limbs feel loose, and the half glass of mulled wine she’d sipped afterwards hadn’t been a good idea.

  ‘The saloon isn’t bad. You saw that. And Uncle Hugh’s apartment –’

  ‘The love shack, you mean?’

  Adele’s cheeks were almost coral. ‘Did you really like him? Nate?’

  Molly had spent exactly fifty-seven minutes in the guy’s truck on the way into town. He’d been nice enough, and his excitement about their mutual surprise for Adele had been endearing. He was just a guy, though. Good-looking enough. He didn’t smell bad. ‘Sure.’

  ‘I knew you would. I knew you’d like him. So.’ Adele brought her hands together, interlacing her fingers as if she were praying. ‘Do you want to, um, hang out? Or do you want to go to sleep? It’s late, and I have no idea what time zone you’re set to.’

  Molly had lost control of her internal time clock years ago. She knew she wasn’t ready for sleep, though – not yet. Her nerves still felt electric, as if her body was set to a low buzz. ‘Yeah, I guess I’m pretty tired,’ she lied.

  Her big sister had always been able to hear it in her voice when she was lying. Molly knew Adele would call her on it – she would go get a guitar and a couple of beers and then she’d insist that they sit around and talk till dawn. Molly wouldn’t be able to get out of it even if she wanted to.

  Instead, Adele just said, ‘Of course you are.’ Her words were bright. ‘I’ll go. Sleep well.’

  Molly’s disappointment was laced with sadness.

  Everything had changed.

  Including them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Molly slept for a short while and woke up stone-cold sober with a headache. She stared at the ceiling until three in the morning, feeling the bed pitch and sway underneath her, a phantom leftover of being at sea for so long. Then she sat up. She wasn’t going to sleep – she wasn’t going to come anywhere near sleep as long as she was thinking about the old Golden Spike Café.

  It had been her favourite place in Darling Bay as a kid. Lana had loved the beach, and it had been almost impossible to get her out of the sand dunes at the end of the night. Adele had just wanted to be wherever their mother was, sitting with her as she strummed a guitar on the porch overlooking the street below, singing in her sweet voice.

  But Molly had loved being in the café. Uncle Hugh h
ad employed cooks, of course. Arnie had been the breakfast and lunch guy, and he’d always liked his deep fryer more than most people. He used to growl as he worked, and the more the waitresses had yelled at him to speed it up, the slower he’d go. The night cook, Stew, had been the opposite, cheerful and so fast he’d sometimes drop the food on customers’ tables because the waitresses couldn’t keep up with him.

  Then again, Uncle Hugh had loved cooking, too. He’d shove Arnie or Stew aside, ordering them to go get more oranges or sugar from the grocer, even though there was an orange tree in the back, even though Uncle Hugh stockpiled sugar like the next war was imminent.

  One afternoon when Molly had been so bored she thought she might die (Adele and Lana were fighting, as usual, about something unimportant and annoying), she’d asked Uncle Hugh if she could help with the lunch service. She must have been no more than fourteen because they’d started the band when she was fifteen. Free time and boredom had disappeared then. ‘Please? I don’t have anything to do.’

  He hadn’t even blinked. ‘You wanna waitress or cook?’

  ‘Cook, of course.’ Like him. That summer, Uncle Hugh had taught her everything he knew, and she’d spent almost every moment in the café, at his elbow. After she’d learned his repertoire of cooked items (chicken-fried steak, Joe’s scramble and his famous bacon meatloaf), she’d branched out into fancier things, meals she insisted he put on the menu, treats the tourists had loved (custard blintzes, nectarine scones).

  It had been her idea to move the old rusting caboose from the back of the property to the front, next to the café. ‘It would make a great coffee stand.’ An artifact from the defunct Central Pacific Line, the caboose had been left behind when the iron mine south of town had closed, leaving the Darling Bay spur unused. It had been good for nothing except fun for kids to climb on for more than seventy years. Uncle Hugh hadn’t liked the idea at first. ‘I already sell coffee in the café. And in the bar.’

  ‘But it would be so cute to sell it “to go” in the caboose. Please?’

  Uncle Hugh had listened to Molly, like her voice mattered to him. He’d hired a crew to move the twenty-five-ton caboose and they’d fixed it up together. It had grabbed the surfer crowd – they’d laughed and called the thick black coffee ‘caboose juice’ and tried to talk Hugh into putting up a sign advertising it as such. Hugh had sensibly refused. The caboose and its line of surfers and tourists became as iconic as Skip’s peppermint ice cream and the Christmas lights on the pier.

  Now, as Molly walked past the caboose in the darkness, she could see it had become as rusted and derelict as it had been when she’d first climbed it at six years old. Poor old thing. Twice abandoned.

  The front door of the café was locked. Of course.

  Molly eased her way around the side of the building. Would she have to pick the lock of the side door? Did she remember how? When she’d been dating Joseph, he’d taught her as a bar trick, although he’d been pretty pissed off when she’d gotten a lot better at it than he had. When she started to be able to get into her own apartment with just a bobby pin, he’d broken up with her, which was really for the best, since he’d gone to prison the month afterwards for trying and failing to break into his cousin’s safe, which happened to be inside his cousin’s bank.

  She didn’t need the skill, though. The latch clicked under her hand, and the door opened with a groan into the dining room of the café.

  The underlying smell – the smell deep, deep down – was familiar to her. Grease from the fries, milk from the shakes, wood from the old eaves overhead. No one could call it a great smell, but it stirred something sweet inside her.

  The smell on top of that was stomach-churning. It was an odour of damp and mould, and something worse, acidic and putrid. Rotting meat, maybe, with a hint of rancid cheese. Molly covered her mouth. It didn’t help.

  Automatically, her hand went out to hit the light to the left of the door. Nothing.

  She heard a rustling to the right and shivered. Uncle Hugh would have strangled a rat with his bare hands had one crept into his establishment (and then he would have cleaned the whole place meticulously—greasy food was one thing, actual dirt was another).

  Fear froze her in place. This used to be home to her. She knew that the first table should be four paces directly in front of her. In her mind’s eye, she knew that if she reached to the left, there used to be at least twelve freshly filled ketchup bottles always lined up on the rail.

  If she were brave, she would put out her hand.

  She wasn’t.

  Instead, she pulled out her phone. She snapped on the flashlight app. The beam of light was as shaky as her fingers, but it illuminated her immediate surroundings.

  Broken. It was all broken. The chairs were tipped over, and two of the old tables looked as if something had been set alight on top of them. The floor – what she could see of it – was disgusting, black and sticky under her feet. Even prepared for the worst as she’d thought she’d been, this was horrifying.

  She moved – carefully – behind the counter. The old black mats were cracked. Another rustle sounded in the kitchen to her right, and she swallowed a gasp. She imagined rats the size of dogs rummaging through the old cabinets. Was it rats? After years of being closed, what would rats still be doing in a place that didn’t serve food? Had they just set up shop? Maybe they were working out of it, sending their little ratty kids into Darling Bay to hunt and gather before bringing the loot back to headquarters.

  Holding her breath, she shined her light into the kitchen as quickly as she could. Something else moved, something that sounded as big as she was. Maybe bigger. Molly choked back the scream that rose in her throat and kept moving forward. Step by step. She knew every inch of this café, even better than she knew the pathway up to the hotel. She could close her eyes and walk into the kitchen and stop when she was a foot in front of the walk-in freezer.

  But if she did that, she might get murdered by the horse-sized rats she could hear scraping themselves along the walls.

  She straightened her spine. She was imagining hearing things, that was all. When she really listened, all she could hear was the thumping of her heart.

  Another step. Then two. Then she was in the kitchen – and oh, no.

  From the sweep of the light on her phone, it was even worse than the dining room. The walk-in didn’t have a door – its cavernous depths held only empty, broken shelving. The industrial stove stood away from the wall at a cockeyed angle, as if it had taken one step forward to dance and then stopped, terrified. The grill was piled with old boxes, and the whole place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in centuries. She could feel rats—huge ones the size of small ponies—looking at her from holes in the wall, their beady eyes focused on her forehead, planning how they’d eat her when she fell over, dead from disgust –

  Oh, she had to get out – now, she had to get out now.

  She tried to spin on her heel, but her shoe stuck to the floor in something that felt like a combination of maple syrup and Krazy Glue. With a horrified squeak, she pulled her foot free and barrelled back into the dining room.

  ‘Freeze!’ The shout was a low-pitched boom of noise to her left near the door. A floodlight shone on her, and she couldn’t see past the sudden glare to what was behind it. ‘Hands up!’

  Molly’s brain went white with fear, a static buzz that filled her body. Out, all she knew was that she had to get out, and out was on the other side of that light, and she had to get around the person who filled the doorway.

  She threw the only thing she had in her hand – her cell phone – at the person as hard as she could.

  The light bobbled, and she could see the man blocking her exit put his hand to his head.

  Molly had always had a good arm.

  She bolted.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The woman was fast, Sheriff Colin McMurtry would give her that. And she had an arm on her. That had been a solid blow to the skull.

&n
bsp; But there was a reason every woman he’d ever dated had called him hard-headed. He shook his head once to clear it of the stars, and then sailed his body sideways, into the woman’s frame as she tried to dart out the door he was blocking. He’d seen in the Maglite’s beam that she was unarmed. It was a safe takedown. One he’d done a million times in his career, usually to furious men.

  He thought taking the woman down would be easy.

  Colin was wrong.

  She roiled under him like an angry cat coming up out of a barrel of water. If she’d known any self-defense moves, Colin would have laid good odds that she might have gotten away from him – she was as strong as sin and pissed as hell. She didn’t land any solid blows, though, and every time she jerked an arm free, he tightened his hold. They were half in the doorway, half out of it, and Colin had the first half of a thought about how funny they must look to someone standing in the street, and then her left leg got free, and he had to stop imagining how they would appear to an onlooker. He rolled her from her side to her stomach, pinning her arms behind her back. She gave an oomph and then stayed still. He could feel her energy coiling itself, but he also knew he had the upper hand and he could wait her out if he had to.

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ he said.

  Her body went still under him. He had the unwelcome thought that her light, sweet perfume was the only pleasant thing in the disgusting café.

  Coming August 29, 2016! Preorder now! (Note from Rachael: I LOVE preordering books! Every single time, I forget I’ve done it, and then they land, and I’m SO EXCITED.)