Where There's a Will

by Virginia Hale

  The revelation was surprising. Beth had seemed so comfortable in the house. Dylan counted blue and purple notes and secured the wad with an elastic band. “Maybe it’s Elma,” she said mindlessly.

  “I doubt Elma would be haunting me.”

  She didn’t think before she spoke: “Maybe she’s pissed you didn’t come to her funeral.”

  Beth’s eyes snapped up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Dylan sighed. She met Beth’s glare. “I’m sorry, Beth. I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.”

  The screwdriver dangled between dainty fingers. “How did you mean for it to come out?”

  Dylan paused. It probably wasn’t the right moment, it was probably so very much the wrong moment, but… “Why weren’t you at the funeral?”

  Beth dropped her gaze. She flicked the lock, testing it. “I had a cruise booked,” she muttered.

  A cruise? Dylan made no effort to mask her shock. She poured a handful of coins into the calico bag. “Seriously?” She tilted her head. “Elma left you a house and you decided to go on a cruise?”

  “Well, I didn’t know she left me the house when I was on the fucking boat.”

  Wow.

  At Dylan’s prolonged silence, Beth raised her gaze. Her eyes widened as awareness washed over her. “Okay, I just heard how that sounded and…it’s not like I wouldn’t have come to her funeral, you know, if she didn’t leave me the house.” Her gaze flickered nervously. She shifted from foot to foot. “Dylan, I didn’t know she’d died until I got a call from her solicitor a few days after I got back.” She looked up and met Dylan’s stare. “You know, you could have called to tell me…”

  It certainly sounded as though Beth had been wanting to get that off her chest for weeks. “Beth,” she said slowly, “I had no clue who you were.”

  Beth arched an eyebrow in that striking, borderline-aggravating way Dylan had gotten used to over the past two months. “Bullshit,” she said softly.

  Dylan ran a hand through her hair. “Okay, so she mentioned you a few times. You visited once, about two years ago. I was out at the time and she mentioned you’d been by. When I heard you were my co-inheritor, that was the only memory I had of you. No offence, but I totally forgot you existed until I got the papers. By then, I just assumed you’d already been contacted.” She paused. “I wasn’t Elma’s daughter. I wasn’t family. It wasn’t on me.”

  Beth refocused on the lock, but Dylan didn’t miss the way her eyes glassed over, the way she avoided her stare. Dylan sighed. “I’m sorry, Beth. I didn’t know—I didn’t know that you hadn’t been contacted, and I didn’t know the real reason you weren’t at the funeral. I shouldn’t have assumed…”

  “That’s okay,” Beth whispered. Gently, testing, she closed the door. She turned the latch, and the lock clicked slowly as the pins slid into place. Dylan watched as she reopened it, the cold afternoon breeze seeping through the gap and back into the gift shop. Beth’s lips curved upward. “It works.”

  Dylan scratched the back of her neck. “Let me, uh, let me buy you dinner.”

  Beth looked over. “Tonight? Now?”

  Just like the week before, when she’d found Beth chewing her lip beneath the harsh light of the supermarket, longing struck her, hard. This thing had started as simple attraction the day they’d met. When she’d coaxed a panicked Beth from the guest bathroom with a white lie about having to lead the tour together, that attraction had sparked into a crush. And then, one afternoon in June, they’d been together in the kitchen. Dylan had made a self-deprecating joke about dropping out of university after only a semester, and Beth had looked at her seriously, and asked her not to talk about herself that way. Just like that, feelings had blossomed.

  Not only was Beth physically gorgeous, she was unbelievably intelligent and surprisingly funny. She was compassionate, considerate. One morning, Dylan had complained about waking up inside an icebox. The next day, she had rolled over to find her bedroom door wedged open, the kitchen oil heater plugged in just outside the loft door—she hadn’t even heard Beth’s footsteps on the stairs. A week later, when Dylan had lost her voice from the June air and a week’s worth of constant storytelling, a packet of grape-flavoured Soothers had magically appeared inside the till.

  Beth didn’t reserve her kindness just for Dylan, though. When a mother of a fourteen-year-old son on the autism spectrum had contacted the homestead to enquire about tours and expressed personal concerns, Beth had taken it upon herself to schedule a private tour for the family after hours. From the loft, Dylan had listened in amazement as Beth lead the family through the house—the kid knew more than both guides put together. At the end of the tour, Beth had refused to accept the family’s money, insisting that anybody who respected Australian history as much as the boy did was entitled to observe its relics at no cost.

  Beth was perfect, and it was beginning to drive Dylan a little crazy. She cleared her throat. “Yeah, I mean tonight. Maybe getting out of here for a while will be good for us.”

  On the patio of the pub, the gas heaters fought against the cold wind that beat off the lake. For a Saturday night, it was quiet, the patio only half-occupied. Dylan hoped it meant better business for her parents at the bowling club across town.

  She watched, amused, as Beth shrugged out of her coat and fussed over folding it. First, she decided to sit on it. She huffed, opting against that. She laid it against the chair back, pulling the lapels around her sides. She wriggled. Finally, she stilled.

  Dylan grinned around the lip of her beer glass. “Comfortable?”

  Beth rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

  Steeling herself, Dylan sat forward and folded her arms on the table. “Since you asked me a silly question earlier, can I ask you something equally as silly?”

  Beth sipped at her glass of Riesling. She nodded.

  “You’re gay, right?”

  Beth smirked. “Why is that silly?”

  “Because I think it would be silly for you not to be.”

  Beth laughed, her cheeks colouring slightly.

  “So you’re not just on the app, like…experimenting?”

  Beth traced the ring of her coaster with a fingernail. “I haven’t experimented in fifteen years.”

  “I am good at picking up the vibe.”

  Beth tilted her head, exposing the elegant column of her neck. “You saw me on an app for queer women, surely it wasn’t that difficult to deduce.” She sat forward. “Wait. I give off a vibe? What kind of vibe?”

  Dylan tried to contain her grin. “You present yourself in a certain way.”

  Beth blinked twice. “A certain way…”

  “A certain way,” Dylan teased.

  “Nobody’s ever told me that.”

  “That’s because I’m kidding.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re as femme as they come. No, the night we met, in the gift shop, I asked you to come up to my place. You barely flinched, like you were used to women hitting on you. I wondered then. And then, later that night, I saw you on Crush…”

  “Right.” Beth’s tongue snuck out to wet her lips, her eyes focused on her hand as she twisted matching rose-gold rings around her index finger. Had Dylan made her nervous? “I can’t say I ever wondered about you,” she said softly, like they shared a secret.

  Pride swelled in Dylan’s chest. “No?”

  “It must have been the fact that you asked me up to your place,” Beth said, her voice honey-smooth as she looked up slowly.

  Their eyes locked. Electric blue pierced through Dylan and undid her every effort to conceal her attraction to Beth. Suddenly, she felt exceedingly exposed.

  Their buzzer vibrated between them on the table. Beth pushed her chair back, but Dylan snatched it up, shaking her head. “I’ll get it. Stay and watch the drinks.”

  She came back to find Beth gazing out over the lake. She looked relaxed, calm. Her wavy blond hair had lost its neat curl, the top slightly tousled by her beanie. Attract
ion caught in Dylan’s chest, and she tamped it down.

  “Table service for the doctor,” she joked as she set Beth’s plate in front of her.

  Beth smiled. “Thank you very much, waiter.”

  As they ate, Dylan buzzed with the need to return to their flirty banter. She watched from the corner of her eye as Beth cut into her schnitzel. “So tell me why you don’t have a girlfriend,” she tried.

  Beth looked up, seemingly surprised by her bluntness. “I did,” she said after a moment. “It ended just before…the homestead.”

  She brought a piece of steak to her lips. “Just before?” Her heart ached as she considered the possibility that Beth was still getting over another woman.

  Beth nodded. “In March.” She tossed balsamic dressing through her side salad with such focus that Dylan guessed it hadn’t been a mutual break-up. Beth’s look of distress made Dylan desperate to know how it had ended. Had Beth broken another woman’s heart, or vice versa? Intuition told her that it was the latter. Beth wasn’t a heartbreaker—it didn’t seem to be in her nature. She was too sweet, too kind. Heartbreak certainly explained why Beth had uprooted her life at a moment’s notice. Perhaps what she’d been seeking was a distraction. And perhaps that was exactly what she had found in the homestead, in Dylan. What if their easy friendship was just a means to fulfil a gap? Dylan wanted to be more than a Band-Aid on an open wound. “What happened?” she dared.

  Beth hesitated, her parted lips wavering. “A loss of trust happened.”

  “Wow. Really?” The thought of somebody cheating on Beth was hard to accept.

  “Yes, really. We were together for almost four years.”

  No wonder Beth always seemed so tense. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Dylan watched the way the down lights of the patio played on Beth’s hair. She took a sip of her drink for liquid courage. “I honestly can’t imagine anyone cheating on you.”

  Beth eyes were warm as they settled on Dylan’s. “She didn’t cheat on me with another woman. She cheated on me with my credit card.”

  Dylan’s fork hovered before her lips. Well that makes more sense…

  Beth looked out across the water. “I gave her one of my cards to book our cruise, a card I never used. I forgot she had it, didn’t even give it a second thought. Trust had never been an issue with us. I had no idea what she was up to…I didn’t get a bill because I opted to go paperless years ago, and I didn’t check that account on the app because I never used it. She’d turned the app notifications off for it anyway, and you know that’s one of the things that gets to me most—that she thought it through, that she was so sneaky about it.” She rubbed at her sternum. “I didn’t find out she’d been having a field day with it for five months. I paid it by direct debit, and I foolishly never really checked my bank account. By then, it was too late.”

  She met Dylan’s gaze. “I wish she had cheated. I truly wish she had. Then it would have been over, and I wouldn’t be left cleaning up the mess. I have enormous debts and was having trouble meeting my mortgage repayments on my place in Sydney. I’ve rented that out, which covers most of it. But my credit card bill is huge.”

  The story filled Dylan with rage. “So you went on the cruise alone?”

  Beth nodded. “I went alone. I suppose it was cathartic. It gave me time by myself to get over it, to figure out what the hell I was going to do when I came home. I spent the first two mornings up on the deck with a cup of coffee and a notepad, just trying to calculate how much she’d cost me.

  “On the second morning, this old man passed my table and he said something like, ‘Can’t leave your work at home, love? You’re in the middle of the South Pacific, let somebody back home take care of it!’, and I just thought, screw this, I’m going to put the whole thing out of my mind and enjoy myself. But then I got back to Sydney and I heard from my solicitor about Elma and…everything changed. I didn’t know if things were going uphill or downhill. Of course,” she waved her knife through the air, “At that point, I had no clue what was waiting for me up here.”

  “What do you mean ‘waiting for you’?”

  “You, silly.”

  She smirked. “You really lucked out with me, huh? Just think, you could have had to share your inheritance with a sixty-year-old bloke.”

  She said it to hear Beth laugh. Instead, Beth’s eyes gleamed as they dropped to her lips. “Exactly. I wasn’t expecting somebody like you.”

  Hope sparked in Dylan. “What were you expecting?”

  Beth licked her lips. “I don’t really know.”

  They both fell silent as they ate, watching as a band set up across the patio.

  They had spent many hours in each other’s company, but Dylan suddenly had a myriad of questions. A door had been unlocked, and there was so much that Dylan wanted to know. “How do you feel about the homestead?”

  Beth contemplated the question. “I feel lost,” Beth said. “I feel like I knew it so well all those years ago, and now I’m here and it’s just…it’s not what I thought it would be.”

  “Like Paris Syndrome,” she said decidedly.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a psychological disorder,” Dylan explained. “Like culture shock. A person has this image in their head their whole lives of what Paris is going to be, only to get there and discover that it’s not at all what they expected.”

  Beth raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been to Paris?”

  “Nope. I’ve never left the country. But I know what it’s like to romanticise things.”

  Beth was quiet as she dipped a chip into gravy. “Something like that I guess,” she said after a moment. “Sarah Blaxland Syndrome, perhaps?”

  She smirked. “I wouldn’t be saying that too loudly around here.”

  Beth leaned forward in her seat. “Do you think Sarah did it?”

  Dylan nodded. “Of course I do.”

  “How can you be so sure? You know there are so many theories.”

  “Come on, you know what Sarah’s life was like after she was acquitted, taking off to Sydney and reinventing herself, marrying a vicar and playing Saint Sarah, taking those poor fallen women out of the Magdalene laundries and into her home. She was guilty as all hell. But it’s not just that—I can feel it in the house. I’ve lived there since I was eighteen. I’ve lived there even longer than Sarah Blaxland. I know she did it.” Why was Beth staring at her so intensely? Dylan pouted. “What?”

  “I just…sometimes at night I think about you up there by yourself and I get this horrible feeling.”

  Dylan’s pulse quickened at the knowledge that Beth thought about her long after they’d parted at the end of the day. The neckline of her long-sleeved shirt suddenly felt too high, strangling. She pulled at it lightly. “You overthink things.”

  Beth’s nose crinkled. “Rose said the same thing.”

  “What’s the rent like?”

  Beth cringed down at the meal on her plate. “Not exactly cheap.”

  “I’ve been thinking—I really want you to start accepting rent.”

  Beth looked up. The smile slipped from her lips. “I don’t want that.”

  “Seriously, Beth.”

  Beth’s mouth set in a hard line. “No.”

  “Come on, I feel guilty,” Dylan sighed. “We have upward of sixty visitors on a good day, ten bucks an adult ticket. I make upwards of two-fifty a day, and that’s not counting the school groups—”

  “I’m aware. We earn the same amount.”

  “I can afford rent. It’s not fair that you’re out there paying for a place while I live in the homestead. I know you’re refusing to take the money because you don’t want to unsettle things for me, but you don’t have to be so polite all the time. It’s your greatest fault.”

  Beth scowled playfully as she downed the rest of her wine, but she quickly sobered. “Can we drop it? If I need help, I’ll ask for it, okay?”

  Dylan nodded, but she wasn’t content to leave it there. As Beth finished her salad, Dylan loo
ked through the clear plastic blinds to the lights of the running track. They glittered on the surface of the water like fireflies, outlining the giant circumference of the lake. She hadn’t been running in weeks.

  When the band started up with cover songs, it was a welcome distraction. Focusing on conversation while her mind was racing was difficult. She chanced a glance at Beth. She seemed content with their work routine, but she was a city girl. The quiet life was enough for Dylan, but was it enough for Beth? How long would it be before Beth would turn to her and confess that she wanted to sell? And what would Dylan do then? What could she do? She didn’t have the kind of money she’d need to buy Beth’s share. She’d have to let everything go, give it all up, go back to collecting empties at the bowling club.

  Masked by the dim lighting of the patio, she watched in amusement as Beth clapped the band offstage as they finished their set. “They were great,” Beth said, beaming. She reached forward and wrapped slender fingers around Dylan’s half-full schooner of beer. Completely oblivious, she brought the drink to her lips, took a sip and placed it back down.

  “If you wanted a beer, I wouldn’t have got you that last glass of white…”

  Beth blinked. “Huh?”

  “You just drank my beer.”

  Beth looked down in disbelief as her eyes darted between her glass of Riesling and Dylan’s beer. “Oh my god! I’m so sorry, I didn’t even taste it.”

  She laughed, Beth’s charm pushing her worries away for the moment.

  Beth looked around as the patio lights brightened. “Is a new band coming on?” she asked.

  “No, they’re closing.”

  Beth’s brow furrowed as she smiled at the bartender collecting empties from the table opposite. “I thought they were taking a break. It’s only half past ten.”

  “What do you mean ‘only’?” She downed her last inch of beer and set the glass down. “Hurry up and scull your wine, Lizzie Borden, they’re kicking us out.”

  Beth stood to multitask, gulping her wine as she slipped her arms into the sleeves of her coat. As she stretched, Dylan’s eyes landed on the sliver of creamy skin at Beth’s midriff between her jumper and jeans. She swallowed hard and pulled her eyes away.