Three Gold Coins

by Josephine Moon

  20

  Lara

  With his mouldable splint in place, Samuel was noticeably cheerier. Lara had even heard him singing softly to himself as he pottered about in the garden. She was surprised to find that she had to watch him even more closely, stopping him from doing too much. Like now.

  ‘Here, let me help you,’ she said, moving swiftly to his side as he tried to use his left arm to pull up a large, out-of-control tomato plant that needed staking.

  He grunted at her and reluctantly let go of the tendrils that swayed like a many-tentacled sea monster intent on not being caught. ‘I shouldn’t have let it get so big,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind, we’ve got it now,’ she replied, happy to be of service and somewhat appreciated. She looked up from where she was crouched, tethering the creature to the wooden stake, to see her employer looking wistfully over at Henrik. The Swede was stripped to the waist, raising a hoe above his head and letting it fall with a thud into the soft earth. His tanned abs glistened with sweat.

  The chickens scratched and fluttered around him, waiting to snatch the worms unearthed by his hoeing.

  ‘Do you miss gardening, Samuel?’ she ventured.

  ‘I miss most things.’ He looked at her directly. ‘It’s true what they say—youth is wasted on the young. You have no idea what you’ve got, you take everything for granted, even something as simple as being able to go upstairs in your own home, or stake your bloody tomatoes.’

  Lara winced as she accidentally tied her index finger to the stake, momentarily cutting off the circulation to the tip. She pulled it free and shook it. ‘I can understand that. I’m only thirty-one but already I’ve got a rap sheet of regrets.’ She shook her hands free of dirt.

  Samuel raised a veiny arm to shield his eyes from the sun. ‘Everyone has regrets from their twenties,’ he said, his white eyebrows rising. ‘You’re still quite dense at that age.’ He managed a rueful smile.

  Lara returned his smile, equally rueful, and picked up the second stake to bang in with a small rubber mallet. ‘So you think there’s still hope for me then?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ she said, puffing a little as she tossed the mallet to the ground and wrestled another portion of the wily bush into line. It was surprisingly heavy and unwilling to bend to her direction. ‘I don’t think this tomato bush knows what’s good for it either. Look—if it stays all bent over like this, it won’t produce fruit and it’ll suffocate and die. It doesn’t want to be pulled into line, but if it will just let me—’ she growled with frustration as a piece snapped off in her hand, ‘—it will be so much stronger and more productive.’

  With a final grunt, she finished ensnaring the bush and stood up, stretching her back. ‘There, all done.’

  Samuel nodded at her. They passed a moment in silence, each watching Henrik but for entirely different reasons, she presumed.

  Then she remembered something. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about the painting of the young girl with the collie dog in the kitchen…is that one of your children?’

  Samuel shifted his weight and leaned more heavily on his stick. He took so long to answer her that she began to wonder if he was going to reply at all.

  ‘That’s Liliana, or Lily, our youngest, and her dog, Beth. Lily was seven when that was painted.’

  Lara remembered Matteo mentioning a granddaughter Lily, but not a daughter. But she smiled, picturing the mass of blonde curls and the pink dress with the frilled white collar. ‘She looks sweet—or were looks deceiving?’

  Samuel wiped the back of his splint across his mouth. ‘She was a devil,’ he said, but his tone was soft.

  There was something in the way he said was that made Lara flinch. She moved closer to him and he followed her lead and turned to go down the two steps to the back door of the house. She went with him, her hand placed on the inside of his upper arm so she could steady him if necessary. They made it down the steps safely and she released his arm. He resisted her less now than when she’d first arrived, trusting her more, she hoped. She followed him into the kitchen, where he stopped in front of the portrait. Lily had amazing blue eyes to go with her blonde locks.

  ‘She got her colouring from your side of the family, then.’

  Samuel nodded, then moved into the living room and slumped heavily into the three-seater green velvet lounge that matched the wingback chairs. ‘The first two—Giovanna and Gaetano—are both dark like their mother. Lily was different from the start.’

  Lara searched for a way to learn if Lily had passed away without asking outright. ‘Do you see much of your children now?’ She perched on a single chair opposite Samuel. This was the most he’d spoken to her since they’d met.

  Samuel eased himself back against the cushions. Lara sprang to her feet to adjust them for him and he nodded his thanks before she returned to her chair.

  ‘They’re in England,’ he said, by way of answer.

  Lara eyed the sleek piano in the room. She’d dusted it yesterday. ‘Musical family?’ she asked, nodding towards the instrument.

  ‘My granddaughter Lily—named after Giovanna’s sister, of course—is a concert pianist. That’s why they went to England. The fact they have English heritage made things easier.’

  She wondered about the difficulties in the family that Matteo had alluded to, but didn’t want to push him. ‘Do you play?’

  ‘No,’ he scoffed. ‘That was all Assunta.’ He smiled warmly. ‘She’d play for hours, totally immersed in the music, losing track of time. She was constantly late for appointments.’

  ‘I have a sister who is very similar. Painting is her thing, that and woodwork and recycling old things for new purposes. She’s got real talent, too. But if you try to get her to a parent–teacher interview on time…’ She shook her head. ‘No chance.’

  ‘She has children?’

  Lara scratched at the inside of her wrist before she could stop herself. ‘Twins. A boy and a girl. Five years old.’

  ‘That’s a great age,’ Samuel said, lifting his feet off the ground and swinging them up so that he was supine on the lounge.

  A warm breeze shifted through the room. A sudden squawking fury exploded from the garden—some poor worm was being drawn and quartered by the chickens, she imagined.

  ‘Daisy and Hudson both have very definite personalities. They’re such little people, ready to go out and attack the world with everything they’ve got. Daisy wants to be a doctor. She’s ghoulishly fascinated with anatomy books. Hudson’s totally different—if we ask him what he wants to be when he’s older, he says, “I’m still working on that.”’

  ‘Smart lad.’

  ‘What about your grandchildren?’ she asked, still trying to piece together his family tree.

  ‘Lily’s brother, my grandson Antonio, is on Wall Street. He has a green card and has no children, no wife and no plans to come back to Italy as far as I know. Our son Gaetano married Sarah and they emigrated to England. They live in London along with their daughter, Aimee. She’d be about your age, I think. I should know.’ He rubbed his forehead then, as if trying to remember exactly, before giving up. ‘Anyway, she’s completing a science doctorate of some sort.’

  There was a long silence, during which Lara tried to fill in the names on the branches of Samuel’s family tree in her head. Then, because she was terribly inquisitive, she asked outright, ‘And what happened to your Lily?’

  ‘Car accident,’ he said bluntly, with almost no emotion, rather as if he’d practised saying it over the years in a way that caused him the least grief. ‘She was twenty. Her boyfriend was driving. They both died.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. It must be the most awful thing in the world to lose a child.’ Lara shouldered grief too, but nothing comparable to his. She had a new understanding of his stoop, his spine buckled over by that load.

  Samuel didn’t respond.

  ‘And what about Matteo?’ she ventured, wanting to keep him talkin
g while he was in the mood. ‘He’s your niece’s son, is that right?’

  Samuel gave a small nod.

  ‘And…’ Lara searched for the right words, but in lieu of anything tactful, she just blundered on. ‘Is he the only one who comes here to help you?’

  The old man folded his hands neatly on his chest and stared at the dark wooden beams in the high ceiling above them. ‘He’s the only one who doesn’t believe it.’

  ‘Believe what?’

  He waited a moment, his eyes fixed and glassy as they stared up. When his voice came out it was soft and scratchy, and Lara had to lean forward to hear his words.

  ‘That I killed my wife.’

  21

  Sunny

  Sunny swirled her hot chocolate with chilli, sitting cross-legged on her sister’s bed out in the granny flat, her phone in her hand with the message from Ari open on the screen. She’d come out here to think, but the email had caught her by surprise.

  A job for Sunny on the Sunny Coast?

  She lifted her eyes from the screen. A full-time job? That was unexpected.

  Lara had left her little place clean and tidy, but it still smelled of her rose perfume. Mind you, if Midnight kept coming in here with her at night after the children were in bed, the place would smell like dog soon enough. The lamp beside her—a paper lantern imprinted with woodfolk—cast a soft light over the bookcase. Neat rows of novels dominated the shelfscape, but wedged in here and there were nonfiction titles.

  Thrive!

  Bipolar and You.

  Think Yourself Happy.

  Recover, Rejoice.

  After Lara’s Big Breakdown, Sunny had questioned herself. Was she bipolar too? Sometimes she’d wondered if it was an invisible time bomb just waiting for the right trigger to set it off. With both their father and Lara diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder, Sunny was, apparently, seven times more likely to develop it too.

  When she was younger, Sunny had been cranky a lot of the time; even she recognised that. But she was a steady, oxen cranky. No flareups. No falls. Despite the genetic risk, she was certain she’d missed it. She’d been lucky; she must have inherited their mother’s sturdy psychological profile instead.

  But when it came to the twins, there would be no way to know for sure for a long time yet. Daisy was pretty straight and even-tempered, while Hudson was a rollercoaster of emotions from one minute to the next. Then again, when Sunny and Lara were younger, everyone thought Lara was the straight one, the good one, the one who would go far in life. And there was Sunny, the wild one, the one with no plans for her future. Look what had happened to Lara, the high achiever, the teacher’s pet. Looks could be deceiving, as they all knew only too well.

  Midnight squirmed against Sunny’s leg, chewing a rope toy, her puppy breath still sweet. Sunny ran her hand down the pup’s body and Midnight gurgled appreciatively and turned to chew Sunny’s hand with her razor-sharp teeth. Sunny had barely thought twice about adopting Midnight. That was the sort of person she’d once been all the time—impulsive, spontaneous, living in the moment. But everything had changed when the twins came along.

  Before she became a mother, she’d take a job one minute and quit it the next. Move in with musicians, then pack up and go home to live at her mother’s. Sleep with this man over here, but love that one over there. She’d lived like a gypsy. Enjoyed her freedom. This job offer from Ari tugged at those old feelings, tempting her to take to the road and start over.

  Sunny rubbed Midnight’s delicate velvet ear between her fingers.

  She returned to the email on her phone. Creative director for a beautifully on-trend furniture, clothing and lifestyle business up on the north coast. Taking the job would mean having to move the kids away from Brisbane, from Eliza and her free housing and childcare, and from Lara.

  More than sixteen years ago, Sunny had made a promise to Eliza in the dim living room, a single lamp switched on, their voices low so as not to wake Lara.

  ‘I’m not going to live forever,’ Eliza had said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Sunny had said, a touch irritated that now she wasn’t going to get back to her flat in time for The X-Files.

  ‘You saw what happened to your father,’ her mother said, wiping her eyes.

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ Sunny had said, not wanting to revisit those times.

  ‘She could end up like that,’ Eliza hissed, pointing down the hall to Lara’s bedroom.

  Sunny pulled a cushion out from behind her and clutched it across her abdomen. It was true. She knew it. Today, a psychiatrist had put Lara on medication. He’d also sent her home with sleeping tablets so she could finally rest, having been awake for days.

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ Sunny said. ‘I need to look after her.’

  ‘The three of us have to stick together. Foxleigh musketeers, remember,’ Eliza said, a phrase they’d bandied around for years while Leonard was in and out of the house. They’d be okay, she’d told the girls, as long as they stuck together.

  ‘I promise,’ Sunny whispered. The awful truth, which had grown like a hard ball inside her, getting bigger with every moment the conversation went on, was that Sunny should have been there for Lara earlier, back when Sunny was a teenager, even before she’d left home. Instead of taking off when things got rough and leaving Lara in the house while Leonard was wreaking havoc, Sunny should have been there protecting her. At the very least, she should have been a better big sister and taken Lara with her. Given her some respite.

  What she would never know for sure was whether she might have stopped Lara’s descent, the explosion of the time bomb, had she taken her with her, looked after her, instead of spending her time drinking cask wine down at the creek and smoking with the boys.

  Now, if Sunny took this job offer, it meant she would be leaving Lara again.

  On the other hand, if the person driving that blue car the other day was who she thought it was, taking the kids away might be the best thing she could possibly do.

  22

  Lara

  Wednesday evening found Lara in a cheerful mood. With buoyed confidence she’d texted Matteo, asking if she could come to see the goats and the cheese factory. She’d told herself that it was all in the interests of education and cultural exploration, and had nothing to do with his lovely hands, eyes and smile. Matteo had replied almost immediately, giving her directions for how to get there.

  After she’d made dinner for Samuel and left him watching something on television, she drove to the farm. She’d decided that when she got the chance, she would ask Matteo about Samuel. Was she caring for a murderer? Where did you go in a conversation after someone said something like that?

  ‘Don’t worry, it isn’t true,’ Samuel had said.

  She’d nodded and laughed nervously. ‘Of course it’s not true.’ Ha ha. What a joke. That would be crazy.

  But crazy was something she knew a bit about.

  It was still light as she drove along the country lanes, but the heat of the day was dissipating quickly. The season had begun to turn. She was still nervous on the road, but was improving with each small trip she took into Fiotti for groceries or goat and chicken feed. Samuel’s Alfa Romeo was a congenial old thing, starting easily and rumbling up the hills without a great deal of oomph but with a lot of tenacity.

  She was rather confused as to which tree-lined dirt road she should be taking, but she eventually spotted a hand-painted wooden sign peeking out from behind a red-flowering bush. Coaxing the car carefully over the dips and ditches of the driveway, she finally arrived in a clearing. There was a casa nearby, not unlike Matteo’s mother’s place—a poor person’s house originally, she presumed, given the variety of building materials she could see poking out from the walls. Wooden barrels with rosemary bushes stood either side of the front door—painted the traditional dark green, of course—and many pairs of work boots lay around on the worn patch of dirt at the entrance.

  She cut the engine and listened to
it ticking down for a moment. But she’d only begun to take in an old tree and a rope swing with a wooden seat when Matteo strode out from behind the house. His khaki shirt hugged his chest nicely, but the best thing about him was his huge smile. He lifted a hand in greeting and Lara unbuckled herself and opened the door, stepping out into the cooling breeze. She ducked back inside the car to pick up her white linen shawl to wrap around her shoulders.

  He reached her quickly, appearing at her side just as she was shutting the door.

  ‘Bella Lara, welcome,’ he said, and swooped down to kiss each cheek.

  ‘Hello,’ she replied, air-kissing him too.

  ‘Come, the g-g-g-goats are just settling in for the night.’ He took her hand to lead her, and she thought her heart would stop.

  They picked their way over the uneven ground, Matteo carefully shepherding her around any deep ditches or slippery places. She was glad she’d worn light sandshoes instead of her gladiator sandals. This was all about embracing the culture, after all, not going on a date.

  On the way, they passed a wooden trestle table with two large plates of cut tomatoes under a breathable fly sheet, and then another with plates of sliced zucchini.

  ‘Are you sun-drying them?’ she asked, delighted with this small detail of organic farming.

  ‘Sì—they will go under oil for the winter.’

  She withdrew her hand from his and pulled her phone from the pocket of her pants to take photos of the delicacies with the rolling cornflower-blue hills in the background. She’d text them to her mum, Sunny and Hilary later. One of the things she was enjoying most about Italian culture was how much everyone seemed to love food.

  Lara put her phone back and continued to follow Matteo. The fencing around the yards was all a little shabby, the grass around the paddocks needed a good mow, and the goat shelters seemed to have been put together with recycled materials; maybe there wasn’t a lot of profit in organic farming.