The Darling Songbirds

by Rachael Herron

  About the Book

  A sparkling, highly entertaining romantic comedy about beloved country girl group the Darling Songbirds, from the bestselling author of Eliza’s Gift.

  Love is a country song waiting to happen …

  Adele, Molly and Lana are the Darling Songbirds, the country-singing sisters who gained fame in their teens for their smart lyrics and sweet harmonies. But when their father died suddenly on the eve of their big tour, the group acrimoniously broke up.

  Now, eleven years on, Adele arrives back in Darling Bay, the sleepy gold-rush town founded by her great-grandfather. For Uncle Hugh has bequeathed to the sisters his hotel and bar the Golden Spike.

  Except this is not the welcoming saloon Adele remembers from her childhood. The building is a ruin, the business is broke and customers are scarce.

  Add into the mix Nate Houston - the handsome, guitar-playing barman who had always believed he would be the next owner - and Adele has one potent cocktail on her hands.

  She needs Molly and Lana now more than ever – but the heartache still runs deep. Can a rundown saloon in a sleepy town finally offer the sisters a way back home?

  The Darling Songbirds is the first in a delightful romantic comedy series, filled with music, laughter and one sexy cowboy.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Rachael Herron

  Copyright Notice

  For Smiley’s Schooner Salon.

  Keep pulling down those signs, Bolinas.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The saloon had always looked old-fashioned, but now it resembled a prop in a ghost town. The boards creaked under Adele Darling’s feet as if they hadn’t been stepped on since women wore hoop skirts. Cobwebs on the porch slung themselves from top beams to bottom ones, and an old wagon wheel leaned against a hitching post in front. It was as if the sidewalk had been poured right around the post, and her Toyota hybrid looked completely wrong parked next to it. It should have been a horse.

  The problem was that Adele wasn’t in an old western, or a ghost town. Darling Bay was the sleepy gold-rush town her great-grandfather had given his name to.

  The town she’d left for good a long time ago.

  There was a hand-drawn sign that said: Hours – 11 AM–2 AM. She glanced at her cell phone. Almost noon, and the doors were locked. Awesome.

  She knocked on the wood next to the iron screen door.

  ‘That won’t do you no good.’

  Adele spun. ‘Sorry?’

  The exceedingly short woman standing on the step below her wore a long, oversized blue dress that hung on her like a sack. Somewhere in her mid-sixties, she had a well-creased face, like a crumpled envelope. A dozen or more necklaces dangled around her neck, crystals and quartz and what looked like actual feathers, on tarnished silver chains. Her short grey hair stuck up in spikes as if she’d just run her hands over it roughly, but her smile was wide. ‘He ain’t here yet.’

  Adele wasn’t sure who he was. ‘Okay …’

  ‘But if you reach up above the door,’ the woman pointed, ‘yeah, right there. You’re a tall one, ain’t you? Grab that key for us, will you?’

  It wasn’t that Adele was tall at five foot five. It was more like the woman was eye level to her elbow. ‘Got it.’ Now that the key was in her hand, Adele had no idea what to do with it. It wasn’t like she would just unlock the bar’s front door. Would she?

  She didn’t have to make the decision. In a move so quick it surprised her, the woman snatched the key from her palm and unlocked the iron security door, swinging it wide open and barrelling through the wooden half-door as if she owned the place, which Adele knew for a fact she didn’t.

  ‘Sometimes I gotta open up for him, you know?’ The woman moved to the right and snapped on two light switches, and then headed for the bar. She was a low, fast-moving bowling ball in blue. ‘It’s usually harder ’cause it’s tough for me to reach that key. It’s not like I mess with the till or nothin’, I just help him out where I can.’

  Adele trailed behind the woman. This wasn’t the situation she had imagined herself in when she’d woken this morning. All she had known four hours ago in her San Francisco hotel was that she had a long drive up the coast. When she got to Darling Bay, she figured she would plan her next move.

  So she’d gotten in her rental car and headed north. Highway One wound through the redwoods, darting out to the rocky coast and back inland again. She’d stopped once to stretch her legs, and had stood cliff-side watching elephant seals slap themselves up and down the coarse sand. It took a bit more than three hours to get to Darling Bay, a long-enough drive to make her feel as far from Nashville as she’d ever felt.

  She used to be used to this feeling. This used to be home.

  And now she had exactly no idea what that meant.

  ‘You want a drink, dearie?’

  Adele blinked. ‘I’m sorry … Who are you?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I could ask you the same thing.’

  That was fair. ‘I’m Adele Darling.’

  ‘Oh, my God. You are.’

  Crap. Adele should have just said her first name. What was she thinking? Nowhere else would her last name have raised more than a vaguely puzzled eyebrow. Sounds familiar … can’t place it. But not here.

  The woman clutched at her pile of necklaces. ‘They didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘Who?’ Adele was feeling more confused by the second. ‘I don’t think anyone knew I was coming.’

  ‘But they usually tell me everything.’ She held up a chain that had a pink piece of stone at the end and peered at it closely.

  ‘Your necklaces tell you these things?’ Adele kept her voice soft. Maybe it was better not to startle her.

  The woman stared at Adele as if she were crazy. ‘Not my necklaces. My dreams.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Of course, it’s not like they’re always right. Sometimes they tell me a storm is coming when all that’s going to happen is I forget to take the kettle off the stove. Same thing.’ She waved her arms above her head. ‘Clouds of steam. Just in my kitchen. You see?’

  Adele nodded carefully.

  ‘Where are the other two?’ The woman peered behind Adele as if she were somehow hiding her sisters.

  ‘Not with me.’ Nothing could be truer. ‘I didn’t
get your name.’ Adele held out her hand.

  The woman’s shake was firm. ‘Norma.’

  ‘And you’re the bartender?’

  Norma laughed heartily, but she spread her palms on the top of the bar as if to negate her next statement. ‘Oh no, not me. You’re a funny one. I’m just a drinker, from a long line of the same. Speaking of which, what can I make you?’

  Not the bartender, then, but not not the bartender. ‘How about a Coke?’

  ‘With rum? And can I read your tarot cards?’ Norma asked hopefully.

  ‘I’m good on both, thanks.’ It was a bit early to start pounding liquor. ‘So if you’re not the bartender, and the saloon was supposed to open at eleven …’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be here.’

  ‘Who will?’ This was beginning to feel like a game of Who’s on First.

  ‘Nate.’

  ‘Nate?’

  ‘You don’t know him?’

  ‘I haven’t been here in a while,’ Adele said. If a while meant eleven years. She’d been far away from Darling Bay, sometimes as far as a person could get. ‘When do you think he’ll be here?’

  Norma frowned and held one of her necklaces, looking upward as if the answer hung in the cobwebbed rafters. ‘Soon.’ Then she filled a glass with Coke and slid it towards Adele. ‘Here you go. Now, tell me everything. How’re your sisters? You know, my dad – may he rest in peace – died before y’all got famous, but I always think he would have loved you. When your dad died, I asked my dad to bring him into heaven with a big ol’ hug. Felt so bad for you young gals. Are you getting the band back together? You know we talk about you all the time. And those magazines, they stopped printing those stories about y’all, and that’s a good thing, but we never believed a word they said anyway. How’s the little one? Lana?’

  The back of Adele’s throat itched. ‘Fine.’ She had no idea how Lana was since she never answered Adele’s phone calls. The ache of it was dull and familiar. ‘Do you mind if I have a look around? While I wait for Nate?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’ Norma bobbed up and down behind the bar, spinning into action. Tomato juice, sliced celery, vodka. ‘A Bloody Mary doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Gotta work at it.’ She frowned and looked upward again. ‘Unless you stare into the mirror, you know? And say those words? I’m not gonna do that. Okay. There.’ She added a dash of Tabasco. ‘Mine isn’t as good as Nate’s, but I’m getting there. Just gotta keep working on it.’

  Adele wandered towards the rear of the saloon. It was just as she remembered it, dark and dusty, smelling of splintered wood and spilled beer. The old jukebox glowed neon blue and green in the far right corner. Next to it was a skinny ATM that had been added since she was last here. To the left of that ran the long bar all the way to the back wall. How many buckets of ice had Adele hauled out of the old storeroom? The girls had loved being there in the saloon, still under-age, helping Uncle Hugh with stocking and refilling in the afternoons. They’d begged to be allowed to stay as late as they could, listening to the music, not leaving until Sheriff Tate came in after his shift and raised his eyebrows at the little girls doing their homework in the far left corner on the big, scarred wooden table.

  The table was still there. Adele touched the top of it, feeling the ridges with her fingertips. People still carved their initials into it, using penknives and ballpoint pens. They didn’t cut deeply (out of respect, perhaps – surely they would have dug more deeply into a tree) and the well-worn initials looped over each other, years and years of couples who had loved and lost and loved again. When Adele and her sisters had done their math homework here, they’d had to make sure their notepads were under their papers, or their pencils would stab through into the table’s scars.

  Somewhere on the table were their initials, too. All three of them, AD + MD + LD. Adele and Molly and Lana. Hidden now somewhere, buried by the map of other letters.

  Adele realised she was humming and closed her throat. She heard the refrain of ‘You’ll Never Leave’ in her mind. Then she wandered back towards the front door. To the right was the stage. Just a couple of feet higher than the floor, it was made of the same old wood and, if she remembered right, just as rickety. Impulsively, she jumped up onto it, stretching her arms wide. A light snapped on above her head, and she grinned in delight. Even when they were kids, Uncle Hugh had kept that motion-activated light there, and they’d loved the way it had shone down on them like a spotlight.

  ‘Sing us a song!’ called Norma from the other side of the saloon.

  Oh, hell, no. Adele swallowed her grin and raised a hand. ‘Maybe later.’ Or maybe never.

  The old pool table stood in the same spot it always had. Adele could imagine a tsunami sweeping in and taking out the Golden Spike, carrying away the saloon and the café and the old hotel – the whole town of Darling Bay itself – but that pool table, as heavy as sin and older than Eve’s apple, would stay right there, right where it had always been meant to sit. At some point over the years, the felt playing top had been repaired. Chalks, the old square kind, were lined up on the rail, and a half-dozen cue sticks leaned drunkenly against the short inner wall.

  Adele could almost hear the crack of the balls. Molly had been their ringer, always willing to bat her eyes innocently at whatever guy thought it would be fun to show off his pool prowess to teenage girls. Molly would run the table, stick the guy’s money in her pocket, and then ask Uncle Hugh for a round of root beer floats for her and her sisters.

  Molly. She wanted Molly here.

  She pulled out her cell phone. Remember the root beer floats?

  Holding her phone in her hand in case the text actually managed to soar out to the cruise ship somewhere on the ocean, Adele used her other hand to lift up the bench seat in the front window alcove. There they were, all the board games they’d spent so much time with. She’d be willing to bet that the Monopoly set was still missing all the Get Out of Jail Free cards. (Sheriff Tate had gotten his feelings hurt one night when he’d been on a particularly expensive Monopoly losing streak.) And the Sorry! game … She pulled it out and lifted the lid. Yep, there they were. Each piece had little teeth marks at the top, marching all the way around. The blue piece was missing the round knobby top altogether.

  While Adele raced around the board, passing her sisters with a cheery ‘Sorry!’, Lana would get so mad she’d chew the pieces, leaving her tooth marks behind, or in the case of the blue one, biting the top right off.

  Adele glanced left. Norma was looking into her Bloody Mary as if it were telling a fortune, so Adele quietly slipped the headless blue piece into her jeans pocket. From the layers of dust inside the bench seat, no one would miss the piece anytime soon.

  She looked out the side alcove window. Across the middle parking lot stood the old café. Funny, she’d assumed it would be still be open, that Hugh’s employees would still be running it. But it was shuttered and dark, an unbearable sense of loneliness coming from the ripped awning. She looked right, up to the slight rise behind the saloon and café. That was the hotel, the third old building that she’d called home every summer of her youth. It was where she would sleep tonight. She yearned for that, for this already-long day to speed up until she could just lie down, close her eyes, and breathe in the ocean-scented air.

  The phone – the real one that hung on the bar’s back wall – jangled. Adele jumped. Norma grabbed it without hesitation. ‘Golden Spike, this is Norma!’

  There was a pause. ‘Yeah.’ She grinned. ‘Right again. You bet. I’ll keep ’er running, boss. Yeah. Okay. And hey? I forgot to tell you I need a raise.’ She slammed the phone down with a hoot of laughter. ‘That was him!’ She looked at Adele as if suddenly surprised to see her. ‘Oh! I should have told him you were here.’

  ‘No, that’s okay. I’ll see him when he gets here.’

  ‘So I guess you’re the boss around here now.’ Norma was obviously startled by the thought, her grey eyebrows shooting higher. ‘Of course you are. Oooh.’ Her drink wrap
ped tightly in her hand, she leaned forward from her saloon stool. ‘You should tell him to hire me. I wouldn’t drink all the booze, I swear I wouldn’t.’ But there was a twinkle behind her expression that said the opposite was true, and that they both knew it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Nate shouldn’t have answered his cell phone that morning, but he was a sucker for a blonde. Especially if the blonde happened to be ninety-one and living on the boat he’d sold her five months earlier. Ruthann Suthers had asked, ‘Does it matter, dear, if my extension cord in the kitchen smokes a little?’ Nate thought of the electrical fire at the hotel, and told her to call 911. She said, ‘I already did. They said it was okay, but they shut off my power.’ Nate had sighed and spent the next two hours crawling around the baseboards in the boat’s mess. He’d installed three new surge protectors, and he’d tested each outlet. By the time he’d finished, he’d bruised a knuckle and ripped his favourite Merle Haggard T-shirt.

  And he was late.

  At least Norma had been at the bar to open up. Unless a wandering tourist or two showed up, she’d probably be the only customer until three, anyway.

  He parked his truck in front of the post office. Getting out, he pulled his Charlie’s Feed and Seed ball cap on backward. What he really needed was another shower. Maybe he could bribe Norma with a couple more drinks off her tab to stay a little longer while he cleaned up. He took the two shallow steps up off street level with one long jump.