“... you get monkeys,” Fred finished. “Yeah, I get it.” Her voice was flat.
He ran a hand through his hair. “Look, I didn’t mean to bring you down, but I wouldn’t feel as if I was being honest if I didn’t tell it like it is.”
“No, you’re perfectly right.” She led the way over to a bench in the garden and sat, and he took a seat beside her. Scully sat on her foot, and she laughed and stroked the dog’s head. “The thing is, for Ginger, Sandi, and me, coming here is like a new beginning. All three of us have had a tough time over the last few years.”
“Because of your father?” he asked. He didn’t want to force her to talk, but he was curious about the Cartwright girls, and why all of them felt the need to escape.
Fred leaned back, her hands folded in her lap. “Sandi’s partner died a year ago in a car crash.”
“Shit,” he said. She was only in her late twenties.
“Yeah,” Fred said. “She’s still not over it. It was horrible, and not just because he died. At the funeral, another woman turned up with a two-year-old kid. Turns out she was married to him.”
Mac’s eyes widened. “What?”
“He was a sales rep, and he told both of them he was away a lot on business. When he wasn’t with one, he was with the other, and neither of them knew. But of course, the worst thing was that the other woman was his wife. Sandi’s house was in Brodie’s name, so she didn’t have a leg to stand on. The wife threw her out, and Sandi lost everything.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. It was a terrible time, and she’s still reeling.”
“What about Ginger?” he said, almost not wanting to ask.
“She had an affair with the son of the woman who owned the restaurant she was working at. He turned out to be a pig, and when she dumped him, he told his mother that Ginger was creaming money off the profits, and she was sacked.”
“Ah, jeez.”
“Ginger took her to court and won, but it was horrible for her.”
The thought of people hurting these young, beautiful women gave him a pain in his chest. “And you?” he asked softly. Perhaps she’d only wanted to get away to help her sisters. He was conscious though that she hadn’t mentioned her mother yet. Was she still alive? What had happened there?
Chapter Eight
FRED CONCENTRATED ON stroking Scully’s ears so she didn’t have to look at him.
She hadn’t planned to offload like this. She didn’t particularly want to admit her failings, or those of her sisters, but there was something about Mac that made her want to confess. It could have been those eyes—they seemed to see right inside her, as if she were a museum piece behind glass, and he was just standing there, studying it.
She didn’t want to confess everything, though, because she liked the way he looked at her, and she didn’t want it to change. Still, he’d opened up to her. It would be rude to say nothing. She didn’t have to tell him everything.
“There was no catastrophe for me in that way,” she said. “It was a downward spiral of events that led to me being desperate to get away. My mother was bipolar. Badly so. She had severe bipolar I disorder. Do you know much about it?”
“Not much,” he said.
“When we were young, I thought she was just energetic and exciting. She’d decide on a whim to take us all to London to visit Madame Tussauds, or down to the West Country for a sudden holiday. At the time, I didn’t connect those manic episodes with the periods of depression that followed. As I grew older though, I began to see a pattern, and she grew worse. She’d drag us out for the day, then halfway through she’d withdraw into herself, shaking and uncommunicative, and I’d have to find a way to get us home. She swung more quickly from one state to another. She’d go on shopping sprees and she ran up huge credit bills. She slept around, even when my father was still home. She was hospitalized several times. She even began to have psychotic episodes—delusions and hallucinations. It wasn’t her fault. But it was very hard.”
“When did your father leave?” Mac asked. He was sitting very close to her, his arm brushing hers. Fred liked the contact. It had been a while since she’d been close to a man, and his presence comforted her, warmed her through.
“When I was seven. I can remember bits and pieces about him, but Sandi was only five, and Ginger only three, so they can’t remember him much. I can recall lots of arguments, shouting, tears. My Dad pleading, begging her to get help, her refusing, saying she didn’t need it. And I remember that she forgot to pick Sandi and me up from school one day, so Dad came to get us, and when he got home she was in bed with another man, with Ginger asleep in the corner. That was it for him, I think. He left soon after.”
“He just walked out? I’m surprised he didn’t try to get custody of you.” Mac was frowning—he disapproved. She liked that.
“Well, you know he was a mountain guide, right? His job took him all over the world. He went off and came back several times, but Mum refused to let him see us. And then of course he had his big accident and hurt his leg, and he obviously decided he needed to settle down, and he moved back here.”
“Did he contact you at all?”
Fred blew out another breath. “Well, that’s the crux of the matter. We didn’t get a single letter from him. We were used to him being away, but as the years went by and we heard nothing, we all got upset and resentful. Mum told us that he couldn’t care for us very much if he couldn’t even bother to write a letter. I wanted to ring, but she said she didn’t have his phone number. In the end, I wrote to him several times, but never heard back, so I assumed he’d abandoned us and didn’t want to know. I thought he’d probably remarried and had a new family. I hated him for that. I blamed him for everything. It was only when he died and you sent that letter that I found out Mum had destroyed all his letters, and all my letters to him.”
“Jesus.” Mac leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “And all that time Harry thought you didn’t want anything to do with him.”
“Yes.” Emotion was starting to stir inside her. She didn’t want to say any more. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t know him well enough, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you admitted to a stranger.
They sat in silence for a while, Fred with her hands clenched, her knuckles white, as she waited for him to ask. You spoke about your mother in the past tense. What happened?
But he leaned back and closed his eyes, lifting his face to the sun, and gradually, she realized he wasn’t going to ask.
Relief washed through her, and she blew out a silent, shaky breath, filled with gratitude that he recognized she didn’t want to talk, and was willing to let it pass.
She watched a huge butterfly flap slowly through the flowers. “Is that a Red Admiral?”
“Yes. Maori call them kahukura. It means ‘red cloak.’”
“I like that.”
“Will you miss England if you stay here?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. I had one or two friends but no huge social group as I didn’t get out much, sad as that sounds. No partner. The island I come from is very insular—everyone knows everyone else’s business—and I’ll be glad to get away from that. The idea of coming here, where nobody knows me or my past, is so exciting, I can’t tell you.”
“Have you applied for residency?”
She shook her head. “We’re here on a working holiday visa, which means we can work for up to twelve months and extend for another three. But the plan is really to take a few days to see if we want to give it a go, and if we do, a few months to make sure, and then if all goes well, apply for full residency. With our father having been a Kiwi, it shouldn’t be a problem. I suppose that even if the vineyard doesn’t work out, technically we could still stay and just live and work elsewhere, but I don’t know that we would do that. We came here to make the vineyard work. If we don’t have that... I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Her throat tightened, and she stopped speaking. She felt embarrassed that she’d s
aid too much, even though she hadn’t told him the worst of it. She barely knew the guy. She believed in his desire to right his father’s wrongs, but he was still a MacDonald, and all three Cartwright girls had been burned for trusting when they should have been more cautious.
But he just said, “All right. You said that Sandi and Ginger are going to take the day to investigate their neck of the woods. You’ve had a look around the vineyard and the winery. Let’s grab some lunch, and then how about we take another shot at the house?”
“Sure.” The idea of some physical work appealed to her. She’d help him clear out the rooms and do some cleaning—it never failed to make her feel better. When her body was busy, it left her mind free to work on the problem. Maybe then, it would become clear to her what they should do.
So they joined the girls and took a seat in the restaurant, and Mac ordered them a couple of platters. They weren’t very good, and Fred exchanged a glance with Ginger, knowing her sister was busy drawing up menus in her head and would already have quizzed the kitchen staff on sourcing local food, including fresh fish and seafood from the bay.
For the first time, Mac treated them to a glass of wine with their meal. Sandi wanted white, so he recommended the vineyard’s Chardonnay. He told them it had a good oak and citrus balance, with a refreshing finish, and would go nicely with the Brie cheese. And for the rest of them he chose a Syrah, with its plum and savory black pepper flavors, which he said went well with the Cheddar and Gouda cheeses.
Fred tried both wines as she ate, pleasantly surprised by how nice they were, and a little excited about the fact that they were made from grapes growing in their own vineyard.
She listened to Ginger and Sandi chat away about the B&B and the restaurant as she ate, hoping their enthusiasm was contagious and that it would encourage her to find an answer to her side of the problem. But it was difficult to find a way out of the maze. The vineyard needed serious money spent on it. She had no money, and no way to get any. Maybe if she got residency, she’d be able to take out a mortgage? She’d have to investigate whether she’d be able to pay herself enough of a wage to meet the payments. She hadn’t expected to just arrive and have the money rolling in, but the last thing she wanted was to get knee-deep in debt.
After lunch, when Ginger and Sandi returned to their cataloguing and note-taking, Fred went with Mac and Scully back to the house, where they spent the afternoon finishing off the tidying of the second bedroom. She’d hoped maybe to find some more of her father’s effects, but it all turned out to be rubbish—torn bits of carpet, old magazines, empty wine bottles, bits of an old dog kennel, parts of a car engine, broken mugs... you name it, she found it in there.
Most of it, she presumed, was James’s junk. How much of this stuff had been her father’s? It was odd to think this had been Harry’s place for so many years, and his parents’ before that. She knew that her paternal grandparents were both dead, and Harry had been an only child, but presumably she had distant relatives across New Zealand. She’d have to research one day and see if she could contact some.
By six o’clock, the room was empty of rubbish, vacuumed, and cleaned. Fred was tired, too tired to go down into the bay to eat, but hungry nevertheless, so Mac volunteered to drive out and fetch a takeaway. He returned with several bags from the Indian restaurant, and the four of them sat in the dining room in the house to eat, dipping pieces of poppadum into the tiny pots of raita and mango chutney, and scooping the hot and spicy curries up with chunks of naan bread.
Fred sipped from the glass of Sauvignon Blanc that Mac had recommended to go with her butter chicken. She was nowhere near as good as he was at picking out the notes of a wine, but even she could taste the gooseberries, with a hint of grapefruit.
She cast the occasional glance at him as she ate. He’d been an interesting companion while they’d worked that afternoon. It had grown warm in the house, and at one point he’d stripped to the waist, revealing a toned, tanned body with impressive muscles that had glowed in the afternoon sun. He had an interesting tattoo—not the full upper arm and shoulder she’d seen on the pictures of some of the All Blacks rugby players, but a ring around his upper arm, in the shape of stylized waves. Did they represent the Pacific? She was too shy to ask, but found her gaze drawn to it repeatedly.
She’d tried to keep her eyes averted, but it hadn’t been easy. He was a fine specimen of a man, and she liked his attitude that anything could be sorted providing you put enough hard work into it.
He talked too, sometimes, telling her about his childhood in Russell, about fishing off the pier, going out into the Bay of Islands and diving for kingfish and mussels. He talked about friends, but never mentioned a sibling, so she thought he was probably an only child. He mentioned his mother several times, speaking about her in a fond, teasing tone that made Fred want to meet her.
But he never mentioned his father. Fred didn’t think it was just because of what James MacDonald had done to the estate. It went deeper than that, she was sure, some simmering resentment that sent roots way back into his past. One day, she’d ask him about it. If he stayed. He’d looked surprised that morning when she’d told him she hoped he’d play a part in getting the vineyard back on its feet. Did he already have other plans? Had he been applying for jobs elsewhere in the country?
Did he have a girl that he was thinking about?
It was none of her business, Fred told herself. She had to keep her head clear. The vineyard had to come first, and even though she’d spent all day going over ideas in her head, trying to work out where they could cut corners without sacrificing the quality of the wine, she was no nearer to coming to a conclusion, and making a success of the place seemed as much of a distant dream as ever.
Chapter Nine
“SO HOW DID YOUR RESEARCH go into the B&B and restaurant?” Mac asked Ginger and Sandi while they all tucked into their curries.
“Good,” Ginger mumbled through a mouthful of rice and naan. “There’s huge potential here. The kitchen’s not in bad nick—some of the equipment could do with replacing, but it’s not essential. The biggest issue is the menu, and the sourcing of local produce. And I’d love to get trained waiters and waitresses rather than local teens who don’t know a dessert spoon from a soup spoon, or at least train the local teens to the proper standard. And of course, the restaurant itself needs bringing into the twenty-first century. Not in its look—I love the flagstones and the kauri wood bar—but fresh paint, new tables and chairs, new cutlery and crockery, that kind of stuff. It all costs money, though.”
“What has to be done?” Fred asked her. “As opposed to what you’d like to do.”
“None of it has to be done, I guess. But I’m not sure I’m prepared to settle for mediocre.” Ginger frowned and poked at a piece of chicken with her fork. Mac understood what she meant. There was no point in doing anything by halves. If she couldn’t bring the restaurant up to the standards she’d been hoping, she’d be better off returning to the UK and taking over an already-performing restaurant.
“What about the B&B?” Fred asked her other sister.
“Much the same,” Sandi said. “There’s plenty I’d like to do. New linen and curtains, a complete re-decoration throughout, a fresh look for the dining room, a new washing machine and tumble dryer for the laundry. Plus of course the pool could do with a new fence, and the garden needs quite a bit of work done to it. Doesn’t have to be done. But if we don’t do it, we’re starting off half cock, so to speak.”
Mac watched Fred lay her fork on the plate and push it away, her appetite clearly disappearing. “Yeah,” she said, somewhat listlessly. “It’s a similar story with the vineyard, and of course, as we said, if the vineyard is failing, there’s little point in getting everything else sorted.”
“Don’t lose heart.” Sandi rested a hand on Fred’s. “Not yet. Give us another day to think about it. I’m not done yet and neither is Ginger. We’re going to come up with a series of plans—what absolutely must
be done, what’s next, what’s not so important, that kind of thing. Then we’ll have a better idea of cost.”
“All right.” Fred pushed away from the table. “I might go for a walk. Don’t do the washing up—I’ll tackle it when I get back.”
They watched her go, and then Ginger and Sandi looked at Mac.
“She really wants this,” Ginger said.
“Yeah.” Mac started to gather together the foil containers. “I can see that.”
“She’s had a tough time, that’s all,” Sandi said, “we all have, actually, and we were hoping that this would be the answer, you know? I don’t mean to guilt you, I’m just saying it like it is.”
“I understand. Fred explained that things have been difficult for you.”
As one, their eyebrows rose.
“Really?” Ginger said.
“Yeah.” He frowned at their surprise.
Sandi exchanged a glance with her sister. “Only... she never talks to anyone. We’ve never been able to get her to see a counsellor, and even her friends, such as they are, don’t know the full story.”
“I’m not sure I know the full story,” he admitted, “but she told me about your mum’s illness, and that she’d burned Harry’s letters to you, and hidden the ones that Fred wrote him.”
“Wow, you must be something,” Ginger said, “to get her talking.”
“Not really.” He shifted in his chair and concentrated on stacking the plates. “We shared a moment, I guess.” He finished tidying, then leaned back in his chair. “I get the feeling she’s not told me everything.”
The girls exchanged a glance. “If Fred didn’t want to tell you, it’s not our place to say,” Sandi said quietly.
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