Shanahan's Revenge

by Julie Mac

  Kate was oblivious to the music, her mind tussling with the scenario back there in the fruit shop car park.

  He’d apologised. She’d accepted. He wanted to forget the kiss. She didn’t think she would ever forget. And therein lay the problem. The whole scene, his apology, her acceptance, was seriously flawed.

  She wasn’t a young innocent. She could have pulled back at any time. But she hadn’t. Instead, she’d welcomed his mouth, drinking in his passion as if her thirst had raged a lifetime.

  She knew it, he knew it. She tapped her neatly manicured nails against the door rest, unconsciously beating time to the music. He said he regretted what had happened. It meant nothing. Those were his words. A hard little ball of coldness settled under her ribs. It meant nothing. He was a well-travelled man, a good-looking, powerful man. Potent in every way. Contact with women must be commonplace for him. The little ball of ice twisted and turned uncomfortably in her stomach.

  Of course the incident meant nothing to him; why should it? Already it was filed away as past history. She felt angry at her own stupidity in allowing a silly little episode to get all out of proportion in her mind. She mustn’t allow her focus to slip, not now, when she was facing the biggest hurdle ever in her career. Difficult as it was, she must forget about that totally unimportant incident under the puriri tree and concentrate instead on the big issue, which was making sure the big, cocky Australian beside her didn’t snatch her future right out from under her nose.

  But first …

  ‘Sam,’ she said quietly. He glanced towards her, and leaned forward to turn down the stereo volume.

  ‘I really am sorry for what happened to Trojan. Over these last few days I’ve relived the whole thing again and again. Believe me, if I could re-run the scene and take the plane somewhere else, I would.’

  His eyes flicked towards her again, compassionate. ‘Don’t punish yourself, Kate. It was an accident. Sure, I wish it hadn’t happened, and I was angry at the time, but I’m not angry anymore.’

  ‘Just sad.’

  ‘Yeah, sad. And I was angry at myself, too, you know—not just you. Probably more angry at me than you. I shouldn’t have put the horses in the airstrip paddock, even though I knew it was hardly ever used. I just shouldn’t have risked it.’

  Briefly, Kate squeezed her eyes tight to banish a sudden image of Trojan’s brown body lying helpless on the ground. She swallowed. ‘It was not your fault in any way. The blame lies squarely with me.’

  He shook his head. ‘Let’s not argue over whose fault it was. Trojan’s suffering was limited. That’s important. At least I was spared the pain of seeing him die of old age or sickness.’

  ‘Oh?’ She looked at him speculatively and for the first time in days, the bitter sharpness of guilt was fractionally blunted.

  ‘He’d developed quite bad arthritis, and last winter was tough on him. I had to double rug him to keep out the cold, and several times I called in the vet to discuss his options.’

  Sam sent a wry smile in Kate’s direction. ‘But Trojan had this certain joie de vivre which made it mighty difficult to make the hard decision. I’d already faced the fact that this coming winter was probably going to be his last. The old boy was twenty-eight, and he’d had a pretty good life.’

  ‘Tell me about him,’ she said softly, then caught the swift glance he shot her way. ‘I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me. Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’ He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. When she looked over she saw he was smiling.

  ‘People who own horses are like people who own dogs. Or people who have children. A willing listener is always welcome.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She smiled in his direction.

  ‘Damn straight.’ He punched the off button on the stereo.

  ‘But if I’m going to tell you about Trojan, I have to start right at the beginning. You okay with that?’

  ‘Sure.’ She felt herself relaxing under the high voltage beam of the big grin he sent her way.

  ‘Here goes then. When I was a kid, we lived on the very outskirts of Sydney, where the country meets the town. There was a pony club down the road and I used to go there and spend hours watching the other kids riding. I managed to scrounge rides in exchange for helping with grooming and stuff, then one day, when I was about ten, someone gave me an old pony which would otherwise have ended up as dog tucker. God, I loved that old horse. He was a scrawny old bugger with dinner-plate hooves, but I thought I was in heaven. The pony club had a paddock for grazing, and I did a couple of paper rounds after school to pay for his extra feed.’

  ‘You had to pay for his feed yourself? When you were only ten?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sam threw her a look as if he thought her question was dumb. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘I did quite well in the pony club competitions. My mother saved up for a couple of years and bought me a new—and younger—pony, and by the time I was sixteen I was right into one-day eventing.’

  Sam was silent while he overtook a tour bus, and as he did, Kate remembered something the HR manager had said in the boardroom on the afternoon Trojan died: Sam Shanahan had been a teenage equestrian champ at national level. At the time, she’d blocked it out; the mere mention of horses had made her feel sick. Now it all came back with stunning clarity—that and the information he’d been a contender for Olympic selection in his early twenties.

  ‘I’ve got a feeling that’s something of an understatement,’ she said.

  Sam shrugged and flashed her that disarming grin again. ‘Around about then, I needed a new horse and I was offered Trojan. He’d been trained by a pro, but wasn’t really being worked, so I got him for next to nothing and he turned out to be a real beaut. He won lots of events for me; he’d do anything I asked him. When I retired him, I just didn’t have the heart to part with him.’ He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

  ‘And now, because of me …’ Kate felt the familiar sadness welling, filling her insides.

  He shot a glance at her. ‘Hey—we’re not going there, remember?’ He waited till she nodded, then continued, ‘An eventing mate over here in New Zealand asked me to help him train up one of his young horses—that’s the grey you saw up north. In between consulting jobs, I was coming over and spending a bit of time here, so I brought Trojan over too. You might say as a calming influence for the youngster. I grazed them at his property in the Waikato, then—’

  ‘Oh—’ Kate slapped her hand against her forehead as realisation dawned: Bob Symes, who looked after her grandparents’ farm up north, had a daughter who was a mad-keen horsewoman, ‘—and then you moved them to my grandparents’ farm up north. Of course, you would have met Bob Symes at some horsey event and he offered you the use of the grazing—and the house. Of course it’s better for it to be occupied from time to time. Much better than sitting empty and becoming a target for burglars. God, I’m so sorry I jumped to the wrong conclusion that day.’

  Chapter 4

  She was smiling at him, her lips parted slightly, stray tendrils of hair blowing back from her face in the air conditioning’s cooling stream. It would have been so easy to simply agree.

  But instead he said, ‘Something like that.’ Tell her the truth. Now. Before the moment passes. He shifted his eyes back to the road, then momentarily across to her again. Her smile was bigger now, her eyes wide and trusting; she was happy that the pieces of the jigsaw were falling into place. Something like that. It was the truth. He drew a long breath.

  The rest could wait.

  He was silent, then he swore as a motorist overtook him and converged too close in front.

  ‘Do you still compete?’ asked Kate presently.

  ‘I stopped doing the serious stuff about seven years ago. I got too busy with my work and too old for all those falls.’ He laughed, enjoying the way she laughed with him. ‘These days I just ride for fun.’

  ‘But you must have been brilliant. Why’d you give up? I thought you were se
lected for the Olympics.’

  ‘Not quite.’ There was that self-deprecating shrug again. ‘I’d reached a stage where I was selected to be in a training squad of possible Australian qualifiers for the Olympics, and I had to make a choice between a real career or a life of endlessly chasing sponsorships. And if I failed—even if I succeeded—where would that have left me career-wise?’

  ‘I can understand that.’

  He nodded—if anyone understood commitment and career, Kate McPherson did. ‘I’ve no regrets, though. I’d had a ball competing up till then, and Trojan and I carried on at local events until he became too old. In fact, I had to tell him it was time to stop.’

  ‘And then a dummy like me came along and killed him.’

  Sam heard the sorrow in her voice, and had to fight an impulse to pull over to the side of the road, take her in his arms and hold her tight until the last scrap of sadness was gone.

  Instead, he leaned forward to turn on the stereo again. ‘Enough of that now. Let’s listen to some music.’

  ***

  They drove without speaking through the Waikato’s fertile dairy country, bypassing Hamilton as they headed ever southward, and the silence between them felt surprisingly comfortable, thought Kate. A heat haze danced from the near-melting asphalt surface of the highway and only the slightest breeze shirred the silvery poplars lining the roadside.

  She shifted in her seat to catch more of the air conditioning’s coolness, and pushed an errant curl back behind her ear. Soon, in the distance, she could see the hulking dark humps of the Mamaku Range, over which they’d climb to reach the volcanic Central Plateau and Rotorua. Heavy black clouds hung incongruously in the blue sky above the range, warning of a possible thunderstorm, a not unusual and not unwelcome occurrence on a hot and sticky February day such as this. The cows will be pleased if it rains, thought Kate, watching the swish of tails among a heat-lazed dairy herd in a paddock by the road. In another paddock, the farming family had erected some small, pony club-type jumps, and her thoughts switched back to Sam, the horse-mad boy who became a champ.

  ‘Your family must have been very proud of you—for your sporting achievements, I mean.’

  ‘My mother was my biggest fan.’ Sam smiled. ‘She was especially proud, because we weren’t very well off, you see, Kate.’ His voice was lighthearted and she detected no bitterness. ‘When I was a kid she bought an old horse float, which her and I fixed up. She loved rolling up at the pony club events round the state in our old Holden station wagon and parking the battered float alongside all the swanky horse-trucks.’

  He chuckled. ‘She especially loved it when the moth-eaten-looking pony from the moth-eaten-looking float, ridden by the kid in second-hand gear, beat the daylights out of the very expensive flash ponies in most of the events.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, and I’d go along with her on that one, too,’ said Kate, laughing.

  ‘If you’d been there, you’d have been one of the rich kids with nothing but the best.’ He was grinning.

  ‘True, but I had a strong sense of justice. And I went to boarding school from an early age, and I have to say being in a dorm with twenty other girls was a great leveller. I was the one who always stuck up for the underdog.’

  ‘Lucky them!’

  She smiled. ‘And what about your brothers and sisters, did any of them ride?’

  ‘There’s just Mum and I, no other family.’

  ‘No father?’ asked Kate softly, and instantly regretted the question. The smile was gone, and in its place she saw a flash of the bleakness she’d seen beside the dying horse. She wanted to reach out, touch him, tell him she understood.

  ‘No father,’ confirmed Sam. ‘He was killed in a farming accident when I was four. That’s when my mother and I moved to Australia. She’d had a … a falling out, I suppose you could call it, with her family in New Zealand and so we shifted to Aussie to start afresh.’

  He reached forward and turned up the music. ‘Do you like the old Fleetwood Mac songs?’ he asked pleasantly. The hard lines were gone from around his mouth, but here was still a darkness in his eyes.

  ‘They’re great, classics really,’ she said, making a mental note: where Sam Shanahan was concerned, family was obviously touchy territory.

  ***

  They headed through Rotorua, passing geysers, mud pools and the dozens of plush hotels and motels, temporary homes to the tourists who flocked each year to see the city’s geothermal wonders.

  Travelling south on the Taupo road, they entered the vast Kaingaroa Forest with its millions of dark, towering pines, then they turned off the main highway onto a road which sliced arrow straight and smooth through the forest, the only other occupants, huge logging trucks. Kate took a call on her phone from Henry Cadogan, who met them at an intersection and transferred to Sam’s vehicle for the short trip through the trees to the demonstration site.

  At her insistence, Henry hopped up in front with Sam. From the back seat, she listened to their conversation, which quickly told her that Henry liked the younger man.

  ‘See these trees, son?’ said Henry, a few minutes into the journey. ‘Fastest growing pines in the world.’

  ‘Apart from Chile’s,’ shot back Sam, a grin crinkling his eyes.

  ‘You might be right,’ conceded Henry, ‘but what Chile gains in speed, we make up for with quality. Anyway, this is the largest man-made forest in the Southern Hemisphere. Chile’s got nothing this size—neither’s your country for that matter.’ He wagged a good-natured finger at Sam.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ jibed Sam, ‘but don’t forget I’m a New Zealander too. I might have spent most of my life in Australia, but I was born in this country.’

  He added quietly, ‘In some ways I feel I belong here.’ Kate had sat silent in the back seat, listening to their exchange, and watching Sam’s eyes in the rear-vision mirror. They’d been fixed steadily on the road, but now they sought her own, and she was powerless to break the connection. Her stomach muscles clenched at the intensity of his gaze, and when he looked back at the road she was left with quickened breath and a head full of memories of his hands against her body, compelling and hard.

  She was glad when they pulled up at the demonstration site a few minutes later. Everyone who was anyone in the New Zealand forestry industry had been invited to the demo, including the local Member for Parliament who just happened to be the Minister of Forestry. Kate, Henry and Sam were handed hard hats and name tags then, with the rest of the group, followed a guide on foot over a rough, recently formed road, and past a newly felled area, where Kate breathed the delicious scent of cut pine, and derived a certain pleasure from the neatly stacked piles of raw logs by the roadside.

  Rounding a corner they could see the Swedish machine, parked ready for action. Someone from the Forest Institute gave a brief presentation, then there was a small delay before the demonstration started. The Minister of Forestry, an old acquaintance of Henry’s, chatted with him while they waited, and Henry introduced his younger colleagues.

  ‘The government’s keen to encourage any innovation that will increase productivity in forests, and therefore create more jobs in timber processing,’ said the minister. ‘What’s the potential of this machine for McPherson’s, Henry?’

  ‘You need to ask Kate, she’s been looking at the specs.’

  Kate smiled at the minister. ‘It certainly comes with impressive credentials, but it’s much smaller than some of the other new generation European logging machines we’ve been looking at, and I’m afraid my conclusion was that it won’t handle the rough terrain in our forests.’

  ‘I don’t agree with you there, Kate,’ cut in Sam. ‘I’ve seen this machine working in Chile. I think it will be brilliant here, and it’s quite a bit cheaper than the other European models you’re talking about.’

  Kate resisted the urge to stomp on his toes with her leather walking boots—an urge which grew even stronger when the minister beamed at Sam and said, ‘Well, I have t
o say my staff have also studied the specs, and they’ve come to the same conclusion as you, Sam.’

  Kate clamped her mouth shut and folded her arms across her chest. Suddenly the logging machine, its new paint still shiny and clean, sprang into action with a dexterity that belied its awkward mechanical lines. Its driver manoeuvred it over bumpy ground to the next tree to be felled. Within seconds, pincer-like grabbers on the long boom gripped the tree, then a saw near the bottom of the boom sliced through the trunk.

  Still standing upright in the grip of the pincers, the tree was swiftly swung to the horizontal and laid on the ground. Now the machine changed its action to run a series of saws down the length of the tree, chopping off the side branches and the bushy head. Next the bark was peeled, and finally the machine measured the log using laser beams and sent the information back to the onboard computer, which displayed the data for the operator. Electronically graded, the log was then deposited in a designated pile.

  The whole operation was over in minutes, then the machine moved on to the next tree. Kate observed, fascinated, and checked her watch to time the process.

  The little Swedish machine scooted over the rough terrain far faster than she’d anticipated. She glanced at her watch again, astounded at the speed at which the machine dispatched the logs.

  ‘Good, isn’t it?’ Henry had to speak loudly to make himself heard over the noise.

  Kate frowned. ‘It’s far quicker than its specs stipulated.’

  ‘That’s because it was built and initially tested in the Northern Hemisphere,’ said Sam, also speaking loudly. ‘Spring to autumn conditions, including snow at both ends of the harvest season, were factored into all specifications. Of course, snow’s not something we have to worry about in the Southern Hemisphere.’

  ‘You’re dead right there, son,’ beamed Henry, and Kate could see the minister on Henry’s other side nodding and smiling at Sam.