The House On Burra Burra Lane (27 page)

Sammy put her fork into the bowl of salad in front of her. She’d had enough of picking at the lettuce and pushing the chicken around. ‘It wasn’t sudden, I knew what I would do.’ She paused, but couldn’t hold the next words back. ‘What sort of man leaves a woman ten seconds after making love to her?’

‘The sort that has a few problems he hasn’t faced before, I imagine,’ Kate said quietly. ‘He came back to you.’

‘But not to marry me. Not even to spend his life with me. I don’t need marriage but I want commitment. And children with him. He doesn’t want any of that.’

‘So you paced your house for nearly a week, but not because you were deliberating about what to do next. Not because you were waiting for him to come back to you. Not because you were too angry to consider what he might be going through or whether or not he was thinking about you. You had it all figured. So you just paced for no reason.’

Sammy pursed her mouth. ‘You’re too smart sometimes.’

Kate smiled.

A friendship demanded time and effort. Kate and Sammy had made the effort and forged their bond a long time ago. Sammy had taken the job in the fashion industry not only for her mother but because she was capable, had enjoyed the bustling atmosphere whilst having her own small, quiet space to perform her job. The reward she hadn’t expected was Kate. A lifelong friend. She didn’t have to question that. ‘I didn’t pace. I worked.’

‘And you’re not asking for my advice.’ Kate picked up her water, sipped. ‘I’m hurt,’ she added. ‘And a little surprised.’

Sammy shrugged. ‘I have a deep well of my own counsel now.’

‘You always did, but you didn’t think you were using it.’ Kate moistened her lips with a flick of her tongue. ‘You deserve happiness, Sammy. And you deserve love.’

The waiter came to their table and swept away their plates, bowls and water glasses.

‘It’ll be difficult,’ Kate said when the waiter left. ‘There’ll be a lot to organise, it can’t be done in a few days, perhaps not even a few weeks. You’ve put down very particular roots, even though you’ve only been there a short time.’

‘Eleven weeks and two days.’ Sammy cleared her throat. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’

Kate nodded. ‘And it looks like no-one will change it. Not even this big, idiot country vet who captured your heart behind my back.’

Sammy took her gaze to the clean white tablecloth, but couldn’t stop her mouth from twitching at Kate’s dry sense of humour. It was better away from Ethan. She could cope. This was the second time she’d smiled.

‘I have a good mind to visit that town you moved to and punch him,’ Kate added.

‘No need. For one thing he’s too big to knock over unless you’re in a tractor, and for another, I suppose he has his own hurts to contend with.’ She hadn’t expected either true love, or total freedom, but had been given the chance at each, and had lost both. ‘He doesn’t want my heart.’

‘Are you sure?’

Sammy looked up. ‘He doesn’t want it fulltime. Just for a
while
. And he isn’t going to get any of it.’

Kate’s expression turned serious. ‘And what are you going to do about Verity and Oliver?’

Goddamn! Five hours. Five hours of trying to keep his brain in line with the requirements of his job. Keeping his focus on the animal. Feeling silly about his outburst in town whilst calculating how many miles that bus had travelled with each push the cow had given. Pulling the calf’s legs so she could enter the world. Watching life begin while his own rolled away. Using his skill and his professionalism, the only damned things he had left to live for, because his heart was in Sydney by now.

Ethan stormed up the stairs to the walkway and marched to Morelly’s.

‘How’re the cows?’ Grandy asked.

‘Alive. Now can we please get back to the conversation we were supposed to have had five hours ago?’

‘I ate your fried egg sandwich.’

Ethan took a breath. No need to take it out on the old man again. Bad temper wasn’t going to help him get rational about what needed to be spoken of.

‘Shoved your sausages in the bin too. Didn’t think you’d want them.’

Ethan stared at him.

‘Had lunch. Now I’m looking forward to dinner. Thought I’d wait for you.’

‘She’s been in Sydney about an hour,’ Ethan said. ‘Let’s get this done, please, because I’m driving out of town in twenty minutes and I’m not coming back until I find her.’

‘You hurt when you think about Thomas, don’t you?’

Ethan startled. Hadn’t expected the conversation he’d asked for to open this way. But he was in it now. ‘My father never gave me a reason to feel otherwise.’

‘He was a rough one.’

Ethan sucked in a breath. ‘Thomas Granger was a bastard.’

Grandy twiddled his cane, turning it in his fingers and staring at the street. ‘Granger was your mother’s name, not his.’

Ethan frowned. This was the first he’d heard of it. Had Grandy got his memories mixed up? ‘The name Ethan Granger is on my birth certificate and my father is listed as Thomas Granger.’

Grandy shrugged. ‘Linnie lied. Bureaucracy, she never could stand it. Damned paperwork nonsense. Got nothing to do with real life.’

‘Why would she lie? Her name was Linnie Jordan before she married. I had an aunt, my mother’s sister. She lived in Queensland where both Jordan girls were raised. She died a year after my mother.’

‘Linnie Jordan Granger. And she wasn’t married to him.’

Ethan stepped forwards, turned, and sat on the bench. So his parents hadn’t been married. There was satisfaction about that. It gave some distance. Lessened the connection between the bastard and his mother. His mother hadn’t spoken much about her life before Thomas, just her childhood and how happy she was with her sister, even though they were orphaned and in foster care after their parents died in a boating accident.

‘Thomas O’Donnell,’ Grandy said, breaking into his considerations. ‘Best looking man in town thirty six years ago. Didn’t like him from the moment I set eyes on him. Could be because he was twenty years younger than me and I didn’t like the feel of my muscles turning to puff candy.’

‘That’ll be the day, Grandy. I can see still muscle and strong sinew in you.’

‘I was like you when I was younger, you know. Hot-headed with pride, strong enough to ring any bell they put in front of me.’

‘Tell me about him.’ If this was the point to gain deeper understanding, Ethan didn’t want to play around. The memories he had would match those of Grandy’s. That his father had been a monster.

‘He arrived in town with your mother. Told us they were married—Mr and Mrs Granger. He left, sudden-like, when you were eight years old.’

‘He left, or ran,’ Ethan interrupted. ‘I didn’t know why. My mother told me he’d died in gaol. I thought she was lying. For years I waited for him to turn up. She told me the truth, before she died.’

Grandy snapped his head round. ‘Did she now?’

‘Told me he’d killed some woman in Sydney. In front of her kid, for God’s sake. Round about the time I was getting myself straightened out in the city. Before I married Carla.’

Ethan heaved his shoulders back. He remembered the reports on the tragedy. Hadn’t realised it was his father. They kept names out of it, for the child’s sake, probably. Or perhaps because they couldn’t find the murderer, even though his prints were all over the scene.

If he’d known Thomas O’Donnell—whatever the hell his real name was—was alive all those years, he would have found him. Repaid him for what he’d done to Linnie Granger. That woman in Sydney might have lived too. ‘I looked for him, after my mother died. I couldn’t find any trace of him, neither could the police. But he was killed himself three years after that woman died. The cops came looking for me, to tell me. I was in university.’

‘And who did this killing?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ethan lowered his voice to match Grandy’s as a few townspeople took the steps from the road up to the walkway. Kookaburra’s doors had been swung open. Families would start arriving in town soon, getting set for Friday night dinner. ‘Probably some criminal he was hanging around with. The cops said they’d found his body south of Canberra. They’d been looking for him, hadn’t closed the case—that woman and her child.’ A nightmare scenario Ethan had never liked to think about for too long. It might have been
his
mother. Himself. ‘That child might be Thomas’s,’ he said. ‘My brother or sister.’

‘She isn’t.’

She? A sister? ‘How would you know?’

Grandy didn’t answer for a moment. ‘The cops spoke to me, too. Trying to get a few answers.’

‘What do you know about his death?’

‘Enough.’

Shit. Ethan straightened on the bench. ‘Are you about to tell me he’s still alive?’

‘Oh, he’s dead. Believe me, Thomas O’Donnell is in hell.’

Ethan lifted his gaze to the early evening sky, relief washing through him.

‘I set upon him myself one day, after I saw Linnie’s face.’ The set of Grandy’s mouth and the narrowing of his eyes told Ethan there were thoughts in Grandy’s mind he felt he had to get straight. ‘He’d hit her, you too. You were five years old.’

Ethan forced memories forward. Which time was Grandy referring to? He remembered the hidings but couldn’t always distinguish one from the other.

‘I thumped him good then,’ Grandy said. ‘I did it again, a few years later. I don’t regret
anything
I did.’

‘I understand,’ Ethan said. ‘No-one who knew him would blame you.’

Grandy didn’t seem to hear. ‘You were holding onto Linnie’s hand that day as though she were the only thing in your universe.’

Ethan ran a hand over his head. ‘She was.’

‘Yes, she was. To me too.’

Grandy had helped his mother, many people in town had helped her—mainly by keeping quiet about her secrets and the abuse she’d taken. Offering assistance from afar—by just letting her get on with her life.

‘You don’t have to worry none about what your kids will inherit from Thomas, Ethan.’

Ethan shook his head. ‘My mother told me not to worry about being like him, but I always thought I must be. That somewhere inside me, my father’s violent blood was waiting to run through my veins. That’s what scares me. That’s why I pulled away from Sammy.’ He pictured Sammy painting her fence, digging her kitchen garden. ‘I might turn out the same way. One day something inherently wrong within me will fly at her.’

‘I never hit a woman or a child in my life,’ Grandy said firmly. ‘But some men need putting down and curbing. That’s what Thomas needed.’

‘Same with me,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Only fought when I had to, when I was younger and felt pushed to it. Some of those young men I hung around with were mad. I put a few of those down.’ He paused, a single memory hitting home. ‘I lashed out at my father once, I was eight, it was just before he left. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I took a spade handle to him—to his legs. He was so shocked, he walked away. Didn’t touch me. Went for my mother instead.’

‘He went away after that,’ Grandy said, his tone of voice placating, as though he were speaking to the child Ethan had been, not the grown man.

‘He lived long enough to do damage elsewhere though,’ Ethan said. ‘Maybe some drifter got hold of him in the end. Never thought there was a man big enough to take him down. But I’m glad there was.’

‘There was.’

Ethan put his hands on his knees and hauled in a breath. ‘I don’t want to be like him.’

‘You won’t hit Sammy, Ethan, or any children you have. I know it.’

It put the fear of God into him. He’d buried the consideration of what might surface within him years ago. He’d placed himself in enough solitude so he could hide and stem the abusive instincts, believing one day they might surface. How could they not, with his history? Then Sammy turned up and his world had flipped. ‘You can’t tell me you know who I am inside,’ he said, teeth gritted, ‘or what I might or might not do.’

‘Oh, but I can, Ethan.’

‘Robert hit. Look at what he did to Carla.’

Grandy shifted. ‘Well, I can’t speak for Robert. He wasn’t my son.’

‘A
t least you’re dressed well,’ Verity Walker said. ‘I had a vision of you stepping inside the door wearing dungarees and carrying a spade.’ She turned, made her way down the narrow hallway of the house Sammy had grown up in. ‘Come in,’ she said over her shoulder.

Sammy stepped inside, closed the front door and inhaled the aroma of her childhood. Potpourri. Waxy furniture polish, but not the supermarket, spray kind—the real stuff that came in a tin you had to prise the lid off. And coldness. It was the smell of cold, clean, and perfect she remembered most.

‘How are you, mother?’ She put her holdall down in the living room, unzipped it, took a few moments to find what she wanted, then took out a box of soft centred chocolates her mother liked and placed them onto the coffee table.

‘The suit is a little out of date,’ Verity said, her glance skimming Sammy’s jacket and skirt, and resting on her shoes before she looked up. ‘The colouring suits your pale complexion though, warms you up a bit. The hat is a good touch.’

Sammy looked down at her raspberry-rose suit. Something she’d bought from one of Kate’s young designers. She was as fashionable and as refined as Kate, as though this was her world and she was comfortable in it, but her mother would never acknowledge perfection in anything Sammy did, said, or wore. Suddenly, she wished she hadn’t worn these city clothes; wished she was back in her house in Swallow’s Fall in her soft track pants, forking her kitchen garden and getting another T-shirt dirty and stained with the warmth and comfort of her efforts.

Ethan had been stunned to silence at the sight of her dressed this way. He’d told her how beautiful she looked. The man who had undressed her patiently, carefully stripping the work clothes from her body, his eyes full of desire. The man who had loved her in bed, naked, yet stroking and stirring her body as though she’d worn velvet and furs … even Ethan had liked her more in her glamorous city wear. His inability to see beneath the type of clothes she wore crushed her faster than anything her mother could ever say to her.

There was a woman inside Sammy who was waiting to break free. Not a designer-dressed parody of business, nor a track-suited workaholic. Somewhere in between there was the real Samantha, living contentedly. A woman who loved, and showed femininity whatever she wore. She didn’t imagine she’d find that woman soon but she didn’t have any intent to stop looking for her.