‘The problem with owning an old house,’ Remy said to Breeze the next day, ‘is that nothing’s ever bloody straight.’
She was trying to re-lay the front steps to fix broken, rickety bricks, because her mother was very likely to want photographs stepping up or down those bricks, or sitting there with Bernie. She didn’t want her mother to trip in her wedding dress, and she didn’t want to spend years contemplating wedding photos where all she’d see would be the steps she should have fixed.
She’d mixed cement, chiselled out the dodgy bricks, and had the replacements all ready to go. Like most things, a simple job in theory was never quite as simple in practice. It was hot, and the cement kept going off that little bit too fast, adding to her pressure to try to get everything done too quickly. To compensate, she’d added too much water to the cement mix, which made it too squishy, and it was hard to get a good depth of mortar to match the other steps.
So she’d chiselled the entire row of bricks out, painstakingly chipped off the old mortar, and tried re-laying the entire step again with a new batch of cement.
The good news was: she was nearly finished.
The bad news was: she probably should have bitten the bullet and paid someone who knew what they were doing.
‘I make a lousy brickie,’ she said to Breeze, who yawned in response and sat on the grey bag of dry cement, making it puff like a sleeping dragon.
That’s when Remy glanced toward Red Gum Valley Road and saw the black ute winding its way up the driveway, coming fast, dust flying from the wheels.
Occhilupo had his head hanging out the side of the ute, so Remy’s first instinct was to drop her trowel, grab Breeze by the collar and haul the dog safely behind the garden gate.
Then she tried patting her shorts and wiping her face to get the cement dust off. Then she gave up. He could take her as he found her, or not at bloody all.
Once again, he parked under the Redwood Pines. Once again, Remy didn’t bother mentioning the sap.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I caught you at home.’
‘I don’t go very far this time of year,’ she said. ‘There’s always too much to do leading into vintage. What’s up?’
He was in uniform again, but khaki shorts today instead of trousers. He wore a cap, and sunglasses, and he hadn’t lost that red clipboard. It was tucked between his arm and his ribs. He hadn’t shaved.
Straight off the bat, the dogs started their two-way whine-fest between Occhilupo in the back of the ute and Breeze in Remy’s garden.
Seth ignored them. ‘I had a few more questions to ask you.’
‘Fine. Go for it. I hope you don’t mind if I keep doing what I’m doing here, though. I’m at a critical point.’
‘Please.’
Remy slathered mortar on her trowel and transferred that to the brick. Scraped it bottom, back, and two sides, then slotted it in place.
It fit first time. ‘Well whaddaya know,’ she said to herself, to Seth, and to anyone else listening. ‘It’s about time something went right.’
She tapped the brick with the rubber mallet she’d borrowed from Zac. Satisfied she had it level, she stood, stepped back, and admired her work from a distance.
‘Not bad.’
‘Looks good,’ Seth said, waving his clipboard at her bricks.
Remy wiped her palms on her thighs. ‘So what questions did you have, Seth?’
‘What row spacing is your vineyard, Remy? What row width?’
She looked at him. ‘You came out here to ask me that? I’m sure it’s in Max’s file.’
‘Hate to break it to you, but Max doesn’t have much by way of files.’
‘Oh.’ She released the elastic band on her hair, shook cement dust out, and scooped her hair into a tidier mess at the base of her neck. ‘You could have texted me or something.’
‘It’s fine. I had to get out to the Hackett’s place again too.’ He opened the clipboard, found his pen. She got stuck looking at his hands. He’d always had nice hands. Big. Strong. Capable. She bet he’d lay a mean set of bricks.
‘Remy?’
Stop ogling his hands. ‘Pardon?’
‘What’s the row spacing and width?’
‘Three-metre row spacing. Two point four-metre row width.’
‘And what clone of sauvignon blanc is it?’
‘Hell and Tommy, Seth. I don’t know. Do I need to get an ampelographer out here?’
‘Nah. It’s all good info to know if we can. Don’t worry about it.’
‘Okay. Anything else? Do you have any news for me on price?’
His gaze skipped away and returned. ‘I’d say, depending on quality and our production needs, absolute max would be $3000. It could be anywhere from $1500.’
‘Max paid $3300 last year.’
‘That was last year. I’m not certain we’ll be making Chameleon this year. Rina and I have been discussing it with Lewis Carney.’
‘Not making it?’ Remy’s heart missed a beat. ‘You can’t not make it. That wine is Max’s flagship.’
‘Yes. And Max doesn’t own Montgomery anymore.’
Remy fell silent. There wasn’t much that could be argued on that.
Seth closed the clipboard, but Remy had the sense he wasn’t finished. He took a moment to grope for the words, and whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t this: ‘Why did my mother write you two cheques?’
Remy tapped the mallet a couple of times, wishing conversations about his mother didn’t make her so nervous. ‘What did Ailsa say?’
‘I’m not asking her. I’m asking you.’
She’d bet her last dollar Ailsa had told Seth something entirely different, but for her, it was time for the truth. She had nothing left to hide, and no reason to hide it.
‘Do you remember how you offered me an advance on my pay that night in your office? I told you I owed some money and you said Lasrey had a policy that might assist staff in financial hardship?’
‘I remember. You didn’t take me up on it. I also told you to trust me, and that I’d do whatever I could to help you. You didn’t take me up on that.’
Remy ignored the latter part. ‘When your mother offered me the $100 000 to resign and to leave, I told her there was someone I couldn’t leave Margaret River without paying.’
He started to speak, changed his mind. ‘Who did you owe $20 000 too?’
‘When he died, my father had debts to a loan shark called Doug Mulvraney. Dad was into Doug for $18 000. Mulvraney made me and my mother responsible for those debts.’
Seth let out a long, slow, breath. He bounced the clipboard on his thigh, like he’d seen a mosquito there to squash, then tucked it beneath his arm.
‘Ailsa wrote me that first cheque so I could pay Mulvraney and pack up the house. The second cheque she dated two weeks later. I had to call her and prove that I was out of West Australia or she said she would cancel it.’
‘Christ on a stick. What was your father into, Remy, that he owed $18 000?’
‘Greyhounds. Shares. Horses. You name it. When he died, Mum and I had bills coming from all over the place. Liquor store bills. He had fuel accounts set up at service stations from Augusta to Capel. He was drunk when he crashed the car, so the insurance wouldn’t pay up. He and Mum were already mortgaged to the eyeballs when Mum had to sell the house.’
‘This is why you were doing the phone sex?’
‘That’s why. It’s the only thing that kept us afloat. It’s the only way we could pay Mulvraney’s interest, and bring the loan down.’
‘Did your mother know?’
Remy bristled. ‘Of course not. That’s not the kind of thing you tell your only parent. I used to log in for phone times when she was at work, when she was out of the house. I was very careful about that.’
‘Didn’t she ever ask where the extra money was coming from?’
Remy hesitated before she met Seth’s eye. ‘I kind of, um, elaborated, when I told her what my wage was with you.’
‘Ah,’ he said.
Breeze let out another of her glass-breaking squeals.
‘What the heck sort of hellhound have you got around there anyway?’ Seth glared at the front of her cottage like he expected to see claw marks in the stone. ‘Occhy. Shut up.’
Occhy cut his barks to whines, then whimpers. He shifted on his front paws, alternating between one paw on the rim, then two, then back to one again.
Seth scratched the side of his head, and even through the sunglasses Remy could see him squinting at her, trying to work it all out. Then he tossed the clipboard on to the bonnet of his ute. It didn’t land flush. It skidded across the polished metal before it dropped to the ground.
‘I have to wash out my wheelbarrow, Seth, or it’ll set.’
He was nearer the hose and he turned the tap on for her, kinking the hose to save water when he passed it to her.
‘Thanks,’ Remy said, tipping the wheelbarrow and washing it so the dirty water flowed into the agapanthus. They were tough. They could handle it. When she finished, he turned off the tap and coiled her hose into a neat figure eight near the new steps.
‘I bet you hang all your shirts beautifully, Seth. Not a crease to be seen.’ It popped out before she thought about it, and she regretted it straight up. It felt intimate and she couldn’t afford to get intimate with Seth. ‘Sorry.’
‘What are you sorry for?’
‘It’s none of my business what you do with your shirts.’ Then she thought: maybe he isn’t staying at a hotel at all. Maybe he’s staying with one of those girls from the social pages. Maybe she irons his shirts.
The thought hit her so hard and so heavy, she almost dropped the wheelbarrow. He didn’t seem to notice how she had to wrestle to keep it straight.
‘My mother said the first 20 000 was to stop you taking allegations to the police that I’d sexually harassed you, that night in my office.’
This time, Remy, did drop the wheelbarrow. It knocked the trowel to the concrete path, making a metallic scrape that hurt her ears. ‘Ailsa said what?’
‘She said two weeks’ later you called and said you wanted more money. That if she paid you another eighty, you’d be gone for good and we’d never hear from you again.’
‘Wow,’ Remy muttered, standing the barrow straight, kind of slumping against it to cover her shock. ‘No wonder you think I’m the lowest of the low. I told Ailsa I’d pay her the money back. I’ve been saving to pay her back.’
The muscle in his jaw twitched. ‘And how’s that savings plan going?’
She swapped her weight to the other foot. ‘I have $78 000 sitting in a high-interest account. I had more. I had most of it at one stage but then—’ she took a deep, noisy breath and let it go with a whoosh: ‘look, I had trouble with a tradesman working on my renovation and my roof started leaking, okay? And the Nissan blew a head gasket. I had to trade it in on the Rodeo. All anybody was talking about was drought and grape prices went down the gurgler. I had a perfect storm of crap.’
‘So you spent the money on your house and a new car?’
‘You make it sound like I bought a palace and a Porsche. Every spare dollar I make goes into that account so I can pay Ailsa back.’
He frowned, and she knew immediately what he was thinking—that it was phone sex paying those extra dollars. She would have told him then that she didn’t work for White Knights anymore—that she hadn’t in years—but before she could get out the words, Occhy’s chain grated across the tray. The scream of the chain on the rim ripped the air, and the dog launched himself from the back of Seth’s ute.
Remy shouted, and both she and Seth lunged forward. Neither made it before the leather collar pulled tight and Occhy fetched back with a jerk, paws scrabbling thin air. Then mercifully, the dog slipped the collar and thudded to the ground. He sat there for a few seconds like a boxer trying to work out if he had it in him to stand up.
Breeze’s next squeal cleared Occhy’s wits fast. The dog scrambled for the verandah and they watched his tail disappear as he raced for Breeze and the gate.
‘That bloody dog,’ Seth muttered. He didn’t climb her newly-repaired steps. He made a running leap through the agapanthus clumps and landed on the verandah.
Remy was a step behind him all the way and that’s why when Seth stopped at the timber gate like he’d smacked into the side of a barn, she almost collided with his broad back.
She expected him to grab Occhilupo by the scruff of the neck and drag the dog away. At the very least she thought he’d give both dogs such a telling-off, they’d stop their whining and yelping for a week. But he did nothing like that. He stood stock-still, staring over the gate at her garden.
Slowly, he shunted his sunglasses to the top of his head then snuck his hands into his pockets. ‘I guess that answers my question.’
‘What does?’
As best she could tell, he was mesmerised by the silver birch grove in the far corner, where white trunks gleamed against leaves coloured mustard yellow. If it wasn’t the birches, then maybe the rustic timber bench in the foreground where her mother had liked to sit and read; or perhaps he was a closet salvia nut—she had about twenty varieties growing.
‘No one who could grow a garden like that could try to kill a vineyard. I can see that now.’
Remy’s heartbeat skipped, and it took a few seconds to kick properly again. ‘I’m glad you think that, finally.’
For the first time in a long time, he turned directly toward her. ‘My mother said you heard a rumour I was visiting Helene Bouchard in France, and you were jealous. You told her you had a “brain-fade” that day. Ailsa didn’t believe it.’
Remy laughed.
Seth got right up in her face. ‘It’s not funny.’ He didn’t shout it. He didn’t need to.
‘Sorry, I know it’s not funny.’ She wiped the smile from her face but held her ground. ‘I didn’t even know Helene existed until Ailsa told me about her, and that happened after the whole spraying thing.’
‘Blake never believed you’d poisoned the vines on purpose. You never fell off his pedestal.’
‘Like I fell off yours, you mean?’
There was a flat spot on the stone windowsill. She sat there, rubbing her hands on the fabric of the shortest pair of shorts Seth had ever seen. The gesture tugged at a memory he couldn’t quite place.
Eventually, she lifted her gaze to meet his. ‘I wanted to give the money back to Ailsa, but I wanted to give it to her in one go. Pride, I guess. I wanted to see her face when I handed her all those zeros and she’d know she didn’t have anything to hold over me anymore. Then I was going to come find you and Blake, and explain everything.’
Seth ran a hand through his hair. What with those two idiot dogs and all their snapping and snarling, and Remy being gorgeous, beautiful, independent Remy—turning everything he thought he knew as fact into fiction—he couldn’t think. She made it impossible for an honest-to-God thought to actually hit his brain and transmit a sensible message. Nothing about Remy made him sensible and he could trace that right back to the day he’d put his hand up to plank-walk with her in the park.
Plus she kept talking with her hands. She’d take one from where it pinched at the material on her thigh and she’d wave it at him as she made each new point. Her arm would jerk and weave and the tank top scrunched higher up her waist. He could see milky skin peeping beneath the bottom of her shirt and the top of those shorts.
And she’d gone and put Blake’s name in a sentence. Again.
So he took two steps forward, bent low, and kissed her.