Two Weeks 'til Christmas

by Laura Greaves

  Claire’s breath caught in her throat. ‘Scotty? Really?’ She tried to keep her tone neutral. ‘You mean like in the last few months?’

  ‘No, always. Ever since he moved back to Bindy after university.’

  She didn’t know what to make of that. The end of her relationship with Scotty had been crushing for both of them. It had never occurred to Claire that Scotty would have anything kind to say about her afterwards – especially not to people who would have been one hundred per cent on his side if he despised her.

  ‘So will you tell me?’ Gus asked. ‘What really happened with Uncle Jim?’

  Claire took a deep breath. Gus deserved to know the truth – if only to better understand why Vanessa had kept it from her for so long – but raking over the coals of her father’s miserable last years was agony.

  ‘Of course,’ she began. ‘You probably don’t remember my mother, Emily, very well. She left my dad when I was sixteen, a few months after I went away to school, but they’d been very unhappy for a long time.’

  ‘They split up after you went to boarding school? I thought their divorce was why you had to go away,’ Gus said.

  ‘Their marriage problems were part of it, but it was also about Scotty.’

  Her cousin’s eyes widened. ‘They had a problem with Scotty? But everyone loves Scotty!’

  Claire couldn’t help but laugh. Scotty certainly was Mr Popularity in Bindallarah.

  ‘They didn’t have a problem with him. They had a problem with us being together. They thought we were too serious about each other, my mum especially.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Mum wasn’t ever that keen on rural life. I think she worried I’d marry Scotty and stay here in Bindy forever. She wanted more for me.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Bindy?’ Gus said with all the indignation of a teenager who had never lived anywhere else.

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ Claire replied, and she realised she meant it. ‘I didn’t want to go. I begged them to let me stay. Leaving here was heartbreaking.’

  ‘And then Aunty Emily left anyway.’

  Claire nodded. ‘She did. She moved to Perth, remarried. I’ve got three stepbrothers, you know?’

  Gus wrinkled her nose. ‘Poor you.’

  ‘After Mum left, Dad really struggled to cope. He’d always liked a drink, but he really started hitting the bottle. The farm went downhill. He wasn’t taking proper care of the cattle. The milking equipment was old and needed replacing, but the processing companies were paying less and less for raw milk and Dad just couldn’t afford to upgrade. So . . .’

  This was the part that always tore her up inside. The part where she’d tried to help, but didn’t try hard enough.

  ‘I offered to quit school and come home. Actually, I insisted. I told the principal I was leaving and everything,’ Claire said. ‘But Dad wouldn’t let me. He told me it wasn’t my job to solve his problems and that my education was more important. So I stayed.’

  Claire lapsed into silence as she recalled the day she’d been summoned to Sister Hilaria’s office to take a call from her father. The smug look on the nun’s face as she watched Claire reduced to tears by Jim’s rage at the other end of the telephone line. It’s not your decision to make, Claire, he’d shouted.

  ‘Then what?’ Gus prompted softly.

  ‘It’s hard to say for sure, because Dad became quite secretive,’ she said. ‘He’d figured out that someone in town was telling me he was doing it tough. I think he suspected your mum, but it was —’

  ‘Scotty,’ Gus supplied.

  Claire smiled. ‘You guessed it. We were always in touch, though I didn’t see him again for three years after I was sent to school in Sydney. He’d always planned to do his vet science degree at Sydney Uni, so I applied there, too.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t really want to be a vet?’ Gus said, incredulous. ‘But you’re, like, the horse whisperer.’

  ‘I didn’t not want to be a vet. I’ve always loved animals and I absolutely adored spending time up at Cape Ashe Stud.’ Claire shrugged. ‘I just hadn’t given it too much thought. I guess I wasn’t used to making my own decisions. I had the grades, so vet science seemed like a natural choice.’

  Liar. Scotty was the natural choice.

  ‘So when Scotty was in Sydney with you, who was spying on your dad? Mum?’

  She shook her head. ‘Like I said, Dad made sure he always put on a good show, especially around Aunty Vee. He told everybody he’d decided to “diversify”. He was going to grow acai berries.’

  Gus nodded sagely. ‘They’re a superfood,’ she said. Another Cosmo fact, no doubt.

  ‘See, nobody in Bindallarah would have known that back when I lived here,’ Claire said, rolling her eyes. ‘But yes, they’re one of those foods that hipsters like to post pictures of on social media. South American farmers couldn’t keep up with the worldwide demand, apparently, so Australian growers were going to be rolling in cash. The climate up here is perfect, Dad said.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ said Gus.

  ‘It was,’ Claire replied. ‘At least, it could have been.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It was going to be an expensive operation to set up. Dad would have to import acai palm seeds from Brazil and build a processing facility. They’re hard to process because the fruit is small but the stone is big, and they have to be harvested really quickly or they lose the health benefits people are so obsessed with.’ Claire paused. ‘You learn a lot about acai berries when your father uses them to defraud people of hundreds of thousands of dollars.’

  ‘Why didn’t it work out, then? It sounds like a great opportunity,’ said Gus. ‘Did the crop fail?’

  Claire sighed. ‘There was no crop. Dad convinced dozens of locals to invest in his scheme in exchange for profit share. Some of them put in their life savings and he promised them the world. But he didn’t plant a single tree.’

  ‘But weren’t people suspicious? Didn’t they ask where the trees were? The processing plant?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nope. He’d told them at the start that the trees were slow growing and it would be a couple of years before they saw any return on their investment,’ Claire said. ‘They were happy to wait. Everyone in Bindallarah trusted Big Jim Thorne.’

  ‘Let me guess, he used the money to improve the dairy farm instead,’ said Gus.

  ‘Most of it. The rest of it he drank. His alcoholism got so bad he couldn’t have made the farm profitable even with the most state-of-the-art equipment on the market.’

  Claire’s chest tightened and hot tears pricked at her eyes. She thought of her father hidden away in the hills above Bindallarah, alone and desperate on his sprawling farm. An outcast by design, seeking solace in the bottom of a bottle.

  ‘And somehow he hid it from all of us.’

  Both Claire and Gus startled at the sound of Vanessa’s voice. Claire turned to see her aunt leaning against the lounge-room doorframe, silhouetted by the fading twilight sun streaming through the glass front door.

  Claire started to apologise for revealing the truth to Gus but stopped herself. Gus deserved to know why the ghost of Jim Thorne still haunted both her mother and her cousin.

  ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this, Mum?’ Gus said, a note of accusation in her tone.

  ‘Because I thought there ought to be at least one member of the Thorne family who’s not trying to carry a burden that isn’t hers to bear,’ Vanessa said simply. She focused her attention on Claire. ‘Nobody in Bindallarah blames you for what your father did, sweetheart. You were just a child. How could you have been responsible?’

  The tears that had been threatening spilled over in a torrent. ‘He was my dad,’ Claire sobbed. ‘I should have known what was going on. I should have been here. He wouldn’t have done it if I’d been around to help out. I abandoned him.’

  Vanessa hurried to the sofa and wrapped her arms around her niece. ‘Claire, nobody knew what was going on. Jim made sure of that,’ she murmu
red into Claire’s hair. ‘You didn’t abandon your dad. You were a teenage girl living her life, which is exactly what you should have been doing. Your being here couldn’t have prevented the farm’s downward spiral. Jim drove the property into the ground all by himself.’

  ‘But at the funeral they said . . .’

  ‘At the funeral people were angry. They were confused,’ Vanessa said. ‘Hurtful things were said in the heat of the moment. You know how small towns are. They took their frustrations out on us because they couldn’t confront the man himself.’

  ‘Wait,’ Gus piped up. ‘You’re saying people didn’t know Uncle Jim had fleeced them until after he died?’

  ‘The full extent of the “fleecing”, as you so eloquently put it, my darling, only became clear when I started digging around as the executor of Jim’s estate,’ Vanessa replied. ‘If he hadn’t drunk a bottle of Scotch and collided with a tree that night, he may have continued swindling his friends for years.’

  Claire winced. It was a harsh assessment, but it was true. Who knew how many more thousands of dollars Jim would have stolen if he’d had the chance? His debts were so massive by the time he died that there was no way he ever could have repaid them without the extent of his scam becoming clear to everyone. He would have faced bankruptcy, prosecution, probably even jail time.

  But having a convicted fraudster for a father would have been preferable to the reality, Claire thought. In her darkest moments, she wondered if he had driven his ute into that tree on purpose – if he thought it was the only way out of the mess he had created. It was just like Jim to try to spare Claire the fallout of his chaotic life. He was used to making big decisions on his daughter’s behalf without ever asking what she thought.

  ‘Wow, Claire,’ Gus said. ‘That’s some heavy stuff you’ve been dealing with. I totally get why you haven’t been back to Bindy for so long.’ She paused, then added, ‘You must really love Scotty Shannon.’

  Claire let out a strangled sound that was a cross between a laugh and a choke. ‘That’s what you got from all this?’

  ‘Well, you’ve been so afraid of what the community thinks of you for so long, and the only person here – apart from me and Mum – who’s always supported you is Scotty,’ Gus said, ignoring Claire’s umbrage. ‘It makes sense that you’d put your fears aside to come back for him.’

  ‘I do not love Scotty Shannon. He’s my friend,’ Claire protested. ‘Why is that so difficult for everyone to understand?’

  But Gus had touched on yet another truth that Claire didn’t have the courage to admit. Her fears about being loathed by the people of Bindallarah weren’t only about what her dad had done. They were also about what she had done to Scotty.

  Gus was right: Scotty was the only person outside of her family who was always on her side. Everyone in Bindallarah loved Scotty Shannon. And now it turned out they all knew he’d proposed marriage after Jim’s death – and that she’d shot him down in flames. Claire worried that people saw her not just as the selfish daughter of a con artist, but also as the callous wench who’d broken the heart of Bindy’s golden boy.

  ‘But you did come back for him,’ Gus persisted.

  ‘For his wedding. To a woman who is not me. Would I do that if I was in love with him?’ No, but you’d do it to try to fool people into believing you’re a good person.

  ‘Well . . . yeah,’ her cousin replied as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She looked at Claire like she thought she was crazy. Or deluded. Or both.

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ she huffed. She crossed her arms and sank back into the sofa.

  Gus wasn’t deterred. ‘You know, it would have made total sense if you and Scotty had ended up together. People are most likely to marry someone who lives nearby. It’s called the residential propinquity effect.’

  ‘Where on earth did you hear that?’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Cosmo.’

  ‘In that case, it’s clearly an incontrovertible fact,’ her aunt replied dryly.

  ‘It is! Look it up!’

  ‘Even if it is a real thing,’ Claire interrupted, ‘Scotty lives here and I live in Sydney. We’re not exactly next-door neighbours.’

  ‘Not now, no. But you grew up in each other’s pockets,’ Vanessa said, looking thoughtfully at her. ‘And you were a couple at university.’

  ‘Don’t encourage her, Aunty Vee. It’s nonsense. Scotty is marrying Nina and I am not in love with him. End of story. Who wants a glass of wine?’

  Claire stomped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. What did she have to do to convince people that her feelings for Scotty were purely platonic? And why was it so important to her?

  Claire took out a bottle of chardonnay and extracted three clean wineglasses from the dishwasher. As she poured the wine, her phone buzzed in her back pocket.

  She peered at the screen in disbelief. It was a text from Jared Miller.

  Hey, Claire, great to see you today. Not strictly wedding business but . . . fancy meeting me for a drink tomorrow night? Jared.

  Claire’s finger hovered over the trash-can icon, but she hesitated. Gus’s Cosmo pseudo-science had rattled her. Maybe there was something to it. She had to admit that most of the girls she’d grown up with had indeed married or were in long-term relationships with local lads. She probably would have too. She had to admit she hadn’t had any great ambitions beyond Bindallarah before her parents sent her to boarding school and her world opened up. Maybe she was fooling herself. It wasn’t like she was dazzled by the dating prospects in Sydney. Perhaps she’d always been destined to end up with a Bindy boy.

  But that boy wasn’t Scotty. She didn’t want it to be Scotty, despite what her family seemed to think. He was off limits anyway.

  Jared was nice enough. They’d got on well in high school and she’d enjoyed his company this morning. What could be the harm in meeting him for a casual drink? And if she were seen in public in the company of a man who wasn’t Scotty Shannon, perhaps it would quieten those irritating whispers.

  Claire hit ‘reply’.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Walking into the Bindallarah Hotel felt strangely illicit. The last time she’d set foot inside the Art Deco pub on the esplanade, Claire had been a child in the company of her parents. Counter meals at ‘the Bindy’ were a rare treat – as close to fine dining as it got back then. That cafés and restaurants – well, one restaurant – would one day fill the main street had seemed as unlikely to a young Claire as flying cars or holographic telephones.

  But there was no question that Bindallarah had moved with the times – and so had the pub. Patrons entering the dingy front bar had once been greeted by sticky carpet and the inveterate tang of old beer. Now Claire entered a spacious and light-filled room decked out with Hamptons-style decor. To her left was a small stage with guitars and a drum kit set up, awaiting musicians. A blackboard on the wall displayed the Friday- and Saturday-night live-music schedule. To her right, a long bar made of white wood was lined with beer taps bearing the logos of local craft breweries she’d never heard of. The rear section of the bar was a dining area; Claire could see an open kitchen that looked to be doing a roaring trade. Beyond it, a leafy courtyard beckoned.

  The Bindallarah Hotel had been, as Jackie liked to say, ‘glass-and-chromed’. Claire wondered what the town’s long-time bar flies thought of the makeover. There didn’t seem to be anyone aged over forty among the Friday-night crowd. The joint was jumping.

  Somehow, over the hubbub of happy drinkers, Claire heard someone call her name. She peered through the cluster of bodies and spotted Jared sprawled across a cane sofa, a beer in his hand.

  Nervously, she threaded through the crush until she was standing in front of him. ‘Hey, Jared,’ she said, hoping he wouldn’t detect the slight tremor in her voice. It was crazy to feel so wobbly – she’d known Jared for years and this was just a friendly catch-up. But she’d never socialised in Bindallarah and she felt like she was on display. She pointed at his
pint glass. ‘Can I get you a refill?’

  Jared jumped to his feet. ‘Let me,’ he said, pecking her on the cheek. ‘What are you drinking? You look fantastic, by the way.’

  Claire looked down at her outfit, an all-in-one shorts-and-top situation she’d borrowed from Gus. Her cousin had called it a ‘playsuit’, which probably explained why Claire felt like an oversized baby in it. But Gus had insisted that it showed off her legs and created the illusion of a waist, so Claire had dutifully left the house in it and tried not to dwell on the fact that she was the same size and shape as a teenager ten years her junior. It was probably time to stop hoping she would ever acquire actual curves.

  But she pushed her insecurities down deep and instead smiled at Jared and said, ‘Thanks. I’ll have a glass of rosé, please.’

  She took his place on the sofa and watched him make his way to the bar. This was going to be fun, she decided. She was going to have a good time. She deserved to have a good time.

  Though she had only friendly feelings for Jared, there was no doubt that he was a good-looking man. It had been a long time since she’d enjoyed a night out with anyone – her shock-filled Sydney catch-up with Scotty didn’t count – let alone someone so easy on the eye. Blue-eyed and tanned, with messy, sun-bleached blond hair, Jared had the broad-shouldered bearing typical of a daily surfer. Gus would have taken one look at his biceps and asked for ‘two tickets to the gun show’. But his impressive physique looked natural rather than chiselled – Jared’s muscles were obviously honed in the ocean, not the gym. Claire made up her mind to appreciate the pleasant scenery.

  Had he always been this attractive? She couldn’t remember if she would have thought him ‘cute’ when they were at school. Looking back through the lens of adulthood, she could only picture a teenage Jared as tall, thin and spotty. And, besides, she’d only had eyes for one gangly teenage boy back then.

  And he had just walked into the pub.

  Scotty saw Claire immediately, and as he made a beeline for her she felt her heart start to beat double time. She glanced at the bar. The queue was three-deep; Jared would be a while.