by Jo Watson
She pointed at one of the pictures. “This is the Rave Room,” she said. She looked up at me and smiled a wide, toothy grin, and then looked back down at the pamphlet. “And this is the Jungle Room.” She pointed at another picture. I leaned in to get a closer look. The room looked like a chill room at a trance party. Neon mushrooms and faces of cats with the “om” symbol as their third eye were painted on the walls, and was that a teepee over the bed?
“Maybe something a little less . . .” I searched for the words, but couldn’t find them. “Do you have any rooms with a desk?” I asked.
“Desks . . .” she repeated, very thoughtfully. As if I’d asked the world’s greatest, most intriguing question. A philosophical question about the meaning of life, or why time was linear.
She finally started nodding, as if she’d silently answered the question in her head. “The House Room will be perfect for you, then.” She flipped the pamphlet over and tapped on a picture. The room looked more like a dance floor in Ibiza, but it did have a desk in it.
I looked up at her and smiled. “Perfect!” I mumbled, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to use a big pink beanbag as a desk chair.
I took my wallet out slowly and pulled my credit card out. “You know, you’re the only hotel in this whole town that has any openings. Everywhere else is fully booked. Is there something going on this weekend?”
She nodded again; this time, she looked somewhat forlorn, despite the fact that her pigtails were bobbing up and down, which only made her seem comic. “Yes, but the Persian crowd never seem to check in here, come the annual Persian parade.”
“The what?”
“Persian cats,” she qualified.
“Aahhh, I see.” I nodded and then stopped abruptly. “Persian cats?”
“Once a year, PCOS comes to our town. They have a ‘best in show’ contest and then they parade down the main road.”
“Polycystic ovaries?” I asked, in utter confusion.
“Persian Cats of the South. But they never check in to my hotel. I’ve even offered to put cat boxes in the rooms, but not even that tempts them. Honestly, I don’t know why. It’s a mystery.”
I shrugged, even though this didn’t seem like a big mystery to me. I passed my credit card over to her, hoping that the thing would be accepted.
“You would think that crowd would appreciate history. I am the oldest hotel in town. My grandfather built this place in the twenties and my dad renovated it in the sixties.”
At that, I perked up. “Have you lived in this town for long?”
“All my life,” she said, swishing my card through that dreaded machine that steals your money.
“Realllyyyy . . .” I ruminated for a while. This was perfect. “So, is it safe to say that you would know every nook and cranny in this town?” I asked.
She nodded. “And I’ve probably explored them all, too.”
“I’m looking for the big old willow tree that this town seems to be named after. You wouldn’t know where that is, would you?”
She nodded and then turned and pulled out another pamphlet. Like the previous one, she spread it out on the table. “Bane of this town’s existence.” She tapped her fingers on the counter again and I looked.
“The Willow’s Eco Estate,” I read out slowly.
“Bloody eco estate,” she shook her head. “About ten years ago, this uptight vegan family bought the land around the willow tree and turned it into a snobby eco-estate, where everyone drives Priuses and cycles and recycles and looks down on you for not being ‘off the grid.’ And God forbid you use a plastic straw around them.” She made some “crazy” gestures with her fingers around her temples. “Want my opinion, eating vegan just makes you angry.”
I looked at the picture of the estate and the first thing I noticed was the large fence around it. “The willow tree is in there?” I asked.
She nodded. “Deep inside enemy territory.”
“And how would I get to see it?” I asked casually. “If I wanted to,” I quickly added, “which I’m not saying I do, but . . .” Oh, shut up, Becca. I pursed my lips together tightly.
“You can’t. Unless you know someone on the inside. The security is as tight as my track on Spotify,” she said, and laughed now.
“Sorry, what?” I asked.
“I make music. I just uploaded my new track to Spotify.”
“Really?”
She nodded proudly. “Yeah. My name is Techno Tannie.”
“Techno Granny?” I asked, translating the Afrikaans word “Tannie” to English.
“It’s my nickname.”
“I see.” I looked her up and down. I liked her. She fascinated me. A part of me always wished I could be more like these people who clearly didn’t care what the world thought of them. The kind of person that stuck out and was unapologetically themselves, not trying to blend in. I envied that quality. “So, back to the eco estate.” I pointed at the pamphlet again. “This fence—is it electric?” I asked.
“God, NO! Not unless they have harnessed the power of all the elements to generate the electricity, so I doubt it,” she said mockingly. “Wouldn’t want to leave a big old fat footprint on the earth; they would rather leave a trail of judgement behind them.”
“Interesting,” I said, half mumbling to myself. I looked up at my host again. It was clear there was no love lost between the locals and these eco-warriors.
“It’s best to stay out of that place, darling. Trust me,” she said, shaking her head.
I nodded. “I’ll stay away.” But that was the last thing I was going to do. In fact, as soon as I’d checked in, I was heading straight for that eco estate. I needed to see what was engraved on that tree. But first, lunch. Or else I would probably eat the tree in question.
CHAPTER 10
The fence was bloody enormous!
And the question was, clearly, what the hell were they trying to keep out? Free-range elephants? This thing could probably stop an army invasion, a zombie apocalypse, winter from coming in Game of Thrones!
I looked around. No one was there and I doubted anyone would be coming down this small dirt road that I’d found. Well, I sincerely hoped not, because I was about to break yet another law. God, I was on a roll. Becca the law breaker. That was me now.
I looked up and then clapped my hands together. I could do this. “Right!” I laced my fingers through the fence. Cue the heroic Mission: Impossible soundtrack. The soundtrack of a woman about to fly up a fence with the speed and agility of a vervet monkey. At least this fence wasn’t electrified, or my career as a criminal would end in cardiac arrest, and that wouldn’t be pleasant. I looked down at my feet. I wasn’t sure I could do this with shoes on. Like a monkey, I needed my toes for added grip. I bent down, unlaced my shoes and pulled my socks off. This was all very undignified and I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been desperate. And I was so desperate. And I could see it. The willow tree. Perched on the banks of the river, far off in the distance. It was taunting me with the secret it guarded. I looked up at the fence and wondered what kind of fork this was? Whatever it was, it was large!
I placed my fingers through the fence again and gripped it tightly. And then my feet. My toes hooked around the metal and, my God, it bloody hurt. I cursed the fact that I had just eaten that massive pizza an hour ago! I was probably now trying to lug an extra stone up the fence.
“Ouuccch!” I winced loudly and looked down at my toes. They were turning a strange shade of purple, but I persisted. I climbed a little, a little more, more . . . The pain was unbearable. I was sure I was going to pass out from it! It felt like the wire was about to slice through all of my toes and fingers, and soon I would be completely digit-less. I gave a half-chuckle, imagining what it would look like with ten toes and ten fingers lying in the sand below. Maybe a doctor could stitch them back on if I put them in a cooler box and rushed them to hospital. But, wait—can you drive without fingers? My mind boggled, but now was really not the time for this ment
al tangent. The fence towered above me like a skyscraper, but I was determined, and so I pushed on through the pain and the fear of severed toes. I was concentrating so hard on the task at hand that I barely heard the noise at first. It was so subtle to begin with that I wasn’t even sure I’d heard it. I was so unperturbed by it initially that I didn’t even glance over my shoulder to see what it was. But, as the seconds passed, I started to become a little more concerned about it. The soft sound of tires driving up a gravel road, getting closer and closer to me.
“Crap.” I looked over my shoulder and saw the cloud of dust coming towards me. I hoped it was a farmer just going about his day, someone that wouldn’t care at all that I—a total stranger—was hanging on to a fence with a giant sign on it that read:
Private property. Trespassers will be prosecuted.
And then I heard the other noise and saw the other thing that struck a fairly large amount of terror into me. The siren, and then . . . Red light. Blue light. Red light. Blue light. Damn, what were the chances that on this small, dusty road, and at this exact moment, a cop would come past? The police car stopped below me. I heard the sound of a car door open and close, followed by the sound of feet on gravel.
Try to be casual. Try to act natural. What was I thinking? There was nothing natural and normal about a shoeless woman trying to climb a fence. I looked down as the tall man put his hands in his pockets and walked over to me. The sun was behind him and he cast a very long and imposing shadow. Like a sheriff in an old western. In my head, an old western song started playing. The kind that starts just before the sheriff draws his gun and blows the bandit to smithereens.
“Hello, officer,” I said feebly, still hanging on to the fence like a chimpanzee. I tried to make casual yet purposeful eye contact with him, but his face was shaded and I couldn’t see his features.
“Ma’am,” he said. Why do they always say “ma’am”? It’s downright intimidating! “You do know this is private property?” he asked. Clearly, the question was very, very rhetorical.
“Is it?” I asked innocently, with just the right amount of faux-shock in my voice. I wasn’t sure it was convincing, though.
“Please can you get down from there,” he said casually, taking his hands out of his pockets and folding his arms.
I nodded. “Sure, sure, I shall do that. Of course.” I obliged and, with force, pushed myself off the fence and jumped. It was as I hit the ground, bending over to catch the full force of my weight, that I heard the noise. It was a noise I immediately recognized . . .
“Shit!” I quickly put my hands between my legs, where the denim had so unsubtly ripped. “Crap,” I cursed again when I realized just how much of my crotch area was now exposed to the elements, and I wasn’t even wearing my good panties!
“Uh, are you okay?” the man asked tentatively—and very unnecessarily, because he knew the damn answer to that question. It was clear that I was not alright. My poor old vagina was half-almost flapping about in the breeze! I looked up at him from my rather undignified position. He took a step forward, his face now completely illuminated by the sunlight, and . . .
A thump in my chest.
A punch in my gut.
A palpitation.
Strange queasiness.
A fuzzy buzz washing over me.
A flutter.
What the hell was that?
CHAPTER 11
“Are you okay?” he repeated.
“I . . . uh, yes, I’m okay . . . I just . . . I . . .” I stuttered over my words and could feel my face break out into a strange smile that I couldn’t control. He looked at me; I could see he was confused by my clearly erratic behavior. Hell, I was confused. What had just come over me? An instant teenage crush on a policeman. How clichéd of me. How horrifically banal of me. But no amount of mental scolding was going to change the fact that this man was utterly gorgeous and I was feeling utterly weak in the ligaments.
“Ma’am,” he said again.
Ma’am . . . ? Would he call me that in bed? Shit, what was I thinking? I placed my hands over my mouth, even though I hadn’t said it out loud. He looked at me very strangely. Clearly I wasn’t having the same effect on him as he was having on me, despite the fact that I was flashing my private parts at him. I tried not to perceive that as a blow to my ego.
“You do know this is private property?” he repeated, slowly and purposefully, dialing up his authoritative tone a bit. Was that the only private he was concerned or aware of?
This time, I couldn’t lie to him. It was very inconvenient that I wasn’t a more seasoned, sociopathic liar. “Yes. I know it’s private,” I admitted flatly.
“Well, then, the question is, why are you trying to climb the fence?” His tone of voice told me that he already knew the answer to the question. Not that one needed to be a brain surgeon to figure this one out. I’d been caught red-handed, in the act of breaking and entering.
“Good question,” I said, trying to shuffle walk, my hands once again firmly between my legs. God, I hoped this didn’t also constitute lewd public behavior, walking around like this, as if I was touching myself. I hoped he didn’t think I was some strange pervert, jumping over a fence for God knows what. What the hell did he think of me?
“I’m a writer,” I blurted out, without thinking. I hadn’t meant to say that at all. “I was researching. For writing.”
He looked at me, skepticism etched into his face . . . his bloody gorgeous face. The face that held those eyes. My God, what color were they? A brilliant green, almost emerald. Dark and shimmery and penetrating and stormy and swirly and—
“What’s it about?” He broke my emerald train of thought.
“What’s what about?” I asked.
“The thing you’re writing. You’re a writer,” he said.
“Right, I’m a writer,” I said, my own rather plain eyes drifting down to his mouth. “I’m writing a book. A sort of thrillery, mystery thingy,” I said, examining the curves of his full mouth. He had the perfect lip shape. God, women drew that on with a pencil and pumped toxins into themselves with needles just to achieve something vaguely similar, and there he was, genetically blessed with the perfect pout.
“And what’s it about?” he pressed.
“Well, um, the book revolves around a private investigator,” I said, making shit up as I went. “I was just seeing how hard it was to climb a fence like this, because, in the book, she needs to break into a property, and I wanted to know how it would feel to . . . you know.”
“Break and enter?” He finished my thought.
“Well, technically, I wasn’t on the other side of the fence, so you can’t really call it ‘entering’ and I certainly didn’t break anything either. It’s not like I had bolt cutters with me, so perhaps that statement is not entirely accurate in describing my actions.” I smiled at him.
“Why would you mention bolt cutters?” He took a step closer to me. “Do you have bolt cutters on you?”
“What? No.” I burst out laughing, while my eyes drifted over his other perfect features and came to rest on the one imperfect thing on his face. A scar cut his eyebrow in half, giving it a distinctly arched appearance. My eyes followed the scar up to his forehead, where a small white line radiated outwards from the eyebrow with such perfection and precision that it looked like it might have been drawn on. It wasn’t a messy scar; on the contrary, it was the most perfect scar I’d ever seen. God, even his imperfections were perfect. He’d probably gotten this from saving a starving kitten from a tree, or diving in front of oncoming traffic to save a toddler who ran across the road after her little pink ball, or maybe—
“So, when you reached the top, you were going to come straight back down?” Once again, he put a full stop to my inner monologue, which I admit was starting to run away with me a bit.
I nodded my head. “Sure. Straight back down. In fact, before you came, I’d just realized how next to impossible it is to climb a fence like this, and I was about to come down
and think of another way for my character to break in.”
“You were, were you?” He looked totally unconvinced, and I couldn’t really blame him.
“Yes, I was thinking that maybe the character could use—oh, I don’t know—maybe some kind of explosives? But I’d have to do more research into explosives, wouldn’t want to hurt anyone, or myself. Maybe you know about them?” His reaction to this statement was immediate and I realized very quickly that my mouth had just gotten me into a world of trouble.
“Sorry?” He took a step forward. “Are you asking me whether explosives could be used to break into this property?”
“What? NO! No.” I started laughing, a little too frantically, really, and then I stopped abruptly and looked at him again. “I mean . . . could they?”
He looked over his shoulder, as if he was searching for my hidden accomplices, or looking for clues, or he was scared. He glanced at my car and then slowly turned his head back in my direction. “Who did you say you were again?”
“A writer.”
He raised that scarred brow at me. God, it was sexy. It was so Khal Drogo-ish, but without all the facial hair, and clearly I didn’t have a dragon, because, if I had, I wouldn’t be climbing over a fence, now, would I?
“Can I see your driver’s license, please?” he asked.
“Uh-huh! Yup.” I nodded and then shuffled towards my car—hands still between my legs. I opened the door, dug in my bag and pulled my license out. He took it and looked down at it, and then the usual thing happened.
He squinted and raised it to his face as if he hadn’t read it correctly. Then he looked up at me, confused, looked back down, pulled it away from his face, as if he still hadn’t read it correctly yet, and then looked up at me again, still confused.
“Pebecca?” he asked.
I sighed. “Pebecca,” I repeated flatly.
“Not Rebecca?” he enquired.
I shook my head and he eyed me suspiciously.
