The Alphabet Sisters

by Monica McInerney

  She couldn’t wait to get onto the keyboard again today. She had so much to do. Catching up on the motel Christmas situation was a priority, but she also had an email to write to Ellen in Hong Kong. Lola didn’t get to see her nearly as often as she’d like, once a year at most, but the letters, phone calls, and lately emails they exchanged kept the bond between them strong. They had a regular correspondence going these days. Lola had even learned how to email photos of herself to Ellen. At Ellen’s request, in fact. For some reason, Ellen seemed to find Lola’s fashion style amusing.

  Wow, Really-Great-Gran! she’d written in her last email. Pink tights and leopard-skin dress as day-wear? Watch out, Lady Gaga!

  Lola Googled this Lady Gaga and rather than being insulted, had been inspired. Which reminded her—she wasn’t fully dressed yet. Fine for around the motel, but not spruced up enough for the shop. She made her way to her current room—number eleven of the motel’s fifteen rooms, the one with the beautiful view over the hills with just a glimpse of a vineyard. It was part of her arrangement with Jim and Geraldine, that she lived in her pick of the motel’s rooms rather than share the managers’ quarters with them. She’d just finished adding the final touch to her day’s outfit of purple pantsuit and gold belt—a large pink flower pinned in her short white hair—when she heard the sound of young Luke’s old Corolla straining its way up the drive. Ah, that lovely boy. So reliable. So clever, too.

  It was twenty-three-year-old Luke who’d organized the entire computer setup in the charity shop. After finishing his apprenticeship with a local electrician, he’d moved to Adelaide, trained in IT, and was now rising through the ranks of a successful computer installation firm. The shop computer was what he called his “after-work work,” a labor of love whenever he was back in Clare visiting his mother, Patricia, another of the volunteers. There’d been opposition at first from some of the other ladies, but once they’d seen it in operation, well, it had become quite a computer club. Lola had needed to set up a schedule to be sure she got enough time for her own activities. Between Lola’s oldest friend, Margaret, and her online bridge club; Patricia and her Etsy handicrafts addiction; and another volunteer, Kay, with her eight hundred Facebook friends, it was sometimes hard to get even an hour at the computer to herself. There was also Joan, who loved posting videos of her cat on You-Tube; another lady who Skyped her son in Copenhagen every Saturday; and even Bill, the shop handyman, who made a big deal of not having a TV at home but spent hours each week watching reruns on TV network websites. Remarkable all around, really. Their average human age was seventy-five. Average computer skills age mid-twenties, according to Luke. “You oldies pick things up quickly, don’t you?” he’d said admiringly, early on in his training sessions. “I wasn’t sure you’d get a handle on all of this.”

  “I’ll have you know I used to run my own accountancy business,” Margaret announced, piqued.

  “I was CEO of a local council,” Joan said.

  “These hands helped more than a thousand cows give birth,” Kay the dairy farmer said, holding them up.

  Luke had looked quite shocked.

  As Lola pulled the door to her room shut behind her now and made her way to the front of the motel, she thought she saw Geraldine look out the dining room window. She gave her daughter-in-law a cheery wave. If Geraldine saw her, she didn’t respond. No manners as well as no personality, Lola thought. “Bye for now!” she called to whoever else might be watching. “Off I go into town. Off I go to do some useful charity work.”

  An hour later, Lola’s mood wasn’t so bright. She’d been mistaken about the response to the Valley View Motel’s online Christmas offer. Yes, there had been more than a dozen inquiries via email, but not a single follow-up booking. God forbid she would actually have to spend Christmas alone. She peeked through the curtain separating the office from the shop itself—only one customer browsing and Margaret was well able to handle her.

  Lola frowned as she checked the emails again. No bookings at all? Why ever not? She clicked on one of the queries at random, and noticed the mobile number under the person’s name. Was it standard business practice to make a follow-up call? Perhaps, perhaps not, but how else was she to find out? She took out her mobile phone. Luke had been astonished to see that as well. “You use a mobile?”

  “Only for the time being. I’m saving up for an iPhone,” Lola told him. It was true, she was.

  Her call was answered on the third ring. Lola put on her most polite voice. “Good afternoon. My name is Lola Quinlan and I wonder if you can help me. I’m doing a marketing survey into a recent online advertising campaign. No, please, don’t hang up. I won’t be long. Let me cut to the chase. You inquired about but didn’t book the Valley View Motel. Why not?” She listened for a moment. “But it’s not expensive. Not compared to other places. Really? You did? For three nights and Christmas lunch included? My word, that is a bargain. I’d have gone there instead myself.” She made three more calls. Two gave her the same answer—they’d found cheaper packages elsewhere. The third person had decided to stay home for Christmas.

  Lola clicked on the different computer files until she found the wording for her Valley View Christmas Special online ad. Jim had given her his version before he’d sent it to the online accommodation sites. She’d tinkered with it a little bit before sending it out to some more sites of her own choosing, but obviously she’d not tinkered enough. Luke had given her a lesson in something he called meta-tags, words that people might use when going searching—”Surfing, you mean,” she’d corrected him—online. She’d rewritten Jim’s ad until it included nearly every Christmassy word she could think of. Christmas. Pudding. Santa. Carols. Holly. Come stay in our lovely ho-ho-hotel! The Valley View was actually a motel, but still … The special offer included three nights’ bed and breakfast and a special three-course Christmas lunch—turkey and all the trimmings! She’d also added a line about a surprise gift for everyone. They would be surprising—so far they included a travel clock, a wooden picture frame, a jigsaw puzzle that she hoped had all its pieces, and a rather alarming red tie, all chosen from the bags of donations left for the thrift shop. Lola had paid for them, of course. Above market price, too.

  She peeked through the curtain again. The customer had left and Margaret was now dusting the bookshelves. “Everything okay, Margaret?” Lola called out.

  “Counting down the minutes, Lola,” Margaret called back.

  Drat, Lola thought. She’d hoped Margaret would forget about her turn. She quickly sent an email to Ellen, sending her lots of love and asking for all her news, then turned her attention back to Christmas. She shut her eyes to concentrate hard for a moment, trying to remember marketing tips from the online course she’d completed the previous year. Eye-catching headings, tick. Clear, concise offers, tick. Irresistible offers. That was obviously where she’d gone wrong. Her current offer was too easy to resist. What would make something irresistible?

  If it was free?

  It took her only a minute to compose the new ad. Just as well, she had only eight minutes left before she’d have to hand the computer over to Margaret and her online bridge game. If Lola had followed Luke’s instructions correctly, the next group of people who emailed asking for extra details about the Valley View Motel’s Christmas package would receive this automated email in return:

  CONGRATULATIONS!

  You are the lucky winner of the Valley View Motel’s special Christmas package draw! Three nights’ accommodation, breakfast each day, and a slap-up Christmas lunch—all completely free! Simply reply to this email within twenty-four hours and include your contact details and I’ll get right back to you.

  For extra authenticity, she added her own signature—she’d recently learned to scan it—and her mobile number. She pressed Send, sat back, and smiled. The bait was out there. All she had to do now was wait.

  Read on for an excerpt of

  AT HOME

  WITH THE

  TEMPLETONS
<
br />   A Novel

  by Monica McInerney

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Prologue

  London

  October, 2009

  From the moment Gracie Templeton knew she was going back to the Hall, she started to see him again.

  He walked past her in the Tube station. She saw him studying at a table in the local library, his head bowed, engrossed in a book. Every second customer in the restaurant where she worked part-time sounded like him. An actor on TV had his shy smile. Everywhere she went, there was a man who reminded her of him. The same height, six-foot-three. The same dark curls. The easy, lanky walk. The same clothes—faded jeans, a dark reefer jacket. For eight years she’d been trying to put him out of her mind, to forget him, to rebuild her life. Now it was as if no time had passed at all.

  As she watched the departure date grow closer, packed her suitcase, tidied her flat, she could think only of him. Three days before her flight, she gave in. Even as she typed his name into an Internet search engine, she knew it was a mistake. When his name appeared, she clicked on the link and began to read, then turned quickly away, shutting the laptop, breaking the connection. Quickly but not quickly enough. A line from the entry had leapt out at her: “A promising career cut short—”

  If she’d dared to read on, would she have seen her name there? A promising career cut short by Gracie Templeton.

  The phrase haunted her throughout the twenty-two-hour flight. Until, there she was, stepping out into Melbourne airport for the first time in sixteen years.

  The man behind the car-rental desk was the perfect mixture of efficiency and good humor. “That’s all great, Gracie Templeton aged twenty-seven of London, thank you.” He handed her English driver’s license back across the desk. “So, is this your first time here?”

  Gracie hesitated, then shook her head. “I used to live here, with my family. For three years.”

  “But you all left again? Summer got too hot?”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  Minutes later she was in the small rental car, breathing in the too-sweet air-freshener fumes, unfolding the map and plotting her route. It was unsettling to see the place names again. Turning up the radio loudly to drown out her thoughts, she focused her attention on the road ahead.

  Just over an hour later, something about the landscape made her slow down. A sign came into view: CASTLEMAINE 25 KM. She wasn’t far away now. She hadn’t been sure she would find her way so easily. There were no longer any roadside signs pointing to the Hall, after all. But it felt so familiar. The broad paddocks, gentle tree-covered hills, the big sky, the space. So much light and space. She stopped briefly to double-check her map, and the smell when she opened the car door almost overwhelmed her: warm soil, gum leaves, the scents of her childhood.

  Five kilometers later, she was at the turn-off. The huge gum tree at the junction of the highway and the dirt driveway had always been their landmark. She indicated left and drove slowly, jolting over potholes and loose stones. As she tried to negotiate her way around the worst of them, she saw broken tree branches, crooked posts, gaps in the fencing. Her father would never have let the approach road look this uncared for. “First impressions are everything, my darlings,” she could almost hear him saying.

  The closer she came, the more neglect she saw: uneven patches of grass where there had once been smooth green lawn, bare brown earth where she’d once picked flowers, rows of fruit trees now left to grow wild, their branches heavy with unpicked, rotting fruit.

  One final bend of the driveway and there it was in front of her. Templeton Hall.

  She slowly brought the car to a halt, feeling as though her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest. She’d expected the building to look smaller, but it seemed bigger. Two stories high, large shuttered windows, an imposing front door reached by a flight of wide steps made from the same golden sandstone as the house itself. It needed painting, several roof tiles were broken, and one of the window shutters was missing a slat, but it was still standing, almost glowing in the bright sunshine, as beautiful as she remembered.

  As she walked toward it, the sound of the gravel crunching beneath her shoes mingled with unfamiliar bird calls from the trees all around. She automatically reached for her talisman, the antique silver whistle she always carried in her bag, and held it tight in her hand. He’d given it to her when she was just a child. Back then it had been a good luck charm. Now it was her only reminder of him.

  She climbed the first step, the second, the third, wishing, too late, that she hadn’t offered to arrive early, hadn’t volunteered to be the first to step back inside the Hall again.

  The front door opened before she had a chance to put the key in the lock.

  In the seconds before her eyes adjusted completely from the bright sunlight, she registered only that a man was standing there. A tall man with dark, curly hair, holding something in his right hand. As she saw his face, she felt a rushing sensation from her head to her feet. She heard herself say his name as if from a long distance away.

  “Tom?” She tried again. “Tom?”

  “Hello, Gracie.”

  He took a step forward into the light.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  Chapter One

  Templeton Hall,

  Victorian Goldfields, Australia

  1993

  Gracie Templeton had just turned eleven when she discovered there were people who didn’t like her family as much as she did.

  It was Saturday morning, June fifth. She woke at seven, knocked on her two older sisters’ bedroom doors, waited for them to shout at her to go away, then knocked again, twice as loudly. Ignoring their second wave of sleepy insults, she went in search of her little brother. He was inclined to sleep in cupboards rather than in his bed, but on this particular Saturday he was, surprisingly, in his bedroom. Under his bed, rather than on it, but easy to find at least. After three failed attempts to wake him, she returned to her own small bedroom at the back of the east wing, the one with blue wallpaper that her father called the Red Room, for reasons he seemed to find funny and she didn’t quite understand.

  It was the first Saturday of the month and Gracie’s turn to be the head of the house. She put on the well-ironed long blue cotton dress she’d hung up in her wardrobe the previous evening, adjusted her petticoats, tied on her apron, brushed her unfortunately flyaway white-blond hair until it was a little less flyaway, checked that her black patent leather shoes were shining and her bonnet neatly fastened.

  After a final look in the mirror, she went downstairs and opened up the dining room, the library, and the morning room. She switched on all fifteen of the lamps, from the small table ones with the colored glass shades to the large standard models with the heavy brocade covers. Next, she polished the dining-room table. It was eight feet long and four feet wide and she couldn’t quite reach the middle of it, but with the lamps turned low she hoped any dust wouldn’t show.

  She lit the incense in the small Chinese-themed room. She straightened the rugs in the entrance hall, tweaked the runner on the main staircase (it always seemed to stick on the fifth stair), and turned the bronze statuette of Athena on the side table in the smoking room so it was correctly facing forward rather than staring at the wall. Her brother, Spencer, thought it was funny to move the statue around in unexpected ways and at unexpected times. One Saturday, Gracie was about to open the heavy front door and welcome the first of the day’s visitors to Templeton Hall when she noticed Athena was standing on her head, balanced precariously against the wall, her bronze legs akimbo. Gracie only just had time to rescue her before the first visitor appeared.

  Returning to the morning room, Gracie used a broomstick to gently nudge the portrait of her great-grandfather above the fireplace back into position (it tended to tilt to the left) and set a record of Beethoven’s sonatas playing on the old gramophone in the corner.

  Her preparation was almost done.
Even though she’d checked the appointments book the night before, she checked it again, trying to memorize where each group was coming from. Her sisters, Charlotte and Audrey, always mocked her diligence.

  “Who cares who they are or where they come from?” Audrey would often say. “They’re just tourists, Gracie. Here to pay our bills for us.”

  “Not tourists, stickybeaks,” Charlotte would correct her. “People with more money than sense.”

  For years, Gracie had heard that saying as “more money than cents,” which didn’t make any sense to her at all. Not that she dared ask Charlotte for an explanation. She’d learned from an early age that it was best not to question any of Charlotte’s pronouncements. There was less chance of being a victim of her sharp tongue that way. Her “legendary” sharp tongue, as Charlotte herself proudly referred to it.

  Gracie loved both her big sisters, but preferred them separately rather than together. Seventeen-year-old Charlotte was quick tempered, but on her own she could also be surprisingly patient. And if sixteen-year-old Audrey wasn’t busy gazing at herself in the mirror or complaining that she wasn’t receiving enough attention from their parents, she could be quite kind to Gracie.

  At least their father approved of his youngest daughter’s passionate interest in the Hall. “That’s my girl,” Henry would say if he came across Gracie sitting on the staircase with the appointments book. “If only the others were as good at this whole malarkey as you.”

  “I am as good at this whole malarkey,” Charlotte said once, overhearing. “Better, probably. I just can’t be bothered. There’s a difference.”

  Gracie put the book back neatly where she’d found it. This morning was going to be busy. The first group was due in at ten, and three others before lunch, but as all the Templetons knew from experience, casual visitors could also arrive at the Hall anytime. She caught sight of the family motto written in curling Gothic script around a framed portrait of her grandfather, Tobias Templeton. It was in Latin, but her father had translated it for her—loosely, he explained—as “Fail to prepare; prepare to fail.”