Page 79 of The Vet from Snowy River
‘Only if you promise to wear a toolbelt and strip down a few layers.’
Josh laughed. ‘Does your boss know you flirt with customers in the café?’
‘Like you’re not a customer who’s come over here to lurk about in the hopes of having a little flirt with my boss,’ said Graeme, waggling his eyebrows in the direction of the kitchen doors Vera had just walked through.
He lifted the stubby of lager Graeme had uncapped for him, and saluted with it. ‘Fair point.’
Graeme tapped the dinner order into the tablet on the counter then lifted his head as the door opened to let in a guy dressed head to foot in motorcycle leathers. ‘Is that—’
‘What?’
‘Do you smell smoke?’ Graeme’s nose was lifted into the breeze like a goanna who’d smelled a roast chicken.
‘No, I—’
Wait. He did smell smoke. ‘Not the kitchen? That better not be the last of the lasagne burning. My need is great.’
Graeme’s voice was grim. ‘Our kitchen’s not across the street out front. Something’s on fire. Let’s go, handsome. That’s building smoke, not food smoke.’
Josh turned his thoughts away from dinner and headed out into the street. ‘Coffee kingandsmoke whisperer. You’re quite the expert, Graeme.’
They stood on the corner of Paterson Street and Curlew and stared out into the night. Lights glimmered behind the upper storey windows in the old brick buildings. The moon was up, but hung low in the sky, sending silver rivers rippling down the mountains.
The breeze that usually swept up off the lake and over the town had stilled but … therewassomething in the air, more of a taste than a smell.
‘Kids burning something in an alley?’ he muttered.
A dull pop sounded above the moving cars on the street and the chatter reaching them from the busy café at their backs. A pop, then the unmistakable sound of shattering glass.
‘That way,’ said Graeme.
That way was the way to the clinic. Josh stepped off the kerb and a fist of unease settled around him. He shook it off, but put a jog in his step. The clinic was barely two hundred metres from The Billy Button Café, but set back in its lot—he couldn’t see the building for the ancient alpine snow gum spreading its limbs in the park.
Shit. Now he could really smell it, and the closer he got to home, the stronger it became. ‘Call 000,’ he said, and broke into a sprint.
‘I’m on it.’
He covered the last fifty metres at a speed he’d not managed since Year Twelve, and what he saw when he reached the clinic had his fist of unease powering up to a sucker punch.
A shattered plate glass mess covered the footpath and inside the Cody and Cody Vet Clinic’s reception room, blazing bright, roared a fire the size of a bull.
Had Hannah returned from wherever she’d disappeared to and gone up to her apartment on the top floor?
Jane Doe and her pups were in there. So was Harry Newell’s pet snake, a guinea pig called Porpoise, and an old and bitter cat with an attitude problem and more health problems than could fit on a standard Cody and Cody patient chart.
He heard the whoop-whoop of sirens as he bashed his way in the side door to the back office, then frantic barks from Jane Doe in the sleepover room. Sisters first. Animals second. Thank heaven Poppy was in Sydney.
‘Hannah!’
He roared out her name over and over as he pounded up the stairs. ‘Hannah! Hannah!’
CHAPTER
23
Vera was hiding in the kitchen like a coward and she knew it. Cooling fruit buns could only be checked so many times, and the orders had thinned; no more lasagnes just cake and coffee requests, all of which could be handled out front.
Dishwasher stacked, oven gleaming, knives sharper than an arctic breeze. She’d run out of excuses. She was going to have to go out there and say hi to Josh and try and untangle the mess she’d made of their date before her head split apart.
