Page 14 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
He followed her up the flight of stairs, the jangling of her bangles adding tempo to the creaking of the floorboards beneath the carpet. More dust floated up and hung in the coloured sunlight that had made its way through the leadlight surround of the front door. The place wasn’t messy. No-one had broken in and torn up floorboards or ripped out fittings. Mildew stained the old wallpaper above the wooden panelling, but the ceilings upstairs were still in good shape, which boded well for the roof.
‘Do you know what happened to the caretaker?’ he said, opening a door and finding a bedroom complete with four-poster bed hung with some cheap lace. ‘Didn’t Josh cadge a room off her for a few weeks back when the vet clinic caught fire?’ An ancient radiator clung to one wall and there was a small desk with a chair upturned on it.
‘Gracie,’ said Marigold. ‘Took off a few months back to visit her daughter up in Queensland and didn’t come back.’ Her phone buzzed and she spent a minute pawing through a massive green handbag to find it. ‘It’s Kev. He’s found your missing solicitor. He’s—oh, dear.’
‘Nothing bad, I hope?’
‘He’s been on a bender and the police have taken his car keys. Blew over the limit in the early hours of the morning. Kev’s going to pop by his office and get the work experience boy to shut up shop for the day.’
‘His wife left him, apparently.’
‘Yes. Joan. She had her reasons. Now, enough of the Dorleys, where were we?’
They finished their tour of upstairs—five more bedrooms, an ancient bathroom complete with terrazzo floor and pink ceramic bathtub, and a broom closet from which a startled brushtail possum emerged, blinking with annoyance at being herded out a nearby window—and headed down to the bar.
‘It’s better than I expected,’ said Marigold. ‘The section of guttering out front hanging off the roof like an old snake skin had me worried.’
‘Good news, then.’
‘Mmm. Someone does need to remind Bruno he can’t buy the town’s most famous landmark and leave it to become a possum playground.’
He could see where this was going. ‘And that someone is me, right?’
Marigold linked her arm into his and walked with him back down the corridor to the door. She opened it and the cold wind roared in, along with the noise of a truck rattling along the Esplanade and a boat engine being revved down by the pier. ‘You’re going to be a busy lad, Tom, what with learning how to run a campdraft and getting this old girl tarted up.’
Of course she’d seen the article in the Hanrahan Chatter. ‘You’re not referring to yourself, I take it.’
She chuckled. ‘It’sexciting, isn’t it? No reason to be in a blue funk when there’s stuff like this to be involved in. It’s our heritage, Tom. Looking after it is how we pay it forward to the next generation. Makes you feel lucky to be alive.’
He frowned over the blue funk barb. Did she know something? He would have drawn his arm from hers except she was gripping him like an oyster grips a rock and he had all the strength of a wet flannel.
‘I’m not in a funk, Marigold.’
‘Of course not, dear. I was talking about Bruno. Why would I be talking about you?’
He cleared his throat. ‘No reason at all.’ And what did Marigold know of Bruno that he didn’t?
She was silent for a moment, which was so out of character Tom braced himself for what was coming.
‘My lamb, my pet, my sweet,’ she began. ‘Do you want to tell me something? A problem shared and all that.’
‘There’s nothing to share.’
‘I’m not prying; I’m caring.’
‘Yeah. Still got nothing to share.’
‘Are you telling me to mind my own business?’ She raised her eyebrows at him and batted her eyelashes.
He laughed. She was shameless. ‘It’s about time someone did.’
She smiled. ‘Tom Krauss, I foresee that you and I are going to become friends. All right then, keep your secrets, but tell me this. Are you going to give this pub a makeover before you find a lessee to take it on, or what?’
‘It’s not my decision, but’—he couldn’t believe he’d been talked into this. Where was his apathy when he needed it?—‘I’ll speak to Bruno. Let him know his solicitor has lost the plot.’ For all the good that would do. ‘That’s likely where my involvement will end.’
CHAPTER
5
