Outback Ghost (11 page)

Esther was home and to Stella's dismay she didn't seem any happier than she had the week before.

‘I'm sorry to land on you like this,' Stella apologised as the other woman opened the front screen door, ‘but Heidi's been desperate to visit.'

Esther glanced down at Heidi, summoned a smile and then offered out her hand. ‘I'm so glad, come on in. I've been thinking about you both a lot,' she continued as she led them down the hallway into a dreary lounge room.

Stella wondered why the curtains were still drawn and why, if Esther had been thinking about them, she hadn't come round to say hello herself. ‘We've been keeping busy,' she said, trying to make conversation.

‘Take a seat.' Esther gestured to two black leather couches. ‘Can I get you something to eat or drink?'

‘No, it's fine, we just had morning tea.' Stella settled onto one couch and gestured for Heidi to join her. Instead, Heidi sat as close as humanely possible to Esther on the other couch. She was about to apologise again, but Esther didn't seem to mind and so Stella bit her tongue.

‘Tell me what you've been up to?' Esther took hold of Heidi's small hand and patted it.

Heidi started chattering about their trips to the beach, the shells they'd found, the movie they'd seen in Geraldton and then finally she spoke about her ride in the ‘carvester' as she'd coined it.

‘You've seen Adam then?' Esther looked to Stella, seemingly pleased by this notion.

‘Not that much,' Stella said, thinking about just how much of her Adam had seen. She couldn't fight the heat that rushed into her cheeks at this recollection.

Esther nodded. ‘He's busy with harvest at the moment. Shocking time of the year. Tell you what, why don't you two come round for lunch tomorrow?' She glanced down at Heidi. ‘I can cook a mean sausage. Do you like sausages?'

‘Yep.'

‘It's practically her staple diet,' Stella added, relaxing a little into the couch.

‘It's settled then. We'll eat about midday but come round whenever you're ready.'

‘Great, thanks. Is there anything I can bring?' Stella asked.

Esther's brow creased as she thought a moment. ‘I have plenty of meat and sausages in the freezer, but I'm a little short on vegetables and I don't want to pester Adam to go into town for me when he's so busy. Maybe you could bring a green salad?'

‘I'd be delighted too. Don't you drive?'

Esther shook her head. ‘Not anymore.'

‘In that case I'd be happy to pick anything up for you if you need it,' Stella offered. ‘Or better still, I'm happy to drive you while Adam's too busy to. I'm going into town this afternoon if you'd like an outing.'

Esther shifted in her seat and glanced down at her hands, not looking at Stella as she spoke. ‘Thank you but I've got plenty to do here.'

It was an innocuous reply but Stella got the feeling there was more to it than Esther let on. She was an odd woman. Even when she smiled, a certain sadness hovered around her. Stella told herself not to be so harsh on the woman; her husband had just left her, for heaven's sake. Maybe she simply didn't want to be the centre of gossip in the small town. If she were in the same position, she'd probably want to lie low for a while too. Not that she ever would be.

Stella had come close to marrying once – her parents and Samuel's had been the traditional type, believing a pregnancy and a wedding ring should go hand in hand – but she'd had her three-month ultrasound a week before she was supposed to walk down the aisle and that was the end of that. Sometimes she wondered what her life would be like now if the radiographer hadn't landed such a scary blow for a couple of nineteen year olds. Would they have managed to make marriage work for their child?

Stella realised she'd drifted off into her own little world. Luckily Heidi had filled any awkward silences with more of her happy chatter and neither she nor Esther seemed to have missed her conversation.

‘Do you like Lego?' Esther asked Heidi.

The little girl nodded.

Smiling, Esther stood. ‘You wait right there and I'll go get Adam's old box of the stuff.'

When she returned, to Stella's amusement, the older woman got down on the floor with Heidi and started to build a city of little block towers. She was patient and helped Heidi, who didn't have the greatest fine motor skills, press the tiny blocks together. Heidi lured Stella onto the floor to join in the fun. She was so used to entertaining Heidi by herself that it was nice to have the pressure off her for a bit. The hours passed quickly but when Stella heard Heidi's stomach rumbling, she decided it was time to try to drag her away.

She pushed back onto her knees and arched her back, which was stiff and a little sore after such a long time sitting on the carpet. ‘I think it's time for us to go now, Heidi. Thanks so much for letting us visit,' she said to Esther. ‘I'm really looking forward to tomorrow.'

‘Me too,' Esther said, grabbing onto the coffee table as she pulled herself up.

As Stella walked back to the cottage hand-in-hand with Heidi, she looked back on the last few hours, feeling good when she realised that some of the sadness around Esther's eyes had shifted while she'd been playing with Heidi. Once again, she felt immensely proud of her very special daughter.

Over the next few days Adam thought about little else but Stella's breast. Long hours in the paddocks gave him plenty of moments to re-live the episode on the cottage's veranda and he found the more he tried to push the image from his mind, the more it pestered to be remembered. Even at night, exhausted from the long, gruelling days, his dreams were filled with Stella and how it would have felt to ignore propriety that day, to have stepped forward and filled his hand with her breast.

Although he'd finished harvesting in the paddock closest to the cottage, he found himself on high alert, constantly on the look out for a glimpse of his guests. When he'd taken Heidi for a ride, she'd told him lots about what she and Stella had been up to. Apparently they'd been walking the farm looking for bunyips. He smiled as he remembered the excitement in her voice when she'd told him. He'd had to swallow a strange desire to offer to go with them some time. For one, he didn't have time right now for anything but the task at hand. For two, he'd never had a desire to spend time with a child before.

Still, despite this knowledge, as he ploughed up and down the paddocks, his eyes were peeled wide in case today was another bunyip hunting day. Pathetic as it was, he'd driven by the cottage in the ute early yesterday morning and today in the hope of getting a glimpse of Stella breakfasting on the veranda. Either he was too early or too late but he hadn't seen her since that first morning when she'd waved at him. The urge to see her was so overwhelming that he found himself sitting in the harvester conjuring up excuses for a visit.

He'd been so deranged as to think about creeping over there at night and puncturing one of her tyres so she might have to call on him for help. But aside from it being plain creepy, there were two other possible problems with this idea. One, Stella seemed a capable, independent woman and it was highly likely she could change a tyre without his help. And two, what if she heard him and started freaking about noises in the night like all the other guests had? He might turn into a fumbling teenage boy whenever he got near her, but that didn't mean he wanted her to leave.

Frustrated by his feelings, Adam gripped the steering wheel and cursed under his breath. Maybe he was simply desperate for human interaction. He'd been used to having his dad and his mate Monty working alongside him in previous years. The new Irish backpackers he had working harvest with him were brothers and kind of kept to themselves. And due to the extra workload, he hadn't visited his mum these past few days either.

Guilt slammed him at that thought and he decided he'd kill two birds with one stone by checking in on her and getting his dose of conversation. The topic would likely revolve around what was happening in the lives of the characters on the daytime soaps his mum watched but that had to be healthier than his current state of mind. He radioed the Irish blokes and told them he was stopping for a lunch break, parked the header ready to start up again in an hour and then drove to the homestead.

Simone's old beaten-up Pajero was parked out front. No doubt knowing he'd be tied up with the harvest, she'd decided to pay a visit to his mum. He grinned at the thought because she'd likely brought food from Frankie's café and if there was enough to go round, it would be far more satisfying than anything he or his mum might throw together.

As he opened the door of the ute, Mutton – who'd been going stir-crazy in the header this morning but who didn't like to be left home alone – leapt past him and bounded through the garden towards poor Goldie resting, as usual, on the veranda. Goldie barked her irritation and Adam expected his mum and Simone to come out to see what the fuss was about but they didn't. He climbed up the steps, discarded his boots next to the tattered welcome mat and let himself inside. They weren't in the living room or the kitchen but he heard a strange noise coming from out the back.

He stilled a moment and it took him a few seconds to recognise the sound.
Laughter
. When was the last time he'd heard that in this house? Intrigued, he grabbed a cold can of Coke from the fridge and followed the sound. He stepped out onto the back veranda and halted, both pleased and surprised at what he saw.

Four women – his mum, Simone, Frankie and Stella – sat back in deck chairs under the big willow tree that took pride of place in the backyard. They were smiling and laughing and sharing cups of tea while Heidi wandered around the garden picking his mum's bright summer flowers. None of them appeared to have a care in the world. If he were a stranger come upon this scene he'd be unaware of the sadness that had simmered in this house for far too long.

If his sister hadn't vanished all those years ago, would this kind of afternoon be normal here? If he really stretched his memory, he remembered his mum used to be the kind of woman who entertained on a fairly regular basis and his sister had been such a happy-go-lucky child that he imagined she'd have turned out much the same. He tried to stifle the pang in his heart that came with that thought. While he never wanted to forget her, thinking about the life she could have lived hurt unlike anything he'd ever experienced. He should have been looking out for her. If anything bad had to happen to either of them, why couldn't it have been him?

That thought sucked all the energy from him. Hesitant about seeing Stella so soon after the breast incident, he decided to make a quiet retreat but Mutton tore around the veranda from the front and all but flew down the back steps to Heidi before he had the chance.

The women turned at Heidi's excited squeals and Adam lifted a hand to wave as he descended the steps. Heat rushed to his cheeks as he made eye contact with Stella. In the simplest outfit of cut-off denim shorts and a pale blue tank T-shirt that accentuated her curves, she looked hotter than ever and he couldn't help but stare.

‘Mr Adam!' Heidi launched herself at him, wrapping her chubby little arms around his legs and giving him reason to look away from the women.

‘Hey there,' he said, stooping down to lift her up. Only when he had her in his arms did he realise how natural the action had been. Their time together in the header had been surprisingly easy and he found himself happy to see her again. He positioned her on his hip and then carried her over to the women. He couldn't very well apologise to Stella for the other morning in front of his mum and cousins so he'd just act like the awkwardness between them didn't exist. Hopefully she'd take his lead.

While Heidi cuddled him as if she were trying to squeeze the life out of him, he greeted the women. ‘Hi Mum, Stella,' he nodded and then looked to his cousins, ‘you two skiving off work or something?'

Simone shot him a look that could kill. ‘Or something. What's your excuse? Shouldn't you be chained to your tractor? Or
something
.'

He grinned as he lowered Heidi back to the ground where Mutton waited. The women laughed again as the puppy tugged at Heidi's T-shirt with his teeth, urging her to come play.

‘Hey, stop that,' Adam ordered, nudging Mutton with his boot.

‘It's fine, she loves it,' Stella said, meeting his gaze again. She smiled and heat flooded his body as he forced his eyes not to drop to her chest. The last thing he wanted was to enhance any ideas she might already have about him being a creep. ‘With any luck they'll wear each other out and we'll both get some reprieve this afternoon.'

‘We can only hope,' he replied, leaning against Frankie's chair.

‘Adam,' his mum said looking up at him, ‘you've arrived at just the right time. Would you be a sweetie and get the barbecue going for me?'

‘I suppose you'd like me to cook the meat as well?' He chuckled.

‘Well, since you mentioned it…' Frankie said and everybody laughed.

Adam trekked to the barbecue, which sat on one end of the long veranda. It hadn't been used in a while, so he gave it a quick wash down, turned it on and then went inside to get the meat. It wasn't long until the women gathered around him. They asked about harvest and he told them it was going smoothly but that he likely had a couple more weeks to go, then they lost all interest in farm talk.

‘Stella's been telling us about a book she's written,' Frankie announced, her voice full of admiration.

‘Really? You're an author?' Adam absentmindedly turned the sausages, wondering what other surprises she might offer.

Stella bit her lip and shrugged one shoulder. ‘A very new one.'

‘Don't be modest.' Simone tsked. ‘A US publisher has just bought her first book, it's coming out next year and she's doing edits while she's here.'