The Auction a Romance by Anna Erishkigal Page 9

  I sat up and rubbed my aching thighs, feeling more content than I had for a very long time. For six long years, my dreams of Harvey had all been nightmares about the last time I had seen him, but for some reason, here, Harvey had found peace. I stumbled into the kitchen. Adam had left yesterday for a three-day trip into the outback, so alas! No Turkish coffee this morning. The stainless steel percolator filled the air with the scent of brewing French roast as I flipped through Australian Cookery and tried to figure out what I'd make for breakfast.

  Pippa shuffled out, followed by Thunderlane, both obnoxiously perky before my morning infusion of caffeine.

  "G'morning, nipper."

  "Good morning, Miss Rosamond," Pippa said, using her father's endearment. "Today's the day!"

  "Yup. Today's the day."

  Today was Pippa's playdate, but Emily didn't get out of school until three o'clock. I shuffled through the cookbook index, debating between eggs benedict and pikelets, while Pippa chattered about her newfound friend.

  "Can we make muffins?" Pippa asked. "I'd like to bring some over for Emily."

  "We're out of fruit," I said. "We'll have to make a trip into town."

  "The blueberries are ripe," Pippa said.

  "Where?"

  "Down by the river," Pippa said. "Close to the place the fairy queen likes to bathe."

  Blueberries?

  I opted to cook eggs benedict, minus the hollandaise sauce because we were out of lemon. As soon as we'd cleaned up, we skipped down to the river so Pippa could show me where the blueberries grew. The hair stood up at the nape of my neck when I realized this was the exact same spot the girl on the white pony had shown me last night in my dream. I must have noticed them last week and my subconscious told me what they were.

  "Did your grandmother plant these bushes?"

  "Great-grandpa did," Pippa said. "There are patches of fruit all over the station."

  Most of the blueberries were not yet ripe, but enough were to make a halfway decent attempt at muffins. We ran from bush to bush filling our buckets, resisting the temptation to stick too many into our mouths. Aw. What the heck! It was only a handful! Pippa chided me for snitching the succulent little blue orbs, her own lips guilty with a purple stain. As soon as we made our way back to the house, I flipped open Australian Cookery again.

  "We have too many for one batch," I said, "and not enough for two."

  "I want to bring enough for me and Emily to eat," Pippa said. "Let's make as many as we can."

  I ran my finger down the conversion tables which said how to adjust the recipe. That sense of knowing whispered: 'hey … stupid … the solution has been right here, underneath your nose.'

  "You'll have to help me." I pretended to be nonchalant.

  "Okay," Pippa said.

  Gotcha…

  Forty-five minutes later the recipe had been multiplied by one-and-a-half, the muffins sat baking in the oven, and not a single tear was shed as I made Pippa use the adjustment table to multiply all the quarter-cups, half-cups, and teaspoons times 1-1/2. We were low on sugar, and also baking powder, so while the muffins baked, I rummaged through the cupboards to take an inventory.

  "We need to go into town for supplies before we stop at Emily's," I said. "We'll stop at the IGA, and then we'll go to your playdate."

  "Can we stop at the library first?" Pippa said. "I'd like to borrow the newest Fairy Realms book."

  "Do you have a library card?"

  "Grandma got me one."

  As soon as a respectable number of muffins had been devoured, I buckled Pippa into the back seat of my Falcon and made my way to the business district. The library in Nutyoon was a modern one-story dun-brick building built at the corner of three intersecting roads. I pulled into a vertical slot on Campbell Street and herded Pippa into the main entrance. A bow-legged elderly man wearing a plaid shirt and drover's hat stopped us just before we got inside the door.

  "You're Katherine Bristow's granddaughter, aren't you, Little Miss?"

  "Yes." Pippa wiggled happily.

  The man held out his hand, old and gnarled, the kind of hand that had done hard physical labor his entire life. I noted the coolness of his fingers as he gripped my hand in a surprisingly powerful grip.

  "I'm Ralph. Ralph Ellis. I own the spread diagonally across the river from you."

  "Oh, hi," I said. "I'm Rosie, Pippa's teacher."

  I'd taken to calling myself Pippa's teacher because every time I said I was her governess, people's eyebrows raised up, as if I was some clichéd heroine out of a Charlotte Brontë novel.

  "I'm real sorry about your grandma," the old man said to Pippa. "And your grandpa, too. He was a good man. A real good man. I bet he's glad your father decided to stay?"

  Pippa fell silent as the man gushed about Adam's parents and then told me to call him if I ever needed anything. She followed me silently into the library, her hands clenched tight to her chest as though she walked naked through a blizzard.

  "What's wrong, honey?"

  "Everybody talks nice to me about my grandpa," Pippa said, "but I only ever met him once. He didn't like me. And he didn't want to be my friend."

  I squeezed her hand.

  "Sometimes adults do stupid things," I said. "He wasn't angry at you. He was angry at your mother."

  "He didn't like me," Pippa said. "Daddy brought me here once while grandpa was still alive. Grandpa told Daddy to get me off of his land, and said if he ever brought me back, he'd have him arrested for trespassing."

  I sputtered as though somebody had just drop-kicked me in the gut. Why, of all places, did Pippa decide to drop this kind of bomb right now? I dragged her in between two long bookcases filled with books to give her a monster bear hug.

  "Listen, nipper," I said. "I don't care what your Mommy did to tick off your Daddy's father. That kind of behavior is not acceptable!"

  Pippa's silver eyes glistened with tears.

  "Grandma said he would have liked me if he'd gotten to know me, but he never wanted to know me. I only ever met him that one time."

  I hugged her, and then I distracted her by bringing her into the children's room. It was a comforting place, redolent with the scent of printed paper and the quiet rustle of turning pages. There were no more Fairy Realms, so the librarian directed Pippa to a book series called Avalon whose storyline revolved around a family of unicorns.

  We checked out the books and then it was time for Pippa's playdate. I followed the directions Julie Peterson had given over the phone. Like most towns on the Darling Downs, Nutyoon consisted of vast tracks of farmland with a small cluster of businesses and houses in the middle. Three blocks away from the downtown area, the last row of houses ceded to open farmland. Julie and Emily's house backed up to one of those pastures, a one-story cottage, bleached and weathered by the sun. I parked the car and smiled as the scent of horse manure and grass wafted in the wind.

  "This is nice."

  We strolled up a concrete walkway lined with zinnias, marigolds and geraniums. While not as flowerific as Linda Hasting's house, a trellis filled with roses and window boxes graced the front, filling the air with their colorful perfume. It was a little pill-box of a cottage, painted pale yellow, with clean white trim, just barely big enough for two. Emily came running out the front door, an auburn fairy, still dressed in her royal blue school uniform.

  "Pippa's here!"

  I smiled inwardly. If only somebody was that happy to see me?

  Your mother wanted to visit your apartment with Gregory. You pushed her away. And you always ignore her phone calls. I pushed my mother out of my mind. Begone, evil spirit! Go back to the dark pit of hell where you belong!

  Pippa disappeared with Emily before I could even carry the muffins up the walk. Julie met me at the door, a red-headed pixie, carrying a feather duster in one hand and a rag in the other.

  "Got to get the chores done," Julie laughed, "'cause this house ain't gonna clean itself."

  "I know the feeling," I said. "
I hope you didn't go through any extra effort on my part."

  Julie laughed.

  "If you like somebody, you don't care how much of a dag they are. I just like to keep up with things so the dust bunnies don't take over."

  She gestured for me to follow her inside the cutest little house I'd ever seen. Not one stick of furniture matched, and yet it worked because she'd painted them to match and outfitted them with vintage linens. Arranged on the walls, on bookshelves and on end-tables sat groupings of like-minded objects: one wall full of tiny vintage paintings; a bookshelf full of antique cows; a group of colorful rocks neatly arranged on a shelf. Everything about this house screamed this is my home.

  "Would you like some tea?" Julie asked.

  "Yes, please. Pippa made some blueberry muffins."

  She led me into the kitchen, equally adorable with mismatched chairs and an old farm-table, all painted barn-red with a light touch of brown to give it the distressed look of expensive antiques. The entire house smelled as though somebody had just peeled a grapefruit and eaten it. She bustled about, pulling teabags out of vintage tins, and set the table with two exquisite porcelain teacups with not-quite-matching saucers.

  "I hope you like Bushells," Julie said. "I can't afford the good stuff."

  "Bushells is fine," I said. "I was never one for snob teas."

  As we sipped our tea, we made small talk about how I liked the town until the girls came plowing through. Emily had changed out of her school uniform into shabby clothing.

  "Rosie! Emily wants to introduce me to Polkadot!"

  "Just make sure you shovel out the stalls before you try to ride him," Julie said to her daughter.

  "Is he good around kids?"

  "He's a great horse," Julie said. "Good to handle, and he almost never spooks."

  "Okay," I told Pippa. "Just be careful around him. Make sure you give him time to get to know you."

  The girls bustled out of the house. I finished my tea, but I found my eyes kept drifting to the door.

  "You wanna go outside and check up on her?" Julie guessed.

  I gave her a grateful grin.

  "Yeah," I said. "And I wouldn't mind taking a look at him myself."

  I followed Julie out the back yard where a paddock had been built around a two-stall shedrow barn with a small supply room at the end. True to his name, Polkadot was a typical brown stock horse with a bit of appaloosa somewhere in his lineage judging by the brown speckles in his coat. He wasn't a beautiful horse, but to Emily and Pippa he was the most wonderful creature in the world.

  "Only one?" I pointed to the second stall.

  "One is all I can afford," Julie said. "Besides, horseback riding was always more Peter's thing than mine."

  Peter was Julie's ex-husband, I remembered.

  "It was good of you to buy your daughter a horse."

  Julie shrugged.

  "It keeps her out of trouble. If she wants to ride him, she has to finish up her chores. Ain't had one bit of lip since I bought her Polkadot, and if she does something bad, I ground her from riding. She been doing a whole lot better in school since I started tying riding time to homework."

  "My father used to do that," I said. "Otherwise I'd have spent all my time on Harvey instead of learning algebra."

  Julie laughed.

  "You didn't tell me you rode."

  My smile faded.

  "Yeah," I said. "I used to ride all the time."

  "You're in a good place if you want to keep a horse," Julie said. "Lots of land. Lots of places to pick up hay cheap unless the drought lays waste to the fields. Maybe Adam will buy his little girl a horse so she can ride with Emily's pony club?"

  "Adam's not sure where he's going to end up living," I said. "He's not opposed to the idea. I just don't think he's much of a horseman."

  "Who, Adam?" Julie laughed. "I think he's been living too long amongst the tall poppies in Brisbane. The Bristow boys were born with saddles stuck to their backsides. Old man Bristow was a jackaroo from deep in the outback, seventh generation."

  I thought of the horrid man who'd ordered Pippa off his land. I watched as she and Emily manned the shovels while Polkadot, the object of their mutual affection, stood patiently, waiting for Emily to feed him.

  "I heard Adam's father was a hard man?"

  "Oh, yeah!" Julie laughed. "We could never see why Adam's mother married his father. He was hard, and she was soft, and ne'er between did they seem to meet. But they adored one another, and I think they cancelled out one another's weaknesses."

  "Did you know Pippa's grandfather?"

  "No more than anybody else," Julie said. "Adam, he was always torn between trying to please his old man and telling him to take a hike. He used to talk to me sometimes, wondering how I got along so great with my dad."

  "Your parents still live hereabouts?"

  Julie pointed to a brand-new, slightly bigger house next door.

  "I don't think I could get along without them. This used to be their house, but when Peter left, they moved out of this one and built that one so I could live close by."

  A pang of jealousy made me grimace.

  "You're very lucky."

  "Yeah, I know," Julie beamed. "What about your parents?"

  "My father was great," I said, "but my mother was a raving tyrant. Not only did she drive him out of the house, but she finally drove him clean off the continent of Australia."

  "Unfortunately," Julie said, "you can pick your friends, but you can't pick who brings you into this world." She leaned onto the fence, an affectionate smile playing on her face as she watched her daughter shovel manure. "I ain't got much, but I got me some wonderful parents."

  The girls finished up cleaning out Polkadot's stall, gave him some feed, and then Emily went to fetch his saddle.

  "How well does Pippa ride?" Julie asked.

  "I'm about to find out," I said. "Same as you."

  Emily hoisted herself up onto her stock horse and rode him a few times around the ring, and then slid down so Pippa could take a turn.

  "Emily? Is it okay if Pippa borrows your helmet?" I called.

  "Sure." Emily bared her auburn curls and handed her helmet to Pippa.

  Pippa slid the helmet over her white-blond pigtails and clasped the chin strap with a minimum of effort. She checked Polkadot's girth straps and the length of his stirrups, and then hoisted herself up, only marginally clumsy. She signaled the gelding to giddy up and rode around the paddock, her face lit up in an ecstatic grin.

  "Looks like you got yourself a rider," Julie said.

  I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath. I let it out.

  "Yup. It sure looks like I do."

  Each time I asked Pippa about the horse camp last summer, she'd talk about how much she'd loved the horses, and then she'd clam up and become all melancholy. Adam wasn't any better. Any mention of the horse camp made him become angry and shut down. Something had happened at that camp to drive a wedge between him and Eva, and whatever it was, I suspected it was the reason Pippa needed that little yellow pill I gave her every morning.

  If only I could get Adam to see how happy Pippa was right now…

  "Where'd you get him?" I pointed at Polkadot.

  "At the Lockyer Horse Sales," Julie said. "For just $350."

  "350? That's dirt cheap. Harvey was appraised for $6,500."

  "That's your horse?"

  "He was," I said. "He passed away a long time ago."

  Murdered. My mother murdered him…

  I dug through my purse for my mobile phone, which only had one bar, and snapped a couple of pictures. Pippa dismounted and then it was Emily's turn to ride around the paddock. I snapped another picture as Emily coaxed Polkadot to step in a clumsy version of a half-pass.

  "Keep your hands still, Emily," I called out. "You're sending your horse mixed signals."

  Emily pulled the reins a bit more sideways and held them stiff. Polkadot's side-step straightened out.

  "How'd you know
he could do that?" Julie asked.

  "He's been trained to ride down cattle." I pointed at the horse's gait. "Look at how carefully he pays attention to what Emily tells him. Even for a twenty-year old stock horse, I can't believe you picked him up for $350."

  "The previous owner was real happy to sell him to us," Julie said. "Threw in the saddle and everything. Once they put 'em up for auction, they don't have no say over who buys them. When the doggers started bidding, the old man made the handler run Polkadot through his paces. Don't think I'd a bought him if the man hadn't showed me you could handle his hoofs and he wouldn't kick you."

  "Do horses always go that cheap out here?"

  "They did that day." Julie shuddered. "The horse auction ain't for the faint of heart."

  The girls switched riders. Pippa tried to get Polkadot to do the same western-style show moves and failed. It was obvious that fancy riding camp had only taught her the most basic skills.

  "Emily's pony club meets every Wednesday afternoon and Saturday morning," Julie said. "She goes twice a week, whether she's at my house or her father's. Maybe you can bring her this weekend?"

  "Adam's all tied up in knots about the fact his business takes him away from her so much. I'll make a suggestion, but he's jealous of his time."

  "Can't say I blame him," Julie said. "I sure wish Emily's father was that attentive." She pointed at the horse. "But since I bought Polkadot, she hardly seems to notice."

  The girls took one more turn apiece, and then Julie started dropping hints by looking at her watch. Two hours we'd agreed this playdate would last and it had been two hours and forty minutes.

  "C'mon, Pippa!" I called. "Emily's got to do her homework."

  "Can we do it together, Mom?" Emily called to Julie.

  "Not tonight. We have to go home and feed Thunderlane."

  Pippa dusted off her clothes, as if noticing for the first time she'd gotten filthy.

  "I'm sorry, Rosie. I didn't mean to get all dirty."

  She looked so worried I had to laugh.

  "Nipper … there ain't no way you're gonna ride a horse and stay clean," I said. "Just take off your shoes before you get into the car. I don't want you christening my floor mats with a stinky dose of horse manure."