Elsa's Stand Read online

  Elsa’s Stand

  An Outback Brides Romance

  Cathryn Hein

  Elsa’s Stand

  Copyright© 2018 Cathryn Hein

  EPUB Edition

  The Tule Publishing Group, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First Publication by Tule Publishing Group 2018

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-949068-11-5

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  Dedication

  To Jim

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  The Outback Bride Series

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The claustrophobic outback heat and swirling red dust suited Jack Hargreaves’s mood. Ratters had hit his neighbour last night. Snuck in while Dimitry was off visiting his lady friend in Lightning Ridge, a woman no one was supposed to know about but everyone did. Dimitry had arrived home in the morning to find his claim raided, the promising opal seam he’d just caught a glimpse of hacked out. Gone forever, along with its potential, perhaps making someone else a fortune. It could have been useless rock. It could have been riches. Now he’d never know.

  That was the thing about opal mining, especially around the Ridge where a black opal run could turn a man into a millionaire overnight: it was a game built on potential.

  Jack gripped the steering wheel, resisting the urge to turn around. Rumour had it there were a couple of new blokes doing the thieving, perhaps a gang. One ratter you at least had a chance against. A gang, nope. Whoever it was, they’d want to watch themselves. Bush retribution could be savage, as the last ratter who’d been caught discovered. Jack wondered if the bloke’s fingers had been worth the price.

  He turned off the unsealed and unnamed goat track onto a wider gravel road that would eventually lead him to the Castlereagh Highway and Lightning Ridge. The track was one of many that criss-crossed the rocky, barren landscape and hid a secret population that most of the world, most of Australia for that matter, had no idea existed.

  Jack hated leaving his claim, especially after last night, but he needed supplies and ratters tended to raid at night rather than by day. And it was time for his fortnightly call to his mum. In all the years he’d been gone from Wirralong he’d only ever missed one call home, and that was because he was in hospital nursing a concussion and severely broken nose after a brawl. Not one of his making, but back then he’d been naive and yet to learn the world operated in shades of grey instead of black and white, and had allowed himself to be dragged into it. He smiled wryly. Funny, that had been about ratters too.

  He hoped his mum was okay. She’d sounded a bit off during their last talk. Her breathing a touch laboured, and she’d had to pause now and then to swallow and cough. At the time, Jack had put it down to excitement and the annoying spring cold Kate had admitted to but dismissed as inconsequential. She’d made a find. Only small, but a find all the same.

  The admission had made Jack’s heart lurch. Although the story had been around for years, he’d never believed in Strathroy’s legendary sapphires, but his mum did. It had become her obsession, an obsession that, several times over the years, threatened to morph into mania. Today’s phone call would reveal whether it had.

  He glanced at his mobile phone secured in the holder he’d fitted to the car’s dashboard. Another seventy or so kilometres before he’d have reception. Coverage was crap out here for normal phones. Many used satellite but Jack had never bothered. He only ever really talked to his mum, or occasionally his brother, Jesse. The rest, like his bank and broker, he contacted rarely and then by email.

  The kilometres passed with their usual monotony. Kangaroos and emus in the vast paddocks, their outlines blurred by heat haze, the occasional wedge-tailed eagle feasting on roo or wild pig roadkill. Rusted car wrecks from miners who’d miscalculated their sobriety or speed, or been too lost in their dreams of riches to keep a look out.

  Fifteen kilometres from town Jack’s phone sparked to life. He made a bemused hmph noise as it pinged and pinged, indicating multiple messages. Someone was desperate. Either that or his number had been fed into a scammer’s auto-dialler, programmed to call until someone picked up.

  Except the pings kept coming. And coming.

  At the Lighting Ridge welcome sign, where travellers were encouraged to turn off and enjoy the town’s unique attractions, five kilometres away, he pulled over.

  Jack thumbed through the alerts, a mix of missed calls, voicemails and text messages. Dozens of them. More. From his cousin Anne, Jesse, Angus McNamara.

  Jesus … one from his dad.

  The very first was from his mum, left just the day after he’d last spoken to her. He inhaled an unsteady breath and dialled his voicemail.

  You have forty-three new messages.

  Christ on a bicycle.

  ‘Oh, Jackie-Jackie. I know you never believed, but it’s true. It’s really true. I found them.’ She laughed, a young girly sound that automatically made him smile. ‘In the most ridiculous of places, of course.’

  The sapphires. It had to be. After a lifetime of fossicking, of obsession, she’d found the lode.

  ‘It was pure accident, too. I just happened to be … Oh … Oh, that felt odd.’

  Jack frowned at the long pause, at the asthmatic breaths.

  ‘Never mind.’ She coughed and cleared her throat a few times, but her breathing remained short. ‘That’s better. I need to head into town now. See Angus. Make preparations.’ Her voice dropped. ‘I reburied them, put the site back how it was. Can’t trust anyone around here.’ She brightened again. ‘Promise I’ll tell you all about it when we talk next. Love you!’

  The message ended and was followed by instructions on whether to save, delete, call back. Jack called back but the farm phone rang out. He tried again. Still nothing. He checked the time. She should have been there, waiting for him. She was always there.

  Jack’s own breath was sharpening, each inhalation painful as it rubbed against his dry throat. He switched to the next message.

  Jesse’s cracked voice had his heart pounding.

  ‘Jack, bro … call me. As soon as you can.’

  More messages followed. Ten or so, all hang-ups. Finally, hi
s brother’s voice filled his ear again. Steadier this time, but hollow.

  ‘Shit. I don’t want to do this.’ A sniff. ‘It’s Mum. She … she’s gone.’

  Gone? What did he mean ‘gone’?

  ‘Collapsed out the front of McNamara’s. Ambulance came straight away but there was nothing they could do. Her heart … I’m sorry.’

  Jack listened to the following messages with a kind of numbness. His dad calling to say he was sorry and that he was there if Jack needed, which he wouldn’t. Angus McNamara offering his condolences and services, the solicitor’s tone genuinely thick with grief. Jack’s cousin Anne, her first few messages sympathetic before frustration at his lack of communication kicked in, and she morphed into stridency about funeral arrangements and wills.

  Then Jesse again. Steely. Angry. As if this was Jack’s fault.

  ‘Get your arse down to Wirralong now. That frigging Anne is trying to take over.’

  And a final coldly articulated message from Anne.

  ‘Given your lack of contact, I’ve taken charge of arrangements. Kate’s funeral service will take place at Memory House at eleven o’clock on the twentieth. I trust you’ll check your phone in time to make it.’

  He called Anne.

  ‘It’s Jack.’

  ‘Jack,’ she said stiffly. ‘My condolences.’

  Condolences? Like she gave a shit for his feelings.

  ‘I assume we’ll see you at the funeral?’

  ‘Postpone it.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible. The notice has already gone out.’

  ‘Place another one.’

  ‘No.’

  Jack’s menacing growl would have made his red heeler, Daisy, proud.

  Anne was too puffed up with righteousness to care. ‘Someone had to do something. Your mother has been dead thirteen days. Thirteen! And not a peep out of you. Not a phone call or message, just silence. I even left a message with the police up there.’

  She may well have done, but the Local Area Command covered an area the size of a European country and the cops had better things to do than run a messenger service. Finding a miner on his claim wasn’t easy either. They could be tunnelled anywhere.

  ‘As for your brother and father …’ She made a tutting noise. ‘Someone had to take responsibility.’

  The phone’s hard edges dug into Jack’s palm as his grip tightened. Jack’s jaw was flexed so tightly he had to chew each word out. ‘You had no right.’

  ‘As the only family member here, I had every right. I’ve made the arrangements. It’s up to you whether you turn up or not.’

  Jack stared through the windscreen, calculating. It was after lunch on the nineteenth. He had less than a day to pack up camp, secure his claim, and drive twelve-hundred kilometres south to home.

  Doable. Just.

  He hung up without a farewell and chucked the phone on the passenger seat. Then he slammed the car into gear and, in a spray of gravel and curses, skidded back onto the highway.

  Chapter Two

  Jack was so furious and flat out getting organised that it was hours into his journey before reality sank in. A wave of grief slammed into his chest so hard he had to pull over and breathe through it while the semi-trailers and caravans he’d overtaken earlier whooshed past, their slipstreams rocking his car and camping trailer.

  His mum, gone.

  It didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be real.

  Yet it was.

  Jack rubbed his face and stared at his palms. They were rough, covered in nicks and abrasions and calluses from years of digging for opal. Hands that had been forged by his mother’s side, as she took him fossicking and regaled him with stories about miraculous finds. About gold fever and opal curses, and sapphires that lay buried somewhere in the overburden and beds of Strathroy’s ancient creeks. Kindling her son’s obsession with her own.

  Christ, he’d miss her. It didn’t matter that they hardly saw each other. They still talked, still loved, still understood each other’s need to hunt and find. Who would understand him now?

  He sighed and looked through the dusty rear window to the tray, where Daisy was tied up. The heeler peered back at him with her mouth open, as though about to talk. Jack flicked a look at the passenger seat. The dog’s ears pricked.

  ‘Just this once,’ he told Daisy as he untied her. ‘And no farting or you’ll be straight back where you belong.’

  They hit the road again, Daisy perched on the seat with her head swivelling between the side window, windscreen and Jack, eyes bright with the thrill of her prime position. He reached across and stroked her head, taking comfort in her easy company.

  ‘The best people, aren’t you, Daise?’

  Daisy licked her chops in reply. Jack smiled and ruffled her ears.

  Rather than tackle the streams of trucks that plied the Newell Highway, he chose the rougher but quieter Kidman Way, through the lonely landscape of western New South Wales. Sunset fell in a spectacular rainbow of colour, painting the sky violet and orange and every shade between, before giving way to a velvet dark night that glittered with the millions of stars of the Milky Way.

  Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Jack pulled into a rest stop for a brief nap, leaving Daisy loosely tied in the tray to protect his gear and bark a warning should anyone approach. It was uncomfortable in the ute but he didn’t have time to set up his trailer, and Jack had heard too many stories of meth addicts targeting campers and caravaners to risk sleeping in his swag in the ute tray, even with Daisy on watch.

  He paused for breakfast at a truck stop, ordering extra steak in a doggy bag for Daisy, and extra coffee for himself, and drove on.

  The vast Hay Plains—one of the flattest places on earth—made Jack feel insignificant against the huge sky and spreading nothingness. At Swan Hill he crossed the Murray River into Victoria, and threaded a course through the cropping and sheep country of the Wimmera towards home.

  On the outskirts of St. Arnaud, eighty or so kilometres from Wirralong, he phoned his brother, only for the call to go straight through to voicemail.

  ‘Yeah, it’s Jack. I’m not far away. Call me.’

  Half an hour later, he tried again.

  ‘Jesus, Jesse, answer your frigging phone.’

  At the turnoff to Wirralong, he re-dialled, only to disconnect immediately when the message service kicked in.

  His brother was meant to be driving up from Melbourne. A three-hour trip at most, the majority along the Western Highway and all with good phone coverage.

  Jack tapped his fingers. Perhaps Jesse was already at Strathroy. Thanks to the hilly landscape and looming Grampian Ranges, reception had never been great at the farm, but a gnawing feeling warned of something else going on. Something that no doubt involved their dad.

  He bloody hoped not. Jack was angry enough already.

  A bright sign and recycled ironwork sculpture of a miner panning for gold welcomed Jack to historic Wirralong, population 5169. He grimaced at it. Wirralong might have been home growing up, but it’d never welcomed him. The locals tolerated his mum because she was one of them—with roots going back to the 1850s, when Errol Hargreaves had the foresight to buy Strathroy and made a small fortune supplying meat to the goldfields.

  Kate’s sons experienced no such accommodation.

  Jesse had escaped when he’d chosen to live with their dad at age twelve. Older, and always protective of their mum, Jack stayed on. It hadn’t made a difference. With his hulking six-feet-five build, dark hair and unsettling pale blue eyes, Jack had too much of his father in him for the locals’ tastes. He felt their suspicion in every look, no matter that he’d done nothing to earn it.

  Whatever his genes, he wasn’t Fraser Greene. And he sure as hell never would be.

  Jesse wasn’t at Strathroy, but someone had been there.

  Hands jammed on his hips, Jack regarded the padlock securing the gate’s hook latch. He stared for a moment at the drive and distant rooftop.


  ‘Christ,’ he said, rubbing his hand over his head and with another muttered curse, strode back to the car to drag a duffel bag from the tray. ‘Keep an eye on things,’ he ordered Daisy, then threw the bag over the gate and vaulted after it.

  He jogged towards the house, dismayed by the farm’s neglected state. Potholes cratered the gravel drive and bolting weeds colonised its centre, as if a car hadn’t passed over in weeks. In the surrounding paddocks, what was once rich pasture carrying fat-bellied cattle and sheep, rank grass swayed tall. Although only early spring, it was already beginning to hay off.

  For a joyous moment Jack’s heart lifted when he spotted Kate’s four-wheel drive parked in the machinery shed, then sank painfully when he realised that it meant nothing.

  She wasn’t home. She never would be again. Someone had just returned it from town.

  The homestead had once been grand, but like the farm had fallen into disrepair. It was also locked up, not even a window ajar. Jack circled the verandah, checking every opening, occasionally cupping his hands to peer in through a dusty pane. He made for the backyard and the spare key that was kept in the old laundry on a hook inside an airing cupboard.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, finding the hook empty and the key nowhere in sight. Unless he smashed his way in, he was stuck.

  He checked his phone. Nothing from his brother and, worse, just over an hour until the funeral.

  Jack was sad, bone-weary and covered in a day’s worth of sweat and grime. His mum deserved more than him turning up like a bushranger. There wasn’t much he could do about his beard or the hair that hadn’t seen a cut in months, but he could at least wash. The laundry was still connected to the water tank and he had soap and deodorant in his duffel. Ten, fifteen minutes max and he could be done and on his way into town.

  With yet another curse, he started stripping off.

  *

  The last time Jack visited Wirralong’s main street, its historic tobacco warehouse and emporium had been empty, the big windows boarded up and timber walls peeling paint. Now it housed a colourful, brightly lit salon called Hair Affair, and windows striped across their centres with mirror tint designed, he supposed, to stop the average pedestrian from seeing clients with their hair in rollers.