CHAPTER
9
The romantic notions that had been filling Kirsty’s head—of war planes swooping low over tropical jungles, of handsome farmers striding through crops in wildly inappropriate workwear—came to a screaming halt when she pulled into the Clarence Hotel Motel.
It was a tribute to orange seventies brick.
Six car bays filled one side of the long concrete drive, with a sedan and a carpet van tucked up between neat white lines, and a long patch of grass, trimmed with surgical precision, ran along the other. Above, nodding their heavy heads in the late afternoon sun, was an abundance of tubby green plants sporting flowers of red and apricot and yellow.
Kirsty pulled her ute into the bay near the reception office and read the card propped neatly in the window: RINGTHEBELL IFNO-ONE’SHERE.
The sign on the road had said vacancies. She gave the door a push but it was locked, so she gave the dangling bell a tingle and waited.
And waited.
Hmm. She lifted her phone to see if there was another hotel nearby, and when she opened a search tab, it held the history of an earlier search:why did I experience shortness of breath and a hand tremor?
She wanted accommodation not silly answers to questions she was avoiding. But it was too late:too much caffeineread the first answer.Maybe a panic attack. Or a lesion on the brain, probably fatal.
‘Ugh,’ she said, ramming her phone in her back pocket. Now she could add a possible brain lesion to the list of things she was avoiding. She grabbed the bell again and gave it a boisterous ding-a-ling. Before the sound died away, a voice spoke.
‘You’ll never find Ken here at this time of day. He’ll be in his garden.’
She turned, and a woman stood there, her head cocked like an inquisitive parrot. No—parrots wore bold, brilliant colours. This woman was clothed in some earnest-looking fabric that might once have been a flour sack. Creamy beige trousers, rolled at the hem to reveal sensible sandals that could have been made from tractor tyres. A tunic of greeny beige, a floaty sort of scarf arrangement about her neck in mustard beige.
Everything about her was earthy and homespun, even the bangles that adorned the woman’s arm from wrist to elbow. A white sticker clung haphazardly to the woman’s tunic, the words PATTY, VISITOR, LISMOREBASEHOSPITALscribbled upon it in red marker.
‘Oh, hi,’ she said. ‘No worries. I can wait.’
The woman moved a step closer and inspected Kirsty’s face in a manner that was a little odd. ‘Your aura is buzzing about like a fly trapped inside a windscreen, pet.’
Heraura? Wow. Would it be too rude to back out of here and lock herself in her ute? ‘My aura is fine, thank you.’
‘I’m Patricia,’ said the woman. ‘Call me Patty, darl.’
‘Maybe there’s no vacancy,’ she said. ‘I can try somewhere else.’ She was already burdened with a family curse, she had no room for some crackpot’s aura.
The woman set down a manila folder on the orange-brick step of the reception office. ‘If you head through that archway there, you’ll find Ken deadheading his roses or something equally urgent. Tell him the flyers he has to distribute are on his doorstep.’
‘Sure.’
The lady tilted her head. ‘What’s your name, pet?’
‘Kirsty.’
‘Well, Kirsty, welcome. What brings you to Clarence?’
‘Just … doing a little research. Family history, that kind of thing.’
‘You’ll have met our Carol, then.’
‘Um, no. Who’s Carol?’
‘Carol Wallace. She runs the Clarence Historical Society and Museum.’
Hmm. Who said luck never went her way? ‘That sounds like just the place I need to go visit, thank you. Is it far away?’
‘Five minutes’ walk down Lillypilly Street, pet, but you’ll need to wait until morning. Carol’s not there today. And here,’ she said, bending down to the folder she’d dropped and pulling out a shiny green leaflet. ‘If you’re still in town at the start of October, you might want to come along to our Bush Poetry Muster. You won’t want to miss it.’