The Three Miss Allens

  The Three Miss Allens

  VICTORIA PURMAN

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  Victoria Purman began her career as a cadet journalist at the ABC and since then has worked in varied jobs in the media, including as a media manager in the public sector, a publicist, a freelance journalist, a political adviser, a speechwriter and a consultant editor. In 2013, she was selected as a Writer in Residence at the SA Writers Centre and currently serves as the deputy chair of its board. She is also a long-standing member of the board of Carclew, South Australia’s youth arts funding body. In 2014, Victoria was named a finalist in the category Favourite New Author 2013 by the Australian Romance Readers Association, and made the long list for Booktopia’s poll Favourite Australian Novelist 2014. In 2015 and 2016, Victoria made the final 75 in that list. In 2014, Victoria was a finalist in the RuBY Awards – the Romance Writers of Australia’s Romantic Book of the Year Awards – for her first book, Nobody But Him. In 2016, she was nominated for Favourite Contemporary Romance by members of the Australian Romance Readers Association for Only We Know. Victoria has been a featured author at the 2014 Adelaide Writers’ Week and at the 2015 Sydney Writers’ Festival. She has also appeared as a panel chair at the 2015 and 2016 Adelaide Writers’ Weeks.

  To my mother-in-law, Vilma Halliday, with much love

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER

  1

  2016

  Roma Harris clutched a cold collection of keys in her right hand, the sharp and unfamiliar edges digging into her palm. Her fingers were August cold, stiff and reluctant to unfurl, and the ocean winds were sweeping up off Remarkable Bay and blowing around her ears. The sleeves of her heavy woollen coat grazed her knuckles and she shivered inside it. It was winter in southern Australia, and it had been a bitter and long one; the kind of weather that sends you inside to hibernate until the first buds of spring appear on the almond trees and the winds finally swing around and come from the north and bring everyone and everything slowly back to life.

  She didn’t yet know the feel of these new keys in her hands. They were a way in to a new life in a new house. Well, an old house to be precise. An old, windswept and forlorn house in which there was more than enough work for its new owner. Roma wasn’t scared of it and had laughed when the agent (‘Remarkable Sales in Remarkable Bay’) had looked sideways at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses when she’d made an offer on the place. She knew the house, had walked past it almost every summer of her childhood, but had never been inside.

  ‘It should be knocked down, in all honesty,’ he’d told her with a wrinkle of disdain on his ruddy face as he’d shown her through the property the first time. ‘If things ever take off in Remarkable Bay again—and I’m predicting they will because I keep a very close eye on the market—it’ll be the perfect place to build a couple, maybe three, modern beach houses. You know, with all the mod cons that people want these days. European kitchens, six bedrooms, three bathrooms. That’s what this town needs. More places like that. Less places like this. They’d go for two million each, I reckon. You just can’t get a view like this down here any more. Rare as hen’s teeth. God knows what happened in here when it was a boarding house and just between you and me I tried to convince the owners they should do something about the … smell. But the owner died and left it to a distant niece or some such person and she doesn’t want it, lives in Brisbane now where the winters are a whole lot kinder, so that’s why it’s on the market.’

  Roma had wondered how the agent made a living with a sales pitch so convincing and had tried not to smirk. The old guesthouse had been on the market for two years with no takers, so she’d offered low, and it was accepted overnight. She’d suspected it then but she knew it for certain now, standing in front of the place, taking in the peeling paint, the weeds like bushes in the front garden and the sad disrepair of the place: it desperately needed rescuing.

  The house was hers now and she was ready to be its saviour.

  There was simply something about Bayview that Roma hadn’t been able to walk away from. It sat facing the water in the best position on Remarkable Bay’s only main strip, Ocean Street, the old, unguttered bitumen road which met the main highway to Adelaide at one end, and the cliff tops adjacent to the bay at the other. The views from every window and door at the front of the house were spectacular. Before she could bring herself to turn the key in the lock Roma turned to the outlook and took in a lungful of air, salty and cool, chilling her as she swallowed it. Across the road there were no houses but a lawned reserve with a shining and abundant low hedge bordering it, and then in the near distance the coastline down below curved like it had been cut by a scythe; with cliffs on either end of the bay and towering Norfolk Island pines reaching into the sky.

  Why did this small seaside town still have a hold on her? As a child on holidays it was sun and the beach and family holidays and melting ice-cream. But now? It was so firmly stuck back in time that it still had a well-patronised video shop. A gust of wind chilled her more deeply through her coat and Roma examined her keys again. They represented some kind of new beginning. Not better necessarily, not shinier.

  But new.

  That’s what she needed Remarkable Bay to be.

  There were more keys on this key ring than she’d ever had in her life: front screen, front door, back door, various window locks and a storage cupboard which, the agent had assured her, she would need to keep locked if she was going to have strangers in her home.

  It was a completely reasonable idea to put to someone who’d just bought a rundown old guesthouse at the beach. The agent had probably assumed that she might be after a sea change or a renovation challenge and would restore the old guesthouse to some kind of new life as a boutique hotel. He’d hinted at it but Roma had smiled politely and never answered him. The last thing she wanted was strangers in her home and, if she was honest, she didn’t want old friends or new friends or family there, either.

  You couldn’t hide if people came to stay, could you?

  Roma took a quick guess about which of her mysterious keys would open the front door and on the second attempt she heard the snick of the lock. The door opened reluctantly, catching against the tattered and worn floral hallway carpet runner. With a shove of her shoulder, she managed to open the door all the way. Light streamed into the hallway in front of her. There was a room to the immediate right, with an open double doorway, and she went in and dropped her heavy shoulder bag and her bunch of keys on the floor. The jangling noise echoed throughout the empty house. This might have been a living room once. Roma screwed up her nose. It
was dim in the early afternoon light and motes of dust floated in the space, like tiny confetti from a ghostly welcoming parade.

  She checked her watch. She’d made good time ahead of the removalists’ truck and it should be arriving any minute. In a more perfect world, one in which she didn’t have to finish up at work and settle on the house on the same day, she might have had time to get there in advance, to clean and paint and rip up carpets. But her life hadn’t been perfect for a while.

  ‘This is it,’ she whispered to the dust and the air and the quiet. ‘Welcome home.’

  She went out the front door and walked the short cement footpath to the gate. Her car was parked on the street, packed with bulging suitcases, her computer safely boxed, and precious keepsakes she couldn’t bring herself to entrust to the journey to the beach in the moving van.

  She went to flip open the boot of her car but stopped, taking a moment to look back at her new home. The guesthouse would have been quite grand in the bloom of its youth. It sat on the most prominent point on Ocean Street, its two stories high and important, and its stonework once a symbol of expense and prestige. The wooden fretwork adorning the balcony above and the ground floor veranda was as decorative as lace on a collar, but its white paint was peeling and loose, revealing layers of ruby red and pale cream underneath. Once, the well-to-do families of South Australia had spent summers in it, but the house was no adolescent now; no classic in middle-age, or a grand dame. Like the town, it had slowly died as other towns in the region had thrived. Remarkable Bay had become the runt of the south coast. The town, and her house, seriously needed love, some fool to come along and spend money to bring them back to life. And for the life of her, Roma still hadn’t quite understood why the fool had to be her. She was clear about why she’d left the city: there was no gotcha moment there. But why this place? Here in Remarkable Bay?

  Cautious and sensible Roma Harris had never run from anything in her entire life. Until now.

  Roma hauled her suitcases on to the footpath and placed them in a neat row. She lugged the first case to the front door, past the black wrought-iron gate and over the cracked footpath. The front door, designed to be a grand entrance, was surrounded by stained glass panels at the top and sides, thankfully still intact and made up of intricate floral designs in pale pink and forest green. Set into the plasterwork above the doorframe was a word which looked half worn away by years of salt spray and biting winds.

  Bayview. And then underneath it the date, 1916.

  The words and numbers were faded like a mirage or a memory; as if they’d been waiting for a hundred years for someone to come along and read them. A century, Roma realised with a little smile to herself.

  Bayview. 1916.

  All those fancy visitors from days gone by probably wouldn’t recognise it now. Above her, the wooden frame supporting the upstairs balcony was strung with silvery spider webs, dust and age. Below her feet, the concrete of the front veranda was cracked like shattered glass and had sunk into potholes in other places. The fly wire in each of the double-sash windows at the front of the house, one on either side of the front door, was flapping loose in the breeze.

  Roma sighed and let herself smile just a little. She would have to make a thousand decisions about the house in the next few months. New or old. Replace or repair.

  Live or exist.

  For now, for today, for this week, this month, she’d chosen to live.

  Roma discovered, to her surprise, that all the downstairs windows opened easily and, before too long, she could smell the sea and feel its crisp chill inside the house. She’d unpacked her belongings from her car and they were crowded together in a pile down the hallway and at the bottom of the staircase. She looked up. Light streamed down on to the steps and illuminated the landing where the stairs turned. Each tread was worn into a slight curve. The honeyed handrail was warm to her touch, smooth and safe, and she slowly took the steps, looking around her at the doorways leading into the five rooms upstairs and the small, functional bathroom.

  It was slightly warmer up there but she could already feel the breeze from the open downstairs windows swirling up the staircase and spreading its reach into every corner of the second floor. The room which would be her bedroom was at the front of the house, and as she made her way there with slow and hesitant steps, she felt a shuddering in her chest as she reached the doorway.

  There was nothing more symbolic of her new life than this room. A room she’d never shared with anyone. She crossed the large, empty space, double the size of the one she’d left behind in the city. The ceilings were like every other in the house: pressed tin painted over with white. The walls were a mint green, scuffed and gouged in places where it seemed furniture had been ground against the plasterwork. As she unlatched and swung open the French doors that opened onto the front balcony, Roma held her breath. Even though she had paid for a detailed building inspection before agreeing to the purchase and it had revealed the balcony was sound, she was nervous going out there. The area ran almost the length of the front of the house: about six metres long and two metres from door to railing. It had the best views of Remarkable Bay. Roma pictured herself sitting in a cane chair with a book and a glass of wine in the summer months, getting lost in the distant waves and the sleepy small town feeling of the place. When the weather warmed and the sun shone, this would be the perfect place to sit and think. Or maybe to simply sit.

  The rumbling of a truck echoed in the quiet and peaceful street. It came to a slow halt behind her car and when the driver cut the engine and hopped out, she waved down at him.

  ‘G’day, love.’ The removalist tugged at his football beanie, pulling it close over his ears against the wind. ‘I guess this is the place?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘We’ll start unloading. You know where you want everything?’

  Roma nodded and felt scared and excited in equal measure. She was ready for her new life to begin right here in the musty rooms and empty spaces of Bayview.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she called back.

  After a late dinner—takeaway hot chips from the pub—Roma had dragged a chair out to her balcony from her bedroom and slumped into it. She was exhausted. It had taken the removalists three hours to unload her furniture and all her boxes, the stairs having made things slightly more complex. Everything was now in the right rooms, if not the right positions. That would all come later. For now, for tonight, she had a mattress and a sleeping bag. And she had a red wine in her hand. In a proper wine glass. Priorities.

  She had a blanket around her shoulders and she tugged it tighter as she took another sip of her glass of Barossa shiraz. Across the road, the reserve was dark now, sucked up into the blackness of the night. The night was so much thicker here without streetlights, something that had scared her on holidays in Remarkable Bay as a child unless she had her older brother Leo by her side. And then she had a flash of memory. Roaming children. Bright pinpoints of torch light in the scrubby coastal bushes. The scratch of branches on her arm. Mosquito bites and midges. Someone being kissed. She remembered there was a path across the reserve that guided walkers along the narrow steps down the cliff to the water’s edge but she couldn’t make it out now in the dark. All she could hear was the roaring white noise of the ocean.

  This was the peace she craved; the peace she hoped would calm her thinking and every trembling, anxious thought that had filled her head for three years. For the nights when she couldn’t sleep, when her memories became her nightmares and her jaw ached from the violent, crushing grinding of her teeth.

  She willed those thoughts away with another sip of wine. There was so much here to distract her from those memories. She knew that in winter, the southern right whales arrived in the bay to give birth, to seek solace from the raging far Southern Ocean. Would she be able to see them from her balcony?

  She held her glass high, made a toast to no one.

  ‘Happy first day,’ she called and her voice echoed in t
he street below.

  And it was then the sadness hit her like a firestorm. Uncontrollable, it swamped her, rose up and stuck in her throat and then exploded out of her mouth in raging sobs and shudders. She gripped the cane chair while her body shook and her throat scratched hoarse with her sobs. There had been no way to prepare for what had happened; there wasn’t the chance for the long, drawn-out, slow goodbye of an illness. There had only been the short, sharp shock of instant death.

  She’d held it in for so long and now it came out of her in a tumult.

  She had alienated all her friends with the depths of her grief. And now she’d left everything. She’d quit her job for a life as a widow at thirty-five, alone in a town where she knew no one. Roma let the tears fall, waited until the racking sobs receded and tried to feel every inch of this grief so she might grow to know it, get over it, move on from it.

  She needed more good days, she knew that. She needed more happy days. That’s what Remarkable Bay was for. Because if there weren’t, Roma feared she would go under, silently and easily, like the southern right whales gliding and disappearing into the depths of the winter ocean.

  CHAPTER

  2

  ‘Hey, Leo.’

  Roma was still in bed when she answered the call from her big brother, her body complaining from the shifting and hauling and unpacking she’d done the day before. It had been a physically exhausting day but an emotional one too. This wrenching oneself from one life and dropping into another took a toll. A few times during the afternoon’s unpacking, during which she’d directed the movers to put the sofa over there and the kitchen table here, the chest of drawers upstairs and the red velvet winged chair in what was going to be her bedroom (up the stairs, turn left and the one with the French doors), she found herself on the verge of more tears. She didn’t sob—she was too controlled for that—but little thin tears had leaked from her eyes and drizzled down her cheeks. As she’d wiped them away with the dusty sleeve of her long-sleeved T-shirt, she’d fought the shudders which rattled her chest, and the fear that snaked up her spine and goose bumped her skin.