Christmas at Remarkable Bay

  VICTORIA PURMAN is a multi-published, award-nominated, Amazon Kindle–bestselling author. She has worked in and around the Adelaide media for nearly thirty years as an ABC television and radio journalist, a speechwriter to a premier, political adviser, editor, media adviser and private-sector communications consultant. She is a regular guest at writers’ festivals, has been nominated for a number of readers choice awards and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Her most recent novels are The Three Miss Allens, published in 2016, The Last of the Bonegilla Girls (2018) and The Land Girls (2019).

  Christmas at Remarkable Bay

  Victoria Purman

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  To my amazing and loyal readers

  Contents

  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 One

  This was absolutely, definitely the perfect place.

  A country town but with waves. Oh, yes. This would do nicely, thank you very much, world.

  Mara Blumberg turned the key and her car’s engine purred to a stop. She opened the door, stepped out and breathed it in: salt, sea, fresh air. In front of her, there was ocean as far as the eye could see, an azure blue carpet rolled out right to the horizon, a million white caps dancing in the distance. The sandy beach of Remarkable Bay was below, down a set of sturdy wooden stairs set into the low cliffs, and it curved into the sand like a half moon. The wind was warm and as Mara breathed it in, it seemed to seep into every muscle, dissolving the tension she’d been carrying for months.

  She wanted small and sleepy and serene and Remarkable Bay looked absolutely perfect. After what she had been through the past few months, she needed something quiet. She didn’t want the big, noisy, argumentative family Christmas that she’d endured for her thirty-five years. When she’d told her mother she was going away on her own, she had looked at her daughter as if she’d taken leave of her senses.

  ‘But it’s Christmas,’ her mother had implored. ‘How can you go away at Christmas?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum. You have two other children—and their children—to spoil rotten. You won’t miss me in the slightest.’

  She just couldn’t do a loud family get-together this year. And she didn’t need Bali or the Gold Coast or Sydney or Fiji. She needed simple and peaceful and quiet so she could stop and think and have the clear space in her head to make some big decisions about her life. Her post-divorce life.

  She turned from the spectacular sea view to check out the house she’d rented. For the next two weeks, until after New Year, it was all hers. It wasn’t anything fancy but she didn’t care. She’d found it on the website of the local real estate agent—‘Remarkable Rentals in Remarkable Bay’—and had snapped it up immediately. It wasn’t a beachside McMansion or anything like that. It was a simple brick home, circa 1970s, and it had two bedrooms, a living area with a big table that seated eight people, and a big deck out the front to take in the best of the view. She’d been secretly relieved when she discovered the place had a dishwasher—who wants to spend their much-needed holidays washing dishes, right?—but there weren’t any other mod cons she needed. She had a quick thought: a coffee maker didn’t technically qualify as a mod con, did it? That was an essential, like a toaster or hot running water or a hair straightener.

  Mara unloaded her bags from the car and in half an hour she’d unpacked everything, hung up what needed hanging in a white laminate built-in robe in the main bedroom, packed the food she’d brought with her into the fridge, changed into her swimsuit and her thongs, slapped on some sunscreen and a hat, grabbed a towel and a book, and she was out the door.

  It was December 23. The school year was well and truly over and her holiday was starting today. Right that minute, in fact, with a book and the beach and the ocean.

  She hoped the sea breeze would clear her mind and help her relax enough so she could at least get some sleep while she was down there. She needed it. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since the divorce papers had arrived twelve months before. She needed the kind of sleep that parents craved after they’d had babies. She had that black-bags-under-your-eyes kind of tiredness that afflicted mums and dads in the shell shock of those first weeks and months of parenthood. Not that she was a parent herself, but she’d seen it in her sisters’ faces after they’d had children. When she stared at herself in the mirror these days, she saw it there in her own eyes. Maybe one day she’d know that exquisite exhaustion of parenthood.

  Now, it was about something else. Someone else. Abbie.

  But all that could wait.

  She stepped outside, locked the door and looked out to the horizon. She breathed in the fresh air and set off for the beach.

  * * *

  ‘Merry Christmas to me. Merry Christmas to me. Merry Christmas, dear George. Merry Christmas to me.’

  George Gray’s deep voice echoed around the plainly furnished bedroom. It wasn’t quite the same when you sang it to yourself to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’, but it was all he had. He didn’t know the words to ‘O Tannenbaum’ or ‘Good King Wenceslas’—was it something about feasting on Stephen?—so ‘Happy Birthday’ would have to do.

  He’d woken in a strange and uncomfortable bed to an unfamiliar sound: the low hum of waves crashing in the distance. Back in the city where he lived, the only low hum he heard was cars and trucks passing on the main road, which was only a few houses away. This was better, he thought as he threw his arms back over his head and listened. The sea air sure beat petrol fumes. He’d left the windows wide open overnight and the warm breeze wafting in over his bare chest was a nice way to wake up. Once upon a time, he’d woken up with the warmth of a woman’s body next to his, but he hadn’t had that pleasure for a while.

  This wasn’t exactly the way George thought he’d be spending Christmas Day: in a house at the beach on his own with no one but a grumpy mutt for company. He was used to working right through the holiday season, handling DV cases and road accidents and assaults and drug overdoses. Yeah, Christmas was never quite so merry when you were a police officer. Twenty years on the force had taught him that Christmas and family reunions tended to bring out the worst in people. Being forced to play happy families was sometimes too much for those who couldn’t bear to be in the same room as their relatives on any other day of the year. Emotions were heightened, and when alcohol was involved and when people had already been driven apart by distrust and abuse and misunderstandings, a roast turkey and a trifle weren’t enough to make up for all those past hurts.

  Merry freaking Christmas.

  George considered himself lucky to have a functioning family he still liked quite a lot. And since he was on holidays, that’s where he’d imagined he’d be this morning—at his sister’s place for the traditional feast of turkey, prawns, roast veg, trifle; the whole box and dice. Shawna had taken over the family tradition when their mother died a few years before, and since there was only the two siblings, it was a small gathering. Shawna and her husband Paul and their kids saw Paul’s family on Christmas Eve, so Christmas Day had become the Gray family’s day. George’s role was to turn up with a couple of bottles of great South Australian wine, a huge box of Shawna’s favourite chocolates and his arms loaded with presents for the kids. He would play video games with his
two nephews, Hugh and Darcy, while Shawna and Paul got everything organised. They would eat, drink a toast to their absent parents—during which Shawna always cried buckets—and then George would drag the boys into the living room to watch the first Star Wars movie—the 1977 version and still the best—and sit with one of them under each arm until they fell asleep, exhausted. It was their thing. Star Wars, every year.

  There would be no Star Wars with Hugh and Darcy tonight.

  This year, everything had been thrown up in the air.

  He’d had a week’s notice that Karen’s dog-sitter had to pack up and leave—one of her parents had had a heart attack—so he’d volunteered to come down to Remarkable Bay to look after the mutt. Karen, his patrol partner, owner of the house and the mutt, was due to finish her stint in rehab just after Christmas, but she was heading from Adelaide Airport directly to her parents’ place to spend some quality time with her family before she headed home. She needed to be with her parents and her little brother, who’d been as worried about her as he’d been. Karen had put in the long stretch and was almost done. Two and a half months before, he’d put her on a plane with a sad and tender hug, telling her he’d take care of everything.

  And if looking after her mutt for a week or so was what he had to do, then he would do it.

  His patrol partner’s slow slide into oblivion had been hard to watch and even harder to bear, but he knew from experience that all he could do was support her and wait. Nothing good ever came from pushing someone to do something they weren’t ready for. Karen had managed to stay dry on the days she was at work—which was a minor miracle—but off duty, she’d sought solace in vodka. When he’d gone around to check on her, the day she admitted she needed help, he’d found her passed out on the kitchen floor. When the ambos had come to take her to hospital, he’d searched every nook and cranny in the place and had found empty bottles stashed everywhere: in the back of various kitchen cupboards; in the linen press shoved behind folded sheets and towels, for fuck’s sake. That had been the final straw. After that incident, she’d been forced to take sick leave from the force and had finally relented and admitted herself into rehab, some well-regarded place in Melbourne.

  He hadn’t heard from her the whole time she’d been away, the woman he thought of as a little sister.

  The partner he owed his life to.

  George turned in bed and looked out the window to the cloudless Christmas Day sky above Remarkable Bay. His time with Shawna and Paul and the kids was a reminder that there were normal families out there, untouched by crisis and chaos. It was true what people said about cops, he thought. The boys and girls in blue were the experts in the worst kinds of human behaviour. In all its fucked-up variations, he’d seen it all.

  That’s why he was missing Shawna and Paul and the kids on this day of all days.

  He looked down at the mutt sleeping by the side of the double bed. He was in the spare bedroom, smaller than Karen’s and with only a double bed and a bedside table in it, but there was still a view. And even though the dog seemed to hate him, she insisted on being in the same room as him.

  ‘Hey, Fluffy.’ George propped himself up on one elbow and yawned.

  The dog opened one eye. She really was a mutt: some kind of terrier-chihuahua mix with little legs and wispy fur all over her body. Knowing Karen as he did, it was no surprise she’d adopted a stray when she’d announced four years ago that she wanted a dog. The mutt had a face only a mother could love.

  ‘It’s just you and me, dog. At least for a few more days until Karen gets home. You’re gonna like me, I can tell.’

  Fluffy slowly raised herself and turned, showing George her back. Or her arse, to be precise.

  George took that as a cue to get out of bed. He padded into the living room on bare feet and stood in front of the wide windows. The house was nice, small but open plan and it sat up on the hill above Remarkable Bay, so there were decent views out to the ocean if you were tall and the trees on the property below were being blown in just the right direction.

  George didn’t think Karen lived here for the views. She’d chosen the Bay for its peace and serenity, because it was as far away as she could get from the mean streets of the troubled suburbs they had patrolled together.

  Those troubled suburbs where drugs and family dysfunction and mental illness had taken hold.

  Those troubled suburbs where she’d been shot.

  He remembered that night like it was yesterday.

  It had been called in as a 104—a potentially violent disturbance—and they thought they were prepared but a knock on someone’s front door had turned into an ambush. George had turned to observe two teenagers in the street hovering around their patrol car and hurling the kind of abuse they’d heard a million times before, which meant Karen saw the gunman a split second before he did. It happened so fast. He heard the door swing open and there was a shout and she was in front of him, then a flash and a bang and she was hit. The bullet had torn into her left shoulder and churned up everything inside.

  That had been three years ago. He’d learned since then that when you knocked on someone’s door, you stepped back, waited out of their line of sight. He was never going to put a partner at that kind of risk again. After six months off work, Karen had gone back on patrol with George. But she had changed. She’d become hyper-vigilant during shifts; the thought of seeing shooters at every corner sent adrenaline coursing through her. The flip side to that, the comedown, was hard to watch. After the shift came the detachment, isolation, depression. Karen had admitted to him once that she found it hard to make a decision about anything the moment she walked in the door after a shift, which made her then partner, Nora, angry and finally pushed her into someone’s else’s arms.

  George had always had strategies in place to cope with the job. He’d grown up with a father who lived in two worlds and who’d been an expert at never letting them collide. When George was growing up, he’d thought his own father was a cranky old bastard who didn’t want anything to do with his family. His dad had been a cop 24/7, old school. He’d driven away his kids and eventually his wife, and George had vowed never to be that kind of man.

  George had avoided doing that to a family by choosing not to have one. That’s why he was alone. Things with his last girlfriend, Chrissie, had come to a crunch point about moving forward and having a family—or not—and he’d chosen not. It was easier to be alone than to explain what it was like to go into a house and pick up a dead baby from its parents’ bed, suffocated because they’d got stoned and rolled over onto their child. Or to knock on the door in the middle of the night and tell parents the worst news imaginable.

  No one should have to put up with that if they themselves hadn’t signed up for the job. He’d always made sure he had down time so the force didn’t take over his life. He ran four times a week. He lifted weights. Staying physically fit was as important for his mental health as everything else. He read books, crime novels, because he liked the way that justice was always served in the end. He liked that fictional coppers always got the bad guys—or bad girls.

  He hadn’t planned on it, but maybe the beach was the best place to get the balance right in his head. He’d been chest deep in Karen’s problems for a while and now she was in rehab, he could pull back a little. Karen was in good hands. She wasn’t there against her will and she wanted to recover, which was a good sign. The mutt was being fed and watered. He’d catch up with Shawna and Paul and the kids for a delayed Christmas meal and screening of Star Wars when he got home.

  Some time at Remarkable Bay. He could do that. He could run on the beach and read some books. All he’d had to do in terms of planning ahead was find somewhere to have Christmas lunch. The local pub was the only option so he’d booked a table there.

  Because there was no way he was going to miss out on turkey and pudding.

  All of this was a small price to pay for helping Karen. Even if it meant putting up with the mutt.

  Cha
pter Two

  Mara had packed a couple of pretty sundresses for her holiday and they were now draped on hangers hooked over the back of the bedroom door. One was a mix of blues and greens with a pop of yellow, an off-the-shoulder style that felt a bit daring when she’d bought it. The other was a sleeveless maxi dress with big red and white flowers on a black background.

  Now she was nervous about her fashion choices. She didn’t feel flamboyant and floral today, or most days, really. The only place she ever liked being the centre of attention was at the front of a classroom. She was used to wearing practical clothes to school: trousers with a crisp shirt, or a knee-length skirt in the warmer weather with a straight-laced top and flat boots. She needed to wear clothes that were compatible with being on her feet all day and walking from one classroom to another across the vast campus of the high school where she taught. And then there was lunchtime yard duty every couple of weeks. She’d grown used to sensible. Now she faced walking into Christmas lunch at the Remarkable Bay pub looking like a walking flower arrangement.

  Her pretty new sundresses were not sensible. They were colourful, they screamed ‘look at me’ and she didn’t particularly want people looking at her.

  She pushed herself up from the edge of the bed. This was ridiculous. This wasn’t the classroom. She was on holiday in a sleepy beachside town where thongs and shorts were de rigueur. People on holidays wore all sorts of things they would never in a million years consider wearing back home: Bintang singlets, beaded kaftans, henna tattoos. Those ridiculous Bali braids.

  ‘No wonder you can’t make a decision about your life. You can’t even make a decision about a dress,’ she told herself. ‘Toughen up, princess.’

  * * *

  ‘Do you have a reservation?’

  It was half an hour later and Mara had arrived at the Remarkable Bay pub for lunch. A gangly young waiter was checking the booking sheet at the bar. He was wearing a collared shirt that was too big for him and a nervous smile. His manner suggested he’d only been at the job a couple of minutes and in puberty even less.