Sunset Ridge Read Free Page A

nearly eighty years a bull-nosed veranda had skirted the Harrow family home and the gauze-enclosed porch had remained a welcoming sight with its scattered timber chairs and numerous potted rubber plants. Madeleine recalled sitting on the veranda with her father many years ago, and it seemed to her that with the renovation of the front porch that particular memory, one of her fondest, had been diluted. Where once she could picture old squatter’s chairs and her father’s dusty boots sitting inside the back door, there was now only a brick wall.
    At the new back door, made of shiny inlaid wood, Madeleine dumped her belongings in order to turn the brass doorknob. It refused to budge. She knocked once, twice, three times as the wind picked up and grit whirled about the building, spraying her bare legs in an arching sting. Her beloved father had died in 1980 and his passing made her both angry at the world and scared for the future. Disbelief at her grandfather’s legacy being sold to keep the property afloat was not the only reason for her dislike of Sunset Ridge. Her father had given up his own career to work the property after Jude had inherited it, and eventually the land had taken him.
    â€˜Hello? Anyone home?’
    The steady hum of airconditioning carried through the late-morning air.
    â€˜I thought I heard someone. You must be Madeleine. George said you’d be coming. He and the missus are in town for a luncheon.’
    The croaky voice belonged to a woman aged somewhere in her sixties. She stood at the corner of the house with an overflowing laundry basket on her hip and a dead chicken in her hand. Her hair was grey and cropped short, and her face was lined. ‘I’m Sonia, the housekeeper.’
    â€˜Hi.’ Madeleine’s gaze fell to the bird. Blood dripped from its neck.
    â€˜You’ll have to lug all that around to the back, I’m afraid. The missus had the front veranda enclosed and now the lock’s gone on the door.’
    â€˜Gone?’ Madeleine repeated as she walked around the house in pursuit of the housekeeper, her belongings burning the muscles in her arms with their combined weight.
    â€˜Busted,’ Sonia emphasised over her shoulder. ‘That’s what happens when you get that type of fancy stuff freighted out here. Once it’s broke, there ain’t no one to fix it.’
    The walk along the length of the homestead revealed grass and scraggly clumps of saltbush and flowering plumbago. The house was saved from the worst of the westerly sun by a row of trees outside the garden fence, however part of the ancient bougain­villea hedge had disappeared, leaving the house to suffer the brunt of the weather. The side veranda had been enclosed with cream-painted timber to keep the dust out and although this side of the house was now a bland wall, it held three evenly spaced windows along its length.
    At the rear of the house Madeleine noticed a new but empty terraced flower bed at the back of the garden, and a new gazebo with a beige cane table and chairs. The lawn was amazingly green for late February during a roaring drought, yet the garden seemed sparse. She noticed that a number of trees and another hedge were gone from the back of the garden, and with their removal the garden fence had been brought forward twenty metres. For the first time Madeleine could see the house paddock fence glimmer in the midday sun. Beyond lay dense woody timber through which the road wound back to civilisation.
    â€˜They’ve made it smaller,’ Sonia explained, as if reading Madeleine’s mind. They crossed an expanse of sandstone pavers sheltered by sail-like cloths attached from the house’s awning. The sails extended outwards and were secured by three tall aluminium posts. ‘They’ve been carting dam water in one of the thousand-litre fire-fighting units to keep some of the flowers and shrubs going, while the bore water keeps the lawn