The House On Burra Burra Lane Read Free Page A

you set foot inside the gate on Burra Burra Lane, hasn’t it?’
    That damned house. He should have kept it … or burnt it to the ground twelve years ago.

Two
    S ammy stepped onto the bottom bar of the gate at the end of her driveway, hauled herself up, and settled her bottom on the smooth, pale grey rail. She pulled the hem of her T-shirt over her track pants, and tried to rock the gate with a thrust of her hips. It hardly moved. Stuck in dense clumps of grass, well rooted in the ditch. Perhaps the gate hadn’t been closed for years.
    She looked up and inhaled the country. The scent of growth and earthy regeneration. Grass, scrubby patches of grevillea, gentle alyssum, scattered eucalypt leaves and fallen bark.
    The sound of peace. Hushed but not silent. Humming with unseen activity.
    She swept a hand through her hair and held it back from her face. The air had surely flown over a cold mountaintop and bumped into the sun to have such a freshly warmed tingle in it.
    She ran her gaze up the driveway. Oliver would split a seam on his handmade business suit if he saw this. Her mother wouldn’t hold back the derogatory comments either. But they weren’t here. She didn’t even have to think about them.
    She swung her legs. Everything around her was hers. The pleasure and the promise. This fantastic old gate with crossbars and rusty brackets—she slapped her hands on the rail. The mailbox across the ditch leaned at a drunken angle, but that was easy to fix. Quick-drying cement, probably. Dig a hole, straighten the post, hold the post until the cement dried.
    She wrinkled her nose. How long was quick?
    A flock of birds rose to the sky, squawking and screeching. She jerked, braced on the gate with her hands and feet. The branches of the gnarled gum tree in the field across Burra Burra Lane shook and rattled as gang-gang cockatoos flew off.
    She glanced at her watch. Almost three o’clock. ‘He might not come,’ she said aloud. Strange to speak and have no-one but the insects and the breeze listen. ‘Which is fine,’ she said to the sky. ‘Because I’m only sitting here to take a break.’
    Couldn’t blame him if he didn’t turn up anyway. He’d been kind and easygoing until she’d made that stupid remark about his doctor’s coat.
    ‘Oh.’ She slapped the gate. Too much deliberating. Samantha talking, not Sammy. She’d let a silly moment go haywire, that’s all. She was bound to make a few mistakes; she’d only been here eleven days.
    She took her gaze back to the homestead. She’d transform the house into a home. It sparkled even now, in her mind, in her heart. The sunlight cast dappled drops of happiness on its neglected trusses.
    The burgundy metal roof slanted sharply over three dormer windows jutting out of biscuit-coloured weatherboard on the top floor. The stone blocks of the ground floor, aged to a peppered honey colour, looked invincible beneath the deep colonial veranda running from corner to corner.
    The ramshackle porch extension on her kitchen wasn’t visible from here, but it was near to collapse. The old outhouse needed attention too.
    A truck’s engine thrummed in the distance.
    She turned to the lane. The driver of the big blue ute had to be Dr Ethan Granger. The vet. The carpenter.
    She’d never been shy before yesterday. Not silly shy; the kind that prickled and heated the skin. There wasn’t time for timidity now either. She was no longer the impatient little girl, pretending stillness for her mother, wanting to please and be pleased. The daredevil kid who’d snuck out behind Verity Walker’s stiffened back was up and running again. The grown woman had reclaimed some of the young tomboy’s courage. About time.
    She eased her shoulders down. This was her first shot at making a go of things her way. No-one was going to feel sorry for her, especially not this man. The man who’d possibly already drawn conclusions about her. Well; she wasn’t asking for help, she was hiring help. If he