The Phoenix

CHAPTER FIVE

Helen Martindale pushed her greying hair back from her doughy, round face and fixed it back in place with a bobby pin. She smiled patiently at the young woman opposite her, who hadn’t looked up from the single-page contract Helen had handed her more than six minutes ago, reading and re-reading every line of text as if it held the answer to the meaning of life.

‘It’s just our standard vendor’s agreement,’ Helen explained. ‘Shouldn’t be any surprises in there.’

The young woman kept reading.

‘We’ll get you a fair price for the place,’ Helen said reassuringly. She was delighted that Mimi Praeger’s granddaughter had chosen to list the valuable Paradise Valley ranch with Martindal

e and Jessop, rather than go with some fancy city realtor, offering all of those ‘virtual tours’ and ‘social media presence’ and promising pre-drought prices that locals like Helen Martindale knew couldn’t be achieved any more.

‘Is there something bothering you, hon?’ Helen asked, once a full ten minutes had passed.

‘Hmm?’ Ella looked up, bewildered, as if suddenly seeing the older woman for the first time. ‘Oh, no. Thanks. Everything’s fine. Do you need me to sign something?’

Helen Martindale pointed to the dotted line at the bottom of the page and handed Ella a pen. The poor child seemed to be in a world of her own. Of course, she’d always been a funny one, a few biscuits short of a breakfast, as Helen’s daddy used to say. No wonder, given the isolated life she’d been forced to lead up at that ranch. Other than at school, she barely ever got to play with other children and learn how social interactions were supposed to work. But she seemed worse than usual this morning. Maybe parting with the ranch and saying goodbye to the cabin she’d grown up in was proving more of an emotional wrench than she’d anticipated.

‘Are you staying on the property while you’re here?’ Helen asked, kindly.

‘No,’ said Ella. She didn’t intend to be rude; she simply didn’t have any facility for small talk.

‘Well, that makes things easier from our point of view.’ Helen smiled. ‘Feels hard for you, I daresay, coming back to the valley now your grandmother’s gone?’

Not sure how to respond to this observation, Ella stood up, shook Helen’s hand stiffly, and left, closing the office door behind her.

Helen Martindale looked through the window as the girl stood on the sidewalk, swaying like a poplar tree in the wind, uncertain which way to go, before suddenly deciding to make a left on Main Street.

Poor thing, the real-estate agent thought again. She wondered whether the profits from selling the Praeger ranch would make her new client’s life better or worse, and she couldn’t quite shake the depressing feeling that it was probably the latter. Ella’s problems, Helen Martindale rightly suspected, weren’t the kind that you could fix with a check.

It did feel hard coming back to the valley, but not because Mimi had gone. Right now Ella was still too angry with her grandmother to allow in any other feelings. No, what was hard was the fact that she was still in limbo, with no idea what the next chapter of her life would look like. Stupidly, she’d put off her job search until she heard back from ‘the man’, who’d promised he’d be in touch again within a few days. It was now nine days since his unannounced visit to Ella’s apartment, and she’d heard nothing from him since.

Not that she had the remotest intention of joining his ‘group’ or attending whatever nonsensical ‘training’ it was that he had in mind for her. But she’d been looking forward to delivering that defiant message in person. And, if she was honest, simply to seeing him again. Although she didn’t like to admit it, the man’s random appearances in Ella’s life provided a thrill that was only partly connected to the tantalizing clues he offered about her parents.

But now he was entirely absent, leaving Ella to return to Paradise Valley feeling even more hopeless and deflated than she had at the funeral. Thankfully, so far, Ella hadn’t run into any of her old high-school classmates/tormentors. That would really be the icing on the—

‘Well I never! If it ain’t Miss Ella! Ella Praeger, as I live and breathe!’

If it had happened to someone else, it would have been funny.

Danny Bleeker, blond, blue-eyed Danny, star pitcher on the Paradise High baseball team and bane of Ella’s life from tenth grade right through to her senior year, was bounding across the street to greet her like an overexcited puppy.

‘How the hell are you, Ella Praeger?’ She wasn’t the most adept at reading these social interactions, but the strange thing was, he seemed genuinely pleased to see her, smiling broadly and placing both hands on Ella’s shoulders, as if she were a long-lost cousin or cherished old friend. He looked the same, although possibly his dark blue mechanic’s overalls gave him a slightly more mature look than he’d had back in High School. ‘I thought it’d be a cold day in hell before you showed up back in town again. Things didn’t work out in San Francisco?’

‘My grandmother died,’ said Ella, with her usual directness.

‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Danny.

‘I’m selling her land.’

Danny Bleeker whistled. ‘That must be worth a pretty penny. So you’re rich now, huh? Or you will be. Well that’s great. Good for you.’

Just at that moment a deafeningly loud babble of voices, like a hundred crossed wires, exploded in Ella’s head like a burst speaker. She clapped both hands over her ears and doubled over, wincing in pain.

‘What is it?’ Danny asked, instinctively wrapping an arm around her. ‘What just happened?’

Ella froze, waiting for the shrieking voices to recede – they usually did within a few seconds – before wriggling out from beneath his arm. ‘Nothing. Only a headache.’

‘You still get those?’ he sounded concerned. ‘You know you should really see a doctor. That shit’s been going on for years. D’you remember in Miss Haelstrom’s class, you—’