‘You mean you didn’t really want to be a vet?’ Gus said, incredulous. ‘But you’re, like, the horse whisperer.’
‘I didn’t not want to be a vet. I’ve always loved animals and I absolutely adored spending time up at Cape Ashe Stud.’ Claire shrugged. ‘I just hadn’t given it too much thought. I guess I wasn’t used to making my own decisions. I had the grades, so vet science seemed like a natural choice.’
Liar. Scotty was the natural choice.
‘So when Scotty was in Sydney with you, who was spying on your dad? Mum?’
She shook her head. ‘Like I said, Dad made sure he always put on a good show, especially around Aunty Vee. He told everybody he’d decided to “diversify”. He was going to grow acai berries.’
Gus nodded sagely. ‘They’re a superfood,’ she said. Another Cosmo fact, no doubt.
‘See, nobody in Bindallarah would have known that back when I lived here,’ Claire said, rolling her eyes. ‘But yes, they’re one of those foods that hipsters like to post pictures of on social media. South American farmers couldn’t keep up with the worldwide demand, apparently, so Australian growers were going to be rolling in cash. The climate up here is perfect, Dad said.’
‘Sounds like a good idea,’ said Gus.
‘It was,’ Claire replied. ‘At least, it could have been.’
‘Oh.’
‘It was going to be an expensive operation to set up. Dad would have to import acai palm seeds from Brazil and build a processing facility. They’re hard to process because the fruit is small but the stone is big, and they have to be harvested really quickly or they lose the health benefits people are so obsessed with.’ Claire paused. ‘You learn a lot about acai berries when your father uses them to defraud people of hundreds of thousands of dollars.’
‘Why didn’t it work out, then? It sounds like a great opportunity,’ said Gus. ‘Did the crop fail?’
Claire sighed. ‘There was no crop. Dad convinced dozens of locals to invest in his scheme in exchange for profit share. Some of them put in their life savings and he promised them the world. But he didn’t plant a single tree.’
‘But weren’t people suspicious? Didn’t they ask where the trees were? The processing plant?’
She shook her head. ‘Nope. He’d told them at the start that the trees were slow growing and it would be a couple of years before they saw any return on their investment,’ Claire said. ‘They were happy to wait. Everyone in Bindallarah trusted Big Jim Thorne.’
‘Let me guess, he used the money to improve the dairy farm instead,’ said Gus.
‘Most of it. The rest of it he drank. His alcoholism got so bad he couldn’t have made the farm profitable even with the most state-of-the-art equipment on the market.’
Claire’s chest tightened and hot tears pricked at her eyes. She thought of her father hidden away in the hills above Bindallarah, alone and desperate on his sprawling farm. An outcast by design, seeking solace in the bottom of a bottle.
‘And somehow he hid it from all of us.’
Both Claire and Gus startled at the sound of Vanessa’s voice. Claire turned to see her aunt leaning against the lounge-room doorframe, silhouetted by the fading twilight sun streaming through the glass front door.
Claire started to apologise for revealing the truth to Gus but stopped herself. Gus deserved to know why the ghost of Jim Thorne still haunted both her mother and her cousin.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this, Mum?’ Gus said, a note of accusation in her tone.
‘Because I thought there ought to be at least one member of the Thorne family who’s not trying to carry a burden that isn’t hers to bear,’ Vanessa said simply. She focused her attention on Claire. ‘Nobody in Bindallarah blames you for what your father did, sweetheart. You were just a child. How could you have been responsible?’
The tears that had been threatening spilled over in a torrent. ‘He was my dad,’ Claire sobbed. ‘I should have known what was going on. I should have been here. He wouldn’t have done it if I’d been around to help out. I abandoned him.’
Vanessa hurried to the sofa and wrapped her arms around her niece. ‘Claire, nobody knew what was going on. Jim made sure of that,’ she murmured into Claire’s hair. ‘You didn’t abandon your dad. You were a teenage girl living her life, which is exactly what you should have been doing. Your being here couldn’t have prevented the farm’s downward spiral. Jim drove the property into the ground all by himself.’
‘But at the funeral they said . . .’
‘At the funeral people were angry. They were confused,’ Vanessa said. ‘Hurtful things were said in the heat of the moment. You know how small towns are. They took their frustrations out on us because they couldn’t confront the man himself.’
‘Wait,’ Gus piped up. ‘You’re saying people didn’t know Uncle Jim had fleeced them until after he died?’
‘The full extent of the “fleecing”, as you so eloquently put it, my darling, only became clear when I started digging around as the executor of Jim’s estate,’ Vanessa replied. ‘If he hadn’t drunk a bottle of Scotch and collided with a tree that night, he may have continued swindling his friends for years.’
Claire winced. It was a harsh assessment, but it was true. Who knew how many more thousands of dollars Jim would have stolen if he’d had the chance? His debts were so massive by the time he died that there was no way he ever could have repaid them without the extent of his scam becoming clear to everyone. He would have faced bankruptcy, prosecution, probably even jail time.
But having a convicted fraudster for a father would have been preferable to the reality, Claire thought. In her darkest moments, she wondered if he had driven his ute into
