The Serpent's Skin by Erina Reddan (top 5 books to read .txt) 📕

separate those girls. After their parents died, Sarah would never have survived Great Aunty Dot without Peg’s spark. Dot was in her seventies when she got them, and she ran a very tight ship. Didn’t believe in kids. Did believe in the Almighty. But Peg could get round her. Naughty as hell. And Sarah was like a mother to Peg. Just about killed her when your dad kicked Peg out. She was never the same.’

‘Peg must have had the smarts, though, ending up with her own place.’

‘That was Sydney. Never knew his real name. Older fella from Sydney who kicked around with us for a bit. He got lucky one night at poker, won the deed of the Parkton house. Signed it over to Peg as soon as Jack threw her out.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Well.’ She seesawed her hand again. ‘He got her pregnant.’

‘Peg was pregnant?’

‘Happened then. More then than now, tell you the truth, what with the pill.’ She examined the remains of her cigarette.

‘What happened to the baby?’

I touched my hand to my belly and then realised what I was doing and let it fall before Mrs Tyler put two and two together.

‘Miscarriage.’ She massacred the cigarette under her heel. ‘Filthy things.’

I stabbed at the stones behind me with my Doc. ‘Okay,’ I said, putting this new thing into what I knew. ‘But even though somebody gave her the house, she had to keep paying the bills all these years, somehow.’

‘All that hoarding,’ Mrs Tyler said. ‘Peg went through the mountains of junk she picked up from those garage sales with a fine-tooth comb first, found a lot of things worth a few bob and kept herself afloat.’

‘Not only mad, then.’

‘She had a solid vein of sanity in there, all right.’ She stabbed a finger at me. ‘Find it. That’ll tell you something about what really happened to your mother. About time we know, don’t you think?’

MARKING TIME

‘Casual Thursday, hey JJ?’ asked Suze as I passed her desk.

‘Nope. Casual funeral,’ I said, wondering what I’d been thinking turning up to work in jeans. ‘Just popped in to double-check everything’s set for next week.’

‘Hey,’ Tye said to me as he dropped a file on Suze’s desk, giving her a gratitude smile. Despite everybody knowing about us, he was scrupulous about professional relations at work, but his drawn-together brows were busy asking a lot of questions.

‘I skipped out on the spread,’ I said, biting my lip. ‘With the court date for the Stintini case being moved up…’ I ran out of steam and investigated the corners of the ceiling.

‘That bad,’ he said, pulling me down the corridor. He closed the door to the photocopying room behind us. ‘You are such a chicken.’ He made a few noises he thought a chicken made, although I’d never heard anything like that from any chicken I’d been acquainted with, which I told him.

‘Who was there?’ he asked, ignoring my careful evidence-based analysis of farmyard culture.

‘Not my dad. Not my brother.’ He hadn’t met Dad even though we’d been going out a couple of years. I gave him the rundown on who had showed up.

‘So you ran away from a few CWA women and their scones.’

‘You are such an innocent,’ I said, taking a precarious seat on the paper-shredder bin.

He squatted down in front of me getting serious with a few well-honed lawyerly questions that went to the heart of things. He laughed in all the right fire-engine-red-knickers and bowling-skittle-priest places. ‘But you’re okay?’ He ran his golden-brown hand over the sandy pale of my bare arm, his eyes wide and warm. I nodded. It was the truth—if I focused on just what I’d told him. And the thing was, I had no plans to focus anywhere else. Not on Mrs Nolan trying to track me down to apologise. Not on Mum’s cameo burning a hole in my pocket. Not on Mrs Tyler trying to rope me back into ‘Mum’s Mystery’. I’d never not told him stuff before. But since I was busy not telling myself the same things, I didn’t consider it deception. It was survival. I was good at survival. Besides, we had bigger things to talk about. I scratched in the hollow above my hip bone.

‘Still,’ Tye said, leaning in to brush his eyelashes over my cheek, before locking in to me, eye to eye, a breath apart. ‘Can’t have been easy,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t think you should be at work.’

I shrugged. ‘Nobody else’s going to sort out the Stintini case.’

He sat back, knowing I was nothing but right. Everybody had to do pro bono stuff, but I had a habit of taking the no-count ones that nobody else would touch because it would never put them a rung higher on anything.

‘Except me.’ He smiled.

I grinned back. ‘You and all that time you got on your hands.’ He was working directly with Maurice on a big case they weren’t talking about and his hours had gone from ridiculous to insane.

‘I’m free tonight,’ he said. ‘Fried rice on me.’

It was my favourite. I closed the distance between us to press my lips into the sweet musky smell of his.

In the end, what with the jeans and the questions and avoiding Maurice because I needed to take him on about inviting my dad to the ceremony behind my back but wasn’t up to it, I gathered a few files and left the office. It was Maurice who put me up for the award in the first place. He’d called me into his expansive, windows-everywhere office at the end of a long day, gestured towards the hard leather armchairs in what he thought of as his informal alcove and told me about the award. I’d argued with him, told him there were plenty of others who deserved it more, had been there longer—Tye, for instance. Maurice raised his right eyebrow in that way that had intimidated many a witness and waited for