Nikki and the Lone Wolf / Mardie and the City Surgeon: Nikki and the Lone Wolf / Mardie and the City Surgeon

Sixteen years …

‘Get another one fast.’ Fred, the Banksia Bay vet, had been brusque. ‘The measure of a life well lived is how many good dogs you can fit into it. I’m seventy years old and I’m up to sixteen and counting. It’s torn a hole in my gut every time I’ve lost one, and the only way I can fill it is finding another. And you know what? Every single one of them stays with me. They’re all part of who I am. The gut gets bigger.’ He’d patted his ample stomach. ‘Get another.’

Or not. Did Fred know just how big a hole Jem had left?

Don’t think about it.

Watch Nikki instead.

He lay and watched woman and dog sleeping, just across the passage. Strangers seldom entered his house. Not even friends. And no one slept by his fire but him.

Until now.

She looked … okay.

She’d wake soon, and she’d be gone. This moment would be past, but for now … For now it felt strangely okay that she was here. For now he let the comfort of her presence slide into his bones, easing parts of him he didn’t know were hurting. A dog and a woman asleep before his fire …

He closed his eyes and sleep reclaimed him.

* * *

She woke and it was three o’clock and Horse was squatting on his haunches rather than sprawled on his side. His head was cocked to one side, as if he was trying to figure her out. Sitting up! That had to be good.

She hugged him. She fed him. He ate a little, drank a little. She opened the French windows and asked him if he needed to go outside but he politely declined, by putting his head back on his paws and dozing again.

She thought about going back to work.

The plans on the table were supremely uninteresting. Engineering had sounded cool when she enrolled at university. Doing stuff.

Not sitting drawing endless plans of endless air conditioning systems, no matter how complex.

Gabe’s living room, however, was lined with bookshelves, and the bookshelves were crammed with books.

And photograph albums. Her secret vice.

Other people’s families.

Nikki had been sent to boarding school at seven. If friends invited her home for the holidays her parents were relieved, so she’d spent much of her childhood looking at families from the outside in.

Brothers, sisters, grandmas, uncles and aunts. You didn’t get a lot of those the way she was raised.

Her friends could never understand her love of photograph albums, but she hadn’t grown out of it, and here were half a dozen, right within reach.

A girl had to read something. Or draw plans.

No choice.

The first four albums were those of a child, an adolescent, a young woman. School friends, beach, hiking, normal stuff. Nikki had albums like this herself, photographs taken with her first camera.

The albums must belong to Gabe’s mother, she decided. The girl and then the woman looked a bit like Gabe. She was much smaller, compact, neat. But she looked nice. She had the same dark hair as Gabe, the same thoughtful eyes. She saw freckles and a shy smile in the girl, and then the woman.

After school, her albums differed markedly from Nikki’s. This woman hadn’t spent her adolescence at university. The first post-school pictures were of her beside stone walls, wearing dungarees, heavy boots, thick gloves. The smile became cheeky, a woman gaining confidence.

There were photos of stone walls.

Lots of stone walls.

Nikki glanced outside to the property boundary, where a stone wall ran along the road, partly built, as if it had stopped mid-construction. Wires ran along the unfinished part to make it a serviceable fence.

She turned back to the next album. Saw the beginnings of romance. A man, considerably older than the girl, thickset, a bit like Gabe as well, looking as if he was struggling to find a smile for the camera. Holding the girl possessively.

An album of a wedding. Then a baby.

Gabe.

Really cute, she thought, and glanced across the passage and thought … you really could see the man in the baby.

Gabe before life had weathered him.

The photos were all of Gabe now—Gabe until he was about seven, sturdy, cheeky, laughing.

Then nothing. The final album had five pages of pictures and the rest lay empty.

What had happened? Divorce? Surely a young mum would keep on taking pictures. Surely she’d take these albums with her.

She set the albums back in place, and her attention was caught by a set of books just above. The Art of Stone Walling. The Stone Walls of Yorkshire. More.

She flicked through, fascinated, caught in intricacies of stone walling.

Gabe slept on.

She was learning how to build stone walls. In theory.

She’d kind of like to try.

She reached the end of the first book as Horse struggled to his feet and crossed to the French windows. Pawed.

Bathroom.

But … Escape?

Visions of Horse standing up to his haunches in the shallows sprang to mind. She daren’t risk letting him go. The faded curtains were looped back with tasseled cords, perfect for fashioning a lead.

‘Okay, let’s go but don’t pull,’ she told him. At full strength this dog could tow two of her, but he was wobbly.

She cast a backward glance at Gabe. Still sleeping. Quick check. Chest rising and falling.

She and Horse were free to do as they pleased.