The Pretty Delicious Cafe Read online

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Pretty Delicious Recipes Strawberry Ice-Cream Cake

  Chocolate Brownie

  Boysenberry Cheesecake

  Bread Dough

  Cinnamon Buns

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  One Wednesday in October I spoilt a perfectly good spring evening by going to bed with a book called Run, Bobby, Run. Hugh at the deli had lent it to me that afternoon when I dropped in for twenty kilos of coffee beans, promising a gripping, fiendishly clever read, and after a solid fortnight of my late Great-Aunty Sheila’s Anne Hepple novels I thought that sounded like just the thing.

  It wasn’t. Two weeks of Anne Hepple does, it’s true, leave you with the feeling that you’re sinking into a bath of warm pink syrup, but there are much worse things. Such as fiendishly clever thrillers about psychopaths who abduct and torture teenage girls, eventually mincing them up to feed to the next victim.

  I read that horrible bloody book until eleven, and then I lay awake thinking about psychopaths, and how easy my bedroom would be to break into, and whether I’d make it across the road to Monty’s on foot without being caught if I heard someone at the window. And then it occurred to me that Monty wasn’t home; he was fishing up the Ninety Mile Beach.

  And then I heard footsteps on the gravel outside.

  When you live four kilometres out of town, three-quarters of the way up a steep hill, visitors tend to drive, not walk. And very few of them arrive at – I looked at the digital alarm clock on my bedside table – eleven fifty-seven pm. My heart gave a great, sickening thump, and began to beat so fast and so hard I felt the blood thrumming in my ears.

  Someone knocked on the back door and, sitting straight up in bed, I screamed like a banshee. The sound shocked me back into silence, and from outside came the rustle of breaking greenery and a dull thump.

  ‘Shit,’ someone said. ‘Hey, sorry, it’s okay . . .’

  Hand to throat like the heroine of a melodrama, I got out of bed and tottered across to the open window. It was the old-fashioned hinged sort, held open by a brass bar with holes along its length that could be dropped over a peg on the window frame. Good for stopping the window from banging shut in the wind, but completely useless as a barrier to passing murderers.

  Outside in the moonlight a slim young man in jeans and T-shirt was picking himself up out of the flax bush beside the back steps. He didn’t look like a murdering psychopath – although, presumably, the most successful ones don’t.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I got a flat tyre at your gate, and there’s no jack in my van.’

  I looked at him dumbly, unable, between ebbing terror and rising shame, to say anything at all.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘I’ll go. Sorry.’

  ‘I’ve got one,’ I whispered. ‘A jack.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Can I borrow it?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Oh. Um, okay. Of course.’

  The house had been built before the era of internal garaging and my car lived in a shed thirty metres from the back door, across a stretch of very sharp gravel. Switching on the porch light I let myself out, squinting in the sudden brightness. In Elmo pyjamas and bare feet I picked my way across the stones to the shed, reached the car and realised I hadn’t brought my keys.

  ‘Sorry, forgot the key,’ I said, turning and starting painfully back.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said my midnight caller. ‘I’m sorry about this . . .’ He stopped, perhaps feeling that all these apologies were becoming a mite repetitive.

  I had retrieved my keys and was tackling the gravel for a third time when a vehicle on the road below slowed and then turned up the driveway. It took the slope with a roar, dark shadows racing before the glare of its headlights.

  It’s his accomplice, I thought wildly, fumbling with a handful of keys in an attempt to grip one between my knuckles as a weapon.

  A ute swept around the corner of the house and stopped just two metres in front of me. Through the dazzle of headlights I saw a figure leap out, rifle in hand, and I shot towards the back door like a bolting hare.

  ‘Stop right there, arsehole!’ cried the gun-wielding maniac. ‘Lia, call the police! You, lie down, or I swear I’ll shoot you.’

  ‘Rob,’ I croaked, sagging back against the doorframe as the other man dropped smartly to his stomach on the gravel.

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ my brother demanded.

  ‘No! Let him up! He just came to borrow a jack – he’s got a flat tyre.’

  There was a short, charged silence before Rob said, ‘So what the hell was your problem?’

  ‘I’m sorry! I was reading a book about a serial killer who kidnapped girls and tortured them, and then this poor guy wandered up and knocked on the door and scared me half to death.’ I started towards the prone figure in front of Rob’s ute. ‘Please get up. Look, I’m really sorry, we’re not insane, honestly; it’s a – a twin thing. Sometimes you know when the other one’s in trouble, or at least when the other one thinks they’re in trouble . . .’ I trailed off, feeling like a complete idiot.

  ‘Lia, you moron, shut up,’ Rob snapped, reaching into his ute to switch off the headlights. Now that he was no longer obscured by their glare I saw that he was wearing only a pair of pink satin pyjama shorts, which must have been the closest thing to hand when he leapt out of bed. They were very short and very tight on him, and the effect was truly horrific.

  Puncture Man was getting to his feet.

  ‘I’m really sorry, mate,’ Rob said, putting down his rifle. ‘I’ll come and give you a hand with your tyre – is that your van just down the road?’

  ‘Er, yes,’ said Puncture Man. He sounded somewhat wary, as well he might.

  ‘I’ll get the jack,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got one,’ said Rob. ‘Go to bed.’ Happening just then to look down he noticed the satin shorts, and his expression went from irritated to appalled.

  ‘Pair of shorts to cover them up?’ I offered.

  Ignoring this, he laid the rifle across the back seat of his ute and climbed stiffly behind the wheel. The other man got in beside him, Rob executed a rapid three-point turn, and they vanished down the driveway.

  I let out a long, shaky breath and began once more to pick my way across the stones to the back door. Rob and I had always had a nebulous and ill-defined awareness of the other one’s state of mind – I believe quite a few twins do – but dragging him from sleep to rush to my rescue was a first.

  I was at the door when the phone began to ring. Running down the hall to the kitchen, I picked it up just before the answer phone cut in. ‘It’s okay! Don’t worry.’

  ‘What happened?’ cried Rob’s fiancée.

/>   ‘Nothing. Only that I’m an idiot. I scared myself stiff reading that book Hugh lent me, and then some poor guy with a flat tyre came and knocked on the door and I thought he was a serial killer. Rob must’ve picked up on how scared I was. I’m really sorry.’

  There was a long, blank silence down the phone. ‘Shit, Lia,’ she said at last. ‘Honestly? You’re not standing there at gunpoint?’

  ‘No, I’m not. Promise. Rob’ll be home in ten minutes; he’s just helping the guy change his tyre.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Anna slowly. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’

  Today, actually, according to the microwave clock on the other side of the big industrial kitchen. (Anna – who was my friend before she was Rob’s girlfriend – and I owned and ran a café, and I lived there.) I toured the premises, locking every door and window as I went, returned to my bedroom, kicked Run, Bobby, Run, hit the end of my middle toe squarely on its spine, swore for a while and hobbled back to bed.

  * * *

  I dreamt of home invasions and minced teenagers, which made waking up in the morning much more pleasant than usual. Getting up with unprecedented relief, I went along the hall to the kitchen, made myself a coffee with two shots of espresso and took it outside to sit on the porch steps.

  Our café is called Pretty Delicious (modesty is overrated), and it sits on a hill above a small coastal town in Northland called Ratai. It started life as a rather pretentious villa, built after the Second World War by a local farmer and his wealthy American wife. They retired to California in the seventies and the house, rented by a series of increasingly dodgy tenants, fell into disrepair. When Anna and I bought it there was a good-sized inkweed bush growing up through the porch and someone whose religious convictions were stronger than their grasp of punctuation had painted JESUS DIED FOR YOU’RE SINS across the dining room wall. Which was lucky, because over the last twenty years Ratai has turned from a sleepy seaside village full of ageing hippies and single mothers into a trendy holiday destination, and if the house had been anywhere approaching liveable we’d never have been able to afford it.

  Our combined savings and some significant parental investment got us a bank loan, and we gutted most of the inside of the house, leaving two small bedrooms and a seriously nasty black marble and faux crystal bathroom at the back. We took out every bit of internal wall that we could at the front without collapsing the roof, and created an open-plan kitchen and seating area with high ceilings and polished wooden floors. We furnished it with mismatched second-hand chairs and tables and shelves full of books, partly for a cool retro look but mostly because it cost less than buying new stuff, and we were inordinately proud of it.

  It was a wonderful morning, very clear and still. The lawn was silver with dew, the growing tips of the kauri trees on the ridge shone coppery pink in the early sunlight and two quail were pacing self-importantly along the top of the hedge. They and the coffee dissolved the last traces of nightmare, and when Anna arrived at seven thirty I had a lemon yoghurt cake in the oven and was chopping onions. She ran up the porch steps and let herself into the kitchen, taking an apron from the hook behind the door.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, blinking away onion tears.

  ‘Morning.’ She switched on the kettle and took a camomile teabag from her personal tin.

  ‘Freaked out?’ I asked, after the silence had stretched long enough to become uncomfortable.

  ‘Little bit,’ said Anna.

  ‘Me too.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Rob was beside himself.’

  I winced. ‘On the way out or when he got back?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Reckon he’ll ever talk to me again?’

  ‘I expect so,’ she said dryly.

  The dryness annoyed me. Serves me right for apologising, I thought, slicing the top off my next onion with more force than strictly necessary. Saying you’re sorry for things you couldn’t help just implies that you could have helped but decided not to.

  Anna and I had been friends, minor frictions notwithstanding, since sharing a dogfish preserved in formalin in a first year university Animal Biology lab. We spent every Thursday afternoon of one semester dissecting him, after which we would adjourn, with the scents of formalin and decomposing dogfish lingering in our nostrils, to the campus dining room for fish and chips. I was always sorry about that, because fish and chips should have been the best meal of the week.

  Post graduation, she went to work for the Auckland Regional Council as a water-quality consultant and I moved to the bottom of the South Island to trap stoats. We stayed in touch, though, and two years previously, when she’d just left both her job and her investment banker boyfriend and I was wondering if my father had a point and I really was incapable of settling down and behaving like a grownup, we’d decided to bite the bullet and start a café. We both loved food and cooking, and we both felt it was time we did something constructive with our lives.

  When we first opened for business my brother Rob was living in Tauranga, a four hour drive away. He designed our outdoor seating area during a visit home and came back the next three weekends running to build it, motivated not by devotion to his twin but by the burning desire to impress her beautiful friend. Three months later he moved home and started his own business, and Anna, who only weeks beforehand had declared herself to be off men, probably for good, packed up her belongings and moved in with him.

  It proved to be an excellent idea, although it had seemed a trifle rash at the time. They were very good for each other – he shook her up and she settled him down – and I was honestly delighted that they were getting married. I’d have been even more delighted if they’d just eloped, though – Anna, foodie though she was, had always had a slightly odd attitude towards actually eating the stuff, and the stress of planning a wedding seemed to be making her worse.

  * * *

  Business that day was brisker than usual for the time of year, and at ten to two I had just farewelled a group of middle-aged ladies and was wiping down their table when someone behind me said, ‘Hey, trouble.’

  I spun around to see a man in his forties, with greying fair hair and good-natured crinkles at the corners of his eyes. ‘Mike!’

  ‘How’s it going?’ said my half-brother.

  ‘Good. Great.’ I dropped my dishcloth and hugged him. ‘You?’

  ‘Oh, fine.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘Buying a second-hand baler in Pukekohe,’ he said. ‘So I thought I might as well come and see you lot, since I was most of the way here.’

  ‘Can you stay for the weekend?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I need to be home by tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Bummer,’ I said. ‘Have you seen Mum yet?’ (My mum; his ex-stepmother. Our family tree is a little involved.)

  ‘I dropped in, but she wasn’t home.’

  ‘No, that’s right, she’s at her friend Carole’s place, tying herself in knots.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong?’ Mike asked, looking mildly alarmed.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Actual knots. They’re doing some sort of advanced yoga workshop.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  ‘Carole’s befriended this strange little man who wanders around in a loincloth telling people they need to live their lives on a spiritual plane. Which means they should give all their worldly goods to him, so he can distribute them to the poor.’

  ‘Or keep them, presumably.’

  ‘I’m exaggerating,’ I admitted. ‘I think he’s harmless.’

  ‘You, exaggerate?’ said Mike. ‘Surely not.’

  Anna, approaching across the polished wooden floor, laughed.

  My family has long accused me of a certain carelessness with the truth, and I have long been wounded by the injustice of their allegations. Surely exaggeration is a perfectly legitimate way of improving the story. If I say there were seventeen million mosquitoes in my bedroom la
st night, it doesn’t occur to me that anyone would think I mean it literally. ‘You sound just like Dad,’ I said.

  ‘Low blow, Lia,’ said Mike. ‘Hi, Anna, how are you?’

  He hadn’t eaten, being one of those strange and unfathomable people who think missing a meal is no big deal. We plied him with bacon sandwiches and cream sponge and sent him off to find Rob, who was building designer stone walls around a wealthy businessman’s cliff top section ten minutes up the coast.

  ‘He’s such a sweetie,’ said Anna. ‘Why hasn’t he got a wife and kids?’

  I pulled a hairclip from the knot of hair at the back of my head and skewered a curl that had made a break for freedom. ‘Pass. He’s had girlfriends, but they never seem to last longer than a few months.’

  ‘Oh well, maybe he just likes his space,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said doubtfully.

  The phone rang, and she raised an enquiring eyebrow at me.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, picking up the portable phone. I’m not infallible, but I’m usually right. It’s not actually all that useful a talent – caller ID is more accurate – and it’s certainly not one I advertise. People are either far too impressed or they think I’m making it up, and neither is good. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hi, love,’ said Mum. ‘Having a good day?’

  ‘Yes, fine. How was yoga?’

  ‘Hideous,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I very much doubt I’ll be able to get out of bed tomorrow.’

  ‘Hot bath?’ I suggested.

  ‘I’m having one now.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t drop the phone.’ My mother has left phones outside in the rain, dropped them into the sea, buried them in the compost heap . . . Her personal best, I think, was losing one into the hopper of a garden mulcher.

  ‘No, dear,’ she said patiently.

  ‘Mike’s here,’ I said.

  ‘Our Mike?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘How lovely!’ said Mum. ‘I haven’t seen him for ages. Is he staying?’

  ‘Just for tonight.’

  ‘I’ll go and make up a bed now. And you’ll all come for tea?’

  ‘I expect so. He’s just gone off to see Rob.’

  ‘I’ll ring Robin and invite them both. About seven?’