Free The House at the Bottom of the Hill by Jennie Jones

it’s hard but the only way you’ll get yourself accepted is to accept people first. Believe me, I know how this is done.’
    ‘If you say so.’ She hadn’t wanted to make friends but neither had she expected to be disliked. Having to befriend the townspeople was a setback but without doing so there’d be no progress.
    ‘Six o’clock. Don’t be late or I’ll get Dan to drive back and pick you up—in fact, that’s a brilliant—’
    ‘No, thank you,’ Charlotte said quickly. ‘I don’t need a lift from Hotshot. I’ll drive myself.’
    Silence.
    Charlotte nipped at her bottom lip with her teeth. ‘Sammy, are you planning on trying to push Daniel and me together?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘Oh.’ She paused. ‘The air bristles between us every time we meet,’ she argued. ‘You noticed that the other night.’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘You’re not going to believe me when I say, again, that we don’t get on. We don’t like each other.’
    ‘Nope.’
    Charlotte sighed. ‘You’re incorrigible.’
    Sammy laughed—a merry chirrup. ‘Yep. See you Saturday if not before.’
    Charlotte put the telephone and the screwdriver on the hall table. It seemed ungracious not to accept the blossoming of a friendship with Ethan’s wife, and Charlotte had a hankering for a friend, but she hadn’t intended to latch onto the hand Sammy was offering. Get in, crack on and get out had been her plan, although she’d known what she was getting into by buying the B&B and how much effort it might take to resell it. Not that she needed the money from the sale; she had enough money to see her through two lifetimes, courtesy of those hotel executives, and would return every penny to have her old life back—but that wasn’t possible.
    Finding the B&B for sale had been fortuitous—she had no idea how she’d have stayed in town during her investigations otherwise, or what excuse she could have given for popping back every day if she’d booked into one of the neighbouring towns’ guest houses or hotels. But then she hadn’t thought her plans through properly. She’d simply waltzed into the real estate office in Canberra waving her cheque book and smiling at the amazement on the saleswoman’s face as she made a cash settlement, just below the already reduced asking price, for a property that had been on the market for over two years. Given the list of renovations she planned, including some that weren’t necessary but would certainly give the house a genuine sparkle, perhaps she’d also bought it for the challenge of bringing it back to life.
    Disappointment at her lack of judgement thrust a wedge into her resolve to be unflinching and stubborn. She turned from the door, walked halfway down the hall and stopped. She leaned her forehead against a flocked peony on the wallpaper and braced herself against the wall. ‘You came here to get answers,’ she whispered. She’d never intended to charge in and ask Ethan the questions straight out—she’d hoped to discover more about him and how he was involved first. Now she knew the people in Swallow’s Fall, she understood her cautious approach had been the right approach. But she should be getting on with finding those answers—before she got too deeply enmeshed in the lives of the townspeople.
    An image of Olivia Simmons’s caring face shone through Charlotte’s unease and she had a sense of her gran hovering around her in a cloud of comfort. She’d clung to the safety of Gran’s hand every day for the first three months after being whisked from Australia to that foreign place. Gran walked her around the village, introducing her to the pond where they fed the ducks and named each one, playing a guessing game the next time they visited to see if they could pick out Griselda from Giuseppe or Mozart from Miranda. And eventually, after months of counselling—walking with Gran to the red-brick Victorian junior school. Being handed over to the principal and left there for six hours, during