“You hear that, Renee?” Angelo exclaimed. “How’s that for a coincidence? The kid shows up on our doorstep after all this time and now Lori’s asking about her.” He leaned toward me. “How do you know her, Lori?”
“Her great-grandaunts are close friends of mine,” I said. “They live in England and they’ve asked me to get in touch with Bree for them.”
“Renee and I have known Bree since she was ten years old,” he said.
“We spent six months in Takapuna,” said Renee, “while Angelo set up his business—”
“Got a chain of cafés,” Angelo interrupted. “They’re eating my wings in Paihia, Auckland, Wellington, Nelson, Queenstown, and Dunedin. Can’t get enough of them. Renee and me, we’re making out like bandits.”
“Angelo is the wing king,” said Renee, bestowing a tolerant smile on her husband.
“If you have cafés all over New Zealand,” I said, “why did you choose to live here? Didn’t you realize how close you’d be to Mount Ruapehu? ”
“Ohakune’s a great place to live,” said Angelo, slapping the table. “Not too big, not too small, and lots to do. And I’m telling you, Lori, we feel safer living next door to a volcano than we did walking down the street back home. There are too many angry people in the States and way too many guns.”
“It’s not a good combination,” said Renee. “I should know. I’m a nurse.”
“Here they use guns to kill possums and deer and wild pigs—not each other,” Angelo went on. “And let me tell you, possums are a real problem in this country—they demolish native trees—so don’t go feeling sorry for them.”
Cameron made a gallant attempt to get the conversation back on track. “So you spent six months in Takapuna . . .”
“Rented a nice little beach house,” said Angelo, without missing a beat, “right around the corner from the Pyms. Used to run into Bree all the time on her way home from school. Nice kid—good manners and sharp as a tack. We kept in touch with her for a while after we moved to Ohakune.”
“What’s all this about ‘we’?” Renee demanded. “I was the one who kept in touch with her.”
“And I kept in touch with her through you,” her husband retorted. He turned back to me. “Her grandma died about a year after we left—God rest her soul—and we stopped hearing from Bree after that. You know how it is. Kids are so busy these days.”
“Since when is a person too busy to send e-mail?” Renee grumbled. “It takes two seconds.”
Angelo ignored her and continued talking to me. “You cannot imagine how shocked I was when Bree walked into the café, Lori. I’m telling you, I was floored.”
Renee snorted derisively. “You didn’t even know who she was until she told you.”
“True,” Angelo admitted. “Bree’s not a little girl anymore, and when we lived in Takapuna, she didn’t have short hair.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Bree cut her hair?”
“It looks like she sawed through it with a butter knife,” Renee informed me. “If she had it done at a salon, she could sue for damages.”
“That’s the style,” Angelo objected. “It’s cool.”
“If looking like an escaped lunatic is cool, then her new hairstyle is cool,” Renee conceded.
“Enough about her hair already,” said Angelo, giving his wife an exasperated glare. “A girl like that, she could shave her head and she’d still be a knockout.”
“Bree’s a pretty girl,” agreed Renee.
“She was looking for work,” Angelo continued, “so we fixed her up with a job cleaning rooms at The Hobbit.”
“The Hobbit?” I said.
“The Hobbit Motor Lodge,” Renee clarified. “It’s up the road. You passed it on your way to the Powderhorn.”
“And let me point out that The Hobbit’s been around for a long time,” said Angelo. “The original owner was a Tolkien fan way before they started making these movies.”
“A lot of us were,” I said. I hesitated briefly, then asked, “Why didn’t you give Bree a job at your café?”
“I had a full crew,” Angelo replied. “Besides, the season was winding down. Renee and I were getting ready to close up shop here and head for our condo in Wellington.”
“We like the theater,” said Renee. “And the restaurants.”
“And the museums and the night life,” Angelo added.
“It makes a change from Ohakune,” Renee concluded.
Two waitresses arrived with our dinners, sending Angelo into a spirited digression concerning the freshness of the locally grown produce and the rich flavors of the hormone-free meat.
“No hormones, no antibiotics, no factory farms,” he said. “They don’t mess with Mother Nature in New Zealand.” He slapped the table again. “In this country, food tastes the way it’s supposed to taste.”