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accessed his money, and as Jenny had discovered with Ray’s insurance payout, if you can manage to get enough of the stuff together in one place and leave it untouched, it had a habit of breeding. Jim’s hundred thousand pounds had doubled long before Australia changed its pounds to dollars, an event that seemed to double his balance yet again. Jenny found herself looking at figures she’d previously related to the rich and famous, not to Jenny Morrison, who ran her kitchen as she ever had, frugally, who grew her own produce, because she preferred to eat her own produce, who each year made her own jams and preserves the way Granny had taught her to. Until she’d started playing shopkeeper, she made her own money too. Customers travelled from Willama to pay inflated prices for Jenny’s dressmaking services and what she earned with her hands felt more real to her than the figures on Jim’s bank statements.
    She owned two bankbooks, one opened when Ray was killed in a sawmill accident. The mills had insured their workers. On paper, she’d been Ray’s widow but she’d always thought of that money as Raelene’s and Donny’s.
    It had paid for Donny’s funeral, had bought a stone for his and his father’s graves. Jenny had withdrawn more from that account to pay for Raelene’s funeral, though not for a stone. Far better that the girl be forgotten in this town.
    The second bankbook had been opened for her by Jim when they’d been together in Sydney during the war. It had become Jimmy’s blood money account since ’47 when Vern Hooper, with Ray’s assistance, paid two thousand pounds into it, Vern’s idea of compensation when he and his daughters stole Jenny’s son. ‘No grandson of Vern Hooper would be raised a bastard in this town,’ he’d said.
    Jenny had never touched that blood money. The book was untouched, except in June when the bank paid in its annual interest; she handed it to a teller then so he might update its balance – which had grown each year since ’47 – as had her beautiful boy, somewhere.
    Jim never mentioned the son he’d known for that brief week in Sydney when Jimmy had been ten months old. Jenny knew why. He blamed himself for losing him. Had he returned to his family after the war he could have played a role in Jimmy’s raising, but he’d chosen Jenny. Jim never mentioned his family – all dead now, other than Lorna. He never mentioned the war. Jenny understood that too – or most of the time she understood. Maisy didn’t. Jim dodged Maisy’s visits when he could.
    John and Amy McPherson had become his friends; Amy, a retired schoolteacher, John, Woody Creek’s shy photographer, who had fifty years of photographs and negatives stored in one of his bedrooms. It had only been a matter of time before Jim, Woody Creek’s historian, and John had got their heads together. They’d created an incredible book for Woody Creek’s centenary, a pictorial history of the town, and the men had worked on other projects since – a hobby, rather than a profession, until Amy came up with an idea for a children’s book.
    She’d been born with fairy dust in her eyes. She’d turned John’s two and a half acres into a fairy land garden, had turned John’s talent with a camera into magical wedding albums, then one Sunday morning, she’d come to the house with a batch of photographs and an idea to build a children’s book around one of Jenny’s rhymes.
    Jim, a facts and figures man, had come on board – at first he’d been reluctant, but since posting their fourth children’s book, Butterfly Kingdom , off to their Sydney publisher, he’d been nagging as hard as Amy for another rhyme.
    They were an odd foursome. John was seventeen years Jenny’s senior, Amy six or eight years senior to John, but they’d become family to Jenny, close family.
    Jenny glanced at her watch. Still plenty of time. She’d dug up Vern Hooper’s back lawn to the east of the house and turned it into a vegetable