Hazel Wood Girl Read Online Free PDF

something to do. Dad is way more of a softie than Mum, and when I begged him, he let me help get some papers together for a business meeting to do with ownership of the farm.
    Adam is not exactly a business genius and I spent the morning scrabbling around for contracts and letters in the dining-room/office, and found most of them inside old farming magazines and between unpaid bills from the last century almost.
    It was a bit of a shocker to realise that Dad is now in charge of the whole farm. I presumed Adam would be here forever, and that Dad would get so frustrated with the whole muddy mess of farming that one morning he’d wake us up and tell us to pack to return to the city. But, as well as finding out that the farm is now Dad’s, Adam told us at lunch that he’s got a job in the Far East teaching English-as-a-foreign-language. He’s going at the end of the summer.
    This is beyond horrible, my worst nightmare. It feels like a stone sitting in my stomach and like my head is full of nothing but air. Maybe I can run away and become a film star and divorce my parents or whatever they call that. I really hate it here, more than I have ever hated anything, even more than I used to hate violin lessons with the old shouty lady. Farms are fine for little kids, boring people, and old people, but not for teenagers and not for people with dreams and an imagination. I cannot spend a whole summer looking out the kitchen window in case my cute neighbour (who, as if I need reminding, laughed at me like I was the fool of the universe the only time we met) might decide to walk past. 
    I think Dad could tell I was in a not-good way, and he brought me to the meeting in the town hall with his lawyer and some other people; I don’t really know who they were. The lawyer made a joke about us being there to sign me over to a new family and I found the idea appealing.
    The town hall was a good place to get away from things because it looks like it’s from somewhere far away, even though it’s on the main street. It’s like a red-brick, German-fairytale castle from a horror movie, super-old and small with turrets, arches, carved wooden banisters and panelling, and mosaic tiles on the floor.
    My backside was in bits waiting on the hard mahogany benches in reception because Dad is always on time for things and the rest of the world is always late. The secretary was really lovely to us, and even in the middle of the meeting she came in with more tea, and gave me the last of the chocolate wafer biscuits.
    Meetings are where people take two hours to say things that could be said in two minutes. The best I can tell, it was about some legal contract with the Egg Farm Grangers, who own the stone barn at the edge of our farm, the one right across the little road from their house and chicken sheds. They lease out the big, stone barn to us (like renting it to us) and Dad says it’s the best one for storing hay.
    For all their shiny shoes they didn’t know much. The lawyer has no clue if the Grangers even own the barn that we are paying them to use. That would be like me collecting rent money for hiring out the café. A bit on the cheeky side to say the least. If that is true than the person that really owns the stone barn could find out and run us off with hunting rifles. Well, they didn’t say that last part, but I bet that could happen. People get funny about their stuff. Like the way Mum is getting pissed off with all the food disappearing from our kitchen garden.
    We have started calling it, ‘The Murderous Mystery of the Vanishing Vegetables’. Dad thinks that it might be a homeless person passing through, except now it’s been happening for more than a week. I think it must be animals. It’s not the same as dogs in the city that eat tinned dog food, or stuff from the deli if their owners are rich enough. The animals here are not polite. A whole row of the early spinach went missing this morning and some of the broad beans. Dad says