Thornwood House (35 page)

4 p.m. Friday, 17 October 1986

God, oh God, I wish I’d never looked.

At lunchtime, I told Mr Abbott I felt sick with period pain and he let me go home. I knew there’d be no one here. Dad’s in Brisbane for work, and Mum’s doing the late shift at the hospital, Tony’s off somewhere. Perfect, I thought. Grabbing Dad’s spare key from the windowsill, I let myself into the shed. It didn’t take me long to find the letter. It was in a big old tin, all crumpled up and torn to bits . . . but I didn’t even bother reading it.

Not after I’d seen the bundle.

It was a fat wad of envelopes with old-fashioned stamps, tied with ribbon. I took them back to my room and spent a couple of hours reading and re-reading them. And now I don’t know what to do.

I have to talk to someone. Corey, maybe. We’re supposed to be fighting, but I need her right now. This is bigger than a stupid fight between friends. Bigger than pride. All I need to do is say I’m sorry and that I love her and I want to be friends with her again. She’ll understand, she’s good like that. I’ll ring her now . . . Just as soon as my heart stops crashing about and I can gather my wits to speak.

Then again, maybe I should tell someone higher up the chain, like a teacher. Maybe Ross? Yeah, Ross’ll know what do to. Afterwards I’ll go to Corey’s and see if I can stay with her for a while. Even just the weekend. I can’t face anyone here, not now.

At least, not Dad. And especially not Mum.

God. God. I wish I’d never looked.

6 p.m. Friday, 17 October 1986

I was shaking like a leaf when I rang Ross. I told him it was urgent, and he said he’d come and pick me up. There was thunder in the distance, and the first few sprinkles of rain on the roof. All I wanted to do was climb into Ross’s big warm station wagon and try to feel safe again. But just before we said goodbye, I heard a car pull into the drive.

Since Mum was doing the late shift and wouldn’t be home ’til after eleven, I knew it must be Dad. He’d freak if Ross showed up here, and I knew he’d never let me get into the car with him, regardless of Ross being my teacher. Besides, the last person I wanted to see right now was Dad. So I told Ross I’d meet him at Grandfather’s house, where we could talk in private. Ross said he could be there in an hour and a half, which seemed like an eternity away, but then he insisted he’d drive me to Corey’s afterwards, which made me feel better.

So I packed my bag, luckily remembering Corey’s present at the last minute, and left a note on my pillow for Mum, saying I’d ring her once I got to the Weingartens’. Then I climbed out my bedroom window and raced up the hill towards Grandfather’s.

Right now I’m huddled inside the hollow tree. The rain set in twenty minutes after I left home, dammit. A sprinkle at first, but by the time I got to the edge of Grandfather’s garden it was bucketing down and I had to take shelter inside the burnt-out beech. I’m drenched, and the tree reeks – ancient charcoal and possum poo – but it’s better than drowning in the deluge outside . . . or worse, sliding arse-over-turkey down the muddy slope.

Now I’m sitting here in the dark, just my little torch beam to write by. The bundle of letters is zipped inside my windcheater pocket. It doesn’t weigh much but somehow it feels like a brick. My thoughts about those letters are a muddled mess, I can’t even write about them. Every time I go there, my mind shuts down. Not true, it says. Just not true.

The wind is flying through the trees, making the leaves hiss and the branches groan. Half an hour’s gone by but the rain isn’t
slowing. I’ve still got time to meet Ross. It took five minutes to pack, forty to get here – so I guess he won’t show for another fifteen, providing he’s on time. I should just brave the rain and run down the hill to Grandfather’s house now, but there’s no electricity and the place is creepy when the shadows come out. I’m freaked out enough after what I read in the letters.

It’s silly, but I keep remembering something Corey once told me, about that old cabin up in the hills on the park border. It’s a spoogly old place, I’ve only been there a handful of times ’cos it gives me the willies. Tony and Danny swear it’s haunted. Doesn’t seem to worry them, though – they’re up there all the time when the weather’s dry, doing whatever it is that boys do in the bush, pretending to be bushrangers or whatever.

Anyhow, one day Corey told me she dreamed about the old cabin. ‘I was standing in the doorway,’ she said in a whispery voice, ‘looking inside. It was dark and someone was in there. I wanted to run away but was too scared to move. The cabin was dark, but over by the window stood a woman. The moonlight fell on her and I saw she was smeared all over in blood and could tell she was dead. But here’s the worst part. She must’ve sensed I was there because she looked over her shoulder and stared right at me. I woke up screaming.’

‘You baby,’ I told her, rubbing my arms to chase the creeps.

‘But Glenny,’ she’d whispered. ‘This woman . . . she had your face.’

Shit, what a drongo. It still scares the daylights outta me. I shouldn’t have written it down. That’s the one thing I worry about with writing stories – all those twists and turns in the tale, some of them scary, some sad – how does a writer avoid attracting that stuff into her own life? Ross says writers – artists and musicians too – are protected by their muse, but I’m not so sure. I once wrote a story about a girl whose mother died, and soon afterwards Mum went to bed for a week and refused to get up. I was so scared, I thought she was going to die. Worse, I convinced myself that because of my story, I’d killed her. And then one day she just got up, had a bath and washed her hair,
then carried on as if nothing had happened. But it made me wonder – just how much power do words have?

I wish I had that power now, I’d make the rotten rain stop this instant. I just poked my head out. The landscape is lost behind a watery curtain, the trees are dark blurs, hazy as ghosts . . .

Damn. Ghosts again. I’d forgotten how spooky Grandfather’s place can be at night. No one ever comes here except me and Tony . . . and just that once, Mr Miller. He looked a bit like a ghost that day with his crazy white hair, and eye bandaged and blotched with blood like something out of a horror movie –

Shit. I have to stop scaring myself. I need to wee again, and now I’m all nervy and jumping at shadows. Hey, the rain’s stopped roaring on the leaves, it must be letting up. Just checked my watch, I’ve still got a couple of minutes to run down the hill and meet Ross –

God, who’s that? Someone’s calling my name.

It must be Ross, got here early and come looking for me.

Hang on, I’d better go and see.

That’s where it ended. I flipped through the diary, causing a few careless rips in my eagerness to find just one more entry – a paragraph, a single sentence, anything. But the remaining pages were blank.

For a long while I huddled in my desk lamp’s bubble of light, surrounded by darkness. My thoughts whirled like moths in a windstorm, battered this way and that by the fierce gale of my growing unease.

I realised I’d just read the diary entry Glenda had written the night she died. October 1986, directly before Corey’s sixteenth birthday. I recalled something else Corey had told me, about Glenda leaving home because of her parents’ row. Only there’d been no row. Glenda had come home early from school that day and found a bundle of letters in her father’s shed. Letters with old stamps, tied with ribbon. Letters whose content had disturbed her.

Love letters, perhaps. From Hobe Miller to her mother?

By her diary entries, I’d surmised that Glenda had been closer to her father. I could understand how finding evidence of her mother’s betrayal of him had driven Glenda to seek support from a trusted teacher. She’d telephoned Ross, left a note for her mother, and escaped out her bedroom window.

And then the storm. The rain.

The hollow tree.

God, who’s that?

The following day, Luella had discovered her daughter’s body in the gully, almost a mile from the tree. Glenda had died after an apparent rockslide sent her plunging down the steep gully wall to the rocks below. An accident. A tragedy. Case closed.

And yet . . .

Less than a week ago, Bronwyn had found Glenda’s haversack hidden in the tree where Glenda had sheltered that night. Had Glenda’s meeting with Ross resolved her fears about the letters she’d found? Had she changed her mind about going to Corey’s, and headed home instead? If so, then why had she left her belongings hidden in the tree – her clothes and makeup, her hairbrush; the tin box that held her treasured diary?

I nibbled a ragged thumb nail. Again I had the feeling that a breach existed, a gap between the facts and my understanding of them. I knew I was overlooking something, missing a vital link . . . but whichever way I turned, the truth shifted, changed shape, morphed into something darker and more worrying.

A picture was forming. One I didn’t much like.

An accident that might not have been accidental.

A death that wasn’t what it seemed.

Then, another image broke into my mind’s eye. A tall scarecrow of a man balanced on the ladder-like branches of the hollow beech tree in the clearing. His arm sunk to the elbow in a fissure at the tree’s fork, searching for something that had lain hidden in the dark cavity for twenty years.

‘M
um, did you realise there’s a type of wasp that preys on cicadas?’

The morning air was cool and damp. It was eight o’clock and I’d just stepped out of the shower. Still in my robe, I made a beeline for the coffeepot. Bronwyn was already at the table, a plate of toast and jam within easy reach as she pored over a battered library book.

Scooping fresh grounds into the filter, I set the pot on the stove to boil. ‘I expect I’m about to.’

Bronwyn bit into her toast, chewed and swallowed, her eyes never leaving the page. ‘It’s called a cicada-hunter, and it flies up into the treetops and stings the cicada to stun it. When the cicada falls to the ground, the wasp mounts it and rides along on it, sort of pushes it ahead with its hind legs, sometimes as far as a hundred metres!’

‘Fascinating.’

‘The best part is when the wasp drags the cicada down into its burrow and files it in a shelf with a whole bunch of other numb cicadas, then lays an egg right inside its paralysed body. Later, when the egg hatches, the baby wasp grub has a ready-made food source. Talk about gross,’ she added raptly.

I blinked through the window, trying without much success to banish the vision of a helpless creature trapped in some ghastly hole, awaiting its fate as grub-food.

‘Thanks for sharing that,’ I muttered, ‘it’s really made my day.’

Bronwyn wasn’t listening. Her head was bowed back over her book as she nibbled a toast corner, shaking her head in private marvelment. ‘I can’t wait to tell Jade.’

I hovered at the window while my coffee brewed. I’d had little sleep after reading Glenda’s final entry, haunted by why she’d abandoned her belongings in the hollow tree. And by why, all these years later, Hobe Miller had gone in search of them.

There was one person who might know.

‘So how are you liking your new teacher?’ I asked Bronwyn. ‘Mr O’Malley, isn’t it?’

I’d been expecting her usual preoccupied monosyllable in response, so was surprised when her head jerked up.

‘He’s a creep,’ she said darkly.

My brow twitched, but I knew better than to probe. The moment she detected the merest hint of curiosity she’d clam up and any useful snippets would be sucked into the black hole of info that was too good to be given out for free. So I poured coffee, feigned absorption in the newspaper, then said in a bored tone, ‘That bad, is he?’

‘Oh Mum, he’s a total sicko. Jade hates him as well; she says he picks on me, and it’s true. He’s always asking me dumb questions, always staring. And he’s coming to the school camp next week, worse luck.’ Flipping the library book shut, she scrambled from her chair and delivered her plate to the sink. ‘Why are you so interested, anyway?’

‘I’ve got a meeting with him tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Great,’ she said bleakly, tucking her book under her arm and heading for the door. ‘Might as well prepare yourself to be depressed.’

‘He can’t be that bad, Bron,’ I reasoned. ‘Corey mentioned him last night. He was her teacher when she was at school. He taught your father as well.’

Bronwyn looked back, surprised. ‘He taught Dad?’

‘And your Aunty Glenda. That’s why he stares, because you look like her.’ The noisy rumble of a car motor cut into our conversation. Bronwyn and I exchanged a look, then rushed into the lounge and peered through the venetians. A blur of white was parked behind a thick bottlebrush, but there was no other sign of our unannounced caller.

We both startled as footsteps thumped up our back stairs and along the verandah. The sound magnetised us to the kitchen window like a pair of iron filings, but our visitor had ducked out of sight into the alcove that sheltered the back door. There was a knock, and Bronwyn and I made a mad dash to see who it could be.