Chapter 7
Fiona
I’m lying in my bed and there’s a man hovering over me. He doesn’t have a face, but he does have a knife, and it’s close to
my neck. He’s speaking, and I can’t make out the words, but I know he’s threatening me—telling me to stay quiet.
I scream and cry until I run out of breath and then I’m suffocating but no one comes and I’m alone with him and time seems
to be stretching and stretching and how long have I been stuck here like this—
I sit up with a shout and my surroundings snap back to reality in an instant. I’m alone in my room—of course I’m alone, but
the fear feels like a physical sensation, like a hot current of terror running through my blood, into my legs and my arms and my stomach.
I am drenched in sweat and shaking. Outside my window, the sky is brightening with the dawn of a new day. I can’t stay in
this house another second.
I pull my walking clothes on and run down the stairs and out the front door, gasping at the cold morning air as I step onto
the veranda. I’m trying to talk myself down as I walk, telling myself that Jon’s nightmare simply got into my head and Tad’s
stories around town are haunting me.
And the stern self-talk works—to a degree. Ten minutes into my walk my heart rate has come down a little and I feel like my mind is clearing, like the fog of the fright is passing.
A car pulls out from Jack’s family farm’s driveway up ahead, engine roaring quietly, headlights on. I haven’t seen cars out
here my last two mornings—this is a quiet road most of the time. It slows down as the driver sees me, and my heart sinks when
I realize it’s Jack.
Oh my God. I’m a mess. I reach up and touch my hair, only to find it is sticking out at all manner of angles—frizzy and matted
from the tossing and turning as I slept. There’s nothing I can do about it now, but my face heats anyway as he pulls to a
stop beside me.
“Hey, Fi,” he greets me. “Nice morning for a walk.”
I decide not to tell him I am not walking so much as sprinting away from my haunted house.
“You’re up early, too,” I say.
“I’m doing some farm visits over at Condobolin today so have to get an early start. But I was actually going to call you today—wanted
to invite you to reader’s group tonight at Turn the Page.”
I wince at that. “I’m not much of a fan of book clubs, Jack.”
A group of school mums started a book club when Mia was in grade 2 and I went a few times, but the meetings were an odd mix
of gossip and pretentious literary criticism and it just wasn’t for me. I went to another once, comprised primarily of my
team from W&J Heritage, but most members of that group never got around to reading the actual book and in time it just dissolved.
“This isn’t a book club, Fi,” Jack scolds me gently. “It’s a reader’s group.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“Not even close.”
“But I won’t have read the book . . . !”
“It’s not like that. Just bring something to read—anything you want. I’ll pick you up at 6:40 p.m.?” I hesitate again, but
he flashes me a half smile. “It’s not like it’s out of my way. This thing at the bookstore is really relaxed, I promise. You’ll
love it.”
What I’ll love is not being all alone with my thoughts for a night, rattling around in that house with too much time to think and work myself
up into such a state that even a nightmare feels like a haunting, and so although I’m not exactly in a sociable mood, I agree
to go.
“Hi, Fi,” Jack greets me that evening as I walk down the front stairs towards his truck. I offer a smile and slip into the
passenger’s seat.
“How was Condobolin?” I ask him.
“I had to retrieve semen from a bunch of Angus bulls today. Just another day in the life of a vet,” he chuckles. “Were you
architecting here today?”
“I don’t know what you picture when you say ‘architecting,’ but I’m going to be at the drowning-in-dust stage of the project for a while yet,” I mutter. I spent most of the day trying to dust the ballroom and didn’t even make
a dent. Those massive living areas might just be the death of me. “Tell me about this book club—”
“Reader’s group.”
“Reader’s group.”
“It’s the kind of thing better experienced first-hand,” he tells me. He takes his eyes off the road just for a second to glance
over at me and smile. “I remember how it felt in those first few months after Winnie and I split. I didn’t much want to see
or talk to anyone, but after a while, I figured out that too much of my own company wasn’t great either. You might see some familiar faces here tonight but there’s not much time for chatting the way Marilyn runs this group. And if you hate it, you never have to come back.”
“It’s kind of you to invite me.”
“You’ve always been deeply unpleasant company, but what can I say? It was the neighborly thing to do,” he says solemnly, and
I laugh and playfully nudge him, like we’re twelve years old again.
The farther we get from Wurimbirra, the more relaxed I feel.
Maybe this was a good idea after all.
There’s at least twenty people at Turn the Page and even at first glance, I recognize maybe a third of them—including, to
my surprise and dismay, Alan and my mother. But before I can even digest that, Marilyn the bookseller runs through the crowd
to greet me and Jack at the door.
“Jack! Welcome, you know the drill.” He playfully salutes her and wanders into the store, but Marilyn grabs me by my upper
arms and plants a kiss on my cheek. “Thank the Lord you’re back, Fiona, because this town is not the same without you. I think
we’ve missed you every day these past—what—thirty years?”
“I’ve visited you plenty of times, Marilyn,” I protest, laughing.
“It’s not nearly the same as having you back here for good,” she says. I’m not sure if that statement is overly generous or
completely misguided. I wasn’t exactly a local celebrity, other than my association with my uncle and much cooler cousin.
But I love everything about Marilyn Owens—from her elegant sense of style to the white-blonde hair she now wears in a sharp
bob. I remember a hint of Muelhens 4711 in the air of the bookstore when I was a teenager working here, and that same scent lingers as she hugs me.
Marilyn opened the store just as I started high school in the early ’70s. In the beginning, this was a dark, narrow space—with
haphazard, mismatched shelving and a category system that could best be described as “loose.” By the time I started working
for her in ’75, Marilyn had found her feet. The space was still small and a little dark, but she knew exactly how to categorize
and display books in a way that locals responded to. Once I moved away, the store continued to evolve. For a while, it felt
like every time I came home, Marilyn had made some dramatic improvement—first, she replaced the narrow plate glass windows
with beautiful heritage-style wooden frames, lending the store an air of elegance and drawing in more natural light. Then
the mismatched shelving disappeared, replaced by expensive custom shelves in a rich cedar. By the time my children were born,
Marilyn had taken over the lease of the shop next door, and when my girls were approaching high school, she was operating
a simple coffee shop there—ahead of her time for Australian bookstores, which were much slower to embrace the coffee-and-browse
trend than their North American equivalents.
“Jack invited me, but I’m still not sure what a reader’s club is,” I admit to her sheepishly, and Marilyn throws back her
head and laughs.
“Darling girl, you are about to find out. I think you’ll love it but if it’s not your cup of tea, that’s just fine.
You could always come back tomorrow night—that’s our crime club.
We alternate between true crime and genre crime, and every now and again we mix it up with something exotic like Nordic noir.
On Tuesday night, we have our literary club—that one’s popular with my most fancy-pants customers.
Basically, they won’t read anything that hasn’t won multiple literary awards, unless it’s poetry, of course, which only needs to win a single award.
On Saturday mornings, we have a primary school club, and Saturday afternoon I’m thinking of starting a graphic novel club for the high schoolers, but truth be told modern teenagers scare me so I’ve been putting that one off.
All of those clubs run pretty much year-round, except for breaks for Christmas and Easter—Oh, and I cancel all of them in January. Obviously.”
January: Australia’s dead zone. It’s so hot here in January, about the only thing that operates on a normal schedule is the
public swimming pool.
“You run all of those book clubs every week?”
“No, every second week. Do you know what I do on the off week?”
“Tell me.”
“I bloody sleep, Fiona,” she laughs. “All of this socializing is exhausting!”
I do a quick headcount. There are twenty-one people in the room with us, some sitting alone already reading quietly, like
Mum and Alan, who don’t seem to have noticed my arrival—they’re seated at a small table with their books already open in front
of them. Others sit in groups, chatting. There are about a dozen upholstered bucket chairs around the room, spread across
both the coffee shop side and the bookstore—plus a handful of beanbags and a few plastic chairs too. Mr Bretts, my old maths
teacher, is sitting contentedly in the wheelchair he has used since he was involved in a terrible car accident when I was
in grade 7. He’s got a beer resting in a holder attached to his armrest, and he’s engrossed in what appears to be some kind
of werewolf romance novel.
Jack has taken a seat beside our mutual friend Stefanie Blaxland, who gives me a pointed look, and I know exactly why. She’s
wondering why I haven’t let her know I’m back in town. Stef and I have been friends since preschool so I know she’ll forgive
me. Eventually.