Chapter 2
Fiona
There’s no time to collect my thoughts because just as Mum’s truck disappears through the gates, the electrician’s van turns
onto the driveway and parks behind my car. Two men climb out. The first is an older man, and he stands scratching his head
as he peers up at the house. The other is a teenager who’s probably an apprentice and who might just be the older man’s son.
“Hey!” the younger man gasps. “This is that haunted house, isn’t it?”
The older man glares at him and mutters something under his breath before he turns to look at the house again. His frown suddenly
deepens, and I know he’s read the stained glass lettering over the door that spells out Wurimbirra.
“You just told me the address, Mrs Winslow. You forgot to mention the property name,” he says, frowning.
“Does it matter?”
“Oh, it matters, all right,” the younger man mutters. “I’ve heard the stories about this place—”
“They are just stories,” I assure them as I hasten down the concrete steps to stand closer. “I grew up here. It’s a big old house, sure, but about the scariest thing you’ll find in there are cobwebs and maybe some mice and I bet you’ve seen plenty of those over the years . . .”
The men exchange a glance, then the older one turns to me and shakes his head.
“I’m really sorry, Mrs—”
“Call me Fiona,” I correct him automatically. I never took Lucas’s name, and that’s been a blessing this year, so I’m not
about to let this man get away with calling me Mrs anything. “Please. The house has been empty for ten years and I’m moving here from Sydney. I can’t get the power reconnected
until you’ve checked the wiring and I can’t exactly live out here without it. Please.”
“Fine. I’ll take a look,” he finally sighs. “But if I see anything, or hear anything, even . . . sense anything in there with us—we’re out of there.”
I lead them upstairs to the bathroom near Tad’s bedroom—that’s where the hatch into the ceiling cavity is—and I tell them
they’ll find the wiring box on the western exterior of the house near the kitchen. After I’ve left them to get to work, I
walk back down the hallway. This would be a dark space with the wood paneling on the walls but for the beautiful stained glass
windows at either end, bathing the hallway in green-and-red-and-gold light. At this end of the top story, the rooms were all
Tad’s—his own room, his guest room, the bedroom he used for storage, Jon’s old bedroom. That room was rarely used even when Jon was a kid. Tad and Daphne divorced when Jon was very young. She moved to a house in town,
and Jon lived with her until he left for university.
It’s not that Jon and Uncle Tad weren’t close.
Jon spent every weekend with Uncle Tad, from Friday afternoon until after dinner Sunday.
To my great frustration, he almost always went home to his own bed to sleep.
If we were caught up in some particularly exciting game, I’d have a sleepover with him at his house, but it had to be a very special occasion for him to agree to sleep at Tad’s, and even then, he would never use this bedroom. Instead, he’d insist
on sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my room in case he had a nightmare—which he frequently did. When we were quite young,
I’d often wake to find some frightening dream had sent him climbing into bed with me. Poor Jon was always so ashamed, as if
seeking comfort and company were cowardly.
I pause in the doorway to Tad’s room. Someone must have cleaned up in here after the ambulance took his body away. There’s
no way Tad wouldn’t have left empty mugs and plates all over the place. Under a layer of dust, the bed is neatly made.
Tad probably wrote in his study until he got tired that night, then climbed into bed to read. He died on New Year’s Eve and
he was here alone, but he wouldn’t have been sad about that. Uncle Tad liked his own company and he loved being here. The only ending more fitting for him would have been if he died slumped over his keyboard, midway through a sentence.
I reach the landing above the stairs, and the first of two doors leading into the mammoth library which served as Tad’s office.
This was his workspace, but it was also his favorite place in the world. There are built-in mahogany bookshelves encasing the windows
and door frames to make the most of every inch. Tad crammed books onto every shelf, both his own novels and those written
by others. He was passionate about literature and read widely—genre fiction, classics, literary fiction, non-fiction. Heck,
he’s even got a whole section dedicated to atlases and from memory, I know there are a few baskets of comics in here somewhere.
He used to tell me that being surrounded by books made him a better writer, as if he could absorb the brilliance from the pages others wrote, simply by close proximity to them.
The success of his career might just be proof that theory was correct.
Tad wrote sixteen novels during his forty-five years in this house.
Tens of millions of copies of his books sold around the globe and he won just about every major literary prize in the world across his career.
This house is remarkable in part because of the key role it played in the creative life of one of the most adored literary voices of a generation.
Tad’s library/office is every bit as long as the mammoth ballroom below it. The couple who built this home, Charles and Flora
Fowler, were avid readers, and it showed. Even in a home with a literal ballroom, this library was the focus of luxury and
expense.
There are rugs scattered over the wide floorboards—covered in dust so that their patterns are now unidentifiable, but I know
they are all a dreadfully out of context mid-century style, geometric shapes and repeated patterns of swirling narrow lines,
somewhat lost in a room with original 1880s windows and floors, and a twenty-foot, pressed-tin ceiling. Tad told me once that
one of the first things Mum did when she moved here from their hometown in California was to drag him out to buy the very
first rugs they saw. The echo in this cavernous space had never bothered him, but it almost drove her crazy.
On the eastern side of the room sits a stretched oval writing table with small drawers down the rounded sides. There are yellowed
sheets of paper and a fountain pen resting on a desk blotter right where Tad left them—the mug Jon made him in grade 8 still
on his desk, as if Tad might return to finish his coffee any second. If I close my eyes, I can still see my uncle there, his
lip caught between his teeth, his shaggy eyebrows drawn, concentrating fiercely as he slipped into a world of his own creation.
I take my phone from my pocket and dial Jon as an impulse rises in me to share my nostalgia. He answers on the first ring.
“You will never guess who just rang me,” he says.
“Hmm. Whoever could it have been?” I wince. “How bad was it on a scale of one to ten?”
“Ten being much worse than I expected and one being much better? On that scale I’m going to say it was . . . oh . . . maybe
a few hundred billion. No one guilts like your mother. No one. She could take down armies with passive aggression.”
I wince again at the heaviness in his tone.
“Sorry, Jon. I really should have told her sooner. I just wasn’t sure how she’d react and I guess . . . with everything else
going on . . .” Maybe I just wasn’t ready to be disappointed, because on some level I was holding on to a foolish hope that
Mum would at least be happy to have me living so close to her again.
“It didn’t matter when she found out,” Jon says. “Ginny was always going to try to manipulate me into changing my mind. She
just kept talking about the terms of the will but . . . even that is . . .” He breaks off, then sighs. “Well, even that is
complicated.”
“I didn’t get much in the way of guilt. Just a whole lot of vague threats. I think they were supposed to be hints that ghosts are going to torture me or something,” I mutter. Jon is silent for so long I say,
“Hello? Are you still there?”
“Fi, there are things I should have told you in person before you left the city,” he says suddenly. “That’s why I really went
to your house last night. I had to drop the keys off, yes, but I also . . . I wanted . . . I needed to tell you some things, and the truth is I lost my nerve when I got there.”
I wipe my forearm across one of Tad’s hideously uncomfortable chesterfield lounges and push the dust onto the rug, then sit gingerly.
There are dusty books scattered all over the coffee table, most propped open and face down, because Uncle Tad always had a heap of books on the go at once.
It hurts my heart to see five more coffee cups and a small stack of plates here.
Tad was a grown-up Hansel and Gretel—he left a trail of mess everywhere he went in case he got lost and needed to find his way home.
“You can tell me anything, Jon,” I say gently. The gravity in his tone seems dire, but knowing my cousin, this could be about something as simple as his guilt over helping himself to the last cupcake
at my birthday in January, so I’m not unnerved.
“We grew up in an unusual family, right?” he says softly. “Most people I know aren’t close with their cousins like you and
I are.”
“We only had each other.” Jon and I are both only children and we grew up with three parents between us who were the best
of friends—Mum is as close to Aunt Daph as she is to anyone. Mum and Tad were the best of friends. Tad and Daph had the most
amicable divorce in history and remained one another’s fiercest champion right up until he died. Three and a half years’ age
difference between me and Jon meant nothing under those conditions. We all lived in one another’s pockets. “You’re more like
my brother than a cousin.”
“To this day I still tell you pretty much everything, and I know it’s the same for you.”
“I know this, Jon,” I say, frowning. “But why—”
“Something happened right before Dad died.” There’s a decade worth of pressure behind that sentence. The words fly from Jon’s