Chapter 5
Fiona
I’m feeling brighter with the dawn of a new day. Uncle Tad always said a good book could fix just about anything, and reading
The Midnight Estate last night certainly did help me wind down until I could sleep. Now, it’s time to get back into something of a healthier routine,
so I rummage through the boxes in the ballroom until I find some active wear and my running shoes, and then I hit the road.
Tad always started each day with a walk around sunrise, and I used to do the same, back before everything went to hell. I’m
running a little late on that schedule by the time I get going today, but I walk for about half an hour, almost as far as
Jack’s house, before I turn back to Wurimbirra. The cold morning air burns my lungs and throat and I’m so out of shape that every incline has me panting in an undignified fashion, but the only way I’m going to fix that is to get
started, so it feels good to have made a step in the right direction.
My good mood lasts exactly as long as it takes me to walk back through the house to the kitchen. My footsteps stop as I walk
through that door, because there’s glass everywhere. Last night when I went to bed I left a neat line of Uncle Tad’s glassware
drying along the countertop, and now more than half of those glasses are on the floor, most shattered.
I’m so stunned that for a moment, all I can do is to stand and stare, as if I can will that baffling mess away. And then I do the next logical thing, which is to try to explain it away.
Freak wind?
But the windows and doors are shut, so that doesn’t explain it.
Did I knock the glasses somehow when I came down to get the book and did I somehow just not notice the noise?
I was tired and a little off, but I wasn’t in a coma, so no.
And then in a heartbeat, my mind goes to more alarming places.
Could someone have broken in here last night?
But my handbag is right there on the table. What kind of robber breaks in, walks past a handbag, smashes five glasses, then
leaves, closing the door behind them?
Could it be pests inside the house?
I have seen plenty of rodent scat, but it was all old—faded and silver. Plus there’s not a single dropping on the bench this
morning, and if it were rodents, they would absolutely have left poo in their wake. Could it be possums? Australian possums
are nocturnal and they do sometimes find their way into homes . . . but no. They leave even more droppings behind than rats
do.
Suddenly I am freezing. Was it this cold in here a minute ago? I try to tell myself it’s just because I’ve come inside from
my walk and my body temperature is dropping now, but does that explain why my teeth are chattering and I’m starting to shake?
I’m not a coward, and I do not believe in ghosts.
I spin on my heels and walk briskly through the house, up the stairs to my room, pulling the door shut behind me. I rest my
back against the door and close my eyes, drawing in some deep, calming breaths.
There’s an explanation for all of this; I know there is.
I just have to stay calm while I figure out what it is.
After a few minutes pretending to read emails on my phone, I’m tempted to call Jon. For any other stressful situation, he
would be the perfect person to call, but in this case I just can’t do it, because if I do, he will either tell me to leave,
or tell me the story about his nightmare again. Neither response will help.
I decide I have to keep busy to distract myself, and I can’t exactly avoid the kitchen forever, so I march back downstairs.
I find an old mixing bowl in the cupboard and I pick up the largest shards of glass. I find the dustpan and broom and I sweep
up the rest, then I vacuum, for good measure. I throw all of that broken glass outside into the dumpster.
I make a trip into the supermarket—definitely not because I’m afraid of the house and looking for an excuse to go out, but because I need milk and coffee beans and food
that doesn’t come out of plastic packets. I take my time walking up and down the aisles, filling the trolley until I can’t
fit another thing in it, but once I’ve loaded it all into my car the obvious next thing is to go home and unpack it all. That’s
when I decide I should go past Turn the Page to get a takeaway coffee. I’m not disappointed at all to see there’s no line at this slightly later hour, and definitely not
disappointed that Aurelia whips up that coffee in absolutely no time.
“How’s the house?” she asks me cheerfully.
“Oh, just fantastic,” I say, and if she notices my slightly strangled tone, she’s too polite to ask about it.
I almost convince myself to go sit by the lake to drink the coffee but then I give myself a firm mental scolding and drive back out to the mansion.
As I unpack the groceries I tell myself it’s absurd for me to be unnerved. Sooner or later I’ll figure out what happened to those glasses and in the meantime
I have so much to do. The best thing I can do is keep moving, and the space that needs the most urgent attention is right here in this
very kitchen. I’ll sort through every single cupboard and drawer. Throw out what I don’t want. Clean the rest. And then I
can start to unpack my own kitchen bits and pieces, to start making this place feel like home.
For a few hours I work away clearing out cupboards, ferrying most of Uncle Tad’s old cookware out to the bin. He wasn’t much
of a cook, but he also did not like to throw things away, so there are mismatched plates and bowls and pots and pans going
back decades in this room. When I reach a bank of drawers near the sink, I find the top full of cutlery, but the bottom three
drawers are full of random bits of paper. Uncle Tad was such a pack rat! I decide I’ll dump the whole lot—after all, ten years after his death, what could possibly need to be kept? But
then I turn the very top page over and I see it’s an invoice for thousands of dollars’ worth of electrical work, and beneath
that, a letter from the same electrician, with a cheque stapled in the top corner.
The invoice is dated June 1999—six months before Tad’s death. The contractor came across from Orange—a regional city about
ninety minutes’ drive away. And the letter from the contractor is dated August 1999.
Dear Mr Winslow,
You have accidentally double-paid invoice 1742a—both times by cheque, one sent in July and one sent last week.
As we already banked the first, please find the second attached.
I look at the cheque and frown. It’s in Tad’s own handwriting. For just about any other adult this would be unremarkable. It’s such a basic necessity of life, to pay your
own bills, to organize your own home repairs. But Mum always paid Tad’s bills, all of them—both business and personal. He was just so disorganized, equally likely to forget to do something
as he was to forget he’d already done it, and do it twice.
The only possible reason I can think that he would have organized this himself was if he were hiding the work from Mum, and
that makes no damned sense at all. It was Tad who hated to spend money on the house—Tad who never wanted anything to change.
Mum so hated Wurimbirra that she surely wouldn’t have cared if he had bulldozed the place.
But if he were hiding the repair from Mum, that probably explains why he didn’t call to tell me about the fire, or to ask
me for advice. Mum and I were much closer when he was alive.
I sigh and set the invoice and the cheque aside, wondering if I’ll ever know the story. But my interest has been piqued now,
so I start to sort through the rest of the paperwork. Most of the scraps probably meant something only to Tad—they say random
things like “Chapter 5, remove that awful sentence and character Eliza is too flat” and “P talk W re S.” There are old TV
guides—not that he ever watched much TV, just the odd film very occasionally, and only when he was between books. There are town council newsletters and Chinese restaurant menus and a brochure
about a holiday resort on the Great Barrier Reef, not that he ever took holidays either. The rest are clippings from newspapers,
almost all from the Forbes Advocate, the local newspaper, about subjects as diverse as the price of wheat, the opening of the cafe in the bookstore, about the
time the town flooded and politicians from all over came to promise relief funds.
Classic Uncle Tad. He would often have little newspaper clippings to show me when I came to visit.
He’d ask me if I’d seen this or heard of that, and whether I was well aware of the issue or clueless about it, he’d wander up to his office or his bedroom or a drawer down here, to fetch the article he’d clipped to remind him to talk to me about it.
I know he did the same with Jon and Ilona, with Mum and Alan, even with Lucas sometimes.
The whole house is probably full of random tidbits like this. I can’t wait to see what else I’ll find—I only wish I knew why he’d saved these things, and who he wanted to talk to about them.
When I reach the very bottom of the bottom drawer, I find another newspaper clipping tucked at the very back. I almost miss
it because it’s stuck in a little crack between the base of the old drawer and the side, and when I tug at it, the corner
tears off.
This one is much older than the others. It’s a small yellow square, print faded, the paper a little curled. It’s been cut close to the text
and there’s no date or publication name, just a small article on the front, and half an ad for Brylcream on the back.
Body Identified as That of Missing Wife
Police have used dental records to identify historic remains found at the bottom of a steep cliff in the Salt Point State
Park. The remains belonged to a Mrs Gertie Lentfer. Mrs Lentfer was first reported missing by her husband Julian in 1956.
Julian Lentfer has also been missing, along with his second wife, Jennifer, since 1960. Police would like to speak to Julian
Lentfer in connection to the suspected murders of both women.
I set the newspaper clipping down on the table and sink back into my chair, pressing my hands to my cheeks. What a dark, awful