Chapter 12
Fiona
Three nights without proper sleep. I haven’t felt this wrung out since Mia was born, back in the first few days when she cried
all day and night. I haven’t cried myself this much since those days. It’s not post-natal hormones that have had me weeping
this time. It’s these words, and this story, and this puzzle that my uncle accidentally set out and that I have almost put back together.
The cats started crying at 4:00 a.m. too, not in solidarity, but in protest when they simultaneously walked into Jack’s traps.
I’ve texted him and he’s coming round on his way to work. I won’t be here, but I’m going to leave the door unlocked so he
can let himself in to check them for microchips. For now, I’ve left them in the traps—although I did manage to add a little
saucer of water and some more food into each one. They’re skinny and cranky, and the one with the white spot on its chest
hissed at me when I came close, but they’re kind of cute. I’ve picked names for them—since they scared the wits out of me,
I’ve decided to call them Hocus and Pocus, and I’m secretly hoping they don’t have loving owners to go home to so I can keep
them.
Instead of starting the morning with a long walk, I once again drank my bodyweight in coffee to try to keep my eyes open long enough to face this day. It’s 8:00 a.m. now, and in my handbag, I have the metal tin I found beneath Tad’s floorboards, along with two copies of The Midnight Estate.
I throw open Wurimbirra’s front doors and shriek in fright when I see Erin standing there. In the turmoil, I’d entirely forgotten
she existed, let alone was coming to clean this morning.
“Shit!” I gasp, and she gasps too, and that’s when I realize she’s not actually facing the door like she was about to come
inside. She’s standing back a little, half-turned away, as if she wasn’t sure she could come any closer. “Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry,” she blurts, and she covers her face with her hands. “You were so nice to me and I felt terrible about it before
I even did it. I don’t even understand why Ginny asked me to do it, but she was so insistent and she and Alan have been so
good to me and Vince so I felt I had to, you know? But I knew right away—”
“You took my book, didn’t you?” I ask her gently, and she bursts into tears. I already came to this conclusion last night.
If Mum had any inkling of what The Midnight Estate was about, it was probably driving her quietly crazy knowing I was reading it, and it’s abundantly clear she’s still afraid
of Wurimbirra even after all of these years. I suspect her insistence that I let Erin come help me clean was simply about
getting her hands on what she thought was the only copy of Tad’s secret book.
“It’s so ridiculous!” Erin cries. “Why would she even ask me to do it? And why would I even agree to steal a book!”
“Erin,” I say, and she looks at me hesitantly, as if I’m about to call the police. I smile. “It’s okay. You just got sucked
into some Winslow family drama, and that’s hardly your fault. Are you still happy to do some cleaning for me today?”
“Really? I mean, yes, but—”
“Then come in.” I step out of the doorway and wave her inside. “There’s two unhappy cats stuck in some fox traps upstairs—my friend will be here to check in on them shortly, and I’ll be back later.”
She’s still begging for my forgiveness and promising me she’ll never do it again even as I leave the house a few minutes later,
but I’m not angry with her. This is so much bigger than any one book.
“What are you doing here so early, love?” Alan calls as I park my car on the drive beside the farmhouse a few minutes later.
He’s loading his two Kelpies onto the back of his truck, ready for work with the sheep.
“I just wanted to chat with Mum.”
He hesitates, dropping his voice as he says, “Go easy on her. She didn’t sleep well.”
That makes two of us.
I let myself into the house and find Mum sitting in her sunroom, knitting. I know Alan wasn’t kidding about the rough night—she’s
still in her pajamas, and I don’t think I’ve seen her in pajamas during the day since the days after Tad’s funeral. She was
so depressed then, I wasn’t sure she’d ever recover.
She doesn’t acknowledge me as I take the seat beside her, resting the tin I found under Tad’s floorboards and my copy of The Midnight Estate on my lap. Mum looks up from her knitting, but she still doesn’t look at me. Her gaze is fixed on the horizon, visible across
the miles of flat paddocks that make up their property. We sit like that for a few minutes while I try to figure out where
to start.
“You read it,” Mum says abruptly.
“Did you?” I ask her. She shakes her head sharply and her lips thin. I’m emotional and I’m trying to be patient because I’m
starting to understand that she’s had such a journey in her life, but I’m so tired of this distance between us.
“We can do this the hard way, Mum. We can sit here and I can ask you questions and you can shut me down and refuse to talk about it. Or you can tell me the whole story yourself and you can share yourself with me. Your real name is Jennifer, isn’t it? ”
Jennifer Lentfer. Virginia Winslow. And Tad always called her Ginny, and that eventually caught on, because now the whole town does. Jon appears in this book
as Ernest. Aunt Daph has been written as Christine. Tad named his own semi-fictional likeness Silas.
And I, Fiona Virginia, have been written as Cynthia Maeve.
Mum doesn’t speak; she just keeps staring out that window. I open the metal tin and I withdraw the engagement ring. I set
it flat on the palm of my hand and I extend it towards her. Mum glances at it, then she recoils.
“Where on earth—”
“It was behind the vanity in the bathroom.”
I still don’t understand how I saw it, just like I don’t understand how I knew to roll back that rug and check the noisy floorboard,
and even why I was drawn to start reading The Midnight Estate almost the minute I laid eyes on it despite everything else I had to do that day. I still don’t understand how the door slammed
shut or why I couldn’t open it, but I know for sure that I was in that storeroom until I’d read every last one of the letters
Tad exchanged with his author pals, and I’d confirmed there was no correspondence with Charity Wilkie.
That’s when I started to wonder if Charity Wilkie even existed at all, and maybe it was that thought that led me to the realization
that there was something familiar about the way the story had been told.
That’s the thing with all of this. Much of the mischief in my house this week has been two very naughty cats, but the cats
don’t explain all of it. I don’t believe in ghosts and truth be told I’m not even sure I believe in an afterlife, but I can’t
help but feel like something pushed me to put all of this together.
Maybe I just want to believe that my uncle dad guided me to this story himself.
“It was your engagement ring, wasn’t it? He gave it to you?”
Mum reaches out and picks the ring up, her thin fingers shaking a little as she holds it.
“I had just turned eighteen. He was thirty-three,” she whispers. “My parents had just died. He seemed like a knight in shining
armor. I thought he was the hero I needed in the worst hours of my life. It wasn’t a case of him sweeping me off my feet so
much as him busting into my life in a bulldozer and cleaning up all of the hard things for me. But that help . . . that rescue . . .
it came at such a cost.” Her face contorts, and she pushes the ring back towards me as she stifles a sob. “Please, Fiona.
Take it and destroy it. I don’t want that thing.”
“Okay,” I say, and I put it back into the metal tin, but then I withdraw Julian’s passport and wallet. Her eyes widen.
“He told me he buried them—”
“In the book, it says he realized that if the body was found one day, the police would probably never be able to identify
it, but if these were with it, they’d have an answer right away. He did hide this tin really well—in a cavity beneath a floorboard
beneath those awful rugs you made him buy for his study.”
“Oh,” Mum says, and she sinks back into her chair and closes her eyes. “He was always looking out for me.”
“Mum,” I say, and my voice is suddenly rough. She opens her eyes and looks at me warily. “Mum, I’m so sorry you went through
all of that. I’m sorry I didn’t understand.”
“I didn’t want you to understand,” she says sharply. “That’s why I didn’t want him to give it to you.”
“Give me the house?”
“Give you the book!” she exclaims, waving a hand towards it.
“Tad wanted me to have it?”
“Fiona, haven’t you figured it out yet? This was what we fought about the day he died.
He told me he was thinking about writing it all down to give it to you.
He wanted you and Jon to know the whole truth and I was so furious with him because for all of those years we had agreed we would take our secrets to the grave! ”
“Wait—you didn’t know he’d already written it?”
“I should have known he wouldn’t be able to help himself,” she sighs. “He was testing me that day, wanting to see how I’d
react—but of course it was already too late, the thing was already finished. When you asked me about Charity Wilkie, I had
no idea this was that. I picked it up at Turn the Page and saw the dedication and had my suspicions and it took reading all of about three sentences across the thing to realize
what he’d done.”
“The dedication . . . ?”
I flip the book open and see the words I missed the first time: “For Jennifer. Forgive me please. I had to.”
“In the book he makes it seem like he never wanted me and Jon to know. Why did he change his mind?”
“I think he always wanted Jon to know. I take it he explains what happened the night of . . . the night . . . when I . . .”
She breaks off, takes a deep breath and tries again. “When Jon thought he’d had a nightmare.”
“The book tells the whole story, Mum.”
“The best part of the way things worked out was that you were spared the trauma of it all. You grew up in this beautiful,