by Anna Romer
I had to bring him back. ‘What secret?’
Ennis shuddered and blew out a breath. When he looked back at me, he was the old Ennis. The safe Ennis. The one who read to us and listened to our woes, who took the time to sit and chat, the way Mum had never bothered to. The one who baked cakes – as humble as they were – for our birthdays.
My Ennis.
He tucked a wisp of hair behind his ear. ‘Everyone thought my sister was a drudge, but that wasn’t true. She made herself like that so Grandfather wouldn’t look at her in that ugly way he sometimes did.’
‘Ugly way?’
‘You know. The way you said your mum’s boyfriends sometimes looked at you.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘But behind her drabness lived a bright soul. Smarter and stronger and kinder than anyone gave her credit for. Grandfather couldn’t see it, but I could. I’d always seen it. Of all the people in my life, my sister was the one I loved best. She was clever and beautiful. Just like you, Frankie.’ He leaned forward and cupped my cheek with his fingers, his touch as soft as butterfly wings. ‘Just like you.’
I barely dared to breathe. Strange feelings rushed through me. I was hot and tingly and weak, as though any moment my bones would dissolve and trickle onto the floor.
From the corner of my eye I saw Lilly sit up from her dolls and look at us. I wanted to reassure her that all was well, that Ennis would never hurt me. But I couldn’t look away from him. Tilting my face, I rested my cheek against the rough warmth of his palm.
‘What was your sister’s name?’
‘Violet.’
‘That’s a lovely name. I wish I’d known her. Oh Ennis, there’s so much I want to know. About you, and also about the world outside. Sometimes it seems to be whizzing past, leaving me behind.’
Ennis withdrew his hand as if burnt. He stood up so quickly that his chair fell over with a bang, and without another word, he ushered us back into our room and locked the door.
Lilly glared at me accusingly. ‘So now you like him?’
Ignoring her, I flopped on the bed. She taunted me for a while, but finally grew bored and left me alone. Later, just before dark, I heard Ennis below in the yard. Dragging the trunk over beneath the window, I climbed onto it. Lilly tried to clamber up beside me, but there was no room. I elbowed her down, but she caught my arm.
‘What’s he doing?’ she demanded. ‘Why are you spying on him?’
Shaking her off, I stood on tiptoe and gripped the window bars, peering out. I couldn’t yet see him, he was clattering about in the woodshed. When he came into view, that tingly feeling rushed back through me.
Lilly punched my leg. ‘Frankie, what’s he doing?’
I didn’t answer, couldn’t.
Below in the yard, Ennis shouldered his axe and went to the wood pile. I had watched him chop wood a thousand times but today it seemed different. Sinful, almost.
‘Frankie?’
I shoved Lilly away with my knee and regained my grip on the bars, straining for a glimpse. He wore no shirt, despite the autumn cold, just grubby workpants and boots. He carried an armload of logs to the block and positioned the first one. Whack went the axe. The log exploded, falling around him in pieces. Muscles rippled across his back and his hair gleamed in the dying sunlight. Wrenching the axe free of the block, he positioned another log and swung again.
‘Why are you ignoring me?’ Lilly whined.
‘Go to bed,’ I said too sharply. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘So you can moon over your boyfriend?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Shut up.’
‘You’re a slag like Mum.’
‘Shut up!’
She stomped off to bed but I barely noticed, my full attention was on the man in the yard below. In the fading daylight, with his long hair and tall lean body, the strength rippling across his shoulders, he was like a fairytale prince. My heart skipped and sang for him, it wanted him near. Did he feel the same about me?
My sister was the one I loved best . . . she was clever and beautiful . . . just like you, Frankie. Just like you.
Tuesday, 22nd May 1951
This morning’s lesson caused a roar. Ennis brought us a cutting he’d taken from the newspaper as he sometimes does. I perked up, thinking it was about me and Lilly – I still badger him about seeing his scrapbook. But it wasn’t about us at all. The cutting showed a dark-haired woman with a sad and sour face, her rouged lips bracketed by frown lines.
‘ “Jean Lee carried to scaffold”,’ I read aloud. ‘ “Apparently unconscious and with her face completely covered, Jean Lee, thirty-one, a domestic of Sydney, was carried, handcuffed, to the scaffold by the hangman . . .” ’
‘Who’s Jean Lee?’ Lilly demanded, reading over my shoulder.
‘She’s no one now,’ Ennis said flatly.
Rumpling the article in my fist, I whirled around and glared at Ennis. ‘Why have you brought us this?’ Lilly tried to grab the wad of newsprint from my hand, so I shoved past her and went to the Warmray, threw it in the embers. ‘Well?’
He ignored me and looked at Lilly. ‘Jean Lee killed a man. She was a criminal so they strung her up by the neck.’
I marched across the room and shoved his shoulder. ‘Stop it. You’ll give her nightmares. You know how she is, worrying about things. What are you playing at?’
Ennis glanced at Lilly, gave her a wink. Ignoring me, he stalked to the door. He reached for the handle, then looked back over his shoulder. ‘You’re always asking for news, Frankie. When I bring it, you tell me not to bother. What’s it to be, then, eh? You want to know about the outside world, or not?’
I looked across at Lilly. She had wandered over to the Warmray and opened the door and was crouching in front of the dying fire, frowning at the mound of ash. Tonight there would be tears. She would cling to me and cry, and ask the same thing she always asked: ‘How much longer, Frankie? How much longer must we stay?’
I put my hands on my hips and faced Ennis, pushing down my feelings for him. I was no longer tingly, but instead burning with the need to lash out. ‘I don’t just want to know about the world, Ennis. I want to live in it and learn these things for myself. Not just by reading a tatty three-month-old newspaper cutting. Me and Lilly . . . we want out.’
18
‘Last step, Tom. Go easy, okay?’
They reached the landing at the top of the stairs and took a break. Tom felt as if he’d just climbed Mount Everest. His ankle, knee and hips throbbed like nobody’s business, but as he gazed along the upstairs hallway, the promise of what lay ahead of him made it worthwhile.
He caught Abby’s eye and winked. ‘Glad that’s over.’
She was gripping his arm, watching him closely. ‘You need a longer breather?’
‘Nah, I’m good.’
She looked doubtful as she passed him his crutches. ‘You’re pale. Pain level?’
‘Okay.’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Hmm.’
He adjusted the crutches, still savouring the feel of her arms around him as she’d taken his weight on the way up. The soft pressure of her hand on his ribs, the silky tickle of her ponytail against his arm. He hadn’t been that close to a woman in years, and it had taken a body full of fractures for him to realise how he missed it. Not the heady rush of the chase, not even the delicious thrill of anticipating bare skin – just the simple, comforting warmth of human contact.
At the end of the hall they entered a long room with a beautiful stained-glass window. He remembered it from his first tour of the house, but there’d been so much else to take in that he had only given it a cursory look. Since then, he’d spent hours poring over the photos Abby had taken, but they were no substitute for being here. He sensed a weightiness in the atmosphere, as though the air was denser and somehow colder here than in other parts of the house.
Abby went to the wall and slid open a panel, exposing the narrow steel door, which she pushed open. Tom stood on th
e threshold of the hidden room and looked in. Late afternoon sun shone through the barred window, but the corners of the room were already gathering shadows.
‘It’s tiny. Perhaps okay for one teenage girl, but two?’
‘You can see why Lil avoided talking about it.’
‘Five years in here,’ he murmured. ‘It really was hell.’
He approached the bed. His bad foot dragged a little, his cast leaving a trail in the thick dust. As he breathed the stuffy air, he let his imagination go to work. He envisioned the two sisters sitting on the bed, heads together. One fair, the other dark. They were reading The Nightingale. He could hear their quiet murmurs, the swish of turning pages. They seemed small and fragile in the half-light, so absorbed in their book that Tom felt afraid for them. What horrors had the sisters experienced up here? Why had only one returned home?
‘You poor bloody kids.’
As if at the sound of his voice, the girls on the bed whipped their heads around to look at him. Right at him. And the terror in their eyes was palpable. At least, the younger fair-haired girl, Lilly, was terrified. Frankie’s back was stiff, her shoulders squared, her eyes burning with defiance. The intensity in their faces shocked him. He’d have sworn he was staring at two flesh-and-blood girls.
Tom glanced behind him, catching Abby’s eye. ‘Shut the door, would you?’
She studied him a moment, then nodded. The hinges squeaked as the door closed. The latch engaged with a metallic click. In the dim light he noted there was no handle on his side.
He examined the window. The sun still shone beyond the bars, but so little of its radiance entered the room. Already he felt hemmed in. Breathless. How desperately the sisters must have wanted to run and shout and play in that glorious garden below. How trapped they must’ve felt. And how much worse for them with the door locked, year after year, their only link to the outside world a pitiful gap of sky high in the wall.
And the man who kept them here.
Tom’s skin prickled.
Again he looked over his shoulder at the door. An image of the kidnapper came to him. A weedy guy with a haggard face and haunted, bloodshot eyes. He almost smiled. Most of the villains he’d written into his books were burly toughs. Muscle-bound bullies with tiny brains. This guy, this kidnapper of children, however, was in a league of his own. He was smart, all right, but browbeaten. Nothing to lose. Desperate. All of which made him unspeakably dangerous.
Tom looked at the bed.
Abby’s photos of the room hadn’t prepared him for the raw awfulness of what he was seeing. Threadbare sheets on a sagging mattress, the centre shadowed by a long black stain. The pillow still dented as though someone had only just lifted their head from it, discoloured where something dark and wet had soaked into the thin fabric.
He ran his fingers along the edge of the stain, recoiling from its stiff, leathery resistance. Blood, most definitely.
He flexed his fingers. Ideas were sparking. He was suddenly keen to be at his desk, his fingers pounding the Remington’s keys. He loved sliding into the zone like this. Letting his imagination run wild. Words were banking up in his mind, threatening to overflow, bringing with them a landslide of intriguing, pulsating images.
He glanced around for a light switch, found none. With the door shut, and the sun sinking behind the distant hills, the gloom was stifling. A feeling of wrongness swirled around him. It was like nausea, only outside his body, enveloping him like foetid air. And was it just him, or had it become impossible to breathe?
He squared his shoulders and tried to shrug the feeling off.
Years ago, while researching the details of a particularly nasty murder case for one of his novels, he’d come across an article about haunted houses. The theory was that houses retain energy impressions of the people who dwelled in them. And whatever emotions those people experienced most powerfully and most often were imprinted on the walls like sticky fingerprints on glass. Sometimes those emotions were so intense that years, decades or even centuries later, other people could detect them.
Did that explain what was happening now? Was he picking up the emotional fingerprint of Frankie Wigmore’s murder?
He’d never been woo-woo. The supernatural held little interest for him. He based his novels on true-crime cases for a good reason – he liked their gritty reality, the way they made him rethink what it meant to be human. What it meant to hover on the threshold of right and wrong, knowing instinctively on which side he belonged. He liked pushing the boundaries of everyday experience, and peeling back the layers to the truth beneath. He liked putting himself into a story, imagining how he would react if the same thing happened to him. The anguish he’d feel if the people he loved were in danger. The horror if he were helpless to save them. As a writer, the darker end of the emotional spectrum was his domain – but usually he only got to explore it from behind the safety of his typewriter. Being in this room, with its sticky, unpleasant residue of the past, was something else entirely.
Downstairs, the phone began to ring. The door opened behind him and Abby peered in.
‘Will I get that?’
He nodded. ‘I can’t imagine who it’d be at this hour . . . But yeah, thanks.’
He listened to Abby’s footfall along the hallway and then more faintly on the stairs. Then silence. Eerie, all-consuming silence. He ran his hand over the dust on the iron bedhead, and then rubbed his gritty fingers together. As a boy, he had craved the outdoors. Escaped at every opportunity into the bushland behind his parents’ home in Katoomba; explored creek beds and climbed trees and hunted frogs in muddy waterholes, soaking up the glorious freedom.
How would such a boy have coped in this cramped room? A few hours would have been bad enough; hell, after five minutes he was already chafing to get away. But five years? To a child, five years was a lifetime. An endless, mind-numbing lifetime. Since his accident, Tom had spent most of his time inside, and was no stranger to cabin fever. But the idea of living year after year trapped in this tiny room seemed beyond hellish; beyond anything he could imagine. As he gazed around, he shook his head. How had those two young girls managed not to go utterly and completely barking mad?
• • •
‘You know,’ the old man wheezed, twisting from the passenger seat of Abby’s car to gaze around at Tom. ‘I’ve been a fan of yours for years. Lil’s not much of a reader, but I was stoked to think you’d moved to the area. Just a pity we had to meet under such circumstances.’
Tom sat propped in the back, his crutches on the floor, his bad leg stretched along the seat. He patted Joe’s shoulder. ‘We’ll find her, mate. Whatever it takes.’
Joe turned back to stare through the windscreen. ‘I appreciate you not calling the cops. Lil does this sometimes. Wanders off. Usually she’s back well before dark. She wouldn’t want a fuss made, which is why I rang you.’
Abby changed gears as they approached a bend. ‘Where does she go, Joe?’
‘Just around the place.’ Joe tugged at his seatbelt. ‘Ever since I’ve known her, she’s had these turns. After what she went through as a kid though, who can blame her? Retreats into herself, gets lost in there somewhere. We’ve been to doctors over the years. She baffled most of them. It’s not Alzheimer’s, more a sort of lapse they call psychogenic amnesia. Blackouts and confusion, loss of memory. One specialist suggested it might be related to PTSD.’ He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘We never told anyone about Lil’s past. She didn’t want to. Got upset every time I suggested it might help to talk to someone. Other than me, that is. A counsellor or psychiatrist. She wouldn’t hear of it. So in the end I stopped suggesting and just started managing the problem.’
‘Does something trigger the turns?’ Tom asked, adjusting his leg.
‘Stress. Upsets. A change in the weather.’ Joe’s bony shoulders twitched. ‘Who knows? We can go for years without any trouble, and then all of a sudden she’ll wake in the middle of the night and plod through the house like a sleepwal
ker. Off to the bathroom, so I think. Then before I know it, she’s in the car and driving away somewhere. Couple of hours later she’s back. Can’t remember where she’s been, or why she even went there. She says it’s like having a nightmare and waking in a sweat, with this hazy sense that she’s somehow in danger.’
‘Danger from what?’ Tom asked.
‘Oh, Lil’s not in any danger.’ Joe took out a little puffer bottle and considered it, then tucked it back in his pocket. ‘At least not any more. But she’s never quite been able to shake herself free of the past.’
‘I feel awful,’ Abby said. ‘It was stressful for her the other day, talking about her abduction. This is my fault, isn’t it?’
‘Aw, no, Abby.’ Joe peered at her. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t even think it. Lil’s a strong woman, she’s got her own mind. If she hadn’t wanted to talk to you, she’d have sent you packing.’
‘It gave her a headache.’
‘You know what she said to me after you left? It felt good to offload. They were her exact words: “good to offload”. I’ll tell you now, lass. The only other person on the planet Lil has ever spoken to about . . . you know . . . is me. And she only gave me the barest bones – no details, mind you, just the black and white facts. A lot of people tried to get the story out of her, and a lot failed. She likes you, Abby. Trusts you. She wouldn’t have opened up otherwise.’
Tom studied the roadside trees. ‘Heck of a worry for you, Joe.’
‘That it is, Tom. That it is.’
They turned onto the New Forest Road and drove north – in the direction of Ravensong – along the eastern side of the Deepwater Gorge Reserve. The landscape here was rugged and thickly forested. A hundred years ago, loggers had cut down most of the old growth. Now the trees grew close together, obstructing access to much of the steep, rocky land. As dusk turned to night, shadows swarmed between the boulders and blackness swallowed the trees.