Thornwood House

by Anna Romer

  He slid a small notepad and pencil from his jeans pocket. After scribbling in the notebook, he tore off the leaf and handed it to me.

  I took the note, mystified . . . until I read what he’d written.

  I’m deaf. Can you sign?

  I felt my eyes go wide. My gaze flew back to his face. He was watching me, his brows drawn, his eyes fixed on mine.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I can’t sign.’

  He scribbled on another leaf and tore it off.

  Good thing I lip read. Speak slower.

  In the harsh sunlight I saw the grey rim around his pupils, the faint pattern of freckles across the bridge of his nose. He was unshaven, and his hair stuck up in sweaty clumps. Shading his eyes with one hand, he regarded me with unabashed curiosity.

  ‘I’m looking for Hobe Miller,’ I told him, now horribly self-conscious as I tried to enunciate clearly. ‘I’ve been trying to contact him about doing some maintenance and repairs on my property.’

  The man blinked at me, then dashed off another note.

  No need to shout. Hobe’s inside.

  Before I’d finished reading the note he’d stalked off, heading toward the bungalow. While he walked, he pocketed the notebook and finished drying off with his sodden T-shirt. By the time I caught up with him he was hammering on the screen door, making a racket that seemed to echo right across the hillside and bounce back from the valley.

  A shabby figure appeared in the doorway.

  I recognised him at once. Hobe Miller’s bony face was framed by white hair, and as he frowned through the screen door, the single lens of his duct-taped glasses flared in the light.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said, glaring at me with evident suspicion.

  Before I could speak, the deaf man’s fingers came to life as he signed.

  Hobe watched intently, then nodded. Swinging open the screen door, he stepped out onto the verandah. For several tense seconds his blue gaze probed my face as though confused by something he saw there.

  ‘You need repairs?’ he asked gruffly. ‘At Thornwood?’

  ‘Yes, I – ’

  ‘You knew Tony Jarman?’

  I nodded, puzzled by his abrupt manner. He was nothing like Corey’s description – rather than being pleased by my appearance on his doorstep, he seemed threatened. He was scowling at me as though a cup of tea and a friendly chat couldn’t be further from his mind. According to Corey, Hobe had hated Tony’s grandfather. Had he hated Tony too? And would that hatred now transfer to me?

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve called at a bad time,’ I told him, glancing at the deaf man. ‘Why don’t I come back later . . . that is, if you’re not too busy?’

  Hobe slumped, shrinking into the shell of his frayed shirt. I noticed stains on the worn fabric; they looked wet, as though he’d recently clutched something bloody to his chest. As I pondered this, a noise erupted from inside the house – it sounded like someone whimpering in pain.

  Hobe’s head jerked around. He shot a worried look at the deaf man. The man sprang to the door and vanished inside without so much as a farewell glance at me.

  Hobe resumed watching me with narrowed eyes.

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ I said, inching nearer the verandah steps, ‘it’s just a cracked window and an old tree limb that’s hanging too close to the roof, probably not even worth worrying about . . .’

  Hobe peered into the darkness that lay on the other side of the screen door. ‘What day suits you?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  He pruned his lips to ponder this. ‘Eight o’clock too early?’

  ‘That’d be great.’ I muttered goodbye and beat a hasty retreat. My legs wobbled as I bounded down the stairs and tried not to run to the Celica. As I climbed in I couldn’t resist looking back at the house. Hobe had watched my escape and now stood at the verandah rail peering down at me.

  I gave an erratic little wave, jammed my foot on the accelerator, and sped off down the track in a miasma of dust.

  Stripping out of my sweaty clothes, I tossed them in the laundry basket then climbed into the clawfoot tub. The old shower-rose was a relic of the past, big as a dinner plate and perforated with pea-sized holes; the resulting torrent was brisk and deliciously cool.

  I hung my head and let the gushing water pound my shoulders, feeling better as the dust and heat and stickiness were washed away. When my fingers and toes wrinkled, I climbed out and scrubbed dry, then got into soft old pyjama shorts and singlet.

  In the kitchen I brewed a pot of coffee and stood at the window, picking at my pecan pie while I stared out at the garden. Heat-haze shimmered the trees, and the sky was pure cloudless blue; the only motion was a solitary lorikeet sweeping back and forth, back and forth, as though unable to find a perch.

  I knew exactly how it felt.

  My thoughts flitted restlessly, trying to make sense of my disastrous visit to the Miller property – but no matter which way I looked, the whole episode remained a mystery. The man at the water tank, his chest a lather of pink foam – blood, I felt certain. But whose blood, Hobe’s? Did that explain the red stain on Hobe’s tattered flannel shirt; had they been in a fight? And what about the whimpering I’d heard while standing on the verandah, surely the sound of someone in terrible pain?

  And Hobe . . . he’d been nothing like Corey’s description. No neighbourly chats for him; his reception had been downright unfriendly. I recalled our first meeting and how he’d seemed troubled when I asked directions to Thornwood. Again I wondered if his dislike of Samuel Riordan had somehow transferred to me, simply because I was now living in Samuel’s house.

  So much for my plan to pick his brains. After his performance today, I guessed he wouldn’t be thrilled about having me quiz him for information about Samuel. Which meant I’d have to do some digging of my own.

  But where to start?

  I’d already searched the house soon after moving in. Samuel had been a hoarder, his lovely old cabinets and sideboards well stocked with flotsam from the past. Shoeboxes full of prehistoric dockets, void bank bonds, receipts for maintenance work around the house, typed letters from various medical boards; tins of tarnished coins and belt buckles, wood boxes crammed with yellowing shirt collars, shoelaces, cotton reels, oddment buttons. A comprehensive collection of relics, but nothing that yielded any clues as to what might have driven him to murder.

  I went out to the back bedroom.

  Thick curtains blocked the intense sunshine, plunging the room into twilight and inviting shadows into the corners. There was a sense of deep tranquillity here, which made me feel – as I so often did in this house – as if I was standing on the threshold of a far earlier time. The past seemed to ooze from the stains on the walls, to seep up through the floorboards, and whisper from the crack in the wardrobe door . . . time meandered backwards, lazily, and yet with such inevitable weight that I found myself drawn right into it.

  If I squinted I could almost see Samuel hovering by the window, elegantly attired in black pants and jacket offset by a white linen shirt. In my mind’s eye he was no longer the youthful man from the rose arbour, but middle-aged, his hair longer and threaded with grey, his face craggier and etched with sorrow, his large frame thinner. His head was bent, and his lips moved. He was reading from a small book, tilting it into the light from the window the better to see. After a while he patted his pocket and withdrew a small object, which he closed between the book’s gilt-edged pages –

  A shrill ringing startled me.

  I jerked around, heart thudding. The phone.

  Running along the hall to the kitchen, I snatched up the receiver and answered. My voice sounded hollow, far away. An echo from another time. The woman on the other end of the line introduced herself as the coordinator of an events agency, and wanted to know if I could do a wedding shoot tomorrow. Their regular photographer had broken his leg and they needed someone at short notice.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, jotting the details on the back of an envelope. ‘Yes, ye
s . . . See you then.’

  After hanging up I stood for an age, staring at what I’d written. Seeing – not the envelope defaced by my chicken-scrawl notes – but the dusty little Bible which had sat untouched for decades on Samuel’s rosewood dressing table.

  The Bible’s leather cover was cracked with age, the corners ragged, its gilt-edged pages faded under years of dust. It was small enough to hold on my outstretched palm, surprisingly heavy. I opened the cover. On the flyleaf was a neat inscription in faded blue ink: ‘Awarded to Samuel James Riordan by St Joseph’s Primary School, Dublin, 1925’. As I rifled through the pages, something slid out and clattered onto the floorboards at my feet.

  A tiny key.

  It was very old, with a hollow post and elaborately wrought heart-shaped head, age-blackened and freckled with rust. I knew immediately where it belonged.

  I unlocked the dressing table drawer, half-expecting to find nothing more than a collection of greying underwear and socks.

  And stared.

  I’d been fourteen when I’d last handled a firearm. An old flame of Aunt Morag’s had been a gun enthusiast, a collector of old and rare handguns. His greatest delight was introducing new eyes to his extensive armoury, and I’d spent many hours poring over his exhibits, repulsed by them . . . and yet greatly intrigued.

  Reaching into the shadows of the drawer, I withdrew the revolver.

  It was large, very heavy. I checked the cylinder. There were no cartridges, not even spent ones. Curling my fingers around the grip, I lined my sights at the window. It was illegal to have it in the house, unlicensed. In Samuel’s day, there’d been no regulations about possessing firearms; everyone on properties had them, every farmer or grazier, any landholder. Not now. By law I’d have to surrender this to the police station, or risk a charge.

  I tightened my fingers around the grip. Samuel’s hands had once been where mine were now. Perhaps traces of his skin – certainly his fingerprints – still clung to the weapon’s lacklustre surface. A part of him, here now, in my hands. I raised the handgrip to my nose. It had a dark aroma – sweat and grease, gunpowder and ash, the euphoric sourness of blued metal and cleaning fluid. It smelled as though it had lain a long time underground, buried away from the healing warmth of the sun. It smelled like money, like stories told in sleazy bars, like smoke and stale cologne. It smelled as though it had been passed from hand to hand, collecting the essence of each person’s skin, the way a bee collects pollen from many flowers . . . only this with a far more deadly sting.

  According to Corey, the town’s rumour-mongers believed Samuel escaped conviction because his father was a friend of the judge. But what if the rumours were wrong? What if Samuel had walked free not because of an obliging judge but due to a bona fide lack of evidence? Evidence that I now held in my hands?

  I checked the drawer and sure enough, right at the back, was a small cardboard box of twelve live brass rounds. They’d have to be surrendered to the police along with the revolver. I should take them now, while Bronwyn was at school. I placed the revolver and box of ammo on the floor beside me and went to shut the drawer . . . when something caught my eye.

  A corner of yellowing paper was poking from beneath the floral drawer liner. Digging under the liner, I pulled the paper out. It was an envelope: large and mottled with age-spots, its flap secured with a strip of brittle tape.

  Inside were two colour snapshots.

  In the first, a dark-haired boy of about ten stood in the shadows at the base of an enormous bunya pine. The boy had Tony’s eyes and Tony’s cheeky grin and he was waving at the camera. Nearby on a sunny patch of grass sat a child’s inflatable bathing pool, a pristine blue sky mirrored in the water. In the left corner of the photo a woman stood at a clothesline. She was tall and heavily built, her hair pulled severely off her face. She was in the process of pegging a man’s shirt to the line, glancing over her shoulder as though taken by surprise. Next to the woman, obscured by her raised arm, stood a girl with long fair hair. A shaggy lawn grew up around them, freckled with daisies and darkened in the centre by the shadow of the unseen photographer.

  I flipped the photo. On the back was written, ‘Luella, Glenda, and Tony. Magpie Creek, 1980.’

  The second photo was a blurred and grainy Polaroid, the paper creased and tattered along the edges as if it had spent its life in someone’s pocket or wallet. It showed four children, two boys and two girls – all were laughing as if at a private joke, their eyes locked on one another. The boy on the far left was curly-haired and ever so faintly familiar. The other boy – who I recognised at once – was Tony, probably about eight years old. One of the girls had fuzzy ginger hair and a broad freckled face, her brilliant smile dimmed only by the gappy absence of a front tooth. Apart from the missing tooth, Corey Weingarten had hardly changed at all.

  It was the girl in the centre of the group, though, who captured my attention. She was grinning widely, her face framed by white-blonde plaits. For a single disorienting moment I thought I was looking at my daughter’s face. Of course it wasn’t Bronwyn; the girl in the photo would have been a few years older than Tony when the snap was taken. By now she’d be in her mid-thirties, perhaps with children of her own.

  I flipped back to the photo of Tony under the pine tree, and studied the girl near the clothesline. Then I re-examined the four kids, convinced it was the same girl in both photos. Who was she? And why was she the very image of my daughter?

  The revolver would have to wait. Placing it back in the dresser drawer with the box of brass cartridges, I locked up and hid the key in the back of the wardrobe. Then, collecting the photos, I dashed along the hall to the kitchen and grabbed my car keys.

  7

  The airfield car park was deserted – there was just one other car, a sporty leaf-green Mercedes. I parked beside it and hurried along the gangway toward the office.

  The door was open, but the cluttered space was empty. I went back along the narrow path and headed to the runway. Two small aircraft were parked on the strip, but there was no sign of Corey’s Cessna. I scrutinised the sky, but it was a vast tranquil sheet of nothingness – no planes, no clouds, not even a stray bird.

  ‘Hello there.’

  I whipped around. Corey had emerged from the darkness of the maintenance hangar and was striding towards me, grinning happily. She wore grimy overalls and a baseball cap that did little to restrain her exuberant hair. As she drew nearer she must have sensed my mood. She gave my arm a friendly squeeze and peered into my face.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve found a couple of old photos,’ I told her without preamble. The photos were already in my hand and I held them out. ‘Tony was easy to pick, and you’re in one of them. I was hoping you might be able to tell me who the others are.’

  As she examined the photos, her smile slipped. She tried to recover it, but it seemed to hang a little crooked. She motioned for me to follow her into the hangar.

  The huge shed was dark and cool. In the centre sat the Cessna. Its doors were flung wide, making it look like a grotesque dragonfly. The smell of sawdust and diesel hung in the air, and as I breathed it in I grew calmer.

  Corey wiped her hands on an oil-blackened tea towel, then took the photos from my fingers. A warm breeze lifted strands of her hair about her face, and the peak of her cap shadowed her eyes. She examined each image for a long time, saying nothing.

  I grew impatient. ‘Tony’s grandfather had them tucked away in a drawer,’ I told her. ‘I can understand why he’d have a picture of Tony. But why would he want a photo of the other kids . . . and that’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. And the curly-haired boy is my brother, Danny.’

  ‘What about the blonde girl?’

  Corey gave me an odd look. ‘That’s Glenda.’

  ‘She looks like Bronwyn. Were she and Tony related?’

  Corey studied me for an eternity. Her eyebrows were drawn as though she was trying to nut out a complicated maths problem. The
n her shoulders slumped. ‘He never told you.’

  A twinge of irritation. ‘Told me what?’

  ‘Hell, I assumed he told you something, the basics at least – ’

  ‘What?’ I nearly yelled, feeling the first nibble of panic.

  ‘Come on. We can’t talk here.’ Grabbing my arm, she hauled me across the hangar, out into the glaring sunshine and along the narrow gangway in the direction of the office.

  We entered the dusty space with its bulging file cabinets and desk of radio controls, cluttered bookshelf and map-covered wall boards. Corey went to her desk and selected an old gramophone record. Sliding it from the paper sleeve, she plonked it on the turntable. A noisy orchestral overture boomed into the room, quickly joined by a strident male baritone whose voice rattled the windows. Corey gestured to a pair of scruffy leather recliners. I sat on the edge of one while she flopped on the other.

  ‘Bloody Tony,’ she said over the music. She wrenched off her baseball cap and wrung it between her hands. ‘How could he not have told you? Glenda was his sister.’

  ‘Sister?’ I wanted to correct her – Tony had no sister, I knew that as a fact because if he had, he’d have mentioned her . . . Wouldn’t he?

  Of course not.

  I realised that I’d constructed a mental picture of Tony’s early life that was entirely built on assumptions. Since he never spoke about his parents, I’d assumed them dead. Because he made no mention of any siblings, I had surmised that he didn’t have any. But now, in the space of a heartbeat, all that had changed.

  ‘So what about Luella?’ I asked Corey. ‘Was she his . . . ?’

  ‘Mother.’

  I looked back at the snapshot. The tall woman at the clothesline had been photographed by surprise and she didn’t look happy about it. Yet despite her alarmed expression, she had a kind face – oval-shaped with small, almost slanted eyes and a generous mouth. She was nothing like Tony and even less like the blonde girl, Glenda. But as I studied her, a rare excitement began to rush through my veins.