Thornwood House (39 page)

He sighed, then pulled up his wrist and grimaced at his watch. ‘I’m sorry, Audrey, I’ve got to rush off, I’m going to be late for class.’

We said goodbye, and I lingered in the coolness watching him hurry along the walkway and vanish around the corner. Then I made my slow way back to the Celica, my thoughts weighing heavy on the diary stashed in the bottom drawer of my bedside table. Buried in darkness, just as it had been for the past twenty years. None of Glenda’s entries was conclusive; none would stand up in a court of law as evidence to support my belief that she’d been the victim of something other than a fatal fall.

But it didn’t matter what she’d written, did it?

The facts told a different story. Along with her haversack and hairbrush and a change of clothes, her diary had lain hidden in the hollow tree at the top of my garden for two decades, a good forty-minute walk from where – that rain-swept night – her falling body had supposedly caused a rockslide.

At the end of the week, I pulled up outside the school gates and cut the motor. We were an hour earlier than usual. Beside me in the passenger seat Bronwyn was jiggling in obvious excitement. She was wearing jeans, her new hiking boots, and her old terry sunhat jammed on her head. Her face glowed with zinc cream.

I reached over to straighten her collar. ‘Remember what I told you?’

‘Stay near the teachers at all times,’ she recited, pulling free of me and searching the mob of kids swarming at the gates. ‘Don’t wander off alone, watch for snakes, and always wear sunscreen.’

‘I’ll miss you, you know,’ I said. ‘We haven’t been apart before.’

‘Yeah, Mum.’ She was distracted, fiddling with her bag, itching to get going.

I sighed, trying to calm the butterflies dancing whirligigs in my stomach. ‘Are you sure you’ve got everything?’

‘Mum, don’t worry! Me and Jade’ll look after each other . . . Oh, there she is! See you in a week!’

With a kiss to my flushed cheek, she grabbed her backpack and sprang out of the car, then hailed Jade, who was bearing down through the hordes towards us.

They greeted each other with their customary exuberance, then shouldered their packs and trundled off towards the waiting coach. The teachers, Ross O’Malley among them, began to drove the kids into ragged lines. I kept waiting for Bronwyn to turn and wave, but she was too immersed in excited conversation with Jade and a skinny fair-haired boy. Five minutes later she was climbing into the coach, vanishing from view as the ragtag procession of kids swarmed in after her.

A dull ache pulsed in my chest. She was slipping away. Only eleven, but already drifting out of my protective orbit, into a wider and – for her, at least – more interesting world.

Sitting there in the sun-warmed car, searching the crowded coach for a glimpse of her, I couldn’t help remembering how I’d been at her age. Plaits and long socks, hand-me-down school
tunics that Aunt Morag had happened across in op shops. Geeky and quiet, a bookworm, painfully shy. For a long time I worried that Bronwyn would be equally afflicted with shyness, but she couldn’t have been more different. Despite the absence of a dependable father figure and the presence of a reclusive workaholic mother, Bronwyn had turned out, as Ross O’Malley said, to be an exceptionally well-balanced girl.

A motor rumbled to life, pulling me back to the present. The coach doors hissed shut and the huge vehicle left the kerb and heaved out onto the road. Scanning the windows, I saw only a blur of unfamiliar faces.

Then, as the coach navigated the corner, I glimpsed her at the rear window, she and Jade together, their faces pushed near the glass. Both of them looking at me, trying to get my attention, waving furiously.

A moment later, the coach rumbled off around the corner, leaving behind nothing but a puff of thin black exhaust.

The house was empty without her. The rooms were full of echoes, the shadows restless. I caught myself hovering at the window, watching the dark trees along the service road. Or going into her room, folding and refolding the clothes she’d left scattered in her rush to pack for camp. Or trying to calculate what she was doing, right now, this red hot minute.

Whatever it was, I knew it didn’t involve worrying about me.

I went out to my studio at the back of the house and browsed through some recent photos, then decided that moping around was getting me nowhere.

So instead, I went in search of Glenda.

I climbed the hill, picking my way along the path that wound up through the pomegranates and monsterio, up to the clearing where the hollow beechwood tree grew. Moonlight washed the old beech in silver, illuminating its bark, making the branches
glow white against the black velvet sky. Around it, the bush was an inky scrim of shadows.

Despite the moon’s far-reaching radiance and my focused cone of torchlight, it took me an hour to find what I’d come looking for. Beneath the overhanging boughs of a collapsed tea-tree, I found the remains of an old haversack. It was sodden and disintegrated, empty of anything except a couple of worms and a wolf spider.

For a while I fossicked in the bushes, training my torch under ferns and grassy clumps, wandering uphill then backtracking to lower ground, all the while keeping the gnarly old beech central to my search. After twenty minutes, my flashlight beam struck a soft glimmer of colour.

The hairbrush was plastic, its translucent pink body cracked and whitened by age. Most of its bristles had fallen away – a few remained, though, and I trained my light up close and searched for a strand of ash-blonde hair. Of course there were none, so I stowed the brush in the grocery bag I’d brought and continued looking. Soon I’d collected scraps of clothing, various articles of makeup, toiletries, a wallet, and the remains of a book riddled with slaters.

On my way back, I paused at the tree. Its white bark seemed to breathe in the darkness. The burnt-out trunk looked sinister. Shadows scattered in the probing cone of my flashlight beam, then re-formed into the outline of a man’s skinny frame, assembling and fleshing out until I could see him with full clarity: Hobe Miller balanced there on a trembling bough, reaching into the fork between two branches, his arm sunk to the elbow as he groped around for what was no longer hidden there. Letters or a diary, it didn’t matter which. What bothered me most was that he’d known exactly where to look.

I hugged my grocery bag and stared into the darkness.

The gully was thirty minutes from here. On the northern boundary of the property, back in the direction of town.
Well known for being dangerous – rockslides, earth collapses, cave-ins.

And murder.

Fear ran light fingers across my skin. Fear . . . and the overwhelming urge to see this gully, to wander among its shadows and lofty trees and sprays of sunlight, to absorb its particular atmosphere for myself. Not with the intention of finding anything, but to get a sense of the place where Glenda – and her grandmother forty years before her – had lived out the final moments of their young lives.

T
he following morning I set out early.

By the time I reached the top of the first hill I was puffing, my skin flushed with sweat, my hair damp beneath Bronwyn’s old sunhat. The battered Minolta I kept for field trips and photographic note-taking was slung over my shoulder along with my satchel and waterflask, bumping me as I walked.

Pausing to look back the way I’d come, I could just make out the homestead’s roof gleaming through the ironbarks, and the deeper green of its garden surrounds. It was a glorious day, the sky faded denim, the air tangy with the scent of leaf litter and wildflowers. Lorikeets flashed green and crimson as they swooped from tree to tree, their squeaky chatter disrupting the stillness. As I passed beneath a giant ghost gum, a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos lifted and flew into the sky, shrieking like devils.

It felt good to be surrounded by nothing but thickets of tea-tree and black-trunked wattles and lofty red gums. There was no one else for miles, I could have been the lone survivor of an apocalypse, the last soul on earth adrift in the golden morning. I had to keep reminding myself that Tony and Glenda had walked this way countless times as kids, a shortcut from William Road to their grandfather’s house; this lonely track had probably once rung with their calls and shouts and laughter.

Glenda had also come this way the night she died, upset after discovering the letters in her father’s shed, impatient to see Ross. Only Ross hadn’t showed, and Glenda had rushed from her hiding place to meet – not Ross, as she’d been expecting – but someone else.

I shivered and picked up my pace.

Ten minutes later, the trail veered downhill. Once or twice it vanished into an erosion gully, and I was forced to crab-walk down the steep embankments on my hands and bottom until I reconnected at the other side. I passed several cone-shaped anthills erupting from the earth like red boils. Further down, the landscape grew lush and wild. I was certain I could hear the faraway tinkling of bells. I stopped to listen, then decided it must be the sound of flowing water. Taking out the aerial shot given to me by Tony’s lawyer, I studied it, identifying what landmarks I could, and surmised I was close to the gully.

Following the watery babble, I pushed through a dense understorey of ferns and wonga vines. The treetops now formed a canopy, their dense mosaic of leaves cutting the sunlight to ribbons. The shadows underfoot were black, and rank with new smells: decaying vegetation and wet wood. Here and there wild orchids and bluebells thrust their jewel-coloured heads above the grey-green foliage, tiny embers of exquisite purple, pink, crimson, indigo.

Then, more chiming bells. I gazed up into the trees, but there was no sign of any birds. As I wandered deeper, the calls became more frequent. Soon I was surrounded by a melodic chiming. Bellbirds, I realised. Their fluty chirps and trills seemed to echo from all directions, as if the sky itself was singing.

Walking on, I came to a small clearing. At its very centre stood a lofty boulder. The boulder was taller than me and shaped like a shark’s fin. Its grey elephant-hide surface was decorated with frills of lichen and moss. One flat face was turned to the
sun, the other thrown into gloom, and the shadow it cast on the leaf-littered ground was damp and tombstone-like.

As I went nearer, I had the bewildering sensation that I’d been here before, a long time ago. Impossible. And yet I could see it as though in memory. The clearing had been darker then, more overgrown, the trees so thick they formed an unbroken canopy overhead. It had been night-time, and the wind had sobbed as it threaded through the leaves.
No
,
stop
, it cried,
Please stop
–

I shook my head to clear it.

Streamers of light fluttered through the leaf canopy, chasing the deep gloom from between the rigid, black-trunked ironbarks. Sunbeams picked along the spines of lacy ferns, turning them brilliant lime-green beneath the ghostly white trunks of imposing river gums. A cathedral, I thought. A sacred place which must have been of great significance to the land’s indigenous custodians.

Standing in this enchanted, timeless clearing, I felt cradled by the soft light, swaddled in the cool green glow, embraced by the giddy chiming-song of the bellbirds. I was a shadow among a million other shadows, existing in perfect alignment, tapping into the greater flow.

So why did being here make me uneasy?

Crossing the clearing, I went to the edge of the gully and peered over. The embankment walls were steep, eroded by cave-ins. Trees grew at right angles up the sidings, their new shoots seeking the light. Boulders thrust from the soil like half-buried skulls. Here and there were fallen trees, their roots jutting skywards, their trunks making gangways over the gaping nothingness.

One wrong step
 . . .

Walking back to the fin-shaped stone, I sat in its cool shadow and took out my flask. The water was sweet and delicious on my parched throat, but it sat heavily in my belly. The air was humid, the heat made me languid. Leaning back, I shut my eyes and breathed out the tension. Felt myself slip into the past.