by Agatha Frost
Katie reached out to open the door, but her fresh set of pale lavender acrylics didn’t quite wrap around the handle.
“I thought getting rid of this place would fix everything,” she whispered, looking directly at Julia. “Why does it feel like it’s only making things worse?”
“After tomorrow, this place will be someone else’s problem, and you’ll be debt-free by the end of the day.” Julia opened her door, smiling at Katie. “Don’t lose sight of why you’re doing this. You didn’t come to this decision overnight, and . . .”
A figure came into Julia’s peripheral vision. James, who she’d assumed was in the back of the van, walked backwards in front of her car, carrying something as large as a washing machine concealed under a white sheet. His son held up the other side, once again dressed identically to his father.
“From your lack of reaction, I take it you knew they’d be here?” Julia asked as she unfastened Olivia from her car seat.
With the baby on one side and the stuffed bag on the other, they met around the back of Katie’s baby pink Fiat 500. Katie popped open the boot and, after looking around, leaned in.
“Your father invited him,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. “I told him not to, but—”
Julia cut her off with a cough as Brian, the man himself, walked through the grand front doors. Through his legs, Julia caught a peek of her brother, Vinnie. Four months shy of his third birthday, he was firmly in his ‘terrible twos’ phase. From what she’d heard from Katie as of late, Julia had a lot of stubbornness and volatile emotions to look forward to when Olivia’s dreaded twos arrived.
“First time in a while I haven’t seen him crying,” Julia said, attempting to divert the conversation as they approached the house. “Do I get a cuddle, Vinnie?”
Julia passed an excited Olivia to her grandfather and crouched to Vinnie with open arms. Vinnie hid even more completely behind Brian’s legs; evidently, a hug from his eldest sister was the last thing he wanted. Even knowing how hot and cold toddlers could run, it stung a little. After two years of cuddling, he’d suddenly become wary of everyone.
“Give your sister a hug,” Brian insisted after returning Olivia. “Don’t be silly, kiddo.”
“No, it’s alright.” Julia tried to ruffle his hair, but he ducked. “Not quite the same, but I lived with a teenager long enough to know it’s better if he comes to me.”
“How is Jessie?” Katie asked. “Still haven’t had her latest postcard at the café yet. Where is she now?”
“India, but they’re pinging around the place like pinballs. From the glimpses I’ve seen, she’s having the time of her life.”
“Oh, to be twenty and travelling the world,” said Brian as Julia stepped aside to let Katie crouch to give Vinnie an allowed hug. “Another eighteen years and this one might be off doing the same thing.”
Giggles she recognised as belonging to her nieces, Pearl and Dottie, echoed around the cavernous formal sitting room through an arch on the right side of the house.
“Your sister’s already arrived,” her father explained.
“Is Neil here?” Julia asked.
“Not that I’ve seen.”
Katie gave Julia a quick, wide-eyed head shake that almost certainly meant ‘I haven’t told him what Neil said to me,’ so Julia didn’t push it. Moments later, Katie left, carrying Vinnie in the direction of the laughter. Julia hung back as her father caught up with her.
“I hear you invited James to the garden party?”
“I take it from your voice you don’t like him either.” Brian pursed his lips, never looking more like his mother. “He’s not all bad, you know.”
“I never said he was all bad.”
“But this library situation has everyone twisted up.”
“Dad . . .”
“When did you last need a library, Julia?” He laughed, fluffing up his hair, still thick and full even into his late sixties. “A new restaurant would be nice, don’t you think?”
“Dad!” Julia stopped in her tracks. “Your son-in-law manages that place, and your son loves that library as much as your granddaughters do. If all he wants is a restaurant, there are plenty of empty buildings in Peridale that would do.”
“It does have great light.”
Brian shrugged and, rather than following the laughter into the sitting room, turned on his heel for the kitchen. If her father was the only person who thought like that, she might have been angrier, considering all her efforts with Peridale’s Ears to stop it from happening.
Early on, when they’d concentrated on going door to door to collect petition signatures, she’d encountered something she’d never expected. Some people weren’t bothered by the library going. Not everyone. Not even a majority. But every ten or so houses, she’d encounter someone whose eyes lit up at the suggestion of a new restaurant. In a village so opposed to change, she’d struggled to understand why everyone didn’t jump at the opportunity to help. As her gran had pointed out, most of the people who’d voiced such opinions were older businessmen close to or post-retirement.
“They think with their stomachs!” Dot had said during their first meeting to compare petitions. “At this rate, all we’re doing is giving that man free promotion for his restaurant.”
Shaking her head, Julia focused on the present and joined Katie and her sister by the front window. Once filled with ornate antique furniture and busts and paintings of generations of Wellingtons, the bare room now had a sweeping echo. The space, the length of a bowling alley with a double-height ceiling, was so big she didn’t immediately notice that it wasn’t empty.
At the window looking out on the garden on the far side of the room, James and Ritchie were talking. Behind them, Julia’s father was assembling a long wallpaper-pasting table on the grass. In front of them, atop four table legs, sat the mystery item they’d carried in, still cloaked.
“I was just apologising to Katie on Neil’s behalf,” Sue explained as she stepped into the small playpen that had been set up. “He’s staying at home today. He’s not taking any of this well.”
“I get it,” Katie said, trying to interest Vinnie in some of the scattered toys. “He’s upset.”
“But that’s no reason to take it out on you.” Sue’s nostrils flared. “He came home all full of bravado last night, saying he’d ‘finally stood up to Katie,’ and I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Like a typical man, he assumed he was in the right.”
Katie wasn’t the only one who seemed tired. Between raising the twins and full-time work as a nurse, Sue’s plate had been full long before the added pressure of her husband losing his place of employment.
“I know this isn’t the outcome we were hoping for, but after tomorrow, we can all start moving on,” said Julia, passing Olivia over the paddock fence to Katie on the other side. “We’re all going to get through this. Watch Olivia for a minute. I haven’t been to the bathroom since my morning tea, and my bladder isn’t what it used to be.”
On her way out of the sitting room, she glanced at James and Richie again. Was she imagining it, or had they had their hair cut since the previous night’s appearance at the library? Either way, the short back and sides and swept back tops were so similar she could hardly tell one man from the other at her distance.
Like father like son.
Instinct sent her to the small downstairs bathroom. From the outside, there the light shining from underneath the door was enough to keep her from trying the handle. She turned and headed towards the bathroom upstairs. With each step up the grand sweeping staircase, her bladder felt one drop closer to popping – so much so, she took the last few two at a time. She traversed the length of the corridor even quicker, and she was ready to burst into the bathroom when voices stopped her dead.
“You know me,” a man said in a husky voice she’d never heard before. “I’ll tell him, and you know I will. Now look up and sit still.”
Julia couldn’t see who was in the bathroom. Like downst
airs, she didn’t want to interrupt, but the door was open a crack. Through the gap, the mirror revealed a stylish man of around thirty with a black goatee. He appeared to be applying makeup to a woman in a fluffy white robe sitting on the edge of the bath. Crispy barrel curls highlighted with many shades of blonde cascaded down her back. Her hair was long enough that Julia would have recognised it if she’d seen it before. She couldn’t see the stranger’s face.
The man applying the makeup could see Julia, though. Their eyes met in the mirror, and her heart sank. The woman spun around, one eye dark and smoky, the other as bare as Katie’s.
“Sorry.”
Julia backed away, pulling the door shut.
Even if she’d wanted to hang around, her bladder had other ideas. Her journey downstairs was much slower than going up, her leg-crossing and banister-gripping barely doing what they needed to. She passed her father talking to another woman she’d never seen before, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. She went straight for the bathroom under the stairs again, relieved to see the door open and the hiss of the cistern refilling after a recent flush.
After a flush of her own less than a minute later, and happy to have made it, she washed her hands at the sink. She looked around the bathroom, the same place she’d taken the pregnancy test that eventually led to Olivia. But thoughts of that night quickly left her mind when she realised there might be nothing other than toilet roll to dry her hands with. She opened the cupboards under the sink, but found them stripped bare except for a single roll of red electrical tape.
Flicking water from her fingers, she left the bathroom. The rush to the top of the stairs faded to a distant memory, until the woman with the multi-blonde mane of hair walked down the stairs and reminded Julia what she’d heard at the top.
“I’ll tell him,” the man with the goatee, two steps behind the woman on the stairs with a silver trunk in each hand, had said. “You know I will.”
Though the words could have meant anything, the more Julia replayed it in her memory, the more threatening his tone sounded. Or maybe it was all in her imagination. Either way, it wasn’t her business.
“Where is he?” the woman demanded of Brian as he set up another table, this time in the entrance hall.
“If you mean James,” Brian replied, a brow arching at the woman, “your husband and son just went out through the kitchen.”
The woman strutted in that direction. The goateed man set down the cases and pulled out his phone. He glanced up at Julia, and the split second of eye contact was enough to make the hairs on her arms prick up. Was she imagining that threatening glint, too?
She almost smiled to signal another apology but thought better of it. She’d apologised in the moment and left immediately. The snarky upturn of his tightening, shiny lips, so perfectly framed by the goatee, wasn’t her imagination, and it was hard not to stare.
She entered the sitting room and was shocked to see all four children playing unattended. They seemed completely fine, but she’d assumed someone would be watching the pen.
“Over here!” Sue hissed from the other side of the room. “You thought we left them, didn’t you?”
“No,” Julia lied as she joined them at the table holding the covered mystery object. “What are you doing?”
“I saw the horror on your face,” Sue said, almost insulted. “James and James II just left this thing. I want to look at it. It could be anything.”
“It could be a bomb,” Katie suggested, a little too seriously. “Or something worse.”
“Worse than a bomb?” Sue squinted at Katie. “C’mon. Just a peek. They could come back any second, and it’s still your house.”
Katie looked up at Julia, seeking approval as she bit into her thumb. Julia could only offer a shrug, knowing she was hardly the right person to look to as a moral compass. She was itching to know what was under the sheet. Its position in front of the floor to ceiling window, perfect for catching the best of the morning light, was too tempting to ignore.
But still, Katie didn’t reach out.
“Ladies.” James startled them all from behind. “Not going to have a peek, were you?”
“No,” Katie said, too loud and too fast. “What is it?”
James strode towards them, Richie a few steps behind. As usual, Julia couldn’t help but notice the air of sadness around the younger Jacobson. She didn’t need Evelyn’s abilities to sense it; the more she was around him, the more she noticed how rarely he looked up.
“I was going to wait until everyone was here,” he said, hand already reaching out, “but I’d appreciate your feedback. Market research, as it were.”
James plucked away the sheet like a magician revealing his final trick without taking the necessary moment to drum up tension. The object underneath sent Katie running straight for the archway, followed by the echo of her own choked cries.
“Worse than a bomb, after all,” said Sue with a gulp.
3
Julia tore after Katie, who was already halfway up the sweeping staircase by the time Julia was through the arch. Katie running up the stairs of Wellington Manor in floods of tears wasn’t a new sight. Many dinners had ended in arguments and outbursts after a one or another thinly veiled insult from Sue or Dot lit the spark to set the night on fire.
These weren’t tantrum tears.
Like most of those other times, Brian flew up the stairs after Katie. Their monolith of a four-poster bed had long since gone, yet they still went in the direction of their former master suite. Also like those times, Julia knew when to give them space. Thankfully, this time she didn’t have to guard the stairs to stop her sister or gran going up to start round two with an attempt at an apology.
Thank goodness things had changed.
Content knowing her father would give Katie a shoulder to cry on, if nothing else, Julia returned to the sitting room. While James and his son produced roller banners from long black zip-up bags, Julia folded her arms tightly and stared at the model on the table.
“One-sixteenth scale,” Sue said absentmindedly as she glanced in the direction of the stairs. “I always wanted a dollhouse like this.”
Dollhouse wasn’t the word Julia would have used.
Even without the roof and the grand frontage, it wasn’t difficult to tell that the model – perfectly stark white – was Wellington Manor. Or rather, what Wellington Manor would become after James finished slicing and dicing it.
“Nine apartments,” James explained, leaving his son to hook up the roller banner that showed simulations of the interior colour schemes. “Wellington Heights will be as luxurious as luxurious gets.”
“Only two bedrooms?” Sue questioned, hovering over the model. “Not very family-friendly, are they?”
“We’re not expecting many families.” James’s grin stretched. “We’re aiming ourselves to a more . . . retired crowd. The kind of old dears who’ve put away enough to enjoy their twilight years in style.”
“Forget your demographics,” said Julia, her frustration bubbling over into her voice. “Couldn’t you have waited one more day to show this off? Katie is just about handling everything, but this was the last thing she needed to see.”
Julia faced James’s narrow-eyed assessment without flinching. His amused smile, always plastered and perfect, stretched wider. He had those lips that were always pricked up at the corners. Always ready to give away what his ever-scanning eyes picked up. She resisted the urge to shrink back as he let the silence bubble up.
“If this village is as nosy as it’s rumoured to be,” he said, snapping out of his observation with a rub of his hands, “you’re going to have most of the residents through those lovely big doors today. What better chance to find some prospective customers?”
“Is that all this village is to you?” Sue dry-laughed, shaking her head into the emptiness of the room. “Window shoppers in your new empire?”
It was Sue’s turn to receive James’s gaze. To Julia’s knowledge, the pai
r of them had never been in the same room, but Sue injected the full dose of her library-based disdain for James into that one laugh. Still, his eyes flicked back to Julia.
“Why do you put all those lovely cakes in your display cases?” James asked Julia as the upturned smile stretched to near-Joker levels. How did he get his teeth so white? “You could put them in the back, no? I haven’t been in your kitchen, but I saw the big, stainless-steel fridges through those charming beaded curtains.” He opened his hands, but before Julia could form her response, he said, “No, that wouldn’t quite work, would it? You put them out front, all bright and colourful, using their mouth-watering perfection to lure people in. How is this any different from—”
“No!” Brian cut James off midsentence, marching towards them from the bottom of the stairs. “Pack it up, Jacobson. Not today.”
“C’mon, Brian—”
“My wife is up there in hysterics,” he snapped, catching the attention of every set of eyes in the room. “You’ll get the keys tomorrow, and then you can do whatever the hell you want with this place. But for one more day, this is Katie’s house. You got that?”
Julia expected bravado that never came. James seemed to deflate and one hand went up to the back of his head. He stared at the model, releasing a steady puff of air. Had he truly not considered how Katie might take it? Or was he a good actor? He had spent months dealing with Katie’s sensitivity, and yet the library had proven how skilled he was at being oblivious.
“My mistake.” James held up both hands before nodding at his son. “Let’s get this out of here.”
Julia’s father, clearly having braced himself for a bigger confrontation, took a second to calm down. When his chest flattened, he gave a nod that Julia read as ‘as you should.’ Her father wasn’t a man to throw his fists around, but the pressure cooker had been simmering for a long time; it wouldn’t take much to blow the lid.
