by Anna Romer
So why did my old fears suddenly feel so real?
I shone my torch to the end of the passageway. Bending low to avoid knocking my head on the overhead beams, I walked towards the cavity in the wall where once my grandfather had stored the ice.
34
Bitterwood, 1977
As Karen hurried along the beach towards the shadow of the headland, her argument with Ron replayed in her mind. She hadn’t meant to cause friction, but that was precisely what she’d done. Worse was Ron’s reaction. Rather than discussing the matter like a reasonable adult, he’d flown off the handle, attacked her as if she’d created the whole episode just to provoke him.
She sighed. They’d been together long enough for her to understand the deep hurt Ron had suffered after his mother – Dulcie – had died. Edwin had withdrawn from the world, making himself unavailable to the teenage son who desperately needed him. Karen understood, but she was also a firm believer in forgiveness. No family was perfect; no one escaped the chaotic rollercoaster of interpersonal relationships. The secret, she had learned, was to roll with the punches, avoid taking anything much to heart, and above all else, be willing to forgive other people’s foibles and move on.
He had a doting wife and a son who idolised him, but do you think you noticed?
Without breaking stride, she glanced back along the beach towards their holiday house. In the morning light, the red tin roof was a tiny speck in the distance, and somewhere beneath it she imagined her daughter’s dark head bent over her colouring book, the girl happily lost in her current obsession as the TV blared in the background. Ron would be at the kitchen table, probably still red-faced after their argument, gorging on the pastries he’d brought back from the bakery. After their episode in the kitchen, Karen feared that he would go to the pub, drink away the day in the company of the casual friends he’d made there over the years. Instead, he had barrelled back through the door half an hour later, arms laden with paper bags.
Karen wanted to smile. Though the day was sunny, a storm brewed in the distance, black clouds pushing bruises along the horizon. On days like today, hot bright days caught on the brink of a storm, she itched to take out her paintbrushes and paper. Seeing Lucy this morning bent over her colouring book, Karen had stifled the temptation to join her.
Funny how things worked out. Since she could walk, Karen had dreamed of being an artist. She’d gone to art school, but had only lasted a year. Her interests changed, that’s what she told everyone; she kept the real reason to herself: lack of talent. Instead, she’d enrolled at Melbourne University to study history, in particular the art of medieval and Renaissance times. Which was how she met Ron.
She reached the headland, and was glad to step into its cool shadow. Climbing the steep path seemed more torturous today than it had last night, and she couldn’t help wondering how she’d managed it in moonlight, without a torch. She was tired, she realised. The combination of sleeplessness and her niggling worries about Ron’s drinking – not to mention the increasing frequency of their arguments – was wearing her down. She paused, and glanced back along the beach. She could see her footprints in the wet sand, weaving all the way back to the foothills. Nestled behind the grassy sandbanks, the cottage would now be in shadow; she could no longer see any sign of it, not even the roof. Far out at sea, the storm clouds had grown darker, and she thought she heard the first rumblings of thunder.
When she reached the crown of the headland, she took another breather. Further up the slope, Bitterwood Park loomed on the other side of the narrow road. Trees obscured the lower half of the building, but its peaked roofline seemed to rub against the clouds, severe and imposing.
She crossed the road and followed the trail between the hedge of twisted trees and around the side of the house, as she’d done last night. She made a beeline for the back door.
‘Edwin, are you there?’ There was no reply, but the door was wide open, so he couldn’t be far. Karen ducked her head inside. The kitchen smelled of toast and fresh coffee. ‘Ed, are you about? It’s Karen.’
Strange. He must be in the garden. She followed the path that wound between the flowerbeds and down into the orchard. The trees were heavy with fruit, large succulent purple mulberries that hung in clusters like babies’ fingers. They would end up taking bucketloads back to Melbourne with them, and Karen would spend the next two weekends stewing them or making her specialty mulberry tarts.
‘Edwin?’
She emerged from the other side of the garden, but still there was no sign of him. Odd, that he hadn’t heard her. She hoped he was all right. She began to worry. Perhaps he’d seen her last night, after all; perhaps he was hiding from her. Ron’s words echoed in the back of her mind.
Mad old buzzard.
Now she was picturing Edwin, concealed somewhere in the shadows, his lanky frame buckled like a concertina into some impossibly tiny bower. Perhaps he was watching her now as she gazed around. Part of her wanted to laugh at the image, but the more compassionate side of her nature felt sorry for the old man.
‘Ed, I just wanted to see if you’re all right.’
When she saw the icehouse door ajar, she let out a relieved sigh.
As she went closer, a shadow swept across the garden. She looked up, realising that the storm had blown in more quickly than she had anticipated. The sky was black overhead, the clouds settling in for a long spell of rain. She’d get soaked if she went home along the beach. She didn’t mind, only that the track down the headland would be slippery. She would have to ring Ron to drive up to collect her, and he wouldn’t be happy.
The wind gathered around her legs, and the icehouse door creaked. She saw that the keys were still in the lock. Going to the threshold, she listened. It wasn’t like Edwin to disappear like this, maybe he was hiding from her after all. Or worse, he might have slipped and fallen.
Pushing through the door, Karen ventured into the icehouse.
So dark. In the distance, she heard the slow rumble of thunder. As she felt her way down some steps, the air got colder. She might have turned back, but the idea had lodged in her mind that Edwin might be in trouble. Poor Edwin. She could still see him, hunched over his book of photos, his frail body gripped by sobs.
The passageway grew narrower. Karen touched the wall beside her. The surface was crumbly, and her fingers came away damp. Perhaps she should go back to the cottage and return with reinforcements. Despite Ron’s lack of compassion for his father, even he wouldn’t ignore the old man’s disappearance.
She was about to turn around, when a glimmer of light caught her attention. At first, she thought it was lightning, but of course, she was too deep into the icehouse for any outside light to reach. It was coming from up ahead. Feeling her way along the wall, she hurried towards it.
The passageway ended. A narrow opening led into a small rectangular room. Near the opening burned a candle, the source of the light she’d followed. It fluttered as she stepped into the room, her shadow cavorting madly up the walls and across the cobweb-infested roof beams. Karen drew a breath when she saw the figure huddled in the far corner.
‘Edwin!’ she cried, and lurched towards him, but as the candle guttered violently in the breeze of her passing, she saw that it wasn’t Edwin at all. It wasn’t even a person, not really, just a bundle of—
The candle went out. Her nostrils filled with smoke.
Impossible . . . Just seeing things.
She stood a moment, hoping her eyes might adjust, but the darkness seemed only to grow denser. It didn’t matter. The thing she’d seen had imprinted itself on her mind, as crisply detailed as a photograph.
Slowly, she felt her way back through the dark, out into the passageway. As she groped along it, her arm snared on something, probably a nail, and she felt the sting of torn skin. Up ahead she saw the stairs, faintly illuminated by the watery light from outside. She hurried towards them. A moment later, she was through the open door and out into the rain. She ran towards the house, b
ut bypassed the verandah and made her way around the front, through the trees and along the crown of the headland. The pathway was wet and slippery. Halfway down she fell and slid. She was more careful, after that. When she reached the sand at the foot of the headland, she paused to catch her breath.
Each breath burned. She tried to tell herself she’d been mistaken, but the thing in the corner had seared itself into her mind’s eye – the dark, tattered thing that looked like a person, but wasn’t. She was not entirely sure what she had seen in Edwin’s icehouse, only that it had no right to be there. Something was amiss, terribly amiss. Ron’s words rang in her ears.
Mad old buzzard, there’s likely more than one skeleton hiding in his closet.
She had to talk to Ron – to articulate what had happened so she could make sense of it. He might still be grouchy after their row that morning, but Ron never sulked for long. He was always there when she needed him. She brushed the wet sand off her jeans and ran back along the beach towards the cottage.
Stupid, to have left the candle burning. How much easier it would have been just to snuff the flame between his fingers, plunge the place into darkness. She hadn’t had a torch, hadn’t been expecting to enter any dark place. The candlelight had given away his presence; it had attracted her, drawn her into the innermost chamber of his secret world, and now she had seen—
Stupid.
Edwin manoeuvred himself in the cramped cavity beneath the floor. There was barely room to flex his arms, let alone roll onto his back, but flex he did, and, reaching up, managed to lift the iron grate set into the floor. Slowly, with concentrated effort, he pushed the grate away from the opening. As a boy, he had fitted into the drainage channel with relative ease; he’d been slender and surprisingly strong, agile as a monkey. Ronald had teased him about his physique, calling him a string bean, a human twig. Edwin had burned inside at the taunts, but his secret had made the jeering easier to bear. A secret place within a secret place – even his mother hadn’t known about the icehouse culvert. During Bitterwood’s heyday at the turn of the century, the well-insulated inner chamber of the icehouse had taken almost a ton of ice. Slowly, as summer reached its peak, that ice would melt away. Edwin’s grandfather, Colman Briar, had been to America and viewed famous icehouses in Washington and Philadelphia, where he’d learned about the importance of installation, proper storage, and drainage.
Edwin climbed stiffly out of the trench. Due to the proximity of bedrock to the surface, Colman Briar had been unable to make his icehouse culvert as deep as he would have liked; instead, he had created a wide, shallow drain, with just enough capacity to cope with the flow of meltwater that inevitably accumulated at the end of summer.
Rubbing his legs, Edwin cursed his age. He was no longer the agile string bean who could fold his lanky body into the smallest of spaces. He was eighty now, his joints arthritic and swollen, his tendons dried up, his muscles withered.
Relighting his candle, he shuffled through the narrow opening into the passage, and was about to head for the stairs when he paused. On the ground near his feet, he caught a glimmer. At first he thought it was just another shard of broken glass, but when he bent to investigate he found instead a small golden heart. He knew it instantly. It was the charm from the bracelet he had given Karen. She must have dropped it here in her rush to get away. He shone the candle about, but did not find the rest of the bracelet. It was very old, he reasoned; perhaps the link attaching the charm had broken, while the rest of the chain remained around Karen’s wrist.
He slipped the gold heart into his pocket. He must return it to her. Immediately, he decided.
Pausing on the icehouse threshold, he looked around the garden. She was gone, no doubt to report to someone – Ron, the authorities, perhaps even the police – what she’d seen. He would go after her, make his way along the road; take a jar of the mulberry jam she loved. Pray that he was not too late to stop her.
Locking the heavy door behind him, he stood for a moment in the sunlight. He was so weary, so tired of keeping secrets. It seemed he had kept them his whole life. Suddenly he wished them gone. Every secret had its use-by date. He had carried this one close to his chest for over four decades. Perhaps it was time to pass the burden to someone else.
Gull Cottage, 1977
Back at the cottage, the dining table was a mess of drawings: green owls flying across a purple sky of yellow stars; tiny red boats bobbing on black oceans; blue cats and big white dogs with brown spots; houses spewing streamers of orange smoke from their chimneys. In the midst of this rainbow of chaos sat Lucy, head bowed over her page, furiously colouring.
Karen called to her, but the girl didn’t look up.
Ron wasn’t in the kitchen or lounge room, so she ran along the hall and checked the bedrooms. When there was no sign of him on the back porch, she went back into the dining room.
‘Honey, where’s your father?’
Lucy shrugged, intent on her page. ‘Gone out.’
‘He left you alone?’
‘I’m ten, remember.’
Karen’s frustration sharpened the already brittle edge to her voice. ‘Where did he go? And please don’t say the pub, or I’ll scream.’
Lucy looked up, and her eyes widened. Karen glanced down at herself. Her T-shirt was filthy, her bare arms scratched where she had run carelessly through the hedge at Bitterwood. She had badly grazed her elbow, and a thin worm of blood wound down her forearm.
‘Mum, what happened?’
For a moment Karen couldn’t speak. Lucy rarely called her Mum these days, claiming it was too babyish, and arguing that if Coby got to call his parents by their Christian names, then why couldn’t she? For the past few months, Lucy had been calling them Ron and Karen, but that wasn’t what made Karen pause. It was the girl’s tone: worried, with an edge of alarm.
She took a breath and let it out. Cleared her throat. ‘I’m all right, love. I got caught in the rain.’ She tried to laugh, lighten her voice. ‘What a goose, I slipped over on the headland, skated halfway down on my bum.’
Lucy fixed her gaze on Karen’s forearm, frowning at the thread of blood. ‘You’d better get something on it.’
For an instant, Karen felt trapped. Such an ordinary moment, here in the dining room with Lucy, the air still sweet from Ron’s pastries and the coffee he’d brewed to go with them. Yet it was far from ordinary. Her discovery had left her shaken. She didn’t know what it meant, only that it cast a terrifying shadow over her family that would remain until the situation was resolved. And to do that she needed to speak to Ron. They would have to go to the police; there might even be an investigation.
Her legs were suddenly wobbly. Dragging a chair out from under the table, she sat heavily, palming her face, breathing through her fingers.
‘Where is it?’ Lucy asked.
It took her a moment to make sense of the question. ‘Where’s what?’
‘The bracelet.’
Karen’s mind whirled. She glanced at her wrist, saw the streaks of dirt, the scratches; vaguely remembered her arm catching on something as she fled along the dark passage—
‘You promised,’ Lucy accused. ‘You promised I could have it, and now it’s gone. Did you give it back to Grandad?’
‘Give what back?’
‘The bracelet he gave you. Did you give it back?’
‘No, I—’
‘You lost it, didn’t you?’
Karen stood up, shaking off her wobbles. ‘Where’s your father?’
Lucy pouted, snatched up a pencil and bowed her head back over her drawing. ‘Dunno. Out.’
‘Out where, exactly?’
There was a long pause, and then Lucy sighed. ‘He went fishing.’
‘I don’t recall seeing him on the beach.’ Nor would she have, she realised. She’d been so distressed that a full circus parade could have passed by and she wouldn’t have noticed.
‘Which way did he go – west towards the headland or east to the rocks?’
Lucy shrugged, Karen’s impatience squirmed inside her. She wanted to shake the girl, hurry her up. She considered just running out onto the foreshore and screaming Ron’s name until he heard her. Crazy thoughts, stress always did that to her. Stay calm, she warned herself. There’s no need to panic. Ron will know what to do. Take a deep breath and stay calm.
Lucy’s attention went back to Karen’s wrist where the bracelet should have been. Her eyes narrowed, and finally she looked up.
‘He went to the rocks.’
35
Bitterwood, 1931
Edwin was undressing for bed when he heard the hammering on the door. He groaned and sought the clock, grimaced at the time. A quarter to eleven.
He had returned home late from Apollo Bay to discover a stranger’s car parked along the verge. He had a sinking feeling, so when he found Clarice in bed, crying and not making sense he feared the worst. Clarice told him that Orah’s father had turned up, and was, at that moment, asleep in one of the guest rooms. She said Orah had gone to her room upset, and that there’d be hell to pay in the morning.
Edwin cursed himself for sending the letter. He had written it in a moment of weakness, overcome by guilt and remorse. Now, he’d have done anything to be able to turn back time and rip the damn note to shreds.
He gazed at Clarice’s sleeping form. She’d been restless of late, but had found relief with the help of Doctor Vetch’s sleeping draught and a cup of hot milk. Soon, the baby would come, but the thought brought Edwin no joy. In the past months, Clarice had grown frail. A frown line had begun to show between her brows, and she had chewed her nails to the quick. She bustled around the house, her face aglow, her eyes bright. This was her last trimester, the baby was due any day and the doctor had given her a good prognosis. Yet Edwin could see the cracks, the forced cheer.
