Love Notes from Vinegar House

by Karen Tayleur

  I wiped my hands and made an excuse to leave.

  “If there’s something you want to ask, then ask it,” said Mrs Skelton. “I’ll either have an answer for you or I won’t.” She was working away at the potato, a few stray wisps of hair waving about her face.

  “Why can’t I go in the attic? I won’t hurt anything.”

  Mrs Skelton added the potato to a bowl of water. “When I was your age I was earning a living,” she said, covering the bowl with a checked tea towel.

  This was no answer. I sighed and stood up to leave.

  “There’s nothing up there for you. Just a whole lot of old things that need throwing away, if you ask me. Or a few that need airing out to the world. But, your grandmother won’t hear of it. And she won’t want you poking around up there.”

  A memory of light pulsing from the attic window flashed into my mind, and I wondered why. Why think of that now? I had a sudden urge to go upstairs and check that Rumer’s note was still tucked away in my drawer.

  I watched Mrs Skelton add some fat to a baking tray, then place the meat onto the tray. I thought it was strange that she had bothered to trim the fat from the meat when she had planned to roast it in fat all along. I watched the house keys, on the crocheted chain about her neck, swing over the pan.

  “If you really want to help, there are library shelves that need attention,” she said. “You need to pull out the books to give it a good dust. I usually start at the bottom and work my way up.”

  And with that she handed me a rag and shooed me out of the kitchen.

  When I went upstairs later to get Rumer for lunch, there was another envelope under her door. As I wondered what to do, I heard footsteps approaching the door from inside her room, then the door swung open and Rumer stood before me.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Mrs Skelton says to come down for lunch,” I said.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said, then shut the door in my face.

  It wasn’t until I walked away that I noticed I had the note concealed carefully in my hand. I didn’t remember picking it up. I went straight to my room and closed the door behind me. There was the same R on the envelope. I didn’t bother to open it but put it into my dresser drawer then went downstairs for lunch. And all the time it was like I was watching myself do this. It was like watching a movie.

  And the lead character was making no sense.

  Chapter 19

  I wasn’t surprised that Luke and Rumer had got together again, but it did make me feel alone in a way I’d never felt alone before. Obviously, they’d had a fight, but that was typical of Rumer. She’d get over it and everything would be sweet until she changed her mind again.

  I am not a bad person. If you ever told me your deepest darkest secret, I wouldn’t tell anyone. If you gave me your most precious thing to care for, I would care for it. If you wanted the truth, I would give it to you.

  So, I’d like to tell you that I handed the notes over to Rumer and confessed to everything. Or even that I’d slipped them back under her bedroom door. But I did neither of these things. Instead the notes lay in my drawer, a guilty secret that made my heart race just with the sheer thought of it. Maybe it was guilt that woke me in the early hours of the following morning.

  Every house has its own sounds in the dark hours. Our shack at Ocean Side has a tin roof that tick-ticks as it cools down after a hot summer’s day. At home I can usually hear the Colonel snoring from his bedroom or the dog scratching fleas as he sleeps outside my door. Vinegar House has its own dark hour noises. There’s the grandfather clock that stands in the entry hall and chimes the arrival of every new quarter hour. The hissing of possums as they scurry over the roof. The creaks and sighs and groans as the house settles its bones after a hard day’s work. And then there is the rattling of the windows during windy nights and the never-endingness of the waves beating themselves up against the bluff.

  I’m not sure which noise woke me at 2.47 am the next morning. All I know is that one moment I was dead asleep and the next my eyes were wide open and I was checking the clock on my mobile. There was something about the time that bothered me, then I realised it was the same time I’d woken nights before. I lay in bed for a while listening to the waves break below the bluff. I wanted to be home. I wanted to leave Rumer and Luke to whatever game they were playing and Mrs Skelton and her horrible food and Grandma Vinegar and her grumpy ways.

  I hadn’t eaten much of Mrs Skelton’s light dinner. We’d had something she called mock fish – grated potato and flour pressed into a patty and fried up. She’d served it with a light salad and, strangely, boiled potatoes – just in case we didn’t have enough potato on our plate. The patty didn’t taste like anything much except maybe half-raw potato and uncooked flour. I’d poked at it and moved it around my plate. The salad was limp with too much dressing. I picked at the potatoes, which had been boiled so long that they fell apart like floury clods of earth. In bed, at 2.53, my stomach rumbled as I thought of fresh bread from the pantry. Mrs Skelton made her own, and it was the one thing she was good at. I grabbed my mobile, turned on the torch app, slipped on a windcheater, and made my way to the bedroom door without bumping into anything. As I stepped out of my room I noticed silvery light spilling down the attic stairs.

  The attic door was open.

  My heart skipped a beat as I stood and considered my options.

  1. Return to bed, forget about the pantry, and wait until breakfast to fill my stomach.

  2. Go downstairs and make a sandwich, then go straight back to bed. Or …

  3. Go to the attic and have another look around while the door was open.

  I decided on the pantry. I began to plan the filling for my sandwich – maybe bread and cheese, or some of the leftover beef from lunch – when I found myself standing at the foot of the attic stairs. I may have decided to go to the kitchen, but my feet had other ideas. As I stood at the bottom of the attic stairs, the muffled creak of an opening door in another part of the house sent me scurrying up the stairs and closing the attic door softly behind me. The moon’s light was reflecting off the Blue Room’s mirror, although the light didn’t extend to the shadowed corners of the room.

  As I passed the mirror I saw something flit across its cracked corner, but when I checked behind me there was nothing there.

  “Idiot,” I said aloud, but my voice was unsteady and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.

  I paused again in front of the hinged chest and tried to lift its lid, but a rusted padlock held it firmly in place. I shook the padlock from side to side, but it held fast, and I soon gave up trying.

  At the octagonal window I caught sight of the sea beyond the bluff’s edge. The moonlight traced a silver path across the dark water. The scene in the front garden was shades of grey. Down below, leading away from Vinegar House, was the lighter grey of the driveway. To my left was the tree house. Further down were the trees that lined the driveway. And something else … there was something in the shadows that had shadows of their own …

  Before I had a chance to think further there was a rustling above my head that made my scalp crawl. Visions of bats or mice or … what other things rustled like that in the dead of night? I shone my phone light into the rafters, but the beam skipped about as my hand shook. It was too feeble to be any use anyway. The groan of the attic door opening made me jump with fright, and a sudden voice from the darkness said, “I nearly locked you in.”

  It was Mrs Skelton. She was wearing a long flannel nightgown buttoned up to her collarbone. Her usual wispy hair hung in a skinny braid that fell over one shoulder. She flinched as I turned my light onto her face.

  “Sorry,” I said, moving the light.

  I could see she was waiting on an explanation – a reason that I might be poking about in the attic in the dead of night.

  “I was hungry …”

  “Yes?”

  I watched her step towards the locked trunk and rest a ha
nd on its lid.

  “A strange time of day to be getting hungry, if you ask me,” she said.

  “I saw the light. From the attic …” I trailed off and listened to the crash of the waves in the distance.

  “Which is why I’m here. I remembered I’d left the door open this evening,” said Mrs Skelton smoothly. “Though I don’t remember leaving a light on.”

  “Moonlight,” I said. I wondered why she had been in the attic at all.

  “Ah.”

  We stood, silent for a moment.

  “Well,” I said.

  She stood aside, and I scuttled down the stairs, my mobile torch beam bobbing in crazy arcs over the staircase and hallway. I heard the firm whump as the attic door shut and the definite click of the lock as it moved into place. I had just reached my bedroom door when she called out softly, “Not hungry any more?”

  “No,” I said. Then added, “I’ll wait for breakfast.”

  I fell into my room, closed the door and leaned against it, waiting for my heart to stop knocking against my ribs. There were three things I knew for sure in that moment:

  1. I was too old to be scared of someone like Mrs Skelton.

  2. There were secrets in the locked trunk, and I was going to discover what they were.

  3. I had seen grey shadows near the tree house and I was pretty sure I knew who they were.

  I pulled the unread note from the dresser and read it by the light of my mobile.

  Dear R,

  I waited for you last night. Why didn’t you come?

  I’ll be waiting there again tonight.

  Let’s sort this out.

  L

  I put the note away and hopped into bed. I listened to the sounds of the house as it breathed in the night and the shudder of the plumbing as if water had been turned off. Then I realised that had been the noise which had pulled me from sleep at 2.47 am. The sound of the plumbing.

  It could have been anything – someone getting a glass of water, or flushing a toilet. Or just a tap not turned off all the way. Yet I couldn’t shake the memory of the empty bathroom with its fogged mirror and water splashing into the tub.

  My hot water bottle was lukewarm, but I held onto it tightly to stop my body shivering. And I waited for sleep to come.

  Chapter 20

  That holiday at Vinegar House, I discovered something about myself that I wasn’t proud of – if I wasn’t supposed to have something, then that’s the very thing I desperately wanted to have. There were two things out of bounds for me during that time. The first thing was the attic. The second was Luke Hart.

  I thought about Luke night and day.

  Day and night.

  I imagined that he’d never met Rumer. That I was the one he’d spent the lazy hot days at Ocean Side with.

  I invented clever conversations where I had just the right answer. Dreamed of us dancing closely. Amazing dances where we both knew all the steps.

  I daydreamed how it would feel to hold his hand again.

  To stroll along the beach leaning into his warmth.

  I wanted to make him laugh.

  I

  wanted

  Luke

  Hart.

  Rumer spent more time out of her room than before, but there were hours when the door was shut and nothing could budge her. Not even Mrs Skelton’s infamous banana muffins. (In fact, I shut myself in my room when they were on offer.) Even when she was out of her room, we didn’t have much to say to each other. Rumer was distracted, and I didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want her confiding her love-life to me.

  I tried to fill my days as much as I could. I couldn’t rely on texting. The mobile phone signal dropped out often – so much to the point that it was out more than it was in. Besides, there was hardly anyone to text. As usual, I’d hidden when things got too tough and now I was in no-man’s-land without a friend.

  My day kind of went like this:

  1. Up for breakfast every morning.

  2. I’d clear the dishes. (Although I don’t know why I bothered because I never got it right. If I stacked them on the sink, Mrs Skelton moved them to the pine kitchen table. If I left them on the table, that’s the very place she needed to be doing something else. The woman drove me mad.)

  3. Check the attic door. (Which was always locked.)

  4. Then I’d go for a walk down to the beach to see if anything interesting had washed up on the sand overnight. (I’d gone back to collecting sea glass. I guess some things never change. Sometimes Rumer came with me, but usually she skipped breakfast and didn’t get up until much later.)

  5. Back to the library for some homework. (I’d found that the desk in the library caught the morning sun. Once Mrs Skelton worked out my routine, she organised for Mr Chilvers to have a small fire burning in the fireplace by the time I arrived each morning. On the face of it, this was an unexpected kindness on behalf of the housekeeper. Of course I knew the real reason behind the kindness – this just added another chore to Mr Chilvers’s day and that would have made her happy.)

  6. A cooked lunch. (Usually I was still full from breakfast.)

  7. After lunch I’d try and do a chore for Mrs Skelton so I could cross that off my list for when the Colonel rang. (He was sounding quite cheery on the phone, which was making me cross. He and Mum had been doing some day trips – sightseeing around the place – and catching up with some of Mum’s old friends. Nice work for some.)

  8. Next, check the attic door.

  9. In the afternoon I’d take another walk to the beach. Or sometimes I’d walk up past the stables or climb up to the tree house or go through the photo albums in the library.

  Grandma tried to teach Rumer and me how to play a card game called five hundred, but Rumer couldn’t get the hang of bowers. Also it meant we needed Mrs Skelton as a fourth player, and she would grumble so much about not getting her work done, that we’d switch to a simpler game like Hearts or Up and Down the River. Playing any kind of game with Grandma was not fun. She always liked to dissect where a particular player went wrong or how something could have been done better. It was like playing games with the Colonel, and I now had an insight into what it must have been like for him growing up. Grandma and Rumer both liked to win, which didn’t leave a lot of space for me.

  I only allowed myself two peeks of Luke Hart per day. If I was having a particularly boring time, I’d allow myself an extra peek just to get through the day. Sometimes I’d watch him go about his work as I sat perched in the tree house. Sometimes I’d see him from my bedroom window – bent over at the waist, steam rising from him in the cold air as he worked the garden beds that lined the driveway – or through the kitchen window, chopping kindling, as I was stacking dishes.

  Then one morning he was in the library. I stumbled into the room on Tuesday morning, my arms filled with books and papers, to find Luke setting a fire in the grate.

  “Hello,” he said. “Just getting this going for you.”

  “Oh.” I tried to recall one of my incredibly clever conversations I’d been working on. “Thanks,” was all I could muster.

  I dumped everything onto the desk and twitched back the curtains to let in more light. I fussed about, setting out my books, notebook and pens. Then I said, “So how’s the job going?”

  “Good. Busy.”

  “Well … that’s good.” I rearranged my pens.

  One of Grandma’s cats swished into the room, jumped up onto the desk, and promptly sat on my notebook.

  “How’s your grandmother?”

  “Nanna,” I said automatically. “Good. Good, thank you.”

  “So how are you going?” he asked. I watched him light a match and hold it against a balled up newspaper page. “Must be a bit boring?”

  “It’s okay.” I pointed to my books. “Getting my homework done.”

  Hmmm, good one Freya, I thought, nothing like stating the obvious.

  “Probably good that you’re not at Homsea right now anyway,” he said.
/>
  I watched the flame from the paper lick at the dry twigs and kindling. I shifted in my seat. I could hear the cat purring. “What?”

  “You know.” He seemed uncomfortable. There was a crackle as a twig caught alight.

  “What?” I wanted to open the window. I needed air. All of a sudden the room was warm enough.

  “That whole thing. With that Suzette girl. Probably good to let it all … you know … die down.”

  “How …?”

  “Facebook,” he said. “Haven’t been online since I’ve been here. Probably yesterday’s news by now.”

  Luke Hart, the one person I’d been thinking of day and night, knew that I had been accused of kissing another girl’s boyfriend. There was a photo of it on Facebook. This was the big issue that I’d been avoiding. The whole reason I was happy to be staying away from Facebook. It’s not what it looked like, but that didn’t matter. Hamish Thomson, Suzette Crompt’s boyfriend, had kissed me as a dare at Tara Wilcock’s birthday party, and someone had taken a photo. Life was so boring at Homsea High that there was nothing else going on. The whole thing had blown way out of proportion.

  And Luke knew all about it.

  By now the fire was burning brightly. Luke added some larger pieces of wood and brushed the bark from his hands. I was so embarrassed I couldn’t look at him.

  “Hamish is a nice guy,” said Luke. “I’ve played footy with him–”

  Luke thought I was actually interested in Hamish Thomson?

  “No …” Did I really want him to think that I was that sort of girl? The sort of girl that kissed her friend’s boyfriend? A Rumer sort of girl? But did I really want to tell him the truth – that I was stupid enough to be at the wrong end of someone’s ten-dollar bet?

  “Thanks for the fire,” I said, and I turned back to my books as if I couldn’t waste another minute away from them.

  The cat was looking up at me like I was a big liar – which I was.

  Chapter 21

  Wednesday arrived with a bright shining sun, no wind in sight and another note. For a winter’s day it was positively hot. This time there was no envelope under Rumer’s door, just a piece of paper folded over twice, and the letter R in that same square writing on the outside of the note.