“Fred can talk if he wants to,” Emily said, folding her arms to contain the volcano bubbling in her chest. “There’s no impediment. Maui told us he just stopped talking after the incident with the boys.”
Cynthia shot a quick glance at Mr Wilmott, then leaned forward to whisper, “You mean the death of three of his best friends? If that kind of thing ever happened to me, I’d probably shut up for a while, too.”
“That would be a blessing,” Emily spat out. She knew she was being moody and horrible but for the moment, didn’t care. “And when have you ever had three friends?”
“Maybe he won’t tell you what he needs to move on because you’re such a grouch.” Cynthia raised her eyebrow, taking the verbal blows in her stride. “Did you ever think of that?”
“I’ve thought of everything. It hasn’t helped.”
“You don’t even talk directly to Fred, have you noticed that? Even now, when you’re desperate to find out how to move him along, you’re only talking about him to me. The only times you address him directly are to tell him off.” Cynthia moved over to stand beside Mr Wilmott, an act of solidarity. “Why don’t I leave you two alone to discuss things?”
“Because he can’t talk and I can’t read,” Emily said with a sigh. “And you’re right.” The words—as usual—sounded in her head. “I’m sorry, Fred. Can you tell us something to lead us onto the right track? I’ve tried everything I can think of and I’m out of answers.”
The ghost stared blankly at her, then switched his gaze to the floor.
Emily groaned and ran her hands through her head. “I just don’t know what to do.”
“Do you still have that weird typewriter hanging about?” Cynthia waved at the table where it had been sitting. “We could see if Fred wants to use that again.”
“It’s been auctioned.” Emily hid her face behind her hands, shutting everything out as she tried to come up with an idea—any idea. “Just a moment.”
She sprang to her feet and hurried into the bedroom. In the wardrobe, she felt along the top shelf above the clothes hangers, pulling out a large box. Inside were a selection of board games.
They hadn’t been played in decades—even when they were children, Emily and Harvey hadn’t been big on so-called ‘fun for all the family.’ Still, the games were something her parents had treasured, so when they died, she couldn’t bring herself to toss them away.
“Here we are!” she cried out, holding aloft the Scrabble set in its original dark green box.
“I hate to break it to you, Scarface, but we’re going to whip you at that game. You wouldn’t even be able to tell if we’re cheating.”
“Not for playing the game. For the tiles.” Emily moved into the lounge and spread out the letters. “How about it, Mr Wilmott? Do you feel up to telling us anything more?”
Peanut ran into the room, nosing at the wooden pieces and trying to bat them away. Emily lifted him up and held the cat on her lap, stroking him as she waited to see if Fred would play.
It took a good half hour before he shuffled over, then another ten minutes of staring before he picked letters out.
“Astrid again.” Cynthia sounded disappointed as she reported the latest word. She folded her arms and shook her head. “Could you give us something new? We already know you’ve got a girlfriend.”
Another hour passed before he pointed out letters again. Emily had to call Cynthia in from the back yard where she’d gone to watch the sunset. Or to mope.
“Gang. Now that sounds more promising.” She gave Fred a poke in the ribs. “Tell us more about your troubled youth.”
“Don’t tease him,” Emily scolded. “Otherwise, we might be here all night.”
Cynthia snorted. “Like either of us has anything better to do.”
Still, she settled back, watching as the ghost picked out letters with all the speed of a glacier moving down a hillside. “Wolf,” she said at last. “Gangs and wolves. Now, that does sound like an interesting tale.”
“We don’t have wolves in New Zealand,” Emily said idly, listening to the satisfied purr from Peanut. “Unless we’ve got some werewolves stored away somewhere, I don’t know about.”
“He’s just picking out the same letters,” Cynthia said with a sigh as Mr Wilmott kept pointing. “Gang. Wolf.”
“Do you mean Wolfgang?” Emily asked. “Like a name?”
The ghost didn’t reply. His only response was to point out the same sequence of letters again.
“Astrid and Wolfgang.” Cynthia sat back and stretched out her legs. “Sounds like he might have something against the Germans.”
“Or something for them, considering one was his girlfriend.” Emily knelt to pick up the tiles from the carpet, not wanting to leave them out to stand on by accident. They might not have the pure fire-power of Lego but she bet they’d hurt just the same.
“I guess we’ll start looking into them with more care tomorrow,” Emily said after catching Fred’s eye. “Astrid Wallheimer, right?”
It might have been her imagination but for a second, the ghost appeared to smile.
Chapter Twenty
“It’s a pity they didn’t have a bigger digital footprint back then.” Gregory stretched out his back, his hands waving high above his head. “If they’d only thought to come up with Facebook in the sixties, it’d make this research a doddle.”
“Bit hard to invent social media before you had the computers to run it on,” Emily pointed out. “And I’m pretty sure even the most enthusiastic time-traveller wouldn’t be interested in changing that many things just to help us out with our one query.”
“Yeah. I’ve been uniformly disappointed with time travellers,” the young man muttered, turning back to the job. “So lazy. So unwilling to meddle.”
“Be nice if everyone could just concentrate on what they’re meant to be doing,” Cynthia chimed in. “We might get this sorted out before the end of the century if everyone stays on task.”
As if the laptop heard her, Gregory gave a hoot of triumph and turned the screen around for Emily to see. “That’s her, right?”
“I think so,” she said, squinting her eyes to make the image less blurry. “That looks like it’s from the same series of photos that Michael and Maui have.”
“It says here, it’s from a biography written by Sheila Wainscoting, about her time working as a matron in various boarding schools.”
“Matron?” Emily pushed the computer back to Gregory. “Maui mentioned her a few times. Is she still alive?”
“No.”
Emily frowned. “Did you look?”
“She’d be well into her hundreds by now. I think we can take it as read that she’s long gone.”
“What about the book?”
Gregory tapped at the keys, scanning the information on the screen at lightning speed. A strange contrast to his physical movements.
“It’s available as a PDF on the website. Hopefully, it’s scanned as words rather than just images, then we can search—Ha! Got it.”
He swivelled the screen around towards her, then caught himself. “It’s got a bit in here about her time at Oakhaven and mentions Astrid three times in the text.”
“Anything we can follow up on?”
The young man dove into the task, biting on his lower lip as he scrolled through the pages. “Here’s another photograph from when she worked in a dairy. Apparently, it was Sheila—Matron—who found her the job.”
Emily scooted around to peer over his shoulder. “It’s fascinating, looking up these old histories.”
“Not much older than you.”
She stared at the back of Gregory’s neck, thinking of all the horrible ways she could enact revenge. “Twenty years is quite a difference. Even at my age.”
“I suppose.”
“What about the family who employed her?” Emily paused. “I presume it was a family business.”
“The parents are dead, but it looks like the son is still alive.” He pulled
up the photograph again, pointing to the boy who looked about ten. “Did you want me to get his details?”
“Yes, please.” The thought of talking to another complete stranger twisted Emily’s stomach, but she hoped Crystal might be talked into coming along for the ride. “Is there anything else in the book?”
“Not much to help you out. It says she left to pursue her religious vocation. Do you think that means she became a nun or something?”
Emily pulled her mouth down. “It could, I suppose. Unless it’s a code word for something else. Maui also said the school liked to play up how much it was helping the children forced to attend. Perhaps the matron was doing a bit of that, too.”
Gregory sat back on his heels, typing the few details he’d learned into Emily’s phone. “If Astrid was Mr Wilmott’s girlfriend, he’d probably be miffed to learn she went into a nunnery.”
The phrase struck Emily’s funny bone and when she stopped laughing, she glanced over to the corner where the ghost sat. “He doesn’t look impressed, one way or the other. Apparently, when the boys died at the school, they were trying to distract the headmaster so Fred could sneak out to meet her.”
“I’m not sure if that sounds romantic or like a stalker.”
“There was no suggestion by Maui it was anything other than a reciprocal relationship. Besides, he never got to meet up with her in the end.”
“Do you think she was sitting at a train station or something, waiting for a lover who never arrived?”
Emily stared into the middle distance as her mind conjured up a heart-breaking image. “I hope not.” She gave Gregory an elbow in the ribs. “I think I prefer your stalker theory over that one.”
She played back the address he’d loaded into her phone. “That’s just around the corner. I could go there straight after work.”
“You could go there now. I’ll take this lot down to the auction house for set-up. It’ll be a nice change to get out of this heat-trap.”
The attic above the charity shop became stuffy by the afternoon. Emily was looking forward to the winter when she’d freeze to death instead.
“If you’re sure you’ll be okay. I don’t mind coming with you and introducing you to everyone.”
Gregory rolled his eyes. “Unless there’s a rabid dog on the loose there, I think I’ll handle the place okay.” He clapped her on the shoulder when Emily continued to frown. “Come on, Grandma. I’m a grown man.”
“You won’t get much older if you call me that.” Emily smiled and pinched his cheek. “Such a good boy!”
The poky flat at the back of eighty-four Severson Drive made Agnes Myrtle’s room at Stoneybrook appear grandiose in comparison. The front door was a ranch slider, with the curtain only pulled halfway. It let Emily see into the three-metre by four-metre house in all its glory.
“I’m not buying nothing,” the man who answered the door said before she could get a word in. “Don’t care what it is, I don’t want it and I don’t need it.”
“David Llewellyn?”
The man’s eyes narrowed, and he thrust his face closer to Emily’s, scanning her up and down before retreating. “Who wants to know?”
“My name’s Emily Curtis and I’m trying to find information about someone you may have known when you were younger. Astrid Wallheimer?”
Although David’s face didn’t alter its expression, she judged his lack of surprise to be a good thing.
“You a relative of hers?”
“No.” Emily was about to add more information, then she clamped her lips together. She didn’t want to play out her entire hand before he’d even looked at his cards.
As the silence lengthened, she glanced over the man’s shoulder. A photograph on the wall showed the same dairy as the one Gregory had sourced earlier. No matter what else, it meant she was on the right track, at least.
“She worked for my parents for a while. A long time ago.”
Emily nodded, once again having to stem a tide of words from flooding forth.
Another short silence. A minute passed. Two.
“You better come in,” David said, standing back from the door and giving a sigh of effort. “I don’t need you standing out there getting the neighbour’s tongues wagging.”
“Thank you.”
He moved aside a large collection of old magazines, dumping them on the floor instead. From habit, Emily noted the pictures and judged the age. They were all for model enthusiasts with the colour schemes dating them back to the eighties and nineties.
Along the walls were shelves showcasing various models. Stacked at one end were boxes, still factory sealed. Emily’s fingers itched to inspect them, but she forced her attention back to David. She was here to find out about Astrid, not price model kits for a potential auction.
“Don’t know if I’ll be much help. Astrid only worked for Mum and Dad for six months. The clearest thing I remember is her leaving without giving much notice. Mum couldn’t come to my sports day because of it.”
“Sorry to hear that. I’m trying to track Astrid down and the more I can find out about her, the better. Do you know why she left in a hurry?”
He shrugged. “Nobody told me anything in those days.” David tilted his head to one side. “Not just me. Every kid was on a need-to-know basis and there wasn’t a lot any parent deemed as need-to-know.”
Emily nodded. She remembered that from her own childhood. These days, parents treated children as fully-fledged members of the household for the most part. When she was growing up, it was a case of being seen and not heard. Kids weren’t just shorter than adults, they operated on a completely different level.
“What was she like?”
“Pretty cheerful, though she didn’t have a lot to be happy about. Compared to the girl my parents had in before her, she seemed grateful to have the job. The one before—Susan, I think her name was—acted like my mum should kiss the ground she walked on just for deigning to turn up on time.”
Although he issued the statement without any sense of humour, Emily laughed politely, hoping to ease the atmosphere. She was getting a sense of entitlement, all right, but it wasn’t from any shop girl.
“Do you know where she was living?”
At that, David’s face screwed up with glee. “She was one of them naughty girls. Came from Oakhaven and was saving up money to get a flat because her parents didn’t want her back. There were lots of kids around town like that. Dad sometimes made me check their pockets before we let them leave the store because half of them were thieves.”
Emily thought back to Maui’s assertion. They’d never believe me. The sadness dragged at her, not helped by the expression of gloom spread across the ghost’s face.
“What else do you remember about her? Was she pretty?”
“No,” he scoffed. “Not that I was at an age when I was looking for that, anyway. But she was about as attractive as a dump truck and twice as fat.” He pulled at his nostrils for a second, then jerked out a handkerchief to catch a large sneeze. “I hope that’s from the pollen,” he grumbled. “I can’t be dealing with a cold. Not at my age.”
Emily cast about in her mind for another question but couldn’t think of anything more to ask. It was all too long ago. Nobody would know more than this man. A goose chase, that’s all it was. The ghost would stay on, glaring at her forever, until the day she died.
“Actually,” David held up one finger, frowning, “I might know why she moved on, after all.” He blew his nose again, staring in disgust at the mess before he folded the hanky and shoved it back in his pocket. “I remember hearing later, on the grapevine, that they’d expelled her.”
“From Oakhaven?”
David scowled at her. “Of course, from Oakhaven. That’s what I’ve been telling you, isn’t it?” He scratched at the receding hairline crawling up his temple. “Yeah. Come to think of it, I’m sure that was how it went down. She was so naughty the worst school in town expelled her.” He grinned. “I guess you can cross unive
rsity off the list of possible places she went afterwards.”
An expulsion should be recorded somewhere. Of that, Emily felt sure.
Probably in a box of records at the department of ‘no one’s ever going to need these again,’ her mind responded in a doleful tone.
As though reading her mind, David continued, “They used to print those in the local paper. It was like a warning to the businesses around town, so they didn’t accidentally hire those kids for a job.”
“The Pinetar Gazette?”
“Yeah. The one and only. Though, that’s a joke now as it’s run out of Christchurch, these days.”
He stood up, grunting with the effort. Emily followed suit a moment later, grateful the interview was at an end. Outside, she took a deep breath of fresh air, holding it in her lungs for a second, like it would scrub her lungs clean.
“The library,” she whispered under her breath. If any place in town was going to have back-copies dated in the sixties, it would be there.
Chapter Twenty-One
As Emily entered the air-conditioned luxury of the library, she spotted the librarian with a queue of people ready to check their books out. Although the system was somewhat automated—compared to the manual ink stamps that had been the modus operandi when she was younger—it still took a few minutes for the backlog to clear.
In the meantime, she wandered over to the graphic novels arranged on a shelf at the head of an aisle. Until the librarian had suggested it on a previous visit, Emily had thought books were something lost to her. Between the vibrant pictures and the discovery of audiobooks, she’d been granted a new lease on bookworm life.
“How can I help?” the woman asked as she approached.
While Emily explained her mission, she realised she didn’t know the woman’s name.
“Georgia,” the librarian replied with a stilted laugh when she asked. She tapped the nametag, then blushed, remembering Emily’s disability.
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