Invitation to a Stranger (14 page)

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Early Sunday morning Aunt Gwen arrived in her old car to collect the sulking Allie. She sat in the back seat beside the dark-haired Jenny staring glumly out the window. Jenny was exactly the same age but even though they were cousins, they weren't really friends, so they didn't bother to say anything. Even though she and Jenny looked as if they were related, same slender build and straight hair, except hers was light brown and Jenny's a darker brown.

An hour later, they turned off the main highway and headed along a winding, bush-lined road. The bush seemed thick and impenetrable behind the road, and looked mysterious and interesting. Very interesting. Allie started to cheer up. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad after all. It would be nice to go horse riding every day through the bush.

“That was part of the National Park,” Aunt Gwen explained.

However the road kept going past the heavy bushland and wound around bald hills and alongside flat paddocks. A little while later, they turned into a driveway of cracked cement with weeds growing through it. Aunt Gwen parked her car in front of a shabby old house with rotting verandas all around. Allie and Jenny looked at each other in dismay.

“It's in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by boring paddocks!” Jenny protested.

Allie scowled. “It's going to be a horrible place to be cooped up for a whole seven days!”

“A lovely, peaceful place to stay,” Aunt Gwen said crisply. She turned around and smiled at Jenny.

“You do like Albert?” she asked.

“Albert?” Jenny asked.

“The orthodontist.”

“He's okay, I suppose, Mum.” Jenny sounded puzzled.

“Good,” Aunt Gwen said. She sounded relieved.

Allie sneaked another look at her cousin. Why was it important that Jenny like her orthodontist? Did she need to have something horrible done to her teeth?

Just then a smiling lady with yellow curls arrived and waited by the car. “Hello, you two must be Allie and Jenny? I'm Mrs. Marybone.”

“I'm Mrs. Wainwright,” Aunt Gwen introduced.

“Mrs. Andrews rang and booked the girls in,” Mrs. Marybone said. “Time does pass so quickly. I remember those two lovebirds turning up here for their honeymoon.”

“Don't remember Mum ever mentioning that she knew you,” Allie said.

“We haven't kept in touch but when she rang I remembered her,” Mrs. Marybone explained. “I've put you two girls in the back room down the passage.”

Aunt Gwen had a cup of tea with Mrs. Marybone in the big kitchen and then drove away. Allie and Jenny followed Mrs. Marybone along the passage up some steps to a little attic room.

“Not bad,” Allie said.

“Very nice,” Jenny said.

“It's a bit away from the other rooms and should be nice and quiet for you,” Mrs. Marybone said as she left.

“What with your orthodontist?” Allie asked as they unpacked.

“Nothing,” Jenny said with a shrug. “I had one awkward tooth fixed, but Mum seemed to think the sun moon and stars shone out of him. She was always catching up with him and also he was into sailing like Mum used to be years ago.”

“Adults are weird,” Allie agreed. “Let's check out Mon Repose.”

They explored the rambling guesthouse and decided they weren't impressed.

“Dead enough to be the local cemetery,” Jenny said sadly.

“Geriatrics snoozing away on the front veranda and stuffy married couples with hordes of little kids,” Allie agreed with a shudder.

They inspected the rotting stables. It was filled with parked cars.

“No horses,” Allie said.

“Probably died of old age.”

The tennis court was overgrown with dead thistles and the accumulated rubbish of years.

“No tennis,” Allie said.

They pushed open the rusting gate to the swimming pool. It was as green as turtle soup and noisy with the croaking of frogs.

“No swimming,” Jenny said.

“Unless you're a frogman.” Allie was so disgusted she felt like crying. Mon Repose was even worse than she had imagined.

They went inside for lunch. Allie noticed that Mrs. Marybone was watching them eat every mouthful. She had to pretend she was hungry, and Jenny also seemed aware that they were watched as they ate. The roasted lamb and potatoes, stringy beans, and slices of carrots were covered with lumpy gravy. This was followed by what looked like pink, lumpy custard for dessert.

“It's a pretty walk down to the river,” Mrs. Marybone said with a silly smile on her face.

“Perhaps we could go boating or fishing to fill in the time,” Allie said.

It took them half an hour to reach the line of trees that marked the river. They marched under the trees and stood on the bank and stared in dismay. There were occasional pools of stagnant water dotting the winding sandy riverbed. A rotting punt was set deeply in the dried mud.

“No river!”

“No fishing!” Allie said in disgust.

“No boating.”

“A whole seven days of Mon Repose. I hate my mother!”

“At least she had an excuse to send you up here,” Jenny said bitterly. “My mother doesn't work, and she confiscated my phone because I ran up a miserable account of two hundred dollars.”

“Mine was five hundred,” Allie said, cheering up. Maybe she and her cousin did have something in common.

“Seven days,” Jenny mourned. “She just couldn't wait to dump me here.”

“That makes us dumpees-in-law,” Allie said.

Jenny giggled as if Allie had said something witty. Allie felt better. Jenny was an all right cousin, and it wasn't her fault they were stuck here.

They trudged back to Mon Repose. More guests had arrived. Mrs. Marybone waved when she saw them.

“Yoohoo, girls,” she called. “Come and meet Marilyn. Marilyn, this is Jenny and Allie. You're all the same age, so you should be such good friends.”

Marilyn might have been about the same age as Allie and Jenny, but there the resemblance stopped. She wore so much black eye shadow she looked as if someone had given her two black eyes. Her jet-black hair was short and frizzed with a bright purple streak across the front of it that matched her painted fingernails. Over her black tee shirt and black tights she wore a bright purple string mesh top.

She shifted her chewing gum to the other side of her mouth, inspected Jenny and her ‘save the whales' tee shirt and Allie's punk rock illustration on her tee shirt.

“Yeah,” she said at last.

Marilyn admitted that she had three younger half-brothers and a nerd of a stepfather as well as her mother staying here, and was just as disgusted as they were at being marooned at Mon Repose. Allie and Jenny decided they liked her despite her weird makeup and op shop clothes.

“It's totally gross,” Marilyn declared. “There are no en suite bathrooms and toilets for any of the rooms, just communal ones.”

“Totally gross,” Allie echoed.

“It's because it is the cheapest boarding house in the hills,” Marilyn explained. “That's why we're here. The nerd believes in being economical. We end up here every year.”

“And I suppose we're here because my mother is being economical as well,” Allie said with a shiver.

The three of them went for another walk. They found paddocks, farmhouses, dams, and farther in the distance, bush covered hills.

“The National Park,” Marilyn said. “Too far to walk anyway.”

When they returned to Mon Repose, the smells of boiled cabbage and corned beef drifted out to meet them.

“It's an awfully creepy sort of place, full of nooks and crannies,” Marilyn said. “Do you reckon it would have any secret passages or secret rooms?”

Secret passages! They tapped and measured their way around all the verandas, through the big room with the table tennis table, through the kitchen and laundries, up the stairs, past the “private area” sign, and through the maze of small rooms.

“Where do you think you're going?” Mrs. Marybone asked as they tapped against the oddly recessed wall. “Only our bedroom and storerooms up here.”

“We thought Mon Repose might have secret rooms or passages,” Jenny said. “We didn't mean to pry.”

“No secret rooms or passages,” Mrs. Marybone said with a chuckle. “Only the attic.” She pulled a rod down the wall. A steep ladder settled on the floor quietly. Above was an opening in the ceiling. “You can have a look, but don't make a mess. The dinner bell will sound in twenty minutes. Put the ladder back when you've finished.”

The three girls scrambled up the ladder. The attic was a long low room under the sloping roof, dimly lit by the small dusty windows at each end. It was stacked with chairs, nests of tables, wardrobes and dressers, plus wooden and cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes.

The girls prowled around. There didn't seem to be anything very interesting, just stored junk as Mrs. Marybone had said. They lifted lids of the boxes and peered in.

“Old sheets folded in this one,” Jenny reported.

“Old pianola rolls,” Allie mused. “There's an old pianola in the big lounge. Wonder if it still works?”

“Only meat safes and kitchen dressers this end,” Jenny called from behind a barrier of boxes.

“Only stuffy old ledgers here,” Marilyn said. “They charged a guest two pounds, ten shillings, and two pence for splintering the dining table in 1925.”

“Maybe they had a riot over the indigestible food,” Allie said.

From somewhere below came the persistent clanging of a bell.

“Sounds like dinner's ready,” Jenny reminded.

Marilyn bent closer to the ledger. “The dining table was splintered because the guest set up a séance as a parlour game that went wrong.” She delved deeper into the box. She pulled something up from the bottom. “Got it!

“Got what?” Allie asked.

“A Ouija board.” Marilyn's eyes gleamed through the dark makeup as she waved it. “We'll have a séance! This is the sort of isolated place where things must still happen.”

“Wonderful!” Allie said. Maybe this holiday wasn't going to be such a dead loss after all. “We'll raise a spirit and ask it some questions.”

“Like how to make Mon Repose a more interesting place to stay,” Jenny said wistfully. “Put everything else back and close the lid. Mrs. Marybone might stop us from using this particular parlour game if it's that good.”

“She wouldn't know a thing about it. It happened in 1925,” Marilyn scoffed. “This is our secret.”

The three girls clasped hands. The attic was very quiet, but the word ‘secret' seemed to echo and sigh its promise around the silence.

 

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