Start reading The Midnight Estate by bestselling author Kelly Rimmer

Chapter 4

Fiona

(edited extract)

The house seems so still after Jack and the movers leave at the same time. It suddenly feels so real – that I’m here, alone, and that this is my home again, and I have to sort all of this dusty chaos into order somehow. The immensity of the challenge is overwhelming. Thinking about it is like flicking an elastic band on my wrist – a flash of discomfort to distract myself from thinking about the truly painful things in my life. 

Now that my belongings have arrived, I find the box of linen to make up my bed so it’s ready for tonight. I set up an electric oil heater in my room and turn it on high. There’s not much I can do about the chill in the air throughout the rest of the house until the firewood arrives, so I pull on an extra jumper. At least the room will be toasty by the time I go to bed.

On my way back downstairs I stop to wind the grandfather clock, smiling to myself as the second hand immediately begins to tick. The hourly chimes were part of the soundtrack to my childhood – maybe I’ll notice them when I’m trying to sleep tonight, but they’ll quickly fade into the background just as they did when I was a kid. I head back to the kitchen and pause long enough to raid the groceries I picked up this morning, which I’ve stashed in the old ice chest to keep them safe from potential rodents. I succumb to the temptation of potato chips, but promise myself this will be the very last time I eat like a teenager. I have a fridge now, so tomorrow I’ll stock it with lean protein. Green things. Grown-up food.

I look around the long kitchen, cast in shades of yellow from the new bulbs in the dusty pendant lights, and a smile breaks over my face, despite the mess. I’ll replace the glass in those long windows – maybe the same style, if I can get them double glazed. I’ll redesign the cabinets. Maybe add an era-appropriate rug under the farmhouse table, and some stronger lighting, and a fresh paint job. 

In time, it’s going to be amazing. For now, I need to tackle the mess in that disaster of a pantry, so I roll up my sleeves and get to work.

As the last light of the day fades, the house seems to come alive. It’s noisy in old houses – wood that expands during the day contracts during the night, so there are cracks and pops and mystery sounds as the cold night air settles. It’s charming at first but it doesn’t take long before I’m startling a little at the louder cracks, and straining to make sense of the quieter sounds. It doesn’t help that the house is bitterly cold, and I don’t even have a radio or television to turn on to distract me. I spent sixteen years here and I don’t remember being aware of those noises before, but the house must have always been noisy like this. I’ve just forgotten. That’s all.

I take a breath and calmly acknowledge that this is going to feel very odd until I get used to the house again. The only way out is through, as Tad would have said. I just have to ride out the first few days.

I try to distract myself with the cleaning. There’s a cast-iron wood stove and oven in the corner of the kitchen, surrounded by a brick mantel, plus the cream Wedgewood electric stove and double oven Uncle Tad installed in the ’50s. They are oddly beautiful, each representing an era in the life of this old house. They are also disgustingly dirty, especially the Wedgewood, so I focus on scrubbing every square inch of it. Next I clear some countertops and set up my espresso machine and kettle, then I move on to cleaning out one of Uncle Tad’s cupboards. Lots of the glassware I find can be thrown away, but I rinse some of the nicer pieces in scalding-hot water and leave them lined up on tea towels along the cleaned countertops to dry overnight.

By 10.00 pm, I am so exhausted I can barely keep my eyes open. “That’s enough for today,” I murmur to myself, and for some reason, the sound of my own voice echoing back through that big old kitchen reminds me that this is my life now.

Lucas and I won’t ever do that big European trip we always talked about but never found the time to plan. I’ll never walk back into my beautiful office in Edgecliff, or chair the allhands staff meeting, or even ride the excitement of a potential new project after a client kick-off meeting. Maybe I’ll never work like that again – if I have to stay in this retirement for five years, do I really want to start again at fifty-five, especially if I don’t need the money?

And now that my beautiful daughters are off finding their feet in the world, I’ll never wake on a Saturday morning to the TV on just a little too loud in the living room, to a kitchen already trashed with half-eaten bowls of Froot Loops and coffees made with far too much sugar.

That era of my life is over and done. And this is what my life is going to look like – me all alone in this big old house, with only the dust to keep me company and framework creaking and crackling the soundtrack to my lonely nights.

The sheer weight of all this change settles on me, until I feel like it might crush me into still more dust on this kitchen f loor. I don’t fight the tears, because I have been promising myself for months that I could cry once I was back to Wurimbirra.

I turn off the lights downstairs and make my way up the staircase to my bedroom, quietly sobbing as I go. When I push the door open I expect the room to be warm and cosy, for it to greet me like the warm hug I so desperately need.

My bedroom is no warmer than the rest of the house.

I walk across to check the little oil heater, cathartic tears once again on hold, and am baff led to see the switch is off. I turned it on, didn’t I?

I’m quite sure I did.

It is such a silly thing to feel unnerved about, but I’m sure I can remember turning that heater on and now it’s off and the house is creaking and I’m all alone out here and the reason I’m all alone is because Lucas and Keira betrayed me and why did it have to be with each other? If he’d had an affair with anyone else I’d still have my best friend, and if she had fallen in love with anyone else it wouldn’t have been a problem at all. And yet they had to choose one another and that means they didn’t just betray me; I lost them both, and in some ways, they were my world. And although my mum is two minutes’ drive down the road now, emotionally she
may as well be on the moon and what am I even doing here?

I turn the heater on. I clean my teeth in the dusty bathroom sink, then slip into bed. I’m too wound up to sleep, too cold to brave the shower in that icy bathroom, too on edge to even cry.

After lying awake for a while, listening as the grandfather clock chimes 11.00 pm, then midnight, I walk back downstairs, turning on every light as I go. I pick up the copy of The Midnight Estate, take it back to bed and curl up to read, hoping a distraction will put my mind at ease. 

Maybe Uncle Tad read this book and saw a message or some wisdom or a parable he knew I’d one day need, and maybe if I immerse myself in the story, I’ll find a glimmer of comfort to stretch across into my real life.