Dad was still at work when Cassie and Ian got home that afternoon. I watched Cassie slip into Mum and Dad’s room and nick the small, bronze key from Dad’s beside table. It was tied onto a blue thread and Cassie hung it around his neck.
‘You can’t just go in there,’ I said.
‘Shut up, Cub.’
‘You can’t just go into someone’s house while they’re not there,’ I said. ‘What if Helena and Tilly come home? You’ll be sprung.’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘Don’t do it, Cass,’ I said. ‘Dad will be mad if you let a stranger in.’
‘Ian’s not a stranger,’ Cassie said.
I peeled a bit of skin from the side of my thumb with my teeth. ‘Well, I’m coming too, then.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘I’ll dob.’
‘See if I care,’ said Cassie. But when I followed them across the lawn Cassie didn’t tell me to get lost again.
When we reached the back door Cassie fumbled with the key, couldn’t get it to fit into the lock. His hands were all wobbly. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.
‘Let me,’ Ian said. He took the key, jammed it in the lock and opened the door, easy. He turned around and grinned at Cassie. I wanted to poke my fingers into his stupid mouth, all the way into his throat until he spewed up his insides.
I stood in the doorway and they barely seemed to notice I was still there. Ian wandered through the kitchen and then the lounge room. He stroked the peeling wallpaper as though it were fur. He tapped on the walls and, when the floorboard creaked, he stamped down as though he were listening for the empty, echoing space of a secret room. I followed him and Cassie into Helena’s room. Ian lay down on the thin mattress.
‘So this was Les’s room?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ Cassie said.
There were honey-coloured perfumes and sparkly jewellery on the bedside table. The room smelled like flowers and, beneath that, warm sweat. Ian heaved his body up and down and the springs squeaked. He lay there for ages with his eyes closed, breathing deep so that his breath whistled through his nose. Finally he sat up and looked around the room. ‘Can I take something?’
‘Yeah, if you want,’ said Cassie.
‘Why would you want to take something?’ I asked.
‘Souvenir,’ Ian said.
‘You can’t just take something,’ I said. ‘This isn’t your house.’
Ian gazed around the room. There was a loose nail poking from the floorboard at the corner of the room. Ian got up, squatted on the floor and yanked out the nail.
‘I could sell this,’ he said, holding it up to the light. ‘There’d be weirdos out there who’d pay a mint for this shit.’
‘What, for a nail?’
‘You don’t get it,’ Ian said. ‘This place is pretty much historical. You should do tours—you’d earn a fortune.’
He stood up, ran his fingers along the wallpaper again. ‘Where’d your Dad find the hair?’ Ian asked. ‘The ponytails.’
Cassie pointed to the wardrobe. ‘In there,’ he said. ‘They were in a locked box, though. Dad had to smash it open with a hoe.’
‘Shit.’
‘I was there, you know,’ Cassie said. ‘When he opened the box.’
‘What’d they look like?’
‘I dunno. Weird,’ Cassie said. ‘I didn’t know what I was looking at. I thought they were little rats or something.’
Ian opened the wardrobe, but it was only filled with Helena’s dresses, a jumble of shoes at the bottom. ‘I can’t believe he went to the cops,’ Ian said. ‘Where’s his loyalty?’
‘He didn’t know what it meant at the time,’ Cassie said.
‘You’re right,’ Ian said. ‘These guys are fucking sly. They look like normal blokes, but inside they’re fucking psychos.’
‘He wasn’t a psycho,’ Cassie said.
Ian let out a laugh. ‘If that helps you sleep at night.’
I didn’t know that Dad had been the one to go to the cops. I wondered what the ponytails looked like, what colours they were. How many of them there were in the box. I felt dizzy, went into the toilet. There was a bloody wad in the bin, like what I’d seen in the girls’ toilets at schools. I wondered if it was Tilly’s. I kneeled down in front of the toilet, but nothing came up. I pulled out three eyebrow hairs one by one, sprinkled them into the water. The skin under my eyebrow stung, but it made me feel better. Gave me something else to concentrate on. I kept pulling until I felt less dizzy, until everything around me started to feel less rotten.
Cassie and Ian were still in Helena’s room so I went and found Tilly’s.
She didn’t have a bed, just a mattress on the ground, like Cassie, but otherwise it looked exactly how I thought it would, though somehow even more perfect. There was a fluffy purple blanket on the bed that still had the clean shop smell. Three stuffed polar bears sat on the blanket, as well as a diary with her name on the cover, written in whiteout and then coloured over with rainbow texta. I tried to open the diary but it was locked shut.
I lay down on her bed, closed my eyes. I pretended that I was Tilly, sleeping on my bed in my lovely room. I got under the blanket and imagined it was morning. I yawned, rubbed my eyes and then climbed out of bed. I crossed my arms over myself like Tilly did, leaned hard on one foot. I opened her cupboard and looked through her things. There was a t-shirt with a rainbow on the front and I took off my overalls and put it on. It was so short I could see my bellybutton. I had an outie that I didn’t like to look at, and I poked it back in. Next to her bed was a box with a jumble of make-up and stickers and pens. I picked out a lip gloss, opened it. It smelled like grapes. I took the wand and smeared it over my lips, looked in the mirror. I half expected to look like a new girl, but I didn’t look like Tilly at all. I just looked like myself with goo on my face. There was something different about me, though. I didn’t look right. I leaned into the mirror and searched my face. There was a patch missing from my eyebrow, the skin beneath red and itchy-looking. I licked my finger and tried to smooth down my eyebrow but it didn’t work. I found a brown texta in the box and coloured it in.
We stayed in the yellow house for almost an hour. I kept my ears open for Helena’s car, but Ian and Cassie didn’t seem to care.
‘We should go, Cass,’ I said.
‘So go,’ Cassie said. His hair was growing long and he flicked it out of his face. ‘No one asked you to come.’
Ian wanted to see downstairs, so Cassie took him outside and down to the crawl space. It was just a stretch of dirt, with a few dead rats that had turned white and crunchy. Cassie said Les had kept all his tools and work things down here, but Dad took all the painting stuff so he could keep the business going on his own, and later the cops had taken the rest of it.
‘Where are the dungeons and shit?’ Ian said.
‘He didn’t do anything here,’ Cassie said.
‘I know.’ Ian ran his hand along the nail hooks sticking out of the stilts. ‘Do you reckon it’s haunted?’
‘I don’t believe in that shit,’ Cassie said.
‘Wally saw a woman standing in the middle of the paddock,’ I blurted out. ‘She had no clothes on and her eyes looked like black holes, as if her eyes had been gouged out. Wally reckons she was a ghost.’