‘Nan? Am I getting warmer?’
Clancy tapped the wall with her stick, then she ran it along the top of the wall where the cavity joined the underside of the house.
The tip of the stick struck something. Something metallic, something hard.
Clancy’s heart bumped. She stretched up on her toes and swept the stick across the rough ledge at the top of the wall. A rusted old biscuit tin jumped out and clattered at her feet.
For a second she stood there frozen, disbelieving. Then she picked up the tin and hugged it to her chest as she stumbled to the doorway. Sunlight blinded her as she ran up the path to the front door, and burst into the house.
‘Is this it, Pa? Is this what you were talking about?’
Pa was in his wheelchair in front of the big glass doors that opened onto the deck. Tash was just pulling back the curtains so he could see the view.
Clancy dropped the tin in his lap and Pa gave a shout of delight. He struggled to prise off the lid with one hand, but he couldn’t manage it, even with Clancy holding onto the tin.
‘What’s that?’ Tash took the tin and yanked off the rusted lid.
Crumpled orange and purple and blue banknotes fluttered to the floor like a cloud of butterflies.
‘Aha!’ cried Pa. ‘Sp-sp-sp!’ He launched into one of his long, incomprehensible stories, with many gestures and much arm-waving. But he seemed to realise quickly that it was hopeless this time, and shrugged his shoulder to say, well, there it is, anyway.
‘So you hid the money under the house?’ said Clancy. ‘What for?’
‘Sp-sp-sp,’ explained Pa.
Tash knelt down and began gathering the notes into piles. ‘There’s about five hundred dollars here! Did you rob a bank? Was it in case the house burned down in a bushfire? Or were you hiding it from the tax office?’
‘Sp-sp-sp!’ said Pa indignantly.
‘And Polly doesn’t know about this?’ asked Clancy, thrilled. ‘Or Dad, or Mark, or the twins?’
‘Nope,’ said Pa smugly.
‘Did Nan know?’
Pa’s face softened. ‘Yes.’
Clancy almost told them then, about the scent of lily-of-the-valley, and that sudden vivid memory that had pushed her forward. But she knew Tash wouldn’t believe her. She wasn’t sure she believed it herself. Instead she said vaguely, ‘Maybe Nan helped me find it. Maybe she was, I dunno, guiding me.’
‘Lucky she didn’t guide the tenants.’ Tash sat back on her heels. ‘Well, we are definitely getting pizza now.’
It was strange being in Pa’s empty house, with no furniture, no books on the shelves, and none of Nan’s photographs on the walls. The echoing rooms felt bigger than Clancy remembered. The house was cool and dim and shadowy, with the musty smell that rooms acquire when they’ve been closed up for a while.
Pa didn’t seem very interested in the house itself. He was gazing out at the view of the national park, the slopes blanketed with deep grey-green, and the huge, overgrown garden with its towering gum trees.
‘Sp-sp-sp!’ He gestured impatiently and Tash pushed him out onto the deck.
Nan and Pa’s house had been built on a double block, more like a patch of bushland than a garden, except for the section near the deck where he’d tended his vegetable beds and fruit trees. A cockatoo screamed from the top of a massive eucalypt, then swooped over the roof with sunlight dazzling on its bright white wings.
‘Sp-sp-sp!’
‘Even I don’t need to look up that one,’ said Clancy.
Pa clucked his tongue as he noticed the dandelions and wild onion grass that had sprung up in the vegetable patch, and the rotting, fallen fruit beneath the lemon and orange trees. ‘Sp-sp-sp,’ he said gloomily.
Tash leaned precariously over the railing. ‘But check out the apples, Pa.’
The apple tree was laden with golden fruit like Christmas baubles. ‘Ha!’ said Pa, pleased. ‘So-it-is.’
Tash gave him a teasing nudge. ‘They grew all by themselves, without any help from you!’
‘Nah!’ protested Pa. ‘Sp-sp-sp.’
Tash ran down the steps from the deck and picked an armful of apples. She and Pa and Clancy sat out on the deck as the golden sunshine slanted through the trees, crunching and slurping. The apples were sweet and crisp and juicy. Far away, a kookaburra let out a joyous laugh, and Clancy forgot to be worried about being there. If her grandmother’s ghost was haunting the house, she thought, Nan would be glad to see them sitting here together, eating apples, just like when she was still alive and Clancy’s family had lived there with her and Pa. Clancy had eaten apples then, too. Nan had cut them up for her. She was sure she could remember that. Clancy took another bite.
While they waited for Pa to finish in the toilet, Tash propped herself against the wall as she scrolled through her phone.
‘Streaks?’ said Clancy.
‘Ordering pizza.’
‘Oh! Were you serious about that?’
‘Of course. Why not?’
‘But – shouldn’t we take Pa home soon? Won’t they be worried?’
‘They’re not expecting him at The Elms. That nurse said we should keep him overnight at Polly’s, remember? And I’ve got his pills. Anyway,’ added Tash, ‘Pa is home.’
Clancy scuffed the carpet with her toe and said nothing.
‘Come on, Clance!’ hissed Tash. ‘Don’t ruin this as well. Pa’s so happy. We can’t take him back to that horrible place. He’d much rather be here.’
‘You always think you can read Pa’s mind!’ whispered Clancy fiercely. ‘But you don’t know what he’s thinking.’
Pa banged on the wall to say he was ready to come out. Tash wheeled the chair into the bathroom and helped him shuffle round and drop into the seat. ‘You don’t want to leave yet, do you, Pa? You want to stay a bit longer?’
Pa laid his hand on his heart, gazed at the ceiling and murmured. He gestured all around, then pressed his hand to his heart again.
Tash gave Clancy a look. ‘I’m taking that as a yes.’
Clancy sighed. ‘Okay, okay.’
They took Pa on a tour of the empty house while they waited for the pizza to arrive: the yellow master bedroom, Mark and Tim’s blue room, the green-painted room that had once been Polly’s, the pink bedroom that the twins had shared. The old-fashioned bathroom had a deep tub that Tash and Clancy and Bruno had all fitted in together on weekend visits. (Tash shuddered. ‘Thank God Nan never took a photo of that!’)
There was a built-in cupboard tucked into a corner of the dining room where Clancy used to hide (she could hardly squeeze into it now) and a broad window seat where Nan used to sit and read.
‘And she had a telescope out on the deck, didn’t she?’ said Tash. ‘I wonder what happened to that?’
‘Sp-sp-sp,’ said Pa; but of course they didn’t understand.
‘Nan had a telescope?’ said Clancy. ‘Is that where I get it from?’
‘Clancy has this thing about space,’ Tash told Pa.
‘Ah!’ Pa pointed up to the roof, then made a circle with his fingers and mimed peering through it. ‘Hm.’ He looked expectantly up at Clancy.