Thornwood House Read Online Free PDF Page A

within minutes she’d be a lobster, but the warmth was so delicious after months of cold that I decided to let her enjoy it while it lasted.
    After all, we were only here for the day.
    My mission: To inspect the old homestead Tony had left me and make a note of any maintenance it must certainly need. Then I’d enlist a local real estate agent to sell it. According to Tony’s lawyer, Thornwood was worth more money than I could reasonably comprehend . . . but that wasn’t why I was keen to offload it. Of course, the money would be a life-changing boon. My income as a freelance photographer was often patchy; as it was, I’d dipped into my nest egg to get us here. My qualms were hard to put into words, but I knew what lay at their heart: Tony had caused my daughter a great deal of joy in her short life . . . and also a great deal of grief. For Bronwyn’s sake – and my own – I knew it was time to shake free of Tony’s shadow and move on.
    By mid-afternoon we’d escaped the city traffic and were cruising along wide country roads, cocooned in a bubble of aircon. The gleaming late-model hire car flew over the tarmaclike a bird, barely registering the potholes and gravel traps as it sped us south-west in the direction of Magpie Creek.
    Bronwyn had chattered all the way from the airport, but the moment we left behind the bleak flatness of the city outskirts she’d fallen silent. Now she sat staring fixedly through the windscreen, as though willing the car to eat up the road and get us there faster.
    She wore her customary jeans and tank top, and restrained her pale hair beneath a polka dot headscarf that her father had given her last birthday. The gesture wasn’t lost on me. She’d worn it for him, and just the sight of it framing her flushed face made me uneasy. I wondered what she was hoping to find at Thornwood. Relics of her father’s childhood, or perhaps clues as to why he’d withdrawn from her life in the last six months. Or maybe, like me, she was curious about the world Tony had kept hidden from us for so long.
    The road climbed steep hills, then nosedived along the rim of sprawling valleys. We passed a few scrubby patches of bushland – but the countryside was mostly farms. Paddocks of freshly ploughed rust-brown soil, or green pastures colonised by herds of sleepy cattle, were offset against a backdrop of sharply peaked hills and craggy mountains. My modicum of pre-travel research had revealed that the formations surrounding Magpie Creek had once been part of an active volcano, now dead for over twenty-five million years. When the early settlers arrived in the 1870s they’d harvested the surrounding brigalow scrub to build their cabins and then their towns. Logging became a major industry – forests of pine, red cedar, rosewood, and eucalypt were culled and hauled away, and the land sown with grass to accommodate dairy cattle. Now, the hills stood mostly naked, their volcanic origins jutting from the velvety mantle of pasture, as though the giants who slept beneath were all bony knees and elbows.
    ‘Why didn’t Dad ever talk about where he grew up?’ Bronwyn asked suddenly.
    ‘Maybe he wanted to forget his old life and move on.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Sometimes people outgrow the place they come from. As they get older they start to feel cramped, so they go in search of a home that fits them better.’
    ‘You mean like a hermit crab? When it gets too big for its shell?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘But he didn’t really move on, though, did he, Mum?’
    ‘How’s that, honey?’
    ‘All this . . .’ She waved at the windscreen. ‘The pointy hills and grey old trees, the big wide sky. It’s like we’re driving through one of his paintings.’
    She fell silent, and I found myself viewing the passing landscape with fresh eyes. Suddenly, everything I saw reflected Tony’s familiar palette: dusty-lavender hills, earth-red verges, ash-white tree trunks, lime-tipped leaves, a cloudless