Chapter One A Murderous Uncle (Probably) There was a door in Gran''s house that no-one ever opened. Dusty had come to think of it as part of the wall, but today something was different. An old iron key was sitting in the lock. She blinked, half expecting it to disappear. It had been a long time since she''d wondered about the room. Years since she''d tried to pick the lock. A single step inside would break the rules, but she couldn''t resist. She turned the key and the door swung inwards with a creak.
Dad had tried to make this room sound boring: ''Storage. Valuable, breakable stuff. No place for kids.'' But Dusty had always known that wasn''t the whole truth. The curtains were drawn unevenly and the room was crowded with spiky shadows that didn''t seem to belong to anything. In a spear of sunlight, she could see a boot print in the dust. Someone had been in there. Careful not to make a sound, she stepped inside and closed the door.
The air was thick. When she was younger, Dusty had whispered spells into jam jars and sold them for three dollars. This room felt like one of those jars; like secret words had been trapped inside for years. There were no boxes. No breakables in sight. It was so empty that it seemed transformative, like a stage. Dad''s lie bothered her. There were lots of secrets in her family.
More, she was beginning to realise, than was altogether normal. But a secret wasn''t quite a lie. She had expected his words to be half true, at least. The only furniture in the room was a bed with smooth covers, and an antique wardrobe with ornate clawed feet. She got down on her knees for a closer look and spotted something glossy trapped between the wardrobe and the wall. Dusty reached through the cobwebs. Her fingers brushed the smooth surface of a photo. With a twist and a shuffle, she pulled it free and placed it in a panel of light at the foot of the window.
She sucked in a breath. It showed a girl in a rainbow-coloured jumper, with dark red hair and warm brown eyes. She had dirt on her cheekbone, or maybe a bruise, and a closemouthed smile that suggested swallowed secrets. The most remarkable thing about the picture should have been the creature on her shoulder. It was a monkey the size of a kitten, with long fur the moody purple of passionfruit skin and a magnificent moustache like feathery whiskers on either side of its nose. But it wasn''t the monkey that held Dusty transfixed. It was the girl. More specifically, it was who she knew the girl must be: Aunt Meg.
This was Meg''s bedroom after all - or it had been, until she ran away long before Dusty was born. Her belly was full of butterflies. It was like finding the cover of a book, an old forgotten favourite, but someone had ripped out all the pages. Not someone - Dad. He clearly didn''t realise that banning entry to this room and refusing to speak of Meg made her far more interesting than she would otherwise have been. Dusty knew very little about her aunt. What she did know was pieced together from snippets let slip in late-night fights that she wasn''t supposed to be listening to. When she was younger she''d asked questions, but she''d learned to keep quiet because whenever Meg was mentioned it tumbled Dad like a wave.
This photo was thrilling. It made Meg feel more real, even reachable. She''d run away as a teenager - ''out wild'', Gran once said. That was the phrase that had fixed the idea of Meg in Dusty''s mind so many years ago. Meg was living wild, bathing in lakes, growing potatoes, drinking tea made from bush flowers, and hiding from everyone, forever. It was an adventure, a fantasy, a fairytale. What could be more wonderful? Dusty felt like she had fallen back through time. She was six years old again and utterly enchanted by the idea of her wild, wandering aunt.
That obsession hadn''t lasted. It couldn''t, when the only solid thing she knew was that there had been a fight - and it must have been a bad one, to snap a single branch of their family clean off. No-one had brought Meg back. Dusty assumed they had looked. Surely they had. But there were lots of places to hide in the wild. In the absence of firm facts, Meg had drifted off to an imaginary place of Dusty''s own making, and there she had stayed, slowly fading from a mystery to a fantasy . and often forgotten.
Until now. Dusty framed the picture with her hands. It was like Meg had been frozen at that age, in this very photo. Noone knew grown-up Meg, and no-one talked about young Meg. The photo was all there was. In this forbidden room with her fingers in a pool of warm light, Dusty felt a touch magical. She locked eyes with her teenage aunt and whispered, ''You can come out.'' She waited.
The girl in the photo smiled her secretive smile and stayed put. Dusty''s arm hairs prickled, but not from magic - a wispy spider was hiking up her elbow. She blew it away and looked around, wondering if there were more pieces of her aunt scattered about this abandoned space. Dusty checked the wardrobe for something, any hint of Meg, but it was empty. She could tell at a glance that nothing had been taken. In the whole room, but for the boot print, the blanket of dust was undisturbed. She chewed on her lip. If there was nothing in here, why had it been locked for all these years? Why had her family needed to seal off the space? Even more intriguing: who had been in this room, and why now? It couldn''t have been Gran, because she was in hospital in the city and she''d been there for weeks.
Dusty heard a creak from the stairway and froze. Creeping over to the door, she listened hard. There was a loud shuffling from downstairs. Gran had finally allowed them to move her bedroom down to the old sunroom. Mum hadn''t been able to get away from work, so she''d stayed in the city and would pick up Gran from hospital in a couple of days. Dad and Dusty had come early to shift the furniture and make sure Gran''s house was nice for her to come home to. They''d done most of the heavy lifting that morning, but Dad, in a funny mood, was still fussing over furniture placement. Dusty heard another step creak and flung the door open.
A thin ray of light streamed from the narrow windows above the staircase, casting a spotlight for nothing. It was just ghosts. Gran said this house was full of them. Dusty looked at the photo. She couldn''t tuck Meg back into that dark corner, not now that she had seen her face. Instead, she slipped it into her pocket and then reached to turn the key. It was instinct, to pretend she had never been inside, but she hesitated all the same. If she left it unlocked, Dad might guess she''d gone into the room.
And maybe she wanted that. Maybe it was a way of nudging him to talk about Meg. A tiny, gentle cue, subtle enough not to make him mad. She stared at the key - the solid, heavy, very real thing that, just like her aunt''s face, she had never seen in her whole life. Dusty lowered her hand and left the door unlocked. She went into Gran''s old bedroom, pulled the double windows open and settled on the ledge looking out over the yard. Gran''s property trailed off from a cluster of houses at the edge of town. At the back, her garden spilled over a fence and mingled with the daffodils surrounding the neighbours'' cottage, but on this side the lawn sprawled out to a wild bushy paddock that sloped high, then slid down to a creek at the bottom of the valley.
Dusty sat with bent knees, and danced from foot to foot on the hot veranda roof. In her mind, a purple monkey scampered along the driveway gates at the edge of the yard. She had never seen a monkey like that before. Why was it sitting on Meg''s shoulder? Where could that photo have been taken, and what sort of marvellous life was her aunt living? Dusty thought Meg''s story was just what a fairytale should be: dreamy on the surface, but underneath . dark, twisted and full of secrets. Below the window, Dad wandered over the lawn. He was taller than most people and pretty skinny. A sapling, Gran used to say.
He had straight hair that stuck up and was always messy, and he wore thick glasses that made his eyes look a bit bigger than they really were. Captain Bones barked from the kitchen, and nearly a whole minute later a shiny car pulled in through the red wooden gates. Dusty watched with narrowed eyes - only partly because of the afternoon glare. It was Uncle Buck. The car stopped and Dad froze like a lizard. She wouldn''t have been surprised if he snapped back and dashed beneath the willow branches. Buck could be scary. There was just something about him.
He was always a bit . shiny. But it wasn''t like sweat. It looked like he did it to himself, like he sprayed on some sort of oil. He also had an evil-looking moustache. He seemed exactly like the sort of uncle who would plot the murder of whoever was first in line for the throne. Not that there was a throne - no crown or treasure either. There were much better things: this old house full of spiders and ghosts; the untameable garden; the huge hilly paddock and the forest that had eaten half of it.
In the valley at the bottom of the paddock, the creek marked the edge of Gran''s land. From the opposite bank, the real bush stretched out in a sea of silver-green as far as the eye could see.