Wildflower Hill by Kimberley Freeman

Author:Kimberley Freeman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-23T03:00:00+00:00

Monica and I were making headway. I was getting better at throwing things out. I didn’t need to keep every birthday card Grandma had ever received, every drawing Uncle Mike had done in kindergarten. I had a week to go before my flight, and if I worked around the clock, I believed I was going to make it. Monica stayed longer hours. I sorted boxes until the early hours, then fell to sleep dreaming of more boxes filled with random, unidentifiable things.

Then Monica found the key. She was cleaning out the dining room, pulling out all the drawers in the oak sideboard one by one. The key wasn’t hidden, it had just slipped to the back of the drawer and become jammed.

“Look,” she said, standing in the threshold to the kitchen, where I was sorting business letters on the table. I glanced up. She held it out, told me where she’d found it.

“It’s got to be for the shearers’ cottage, right?” I said.

“It’s the only door we haven’t been able to unlock.”

“Can you go and have a look?”

She nodded once, then took the stairs down through the laundry. I was skimming through an old letter to Grandma from a wool classer. I could barely understand what was being said, whether the letter was important. It was dated 1938, so Penelope Sykes might want it. I sighed, started a new pile. Went to the next letter. I started thinking about a coffee break.

Then Monica thundered up the stairs. “Emma!”

I turned; she stood at the top of the stairs, panting.

“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s full.”

“Full?”

“Come and look for yourself.”

I eased myself out of my chair. I’d learned that getting up after sitting still for a long time was a killer. Then I followed Monica carefully down the stairs and out through the laundry.

The sunshine was uninterrupted, but it was still cool. The morning breeze moved gently, rustling through the tall gums on the edge of the property. A pair of rabbits bounded away from us. We let ourselves out of the gate and across the overgrown green field to the shearers’ cottage, an old stringy-bark cabin on the edge of the property. The door stood open. Cobwebs everywhere. And boxes. More boxes.

In every room, boxes.

“Jesus,” I said.

“When does your plane leave?”

“Sunday at one.” I turned to her. She was smiling, and although I felt overwhelmed at the thought of more boxes—so many more boxes—I had to laugh. “I’m not going home, am I?” I said.

She shrugged. “I guess you could just take it all to the dump.

But I couldn’t. I’d only just begun to realize that I was looking for something in these boxes. I was looking for the story behind Grandma buying a sheep farm for nothing, for who the little girl in the photograph was, for what Grandma did before she had Mum and Uncle Mike and settled down to life as a businesswoman and an MP’s wife. I didn’t want to miss anything.

I opened the lid to the nearest box and peered in.

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