The Midnight Dress by Karen Foxlee Read Free Book Online

of it.
    ‘It isn’t about that,’ says Vanessa Raine. She’s sobbing when there’s no need to sob. It’s only a question, he thinks. Only a question. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I don’t even think that place was true. They talked about this hidden hut up on the mountain but they were always talking like that, making things up.’
    ‘It’s just I’ve heard it from a few other people. Parents, you see. It could be important. If you can think of anything you heard Pearl or Rose say about this place—’
    Vanessa’s mother, Mrs Raine, the colour psychic, Harvest Queen 1969, interrupts then. She looks like an older version of Vanessa, preserved in formalin. Her hair is bottle-blond and her tanned skin is beginning to crease. She stretches open her painted pink lips and explodes.
    ‘I think we’ve had just about enough,’ she says, getting up. Her hot pink heels clicking on the gymnasium floor. ‘Vanessa has said what she knows and I think we’ll leave it at that. Come on, Vanessa, stand up. We all know where you should really be looking – you want some answers, you just need to go down Hansen Road and pay a visit to that woman because we all know, and I’m telling you this right now, if you don’t, you’re idiots. She had something to do with this.’
    The dress again.
    ‘Right,’ he says, picking up his pencil. ‘Tell me about this woman.’
    ‘The house at the end of Hansen Road,’ says Mrs Raine. ‘Very end, old house up against the mountain, looks like a rubbish tip. Her name is Miss Edith Baker.’
    ‘And how is she related to all this?’
    ‘She made the dress,’ wails Vanessa. ‘She made the dress.’

The same creek that runs through the Falconer cane bends backward on itself then, up toward the mountain from where it sprang. It crosses some way behind Edie’s strange house, where the back paddock gives way to bush. Rose can hear its rushing up behind the trees. She stares up at the mountain that fills the sky from the old woman’s back steps.
    ‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it?’ says Edie.
    ‘It’s okay,’ says Rose, even though there is something about it that makes her feel dizzy. She wonders what it would be like beneath its mysterious green pelt, which grows dark with the shadows of clouds and silvery in the sunshine, which releases startling sprays of parrots, which veils and unveils itself all day long. She imagines all the mossy groves and caves and hidden things.
    ‘Full of secret places,’ says Edie, which makes Rose look at her and cross her arms.
    ‘Has it got a name?’
    ‘Well, that rock there, the big bluff, is of course called Weeping Rock, because it always weeps, even in the dry season. And the middle part, where the mountain dips, was always called the Saddleback. There’s a lookout there and on the other side of that, the seaboard side, you can’t see it from here but from the bay, that bluff is called the Leap. They’re all easy to get to from the town side, big tracks, but really only places for visitors. Daytrippers, we used to call them. See above those trees? I would climb all the way to there when I was a child, with just the old paths that have been here a thousand years. I didn’t know if you’d come back. You must really want a dress, which is a good thing – dresses are the best medicine for young girls.’
    Rose keeps her face very still.
    ‘I can already see it,’ says Edie, turning up the stairs.
    Rose isn’t so sure. She’s argued with herself the whole way. She doesn’t know whether she likes the old woman with the small dark eyes and skullcap of hair. The house is falling apart. There’s a tree growing though the front stairs. Everywhere there’s the detritus of the forest. The leaves drying in small piles in the corners of rooms and seed pods jammed in the floorboards. The curtains are dappled with mildew and festooned with spider webs.
    ‘Is Miss Baker as strange as they say?’ Pearl asked her, painting her nails in lavender