Lolly and the dogs weren’t home yet. The cats were more friendly than usual. As Harper looked inside the fridge, the pair of them weaved around her legs.

The slightest sound or movement made her look, half-expecting Will to be there. She needed more distraction. Crunching an apple helped her think; her head was so full. Sitting on the spinny chair in her bedroom, Harper typed ghost sightings in pandemic and she spun around while she waited for the results.

There was a full page of links to choose from, mostly from America. She clicked settings and changed the region to Australia.

The first page of results was confusing. There were newspaper articles that called cities like Melbourne ghost towns. Only they weren’t talking about ghosts but about how empty the streets were in lockdown, when no one was allowed to go to work or school. Ghost town meant deserted, not full of ghosts.

On the second page, there was something interesting.

Pandemic Stirs Up Paranormal Activity

For some, life in Melbourne lockdown has been less isolating than they imagined, according to paranormal investigators. Unexplained activity in the home has been frequently raised in calls to the Australian Paranormal Society. Pandemic restrictions, forcing people to spend more time indoors, has led some to wonder if they are sharing their space with supernatural forces.

That was interesting; it meant that Harper wasn’t the only one.

Next she tried to look up Molly and Mae Lamb. She added ‘Melbourne’, ‘1913’, their last year at Riverlark, and ‘1915’, the last year Will had seen them before he went to war. After some false starts she found two funeral notices. Molly Lamb’s funeral: 8 July 1919. Mae Lamb’s funeral: 17 July 1919. So close together.

Harper searched for Vince Lyons, Will’s friend who’d survived Gallipoli and had received a medal. Another funeral notice: 21 June 1919.

Will and Vince, Mae and Molly. Harper pictured the lunchtimes at the river that Will described. It sounded exactly like the word Riverlark. A lark meant a good adventure: a good adventure at the river. But the four friends had all died as teenagers. It seemed that Vince, Molly and Mae might have been taken by the second wave of Spanish flu to hit Australia. The dates matched. She didn’t want to tell Will more sad things, especially after the way he’d seemed just before.

Two hours later, she heard the back door and the clatter of dogs. Hector came barking up the hallway to find her and leapt into her arms. She carried him back down the hall, taking a good, comforting sniff of him.

‘You’ve stopped barking, have you?’ Lolly said to the little dog. ‘Rascal. Started as soon as I parked the ute, yapping away up the stairs giving everyone a headache.’

The kitchen smelled of hot chips and vinegar: Lolly was unwrapping the parcel on the bench. She said she’d had a job by the bay so it was only right to take advantage: a long piece of battered fish for her and two dim sims for Harper. All the thinking and researching had made Harper hungry. She took plates and cutlery to the table, and got the sauce and Lolly’s nightly beer.

‘Never seen you so ravenous,’ said Lolly. ‘They must be working you hard at that school.’

Harper slowed down on the chips and picked up a dim sim.

‘Lolly…?’

‘Mm? That sounds ominous.’

‘It’s just…I don’t know much about our family on your side. Going back generations.’

Lolly put another chip in her mouth. Harper tried to be patient.

When Harper had done a family-tree project the year before, Larry’s family took up all the room. She’d made it last minute when her mum was on a nursing shift, so there was only a little branch for Liz’s side. There was Harper’s grandfather—her mum’s dad—Jack Standish, builder (deceased). He’d died when Liz was a teenager and she didn’t talk much about him. Next to Jack Standish, the tree had an ‘m’ for married and the name Charlotte ‘Lolly’ Lamb. Below their names it said Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Standish, her mum, and below Liz and Larry, ‘Harper Moss’. She had Larry’s last name.

‘I was wondering if there were twins in your family,’ said Harper, trying again.

‘Oh yes, I was a twin. Did I ever tell you that? No, I don’t suppose I did. I had a twin sister called Rose. She died when we were two.’

‘That’s so sad.’

Lolly nodded, and kept eating. Harper wasn’t sure if she could ask anything else. It might upset her grandmother.

But then Lolly said: ‘How are you with ladders?’

There was a hatch in Lolly’s bedroom that Harper had never noticed. Lolly pressed on it with a broom and it popped open. She used the other end of the broom to hook a ladder and drag it down. Harper climbed up with a torch.

At the top, there wasn’t an attic but a roof space about a metre high, full of boxes and other bits.

‘It’s a large one marked Lamb Stuff,’ Lolly called up from the bottom of the ladder.

Harper balanced it on her shoulder and came down the ladder one-handed.

After they cleared away the dinner leftovers, Lolly opened the box on the dining table and Harper watched her unpack: photo albums, bundles of letters, and assorted small boxes, cardboard or velvety—for jewellery, perhaps.

Lolly chose a small red album and sat down. Harper looked over her shoulder at black-and-white photos of a baby in a knitted bonnet that tied under its pudgy chin with ribbon.

‘This is my mother, Sarah Thomas. She was born in 1923. Don’t you think your mum looks like her? Here, this is better, she’s about fifteen in this one.’

It was true, Harper’s mum and Lolly’s mum looked like the same person.

‘I didn’t have a very nice father, unfortunately,’ said Lolly. ‘So although I grew up with the last name of Thomas, when I was fifty and a widow I decided to use my mother’s childhood name of Lamb.’

Harper got goosebumps on her arms.

Lolly pointed to another photo. ‘And this is my grandfather, Edward Lamb. Born, let me see…1898.’

‘You look like him, Lolly.’

‘That’s a nice thought. I was close to him. Now, he had an older brother he didn’t like, and two little sisters. Twins, as you were asking. And there was a sad story about them. Where are they? Here, Molly and Mae.’

Harper could hardly contain her excitement. Molly and Mae Lamb.

‘What does that make them to me? My great… great…’

‘Great-great-great aunts. I’m trying to remember what happened to them.’

In the photo there were two older girls who looked about eighteen. They were arm in arm and Harper could just make out that they were smiling; the photo wasn’t very sharp. One girl was wearing a dress down to her feet, belted at her waist, and had dark hair in a bun with neat waves that framed her face. The other girl had the same face but her hair was cut to her chin and dead straight like Harper’s. She was dressed in white, not so much a dress but a uniform, with an apron, and she was holding a small piece of cloth in one hand.

‘Lolly, who do you think the twins look like?’

Lolly held the photo closer to her, then away again, then closer, and then looked at Harper.

‘Spitting image of you! Especially this one,’ she pointed to the one in the apron.

‘That’s what I thought. Is that Mae?’

‘I believe so. Well, how lovely. You can keep that.’

‘Really? Are you sure?’

‘They’re your family too. I don’t see why not.’

Harper had another question lined up already. ‘Lolly, do you think that Molly and Mae might have died from Spanish flu?’

‘You’re so clever. Yes, that’s exactly what it was,’ said Lolly. She put the photo of Edward Lamb against her heart. ‘I remember my grandfather telling me.’

Harper held up the photo of the twins. ‘I think Molly and Mae went to Riverlark.’

‘Do you? Well, it’s possible. My grandfather lived around here all his life. I grew up in a different part of town but I loved visiting him. S’pose that’s why I planted myself here, eventually. But where’s all this sudden curiosity coming from?’

‘Just from things I’ve been reading about in the library. For a project.’

Something else in the box distracted Lolly. She started to read a letter and stopped talking completely. Harper sat opposite and quietly picked through the other things. It seemed strange that Lolly had all of this hidden away in a box when the shelves beside them were crammed with things that had belonged to strangers.

Soon, Lolly yawned and said she’d had enough history for one day, and could Harper pack it up and put the lid on because the cats had been known to chew paper or make off with bits of jewellery.

When Harper went to bed, she put the photo of Molly and Mae on top of Cleo’s drawing of William Park, and the cadet badge on top of that. She tried to read, but instead of being drawn into a story, the words were like bits of barbed wire keeping her out. Her mind was on other things.

Why did people always think that ghosts haunted the place where they died?

People could die anywhere.

What if where you died had no meaning but where you lived did?

What if you could return to an object, as well as a place?

She got her iPad and tried to google her questions but there were no solid answers for a cadet badge appearing out of nowhere, or for tumbling shelves, for Corey’s strange scooter accident, or the clean slice on Briar’s face at netball and the badge being there on the court.

She pictured herself throwing it into the river that day.

The badge sat still and innocent next to her.

Her eyes were prickly-tired. She turned off the ipad and lay down, curled around her little trench dog.