Friday morning came with a heavy fog and temperatures just above freezing. The fire that Uncle Paul had lit for her had kept the house cosily warm all night but now just a few embers and a glowing half log remained. Something had woken her, a truck maybe, but as soon Rebecca had opened her eyes, she felt wide awake. She swung her feet over the side of the bed and let them dangle there, feeling for the floor, but she had to slide further to the bed edge before they finally reached. As soon as they touched the old floorboards, she drew them back.
“Whoa, that is icy.” Rebecca made a mental note to invest in some slippers and maybe some rugs.
Light was filtering in through the torn blind that had hung in the bedroom window for the past fifteen years. Grandma’s homemade curtains hung there as well but Rebecca had not thought to draw them over the night before.
The sound of another truck rumbling along the unsealed road finally encouraged Rebecca to climb out of bed. She stepped to the window and peeked through one of the larger tears in the stained grey blind. Outside she saw the flash of a taillight in the thick fog. Rebecca knew it was probably a logging truck heading off to the state forest and that it would rumble back, fully laden later in the day. She fumbled through the duffel bag that she had yet to unpack and found her track pants and a hooded jumper, quickly pulling them on and following with a thick pair of socks she had borrowed from Grandad.
She had never been one for breakfast, but coffee was a must. Rebecca wrapped her arms around herself as she wandered down the hall to the kitchen. She took a deep breath of the chill morning air and noticed immediately that it smelt somehow different to her memory. Mornings here had always smelt of hair cream and black tea, but with Pop gone those smells would never return.
The kettle seemed to be taking forever to boil and Uncle Paul had only bought her some cheap coffee, but she needed a caffeine hit to start her morning. While she waited for the old kettle to break the morning silence with its piercing whistle, Rebecca walked to the back door and swung it open. The freezing air rushed inside, shaking away whatever sleep from her eyes that still hung there. The fog was still thick, but she could see the trees in the back yard and small patches of light blue sky above. Once the fog cleared, she knew it would be a bright and sunny day.
Looking at the old wooden veranda, covered in a film of water from the morning mist she noticed small animal footprints.
‘Possums’, she thought, ‘Cheeky buggers but damn I must have slept. I didn’t hear a thing.’
Rebecca was about to turn back and head to the kitchen when she noticed something else. Another footprint but larger and not some wild animal. It was a print of a work boot. She stared at it for a moment, trying to figure it out. Her mind racing at possibilities but arriving at only one conclusion. Someone had been prowling around the house while she slept. She felt her heartbeat quicken and almost fell over as the kettle suddenly let loose with its scream.
“Shit”, she muttered through deep breaths and then stepped out onto the weathered old boards of the veranda to have a closer look.
It was a single boot print, right beside the concrete blocks that made up the steps down to the backyard. Beside it more prints from the possums and now drips of water from the eaves. She thought it strange that there was only one footprint and stepped onto the first step to look for any others that might be on the old cement path but stopped and took a mammoth sigh of relief when she saw and finally understood what had happened.
One of Pops old boots lay on the grass directly below the footprint. One of the possums must have knocked it during the night, leaving the mark that had given her a bigger fright than she needed. Rebecca looked out into the backyard to the trees that were becoming more visible through the fog, before shaking her head and muttering.
“Little bastards.”
She now needed that coffee more than ever and the kettle was still screaming. As she headed back inside, she turned one more time to the back yard and yelled.
“Game on Possums. Game on.”
Suddenly something crashed heavily against the shed right at the back of the yard and as Rebecca watched, a figure, clad in heavy, dark clothes and a grey beanie ran from the shed and disappeared into the fog.