It Hasn't Always Been a Shed

"Some things need daylight, Charlie. And mine isn't a story you hear between other people's emergencies." — Thelma Jeffries

The staircase at Jeffries Manor had been built for a different century's sense of time. Wide treads, shallow risers, a banister of Tasmanian blackwood worn smooth by seven generations of hands — the whole structure designed for an era when ascending to the first floor was an event rather than a transition, when the act of climbing carried social meaning and the architecture accommodated it accordingly. Charlie climbed slowly, not because the stairs demanded slowness but because his body did, and because the minutes between Louise's sitting room and Thelma's bedroom were minutes he needed for the recalibration that had become necessary every time he absorbed new information on this case and found it didn't fit the space available.

The first-floor corridor stretched ahead of him, dimmer than the ground floor, the afternoon's failing light filtering through a window at the far end and casting a pale, elongated rectangle across the runner carpet. Doors on both sides — four, five, six — most of them closed, their brass handles tarnished to a matte greenish patina that spoke of decades between polishings. Family photographs lined the walls in frames that progressed from ornate Victorian gilt near the stairs to simpler modern wood further along, as though the house itself were ageing as you walked deeper into it.

Charlie paused outside the door Sarah had described. Closed shut, warm light spilling through the gap beneath — not the grey of the corridor but something softer, lamplight, the kind of warm glow that belonged to occupied rooms and deliberate comfort.

He knocked. Three raps, measured, unhurried. The knock of a man announcing himself rather than requesting permission.

"Come in, dear." The voice was thin but precise, the vowels shaped by the particular Tasmanian diction of someone who'd been educated before the Second World War — clipped where modern speech would linger, formal where contemporary usage had softened. "The door isn't locked. I don't lock it. Never have."

Charlie pushed the door open and stepped into Thelma Jeffries' world.

The room was large by modern standards but had been made intimate through accumulation. A lifetime's worth of objects had been arranged around the edges of the space with the careful, considered placement of someone who had spent years deciding precisely where each thing belonged and would brook no alteration. Books lined two walls — hardbacks mostly, their spines ranging from leather-bound volumes that predated Federation to paperback mysteries with creased covers and broken spines. A writing desk sat beneath the window, its surface holding a reading lamp, a magnifying glass, a stack of correspondence, and a framed photograph of three teenagers standing at the edge of a forest, their faces bright with the particular recklessness of youth. The bed dominated the room's centre — a high brass frame, white linens, and propped against its pillows, Thelma.

She was smaller than Charlie had remembered, though he wasn't sure what he'd expected. Ninety-one years had compressed her into a frame that seemed barely sufficient to support the weight of the blankets tucked around her waist, let alone the weight of the history she carried. Her face was a study in the archaeology of beauty — the bones still elegant beneath skin that had thinned to translucence, cheekbones and jawline holding the ghost of a structure that must have been striking sixty years ago. Her hair was white, fine as cobweb, arranged across the pillows with the particular carelessness that suggested either someone had brushed it for her that morning or she'd stopped caring how it lay. Her eyes, though — her eyes were the wrong age for the rest of her. Sharp, dark, carrying an alertness that contradicted the frailty of everything around them.

Those eyes found Charlie in the doorway and held him there.

"You're not the young woman," she said. Not accusatory. Observational. The statement of someone who catalogued visitors the way a birdwatcher catalogued species — by distinguishing features, by the manner of approach, by what they revealed about themselves before they'd said a word.

"No, ma'am. I'm Detective Sergeant Claiborne. Charlie." He moved into the room the way he moved into all occupied spaces at scenes — carefully, with attention to where he placed himself relative to the person he was speaking to, conscious that his physical presence carried implications he needed to manage. He chose the chair beside the bed rather than standing over her, lowering himself to a height that put his eyes roughly level with hers. The chair was upholstered in faded chintz, its cushion carrying the permanent impression of someone's habitual sitting — Louise, probably, or a carer. "I'm here to check on you. Make sure you're all right."

"I'm not all right," Thelma said. "But I suspect you know that, or you wouldn't be climbing my stairs."

The directness surprised him, though it shouldn't have. Ninety-one years of life stripped away the social padding that younger people used to cushion their interactions. What remained was the essential architecture of personality — unadorned, undisguised, offering itself without apology or pretence.

"Can you tell me what you heard this afternoon?"

Thelma's gaze moved from Charlie to the window. The curtains were open — heavy damask, once rich, now faded to the particular shade of resigned elegance that expensive fabrics achieved after decades of sun exposure. Through the glass, the grounds of the manor stretched towards the tree line, the failing afternoon light rendering everything in shades of grey and dull green. From this height, Charlie realised, you could see the shed. It was visible from Thelma's window — a small green rectangle at the edge of the gravel, O'Neil's cordon tape catching the last of the light as it flickered in the wind. She'd been able to see it all along.

"Louise was shouting," Thelma said. Her voice had settled into the cadence of testimony — careful, sequential, each sentence tested for accuracy before release. "I don't hear everything from up here, but Louise's voice carries when she's angry. Or frightened. This was frightened." She paused. The distinction between anger and fear in a granddaughter-in-law's voice, made from a room on the first floor through Georgian sandstone walls — Charlie noted the precision of it and filed the observation under lucid.

"Could you hear what she was saying?"

"Fragments. A name. I believe she was calling for someone to stop. Then it went outside, and I couldn't make out the words anymore, only the tone." Her fingers moved against the blanket — thin, spotted with age, the knuckles enlarged in the way that arthritis produced over decades. The movement was small but restless, the unconscious fidgeting of someone whose body wanted to act whilst circumstances confined it to witness. "Motor cars arrived. Doors. Voices — official voices. You people have a particular way of announcing yourselves."

"And then?"

"Then the young woman came."

Something changed in Thelma's face when she said this. The alertness in her eyes, which had been analytical, evaluative — the expression of someone assessing the man in the chair beside her bed and deciding how much to reveal — shifted into something warmer. Not quite tenderness. Something more complicated, carrying layers that Charlie couldn't read from the surface alone.

"She came upstairs. Quickly. I heard her on the stairs — running, or nearly running. My door was open, and she came in with her weapon drawn, checking the room the way you people do. Corners first. Then me."

"Do you know who she was?"

"I called her Jane." Thelma's voice dropped, not in volume but in register, as though the name required a different part of her throat to produce. "She looked — she looked so much like Jane. The eyes. The way she stood. Jane used to stand like that, as though she was preparing to do something brave and was gathering herself for it. This girl stood exactly the same way."

Charlie held very still. The connection Sarah had mentioned — Thelma knowing Jane Lahey — was surfacing with a depth and specificity that transformed it from social coincidence into something that felt structural, load-bearing, a thread that connected this afternoon's events to decades of history he didn't yet understand.

"Jane Lahey," he said. Not a question. A placement marker, establishing that he knew the name and inviting Thelma to continue without requiring her to explain the relationship from the beginning.

"My dearest friend." The words arrived with the simple absoluteness of a fact that had been true for so long it no longer required qualification. "Since 1942. She and Bob Gangley and I — we were inseparable. The forests, the coast, everywhere. We explored everything. Knew every track between here and New Norfolk before we were old enough to understand what any of it meant."

She stopped. Her eyes had moved to the photograph on the writing desk — the three teenagers at the forest's edge. Charlie understood that he was looking at Thelma and Jane and Bob, captured in an image that had been sitting on that desk for decades, present in this room the way some presences were always present, felt even when they weren't acknowledged.

"Jane's at Vaucluse now. Palliative care. Pancreatic cancer." The medical terminology arrived without hesitation, without the euphemism that some people of Thelma's generation preferred. She was a woman who named things directly, even when the names were terrible. "I can't get to her. The stairs, you see. I can't manage the stairs anymore, which means I can't leave this room, which means I can't reach Lindisfarne, which means my dearest friend is dying twelve kilometres from where I'm lying and I can't hold her hand."

The last phrase carried a weight of grief so compressed, so long-accumulated, that Charlie felt it against his sternum like a physical pressure. He'd come upstairs for a welfare check and a preliminary account. He was getting both, but he was also getting something else — a window into a relationship that stretched back seventy-six years and was ending now, in separate rooms, in separate buildings, with neither woman able to reach the other.

"The young woman — Sarah. She's Jane's granddaughter."

"I know that now. I didn't know it then. Or perhaps I did, in some way that wasn't conscious. She has Jane's eyes, Charlie." Thelma used his first name as though they'd been having conversations for years, as though the formality of his rank was an irrelevance she'd already dismissed. "Not just the colour. The quality. The way they take you in. Jane always looked at people as though she could see what they were carrying, the weight they didn't show. This girl — Sarah — she looked at me the same way."

"What did she say to you?"

"That she needed to get back to Louise. That I should close the door and not open it for anyone." A thin smile crossed Thelma's face — not humour exactly, but recognition of something. "Very firm about it. Exactly the way Jane would have said it. Jane never asked you to do things. She told you, and you did them, because she was always right about what needed doing."

"And then?"

The smile vanished. The alertness in Thelma's eyes contracted into something harder, more focused, and Charlie saw the moment she arrived at the part of her account that she'd been approaching with the careful deliberation of someone navigating difficult terrain in uncertain light.

"There was a sound."

She said it the way Louise had said Luke came back. Three words, carrying freight that the sentence structure couldn't support, bending under the weight of what they were being asked to convey.

"From the shed." Her gaze moved to the window again. The green rectangle. The cordon tape. The sealed door that Charlie had closed behind himself twenty minutes ago. "A mechanical sound. But wrong. Not an engine — I know what engines sound like. Not machinery. Something else. Something—"

She faltered. Charlie waited. He didn't prompt, didn't redirect, didn't offer language to fill the gap. He let the silence do its work, because the gap itself was informative — the space where words should have been and weren't, the frontier of description where three separate witnesses had now arrived independently and stopped.

"I can't describe it properly," Thelma said. The admission cost her something — Charlie could see it in the way her jaw set, the slight tightening around her eyes. This was a woman who valued precision, who had been naming things directly for ninety-one years, and the inability to name this particular thing offended something fundamental in her relationship with language. "It was loud. Brief. And it felt — it felt as though it came from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. As though the sound wasn't travelling through air but through the fabric of something else entirely."

Charlie absorbed this. Three witnesses. Three descriptions of the same sound. Sarah had said an engine, but not an engine. Louise had said a mechanical sound, but wrong somehow. Thelma was saying it came through the fabric of something else entirely. Each account was different in its specifics and identical in its failure — each one reaching for a comparison, finding the comparison inadequate, and retreating into the language of negation. Not this. Not that. Something else.

"Sarah cried out a name," Thelma continued. "Karl. She was terrified. I could hear it in her voice — not just fear but something beyond fear. The sound you make when you understand something terrible is happening and you can't stop it."

"And after the sound?"

"Silence." The word came out with peculiar weight, as though Thelma were describing not absence of noise but a specific, active quality. "Not ordinary silence. Not quiet. Silence. The kind that fills a space after something has been removed from it. The house itself seemed to be holding its breath."

Her fingers had stopped their restless movement against the blanket. They lay still now, both hands flat against the white linen, palms down, as though she were steadying herself against a surface that had become unreliable.

"Sarah ran. I heard her on the stairs again, going down this time, faster than before. Then I was alone."

Charlie let the account settle. He was conscious of the time — the light through Thelma's window had deteriorated further whilst they'd been talking, the grounds below now rendered in near-monochrome, the shed barely visible against the darkening tree line. His officers were out there in it, searching bush and garden in failing light for a man who hadn't left through any exit a three-metre-square outbuilding possessed.

"Thelma." He leaned forward slightly, the chintz chair creaking beneath his shift in weight. "You've lived in this house for seventy-one years."

"Seventy-one years this past April."

"In that time — has anything like this happened before?"

The question hung between them. Charlie had asked it without knowing precisely what this was — was he asking about disappearances? About impossible sounds? About events that defeated the descriptive capacity of every witness who encountered them? He'd left the question deliberately open, allowing Thelma to interpret it through whatever framework she possessed, because her framework encompassed seven decades of this house and this family and whatever secrets the sandstone walls had been absorbing since 1817.

Thelma looked at him for a long time. The sharpness in her eyes hadn't diminished — if anything, it had intensified, becoming the focused, calculating attention of someone deciding how much truth a particular recipient could bear. Charlie had seen that expression before. On intelligence officers deciding what to declassify. On surgeons deciding what to tell families. On old people deciding which of their secrets to carry to the grave and which to release before they got there.

"This house has its history," she said carefully. "The Jeffries family has its history. Some of it is in books. Some of it is in the walls." She paused, and her gaze drifted to the writing desk, past the photograph of three teenagers, to a small wooden box that sat partially obscured behind a stack of correspondence. "There are things I could tell you that would make what happened in that shed today seem — not less impossible. But perhaps less unprecedented."

The words landed in Charlie's chest with the precision of a statement that had been rehearsed, not today but over years — prepared, held in reserve, waiting for the moment when someone asked the right question in the right tone and earned the right answer. He recognised it because he'd heard it before, in other contexts, from other witnesses who'd carried knowledge that was waiting for permission to surface.

"I'm listening," he said.

Thelma's mouth opened. Then closed. Her eyes moved to the window again — to the shed, to the cordon, to the officers moving like shadows across the darkened grounds — and something shifted in her expression. The calculation completed. The decision resolved. And the resolution was not the one Charlie had been expecting.

"Not today," she said. The words carried finality but also something gentler — an acknowledgement of his attention, a recognition that he'd asked honestly and deserved more than deflection. "I'm very tired, Charlie. And some things need daylight. They need a clear head, and mine isn't clear at the moment — not with Louise downstairs in that state, and Jamie gone, and Kain gone, and now your detective gone as well." Her voice wavered on the last word, the tremor of someone who had been holding fatigue at bay through willpower alone and was reaching the limits of what willpower could sustain. "Come back tomorrow. Bring your notebook. Bring your questions. I'll answer them properly."

It was a dismissal and a promise simultaneously, delivered with the authority of a woman who had been mistress of this house for seven decades and still understood, even from a bed she could no longer leave, how to control the flow of information within its walls.

Charlie could have pushed. He had thirty years of techniques for keeping reluctant witnesses talking, for maintaining the conversational momentum that carried people past their intended stopping points into territory they hadn't planned to enter. He could have asked the follow-up questions that would have made silence uncomfortable and speaking the path of least resistance.

He didn't. Not because Thelma was too old or too frail for pressure — she was neither, and treating her as though she were would have been precisely the kind of condescension she'd have recognised and resented. He didn't push because his instincts, honed across three decades of reading people in rooms exactly like this one, told him that Thelma Jeffries would say more tomorrow than she'd say tonight. That the promise wasn't deflection but preparation. That whatever she knew about this house and its history required a fuller telling than a welfare check could accommodate, and that she intended to provide it — on her terms, in her time, with the particular care that lifelong secrets demanded when they were finally being shared.

"Tomorrow, then," he said. He rose from the chintz chair, his right knee broadcasting its displeasure in a sharp, intimate signal that travelled from joint to hip. "Is there anything you need tonight? I'll have an officer in the house."

"Tell Louise to come up when she's able. She shouldn't be alone down there." The request was practical, maternal — the instincts of a woman who had been looking after this family since before Louise's husband was born. Then, softer: "And if you speak to anyone at Vaucluse — if Jane's name comes up for any reason — tell her Thelma is thinking of her. Tell her I'd come if I could."

"I will."

He moved to the door. Behind him, he heard the small sounds of Thelma settling — a shift of weight against the pillows, the whisper of blankets being adjusted, the particular sigh of someone releasing the tension of sustained alertness and allowing their body to remember how tired it was.

"Charlie."

He stopped in the doorway. Turned.

Thelma was watching him from the pillows, her dark eyes catching the lamplight, and in that moment — just briefly, just for the space of a held breath — she looked less like a ninety-one-year-old woman confined to a bed in a grand old house and more like someone standing at a threshold, deciding whether to step through.

"The shed has always been there," she said. "Since before James and I married. Since before the house was extended. It's been that shed, in that spot, for as long as anyone remembers." She paused. "But it hasn't always been a shed."

The statement arrived in Charlie's mind and found no immediate place to settle. It sat in the space reserved for things that were present, noted, not yet understood — the same space that held the metallic smell and the undisturbed dust and the intact cobwebs and the sound that three witnesses couldn't describe.

"What was it?" he asked.

Thelma closed her eyes. The lids were thin, almost translucent, and Charlie could see the faint movement beneath them — not sleep but withdrawal, a deliberate turning inward.

"Tomorrow, Charlie. I promise."

He stood in the doorway for a moment longer. The lamplight held its warmth. The photograph of three teenagers watched from the writing desk. The wooden box sat partially hidden behind its stack of correspondence, present, noted, not yet understood.

Charlie nodded to a woman who could no longer see the nod, pulled the door gently until only a hand's width of gap remained — open, as she preferred it, never locked — and walked back down the corridor towards the staircase, carrying more questions than he'd climbed with and the growing, structural certainty that whatever had happened in that shed today was not the beginning of the story.

It was the latest chapter of something that had been happening in this place for a very long time.