Free The Mystery of the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks

half-gallon cider jar with a wide neck closed by a screw top, and there was something in it down the middle.
    The head thatcher opened it and fished this out. Itwas a stiff brown roll of paper or something like paper.
    â€œParchment!” said Omri’s father reverently. They carefully unrolled it on the garden table. There were a number of smaller pieces of ordinary paper rolled up inside it.
    The parents went quite crazy over these. They were mainly lists of names, and the only halfway interesting thing for Omri at first was a few scrawled comments at various dates, such as: ‘June 12 had to stop work till more thatch come’ and ‘Sep 20 thunderstorm blew the half we done away tarpaulin and all, right across field. Mr S beside hiself though it weren’t our fault’ and ‘Bob T. fell off rooftree luckily on a pile of reeds so only cracked his leg.’ One of the men read this aloud and they all roared with laughter. “Seemingly Bob must’ve had too much cider with his lunch!”
    Then Omri’s mother picked up one of the newer pieces of paper and said, “Oh, here’s the one from the last thatching, back in 1950!” And suddenly Omri was interested.
    â€œLet me see that, Mum!” he cried, almost snatching it from her hands.
    There was the list of names, and a few comments that made Omri’s heart beat faster.
    â€˜Missus D’
(Driscoll,
thought Omri,
that’s her!)
‘still gives us our tea though we trys to stop her troubling herself when she should keep to her bed.’ ‘Doctor come. Missus D. weaker.’ And, at the bottom, one last commentthat chilled Omri’s heart: ‘We did the last trim very quiet. Finished October 10, 1950. She won’t see the job, poor lady.’
    â€œOmri,” said his mother, who was reading over his shoulder, “could ‘Missus D’ have been Jessica Charlotte?”
    Omri opened his mouth to say, “Of course it was,” but he mustn’t give away that he knew anything, so he said, “Maybe, Mum.”
    â€œShe did die that year. You know, I’ve been thinking about it all, since you came up with your idea about Jessica Charlotte living in this house. It’s all coming back… I was about nine, and Granny Marie got a letter telling her her sister had died. She was very upset about it. ‘She was here in England!’ she kept saying. ‘So near, so near, all this time!’ She’d always thought she was abroad. I remember her crying, which she never did usually, and me trying to make her feel better, and her saying, ‘Here all the time, and never a word or a sign! And now it’s too late!’ Then she put on what she called her blacks — her funeral clothes — marched me in to the next-door neighbour’s, and was gone for two days.”
    She broke off, frowning.
    â€œThen something else happened. Just after she got back, the postman brought a big package. I remember her getting it. She tore the paper off it — it was a box of some kind — but she wasn’t interested in that. There was a note with it, and when she read it she just broke down. It was awful. She wouldn’t show it to me. I remember hersobbing and crumpling it up, and after that for days and days she just kept bursting into tears. ‘Oh, how could she! How could she be so wicked!’ she kept saying. ‘My own sister to be the cause of it all!’ And I kept on at her to tell me what her wicked sister had done, but she never would. And after that she refused to speak about her. So I always thought about her as my wicked great-aunt Jessica Charlotte.”
    Omri said nothing. He couldn’t. He was thinking,
She was wicked, then. Really wicked.
But he didn’t want to think that. The notebook had said to him, don’t judge. He didn’t know everything yet. He kept his mouth shut and picked up another bit of paper from the bottle without