She swept up the parcel and went back downstairs.
“Tell me again who sent it?” Polly was still trying to understand. Jess had come barreling into the kitchen with a determination Polly recognized from when her daughter was a child. She’d been waving a small package and delivering a hurried explanation from which Polly gleaned only that someone somewhere had sent something and that she was somehow involved.
“Her name is Nancy Davis.”
“I don’t know anyone called Nancy Davis,” Polly said, puzzled. “Why would she send me a parcel, and how did she know to send it to me here? And why was it addressed to you?”
Jess exhaled impatiently. “Nancy Davis is Daniel Miller’s niece.”
“Daniel Miller who wrote the book I gave you?”
“Yes, exactly. Daniel Miller died some years ago, and Nancy was his executor. He left a package with instructions that if Nora died, and contact was ever made by one of her descendants, this package should be passed along.”
“But I didn’t make contact.”
“No, butIdid. I rang Nancy Davis.”
“Then why has she sent the package to me?”
“That I don’t know. But Nancy said the instructions were explicit. The package was for you.”
Polly sighed. Her inclination was toward trepidation. She had brought Daniel Miller’s book for Jess because she wanted to help her daughter at a difficult time, but she wasn’t keen to reopen the wholeaffair. It had caused such a rupture in her life: the shock of learning what Isabel Turner had done; Nora’s demand for secrecy; her insistence that Jess should never be told...
And yet here they were. No matter Nora’s wishes, a package had arrived for Polly, the train set in motion by Jess herself. The three of them were like the figures in an old fairy tale: the spell cast atop the baby’s crib, the promise extracted to prevent the child from learning a secret, the inevitability of truth’s return.
“The instructions were explicit,” Jess said again. “It’s yours to do with what you will.”
Polly took up the parcel. No matter how uncertain she remained, one thing was very clear: Jess was desperate to know what it contained. She steeled herself and said, “Shall I open it, then?”
“If you like.”
Polly concealed her amusement at Jess’s attempt at nonchalance. Indifference had never been her natural state. “All right,” she said. “Let’s see what’s inside.”
The sticky tape holding the bubble wrap together was old and had started to yellow. It came away easily. “It’s a cassette,” Polly said. “I haven’t seen one of these in years.”
“What’s on it? What does it say?”
Polly turned over the case to look at the label.nora turner-bridges, december 14, 1979.The date rang a bell, and it took less than a second for the pieces to come together. That was the day Daniel Miller had visited Nora at Darling House. She said as much to Jess and then frowned. “But I don’t know what that’s got to do with this cassette.”
Jess drew breath. “It’s the interview he did with Nora.”
Polly listened as Jess explained about Daniel Miller’s return to Australia after the discovery of Thea Turner’s remains. “He was here to write the addendum that appears in later editions of his book, but Nancy told me he also made recordings. He couldn’t in ’59—thetechnology wasn’t good enough—so he spoke to the residents of Tambilla again.”
“I had no idea. So that’s what they were doing in the library. And then afterward, he came out into the garden.” Polly remembered the large satchel he’d been carrying; it had contained an early tape recorder, she supposed.
“And that’s when you met him?”
“You met him, too. He was much taken with you.”
Jess was nodding; her eyes widened in realization. “That’s how he knew my name.”
“I suppose it is.”
“May I?” Jess indicated the cassette.
Polly watched as Jess turned the plastic case over in her hands, cracking it open and running her finger ardently along the top of the cassette.
Taking in her daughter’s excited face, Polly’s mind returned to the day she’d met Daniel Miller. She saw herself standing by the fountain, chatting with the sophisticated, leather-clad American writer as baby Jess crawled over and pulled herself to standing. Polly had liked Miller. Something in his eyes had communicated genuine interest, even when he was asking the most mundane questions about her life at Darling House and making small talk about how much she must have enjoyed growing up there, how nice it was for the three generations to live together, how Nora had doted on Polly as a baby.
