“Yes. Nearly. On Christmas Eve.”
“It’s hard to imagine.”
“What is it they say? The days are long, but the years are short.”
“What’s she like?”
“Polly? Oh, she’s a good girl. Sensitive and kind, clever at school, quite a beauty. But she’s naive; romantic, delicate—the sort of girl to read a lot of books and poetry and imagine that life might really be like that. I have to save her from herself sometimes, watch carefully to make sure people don’t take advantage. I don’t mind. It’s what I signed up for: having a child is a job for life.”
“I remember the two of you back then. I didn’t realize it, but you made me think of my sister-in-law and her baby. Your Polly was a lovely child, so calm.”
Jess glanced at Polly, but her head was bowed, her emotions difficult to read.
Daniel Miller asked Nora then whether she had been back to Tambilla since 1960.
“Good God, no. Certainly not. I couldn’t bear to go near the place again. It haunts me, all of it.” There was a pause then, and Daniel Miller wisely left it to expand. When Nora spoke again, her voice faltered: “Have you... Did you visit the house while you were there?”
“I did.”
“Was it in poor condition? I don’t know who’s looking after it, whether Thomas organized someone. There were those hippies, the ones who found her—God only knows what they’ve done to the place with all their digging and interfering.”
“It looked okay. The worst they’ve done is to hang tie-dyed sheets across the doorways. The garden has suffered, though. Henrik Drumming looked after it for as long as he could—despite Thomas’s instructions to let it alone—but he had a stroke a few years back and it all got too much.”
A lull fell, and Jess was aware of the shuffling of feet, the squeak of leather as someone shifted position, and then Nora’s voice, tight, unnatural: “Her roses?”
“They fought valiantly to hold on, but at some point, a bird must’ve dropped a cherry tomato seed into the garden and the vines have grown wild since then. The roses are pretty much suffocated.”
“She’d have hated that. The rose garden was her pride and joy. To think of those philistines digging it up! Once, it was a sacred place—no one would have dared.”
“Do you think your brother will sell the house now?”
“He has no reason to keep it.”
“Maybe this will be the closure he’s been waiting for? It must have been horrific not knowing for certain what happened to his child.”
The suggestion sounded sensible to Jess, but Nora said only, “Is that everything you need? I’m getting tired of talking.”
“It is.”
Jess heard packing-up noises—briefcase clips being popped, the rattle of a pen skittling across a surface, a glass being lifted and returned to a tabletop, and then, suddenly, Nora’s voice again, as if an afterthought: “How were they all? The others down there?”
“Well enough.”
“Who did you meet with?”
“Peter Duke, Percy Summers—he’d lost his wife, sadly.”
“Meg died?”
“A year or so ago.”
“I didn’t know.” Nora spoke so softly that Jess leaned forward as if it would help to hear her better. “She came to help me, do you remember? Turned up on Christmas Day to bring me food and insisted on staying to clean up the kitchen.”
“She was a kind person.”
“And now she’s gone. She’s really gone.” Nora’s tone was tender, but there was something else there, too. Disbelief, Jess decided: she couldimagine how disconcerting it would be to learn of the death of someone who had shown such kindness in a time of tremendous anguish.
“Her son Kurt was still around,” said Daniel Miller, “and I spoke with Betty Diamond and Becky Baker.”
