A pause, a silence, and then Daniel Miller said: “There’s one thing I don’t understand. When Becky Baker set upon you in the main street and swore that it was Isabel’s baby in that pram you were carrying, she was right, wasn’t she?”
“It was no business of hers.”
“But Meg Summers vouched for you. She must have known. She’d been up at the house with you, she knew Isabel, she’d seen baby Thea in the past. She was a mother herself—she’d have known the difference.”
“Your point, Mr. Miller?”
“I’m wondering why she’d have done that. Why did she keep your secret?”
“You’d have to ask her. She was beloved in town—a mother to everyone, that’s what people said. Perhaps it was as simple as she knew I was the best person to care for the baby.”
Daniel Miller made a noise of consideration and was silent for a time, pondering this. His voice, when he spoke again, was low. “And what about Polly, your baby; what happened to her?”
“I kept her safe in the wicker crib for a time. She looked so peaceful, so perfect. And then I buried her.”
“In the rose garden?”
“It was the most beautiful place. You remember. They should never have been digging there; it was sacrosanct. She should have been safe there, safe to sleep peacefully forever.”
Part IX
34
Sydney
December 20, 2018
Dawn was breaking when Jess heard the front door close downstairs. From her bedroom window, she watched as Polly disappeared over the crest of the hill in the direction of the Darling House cove. It was no surprise that her mother couldn’t sleep. Hearing Nora on the tape had been shattering enough for Jess; she could only imagine what it must have been like for her mother.
They hadn’t spoken of it yet. When the recording finished the night before, Polly rose from her seat, muttering the usual perfunctory good-night wishes before heading off directly to her room.
What Nora had said, what she’d done, was unfathomable—the confession, delivered so frankly, had landed like a stone in a pond, sending ripples rolling on and on toward the bank. Jess’s thoughts had cycled all night, ranging across her own life, settling briefly on various interactions she’d had with Nora, small things she’d seen, heard, and felt, but coming to settle eventually on what she’d learned over the past week.
She kept revisiting the conversation she’d had with her grandmother in the hospital:You...Nora had said when she opened her eyes to see Jess.I’ve missed you... You came from England...It was clear now that her grandmother, in her confusion, had thought she was speaking to Isabel; when she’d said,I’ve looked after her...she’d been promising she’d taken good care of baby Thea; and when she woke in a panic, grabbing Jess’s wrist and hissing:Issy, help me... He’s going to take her from me,it wasn’t Mr. Bridges she’d feared; it was Marcus Summers. The sudden arrival of his letter, expressing a desireto speak with her about Thea Turner, had filled her with terror, sufficient that she had braved the narrow stairs to the attic.
But to do what? What had Nora feared from Marcus? He hadn’t mentioned anything about Polly being Thea; in fact, one of the reasons he claimed to be telling his story was to assuage his guilt, and that of his father, for the part he believed they’d played in Thea Turner’s death. It was only Marcus’s mother, Meg, who had known the truth, having been up at Halcyon in the days following Nora’s delivery. Which begged the question as to why she hadn’t told the rest of her family. Nora’s tone when Daniel Miller asked why Meg had kept her secret had been noncommittal: “You’d have to ask her.”
Perhaps Nora was right, and Meg had simply decided Nora was the best person to take care of the baby, though Miller’s silence at that point on the tape suggested he was dissatisfied with the answer. Maybe he’d just been upset by the whole turn of events. That would explain why he’d disappeared from view after the publication of his revised edition with its addendum. It was bad enough to make errors in journalism; to publish a true crime book to great acclaim and fanfare, only to discover later that a central tenet—the fate of a missing baby—had been completely wrong, would have been hard to bear.
As for Nora, no matter how calm she’d managed to sound on the tape, Jess knew she must have lived with great anxiety that someone, someday, would hold her to account. She had managed to convince herself she’d acted in the baby’s best interests, but there was surely a part of her that grappled with the horror of what she’d experienced, guilt over what she’d done. Jess knew there was: How else to explain the roses? Nora had hated them: one of the first things she’d done when she inherited Darling House was to tear every specimen from the garden. It had once seemed an endearing idiosyncrasy, because who on earth took so violently against a rose? But now, knowing that Nora had buried her tiny newborn baby in Isabel’s rose garden, the antipathy took on a far more sinister stain.
An alert sounded on Jess’s phone, a reminder that the meeting with Nora’s solicitor was scheduled to begin in two hours’ time. They’d arranged to get together at eight, before he went into the office, early enough to accommodate Polly’s flight back to Brisbane that afternoon.
Jess stared at the reminder for a moment. It was almost impossible to believe that life could go on as normal—appointments, paperwork, meetings—when the night before had brought such revelation.
As if to underline the fact, a fresh email notification appeared on her screen. It took a moment for Jess to recognize the sender, Rowena Carrick, as the university professor she’d written to about poisons. The response was informal and direct:
Hi Jess,
Happy to assist. To your second question first, algae bloom toxins are more than capable of causing death to humans—indeed, they’re among the deadliest we know. I’m not overly familiar with historical postmortem, but cyanotoxins had certainly been discovered by 1959, and both gas chromatography and liquid chromatograph detection methods were in early practice then. I’d have thought the medical examiner would’ve run this test.
Re your original question: There are various poisons that wouldn’t have been discernible in 1959, not because they weren’t recognized as toxic, but because the science to isolate them wasn’t yet established. Take tetrodotoxin, a specialty of mine. Recognized as toxic for hundreds of years—even shows up in Captain Cook’s logs for 1774—but the structure wasn’t elucidated until 1964. Extremely toxic to humans, a thousand times more than cyanide. Found in the livers, ovaries, and skins of porcupine fish, triggerfish, puffers, toadfish, etc., aka the parts fed to Cook’s pigs in Haiti.
I’ve attached a (not-exhaustive) list of possible contenders, butit pays to remember that dose is key. Sodium chloride is toxic, but you’d have to eat a lot of table salt for it to kill you...
Cheers,
Rowena
