She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but it hadn’t included Polly’s face crumpling as tears formed in her eyes and her hands came up tohide them. She wondered at first if her mother had misheard, or if there were something else about the matter that she’d missed. “Are you okay?”
Polly had taken a tissue from her handbag; her cat necklace was tinkling against the bird as she dabbed her eyes. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s really nothing. It’s nothing and it’s everything.”
As Jess waited for Polly on the bench in the middle of the Centenary Garden, a group of crimson rosellas swept overhead in a flash of blue and red, disappearing noisily into the branches of the giant gum at the back of the hotel on the other side of the road. She was still experiencing a curious, though not unpleasant, culture shock. The last thing she’d expected when she set out from London just over a fortnight ago was to find herself spending Christmas with Polly in a small country town in South Australia.
For her part, Jess had a raft of things to do while she was here. The first related to Isabel’s journal pages. There was a detail that hadn’t made its way into the official account that Jess had been pondering. Isabel had consulted a solicitor about procuring passports: Why hadn’t he come forward during the police investigation, particularly when the finger of suspicion was pointing at his client? Jess had been trying to figure out how to track down his identity, when she’d spotted an article on the front page of a newspaper report she’d printed from the day the Turner bodies were found. It mentioned the death of a prominent Adelaide solicitor, Mr. Alan S. Becker, in a car accident on Jetty Road. It was a long shot, but Jess had managed to ascertain that Mr. Becker’s business effects had been donated by his wife to the State Library of South Australia, and she planned to go and look as soon as they reopened after Christmas.
She’d also arranged to meet again with Marcus Summers. Their previous conversation had been cut short, and there was something she wanted to ask him. It was going to take a delicate touch, though.Jess had wondered why her grandmother hadn’t destroyed the journal pages sooner, then, drifting off to sleep some nights before, she’d realized the nature of the moth that had been flickering on the edge of her memory when she was in the attic. It was the pufferfish. Rowena Carrick had mentioned its toxin in her email as one that wasn’t isolated until the 1960s, and couldn’t therefore be tested for in 1959.
She’d considered Percy—she’d even considered Marcus—but then, in a parallel line of thinking, Jess had found herself reflecting on Nora’s change of heart about Isabel. In the beginning, Nora had been her sister-in-law’s fiercest defender, vehemently insisting that Isabel could never have committed the heinous crime of which she’d been accused. But after her baby died, after she discovered Thea in the rose garden, after the run-in with Becky Baker in the street, Nora had “remembered” seeing Isabel behave harmfully toward baby Thea. She had told Daniel Miller and he had felt duty bound to inform the police. His evidence had swayed their thinking and ultimately the coroner’s view.
Jess wondered when Nora put two and two together. Had she seen Meg in the kitchen and wondered why she was taking special care to discard every remnant of the fish paste? Or was it only after Meg had stepped in and rescued her in the street that she started wondering why and realized what had happened? Either way, each woman had a guilty secret that the other had agreed—tacitly or otherwise—to keep. It hadn’t been disbelief that Jess had detected in Nora’s voice on the tape when Daniel Miller told her Meg was dead—it was relief. The only person who knew her secret was gone.
All speculation, of course, but it did explain why Nora would have kept the journal pages: they were proof of the affair and Meg Summers’s motive. A very handy thing to have, in the circumstances. Jess felt sorry for Daniel Miller. It must have eaten away at him that he’d published something he knew not to be true. She had gone back toread the addendum again and noted that he’d got around it by taking the point of view of people who had no reason not to believe the evidence as it presented. In that way, the outcome of the book was authentic; the voices telling the story were doing so truthfully. But Jess understood why he’d felt unable to publicize the new edition. It would have involved a level of duplicity with which, from what she knew of Miller, he wouldn’t have been comfortable. Already, he must have struggled with the ill feeling that he’d helped to propagate a falsehood, that he had been complicit in Nora’s deception.
Jess glanced at her watch and saw that it was ten past twelve. Polly was late. She’d mentioned as they parted the night before that she was going to visit a stone fruit nursery on the edge of town this morning. It had seemed like a very specific way to spend time, but Jess had other things on her mind and figured maybe Polly had a penchant for peach trees. There was a lot she still needed to learn about her mother. And her father, for that matter.
She reached into the brown paper bag and withdrew the two books she’d purchased from the Banksia Bookshop. The first was a new copy of an old favorite:The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek. Jess had seen the familiar cream-colored spine on the shelf and been flooded with memories of being taken to the library by Polly as a child. The memories were new—not the library part, with its smell of pages and dust, the excitement of the small stack of borrowed books, the click-clack of the date stamp—but somewhere along the line, Polly had faded from the picture.
Now, though, Jess could see the two of them in her mind’s eye, curled up together on the cushions in the warm, sunlit corner, reading the much-borrowed copy of this book. She was pleased to find that the illustrations, with their crosshatched mastery of the macabre, still had the power to transfix her; she’d remembered them in all their glorious detail. The story, though, was a surprise. She’d been frightened of it back then, but as she read it again today, Jess wasn’tsure how she’d missed the fact that the bunyip was simply a lost soul, wondering what and who it was, where and to whom it belonged.
The other book was also about loneliness, in a way: it was calledThe Meeting of Strangersby Jonathan James and told the story of a man who’d had a happy marriage and a good life but couldn’t stop thinking about his long-ago first love, who had broken his heart. The author’s bio on the back of the book described an accomplished writer, with a wife and three children and a home in North Carolina.
Jess had googled Jonathan James the night before, back in her hotel room after her mother told her, and pored over old interviews, learning about him but also, she realized, searching for evidence of herself. Did she write because she’d inherited the trait from him? Did she also like Jeff Buckley because musical taste was coded genetically and passed from him to her?
By the same token, she’d found herself thinking of Polly. There was no handy online biography to read about her mother, no interviews from newspapers, no website to trawl through. She’d heard a lot of stories over the course of the past thirty years, but they had all been told by Nora. The same stories Nora had told Polly about herself: that she was sweet but nervous, well-meaning but delicate, that she needed her mother to look after her.
Nora. Even as Jess was hurt that her grandmother hadn’t trusted her with the truth, and shocked by some of the decisions she’d made, it was impossible to be truly angry with her. Because while Nora’s focus had made Polly feel smothered, she had, through her care and attention, built Jess up, made her believe she could do anything, and given her the confidence to spread her wings. Jess carried a complete set of Nora’s Rules for Life inside her mind, applicable to every situation in which she found herself. She also carried decades’ worth of memories of being encouraged and loved. She might not be a Turner in the genetic sense, but Jess would always be Nora’s granddaughter.
Being part of a family was complicated. Jess wasn’t sure whethershe would ever completely understand how her mother could have left her behind, but she did see why Polly had to leave Nora—more precisely, Nora’s version of herself—behind. Jess saw, too, that it couldn’t have been easy. It must have taken courage and strength for Polly to break away from Nora, to leave everything she knew, the things she’d been told, and remake herself by creating a new life all of her own.
“Hello!” Polly had pulled up on the other side of the road and was leaning to call through the open passenger-seat window. When Jess looked over, she beckoned eagerly. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“A matter of minutes,” said Jess, sliding into the passenger seat and tucking her bag of books into the footwell. “How was the nursery?”
“Wonderful,” Polly said, as they drove together down the main street and out of town. “It was wonderful. I’ll tell you about it later; there’s a lot to tell—once we’re finished here.”
An enigmatic enough response, but also a reminder to Jess that she still didn’t know where “here” was. “Where is it we’re going?” she asked, but even as the words left her lips she noticed that the car was slowing. She saw the street sign and knew where they were; she had driven here herself just the week before.
A sporty red Mazda was pulled over on the verge at the end of Willner Road. “I think that’s her,” said Polly, peering over the top of the steering wheel.
A woman with a shoulder-length auburn perm waved at them enthusiastically before climbing back into the driver’s seat of her car and starting slowly up the winding driveway. Polly followed, parking behind the Mazda on the gravel at the top.
The other woman met them with a dazzling smile. “Hi there,” she said, “I’m Deb—Deb Green. And you must be Polly?”
“I am. Thanks for agreeing to show us through on Christmas Eve.”
“No worries at all. It’s a beautiful property.” She gestured with a wide sweep of her arm at the grand house behind her. “A bit neglected over the years, but a wonderful project for the right person. Some history to it, like most places this age.”
“Is it all right to take a look?” Polly asked.
“Certainly. I’ve already been in and opened things up—you’re free to wander. Take your time. I have some emails to send off before Christmas, so I’ll be out here, but I’m happy to answer questions when you’re finished.”
Being inside the house was every bit as eerie as Jess had anticipated it would be. Through the entrance hall, she reached the sitting room where police had spoken to Nora; the dining room where the Turner family had eaten their final breakfast; the library, with its wall of bookshelves; and the good parlor, where the netsukes used to live. Much of the furniture was still in place: having removed the personal items, Thomas Turner had decided that, mostly custom-made, it belonged with the building. He had always, Jess remembered, held the provenance of the place in high esteem.
With Daniel Miller’s account in mind, it was hard not to hear the echoes of John Turner running too heavily down the stairs, the piano starting up in the library, the happy noise of a family leaving for a picnic lunch. It had been fifty-nine years to the day. Jess ran her fingertips lightly along the banister of the wide, handsome staircase as she followed it up to the balcony level.
It never failed to amaze Jess, the power of the written word to impart not only knowledge, but experience. This was her first time physically in this house, but Daniel Miller had taken her to Halcyon in 1959, and thus she already knew it. She saw the door that led to the room that had been Nora’s and went directly to it. Glancing across the balcony, past the telephone alcove toward Matilda’s bedroom, Jess experienced a flash of what felt almost like a personalmemory: Nora’s observation of her nieces that last day.Did you get it?A nod.Show me... Not out here!
