Percy didn’t know what to say. He wanted to reassure her, to tell her what she needed to hear—that the baby would be fine, that everything would turn out for the best. But he decided to stick with what he knew for sure. “There’s no finer tracker out there than Jimmy. Young Eric Jerosch is no slouch, either. But this weather will make things difficult. That’s serious rain and it looks like setting in.”
“Perhaps someone saw something?”
“Perhaps. Though you have to think they’d have come forward by now.”
Meg considered his words. “I’m so worried, Perce,” she said at length. “I’m so very frightened. What’s going to happen to that dear little child?”
Percy finished his cigarette and stubbed it out. He’d done the right thing keeping his concern about Kurt to himself. Meg had enough on her mind; there’d been no need to burden her further. Their son had done nothing wrong. The policeman’s interest would come to nothing. He was simply being thorough, just as one would expect when faced with a scene like that.
Percy only wished he’d been able to get more from Kurt himself. Meg had told him on the cusp of sleep that she was worried their boy would take the deaths extra hard because he and Matilda had argued recently. He’d come home very glum a day or two before, she said. But when Percy tried to talk to Kurt, the boy had looked at him with the weary countenance of someone twice his age and said that he wasn’t ready yet. His sons had been lucky, Percy realized. They’d grown up in the wake of the war; their lives to date had been led ina period of peaceful prosperity in a sleepy country stranded between oceans on the far side of the globe. They’d been upset to lose their granny, Percy’s mother, but she’d been an ancient figure to them, and it had been the natural order of things. Their first taste of anything like grief had been Buddy’s death a couple of months before, after a weekend camping.
But where the death of the family dog was gutting, what had happened at the Wentworth place, to the Turner family, was very different. There was the shock of the situation, for starters, the enormity of it, the horror, a whole family gone like that, but then there was the loss of each human being individually. The future, their hopes and dreams—each one was a tragic loss. The death of children especially was hard to bear. It was a sacrilege. For a boy—a man—who thought himself in love... well, it was crushing.
Percy had wanted to console his son, to tell him that he understood, but he knew the words would fall hollow. “She’s dead, Dad,” Kurt would say. “I loved her, and she’s gone. How can you ever understand?” And what on earth could Percy possibly have said to that?
His chest ached, as if a great pair of hands had closed around his rib cage and started squeezing. He realized suddenly that he needed to get away from this plot of land, this house that had contained him all his life. On many occasions Percy had felt trapped by it. Tonight, though, he felt exposed. His limbs were filled with nerves that needed settling. He craved to move, to walk, to be somewhere else for a time.
Percy left the verandah of the coach house and crossed the yard, letting himself in through the back door of the house. He crept along the hallway until he reached the small room at the entrance. A lamp with a fringed shade glowed yellow on the table by the Christmas tree. He shrugged into his raincoat and took a flashlight from the shelf by the door, aiming it toward the ground to check that it was working. Its beam illuminated a row of work boots lined up against the wall. When Percy couldn’t get his boys to talk, after Marcus had stormed off and Kurt had retreated to his bedroom, he’d set himselfto work cleaning their muddy boots. He’d needed to keep busy, to find some sort of purpose. It had been the only way he could think of to care for them in the moment. A small act of love, in place of the comfort he was unable to provide.
Satisfied that the battery would hold, he switched off the torch, tucked it inside his deep coat pocket, and, careful not to make a sound, slipped outside, closing the door silently behind him.
12
Percy had been walking for an hour by the time he entered the wooded grove at the edge of Merlin Stamp’s property. He hadn’t planned to go the back way out of town, but it had suited him to be in the dark, away from streetlights and other people. It struck him that he was acting like a man with something to hide.
The trees were dense here, in this higher, damper part of the Hills, a blend of ghostly candle bark gums and stringybarks, with silver banksias growing thick beneath them. Percy had the torch, but he didn’t need it. He knew the way.
Rain dripped through the canopy, hitting the lower foliage and trickling to the ground. Small nocturnal animals, swamp rats and bandicoots, slipped among the underbrush unseen. This was a natural place, untouched by humans; one of the few truly wild patches left. Percy knew Stamp a bit, and something of his troubles, but he hadn’t seen the man himself up close in decades. He was aware that people talked. Over the years, he’d heard his boys and their mates scaring one another with tales of bodies buried in the cellar and disappeared children. But kids could be ghoulish like that, and Percy had never had an issue with Merlin Stamp himself, nor his dogs.
His thoughts were on Isabel Turner as he made his way through the trees on the border of Stamp’s land. He’d seen her here once before, she and her husband, about five or six years ago. Percy had been assessing the place for risk ahead of the fire season when he’d become distracted by what he swore to this day was a platypus. The duck-billed, egg-laying mammal had been thought extinct in these parts for most of the century, but he was sure he’d seen one glide from the bank and into the water. He’d hurried his notebook from his pocket and was eagerly recording the positionwhen the sound of twigs breaking underfoot on the other side of the gorge arrested his attention.
He’d known at once that they were arguing, even if he couldn’t hear the words they were saying. Mrs. Turner, walking ahead of her husband, had stopped abruptly, her body rigid, her gaze lifted to the treetops. Even from a distance he could read the anger emanating from her stiff posture. She stood like that, her husband’s words washing over her, until finally she turned and responded, her hands moving like a pair of birds.
Percy had been transfixed. He didn’t usually stare, but the whole situation was utterly unfamiliar to him. He and Meg didn’t have that sort of argument. They didn’t fight at all, really. He could vaguely remember that, once upon a time, they’d held different views on things; over the years, though, their disparities had mostly softened and merged.
“What’s that?”
Percy had jumped at the voice beside him. A child of around five had materialized, as if from a crevice between the great gray-speckled rocks that loomed this side of the gorge. She was pointing at the sketch he’d made.
“A map,” he said, his heart still racing with surprise. “I drew it.”
“Why?”
“I want to remember this spot.”
“Why?”
The child was Evie Turner, he realized. He’d heard Meg talking about the Turners’ youngest daughter: “She’s an odd little bird, that one. Bright, but so many questions!” He explained about the platypus.
“The platypus is a monotreme,” she said.
“That’s right. Same as the echidna.”
Her face was a study in implacability. “I draw, too,” she said eventually. She took her own sketchbook from a bag strapped diagonally across her body, opening it to a page that featured several proficientnature sketches. “I notice things. I’m going to be a scientist when I grow up.”
“Very good. We need more of them.”
He saw then that her gaze had dropped, and her focus sharpened. She was studying a nearby bush covered with vibrant yellow pompom flowers.
