Thea Turner had been the newest baby in Tambilla. Meg had knitted a pair of yellow bootees ahead of the birth, just as she did for all the newborns, but she’d taken a particular shine to Isabel Turner’s babe. A few weeks after the child was born, she’d even pulled out therolls of pink yarn. “What? I like to have a project,” she said when she noticed Percy’s surprise. “Better a matinee jacket for that sweet baby than a nest for the mice.” Young Becky Baker, whom Mrs. Turner had hired as a nursemaid, couldn’t walk that hulking great perambulator past the shop without Meg finding a reason to join her outside. “Such a pretty little thing,” she would say when she came back in at last. “A real neat little face—and those rosebud lips! She’s an absolute doll.”
Percy had cursed the Baker lass for passing their door so often. This, he knew, was utterly unfair. From what he heard she was a good worker and a kind soul; she was just doing her job. All the same, he wished she’d keep the baby out of Meg’s way. He’d known his wife long enough to detect the hidden note of longing underlying her comments. One afternoon, a few weeks ago, she’d even said: “If Kurt and Matilda were to have a baby, she’d look a bit like that, don’t you think?”
Marcus had been stacking flour onto the shelves in the corner of the shop at the time and had tossed a bag down in disgust, sending white dust pluming into the air. Typical fourteen-year-old behavior, Percy had told himself, nothing to get too concerned about; he’d reprimanded the boy later. Secretly, though, he’d had some sympathy. The last thing he wanted was for Kurt to settle down to the business of having babies. Plenty of time for all that later, after he’d studied and learned and traveled, made the most of himself and everything that the world had to offer a young man with a fine brain and legs that did what they were told.
Percy felt a stab of terror as an image of Sergeant Duke making a note of Kurt’s name came to mind. There was nothing to fear, he told himself. His son hadn’t played a role in what happened to the Turners. He just needed to keep Kurt safe as the policemen carried out their work—their real work—of finding out how the family had wound up dead on Christmas Eve as they ate their picnic lunch by the creek.
It was raining again now. Lightning lit up the sky beyond themountain ridge. The sound of dingoes came like a scream. This place felt haunted, changed.
Percy knelt to touch the earth where they had lain. Tears fell, as away from his family, his other concerns, he was able to feel the full weight of what he’d discovered that afternoon.
He stayed like that for a time, until something crept up on him, drew his attention.
A noise? An instinct? Percy wasn’t sure. All he knew was he was nursing a vague new sense of dread.
He switched off the torchlight. Waited.
Slowly, he stood.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was not alone.
Was that movement in the shadows?
He stood very still and listened. There was a rustling. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Percy knew that he was being watched. Something—someone?—was there with him.
Part III
13
Sydney
December 11, 2018
In her single bed, in her childhood room, Jess slept fitfully. She’d left the window open, and the smell, the sounds, the touch of Nora’s sheets against her skin, conspired to form a time machine. Her dreams were shot through with people from her past, forgotten versions of herself. She was a girl at school, a child visiting Darling House with her mother, a teenager at the beach... and then, with a surge of panic, she was awake again, wondering where and when and who on earth she was.
It was pitch-black. The clock told her it was 3:00 a.m.
Jess stayed very still, waiting, hoping, trying to fall back into slumber. Just an hour or two more, and she could get up and start the day.
But sleep was elusive. Lying in the dark, she felt divided, dissolvable, displaced. She pictured her bed in London and it seemed like make-believe. But this place was not right or real, either.I want to go home.The thought came to her in a flash and immediately she pushed it away. The sentiment was childish, but also meaningless. It wasn’t that she wanted togoanywhere; rather, she wanted tofeelat home, settled. This was jet lag, she told herself. The discombobulation, the separation of mind and body, the struggle of each to reclaim the other and together resume circadian rhythms.
Whatever the case, she was now wide awake. Jess switched on the bedside lamp and the circle of warm yellow light chased shadows into the corners. The world began to make sense again. She pulled out her laptop and waited while it booted up and connected to Nora’s Wi-Fi. A list of new emails scrolled into place. She scanned thesender names in case of anything urgent but saw only subscription emails and discount offers.
Jess considered writing to Rachel, decided against it, and opened Word instead. Work had always been her safe harbor, and so would it be now. She opened the article about coming home and picked over the outline she’d drafted on the plane. When she got to the end, she let out a long, slow exhalation. It was dreadful. Thin and flimsy. Worse, and strangely, it was like someone else had written it. It didn’t speak to Jess’s reality or with any authenticity to the greater human experience. It was advertising copy with a bit of trite humor thrown in.
None of this, she suspected, would be a barrier to publication. But reading it here, in the same bedroom where she’d sat to fill in her application for university more than twenty years before, Jess felt exposed. She was well acquainted with the demands and stresses of adult life—bills to be paid, compromises to be made—but there were moments that highlighted the distance she’d traveled from the idealism of her youth, and they never failed to make her feel ashamed.
Jess minimized the document and opened her search engine to the BBC page. For all that the twenty-four-hour news cycle had distorted journalism, politics, and possibly democracy itself, it was a gift to the lonely insomniac. She started with the headlines before finding her way, somewhat inevitably, to Matt’s weekend column about the etiquette of baby music classes, and then following a link that led to another, through the current events forest of Meghan Markle presenting a fashion award, NASA discovering signs of water on a nearby asteroid, and Theresa May facing a leadership challenge over Brexit. The accompanying photograph of Number 10 and its oversized Christmas tree, the familiar slick of the wet London road, brought on a pang of homesickness. Jess glanced at the open window and wished the sun would rise.
It was too easy in the dark to glimpse the things she preferred not to see: the depth of Rachel’s sympathy when she learned of Nora’sfall; Dr. Martin’s advice in the hospital; the unutterable suggestion that Nora might not get better.
Jess closed her eyes against an outcome she didn’t want to contemplate. The air was muggy, and she could smell gardenia and a hint of salt. Nighttime smells, so familiar after years of sleeping in this room, and before that in her tiny bedroom in the apartment farther along the peninsula.
On the night of Thomas Turner’s funeral, Polly had told Jess, “I found out why it’s called a wake.” They were in Jess’s room together. This was their usual routine, Jess lying in her narrow single bed beneath the window, the dreamcatcher dangling from the ceiling above; Polly sitting beside her on the chair she’d bought secondhand and that they’d stained together on the balcony with shellac. (“Resin from the lac bug of India,” Polly had said, stirring the rich syrupy mixture. “Isn’t that something?”)
So much had happened since they’d left that morning that Jess had forgotten she’d started off by puzzling over the word, and that her mother had promised to find out its derivation.
“It’s an ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition,” Polly began, “the mixing of two ideas—one from earliest Christian times, the other from long before. The first Christians used to follow the custom of ‘waking’ a new church by singing, feasting, and praying in it.”
