Jess pulled the visitor’s chair closer to the bed and slid her notebook from her bag. “No evil spirits on my watch, Nora,” she said softly.
As she sat in silence, Jess kept circling back to her grandmother’s secrecy. Nora was never one to shy away from past sorrow. She’d been forthcoming on subjects like her failed marriage, the loneliness she’d suffered as a child, a number of professional setbacks. She knew that history was cumulative. That the past was not something to be escaped from, but a fundamental part of who one was.
Even more confusingly, after her brother’s funeral Nora had spoken about him to Jess often and at length. She’d start by saying, “I recognize myself in you, Jessica,” and then, “More than that, I see my brother.” This, Jess understood even then to be the highest praise. “He was determined, decisive, and he didn’t sit around and let opportunities pass him by. He was brave, too. He saved a man’s life in the war. That’s how he made his first fortune.”
“By saving a man?”
“An important man.”
“How?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you someday.” And then she’d shake away the sadness that inevitably crept across her face and force a cheerful tone: “Have I ever told you about the time he and I found a convict tunnel at the bottom of our garden?”
But she’d never come close to revealing any of this particular story. In fact, Jess realized now that Nora had rarely spoken about Thomas Turner as an adult. This omission had not seemed odd to Jess at the time—brother and sister had been close when they were growing up, but in adulthood their paths had diverged. He’d moved overseas before the internet and routine air travel made connection easy, and Jess was aware of her grandmother’s fear of flying.
“We wrote letters,” Nora said, “but it’s not really the same as seeing someone.”
“He should have visited you.”
“He’d have liked to come back.”
“Then why didn’t he?”
Nora had considered the question carefully before saying, “It’s a hard thing to explain to a young person. Sometimes coming home isn’t as simple as you think.”
Now Jess understood. Grief had driven him away. Australia, his home country, must have been layered with traumatic memories.
But was grief enough to keep Nora quiet for so long?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jess said quietly, tapping the nib of her pen gently on the lined page of her notebook. “Why didn’t you tell me about Halcyon?”
And why had her grandmother started to think about the place now?
As if she knew she was being watched, Nora’s sleeping face animated into a mild half smile. Jess reached out to take a small, birdlike hand in her own. The past often came back to the minds of the elderly, just as Patrick had said—perhaps that’s all it was. But—she thought of Patrick’s revelation that Nora had been upset recently by a letter from a South Australian solicitor... Thomas Turner’s house had been in the Adelaide Hills.
Jess gave her grandmother’s hand a gentle stroke then lowered it carefully onto the sheet. Opening her notebook, she added a reminder to look for the South Australian lawyer’s letter to her to-do list, then stood and went to the refreshment machine at the end of the hallway and made herself a cup of tea. The result had a dishwater-gray tinge, but it was hot, and it would do. She took it back to Nora’s room and typed “Turner Family Tragedy” into her phone’s search bar, scrolling through the results until she reached entries that she hadn’t yet read. Most contained the same information, but every so often there was a new snippet.
After a couple of hours, with her internet browser full of open tabs and her vision swimming, Jess sat back and closed her eyes. Some of the blog posts contained quotes that had been taken from newspaper articles of the time, and one journalist’s name had come up a lot. The name rang a bell, and Jess had to think for a moment as to why that might be. Then she remembered: the essay about Thomas Turner that had sent her down this rabbit hole in the first place.
She typed the journalist’s name into the search bar and opened his Wikipedia page. Daniel Miller was an American reporter born in 1930; his black-and-white portrait, an unposed photograph in suit and hat, had something of aMad Menlook about it. He had written forThe Atlantic,Esquire, andThe New Yorker, among other publications, and was an early adopter of New Journalism, as practiced by the likes of Truman Capote and Joan Didion—a more intimate style of reporting, where fiction techniques were applied to nonfiction topics with the aim of bringing readers emotionally closer to the story.
Daniel Miller had stationed himself in South Australia for the duration of the police investigation and inquest into the Turner deaths, producing a series of essays that developed into a book.As If They Were Asleephad been lauded at the time for its fresh approach and was aNew York Timesbestseller in 1961. An updated edition was published in 1980 after the discovery of the infant Thea Turner’s remains, but in the years since, the writer had disappeared from public view.
Jess typed the title and author name into her search. The book wasn’t in print anymore, and she couldn’t find any mention of an Australian edition. There were, however, copies showing up on various online secondhand book sites. Jess browsed some of the options at AbeBooks before selecting one that looked to be in good condition.
She fished her credit card out of her handbag but stalled when she saw that delivery to Australia was estimated to take twenty-one to thirty-six days. Jess doubted she would still be in Sydney in a month’s time. For an extra seven dollars, priority shipping could have it to her in five to eight days. Jess selected the faster shipping option and finalized the transaction just as Nora’s nurse came in to check the monitor and let her know that visiting hours were ending.
A very young woman at the nurses’ station caught Jess on her way to the lift. “Excuse me—you’re Mrs. Turner-Bridges’s granddaughter, aren’t you?”
Jess nodded a confirmation.
“We had a phone call before. Someone wanting information about Mrs. Turner-Bridges. I didn’t give it out, as we’re not allowed to do that. No personal information unless to the next of kin.”
Nora was well-connected in the local community, but her friends would have contacted Mrs. Robinson or the office. “Did the caller give a name?”
The nurse searched the desk, cluttered with papers, before finding the message. “She said her name was Polly Turner, that she’d only just heard about her mother and wondered how she was...”
The young woman trailed off. Jess understood her awkwardness. Naturally it was difficult to comprehend a situation in which the daughter of the patient wasn’t the next of kin. Jess realized, too, that she hadn’t called Polly herself to report on Nora. Worse, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to do so. She wasn’t in the habit of contacting her mother with family updates. “Thank you,” she said, with what she intended to be a reassuring smile. “It’s fine to bring her up to date ifshe rings again. In the meantime, I’ll give her a call and let her know where things are at.”
