“It’s what happened.”
“According to whom?”
In this case, according to Daniel Miller. Jess enjoyed and admired Miller’s careful world-building, his close observation of his subjects. That he had cared for them, she didn’t doubt; beyond his meticulous attention to detail, Jess perceived a genuine desire to imbue them with humanity. But while any journalist might aspire to do the same, Miller had taken it a step further, crossing the line from observer into animator when he entered their heads, described their imagined thoughts, turned them from subjects into characters.
No doubt this was what had made the book so much more compelling than a straight reportage might have been. Buthowhad he done it? How did he claim to know what Isabel felt about her life in Australia, or her husband’s increasingly frequent trips abroad? How did he know that Isabel struggled with being an outsider, distanced from her children, unnerved by the sparseness of the landscape?
The first chapter she’d read that morning depicted Mrs. Turner sitting on the verandah of the house writing in her journal—a habit, the reader is informed, that she followed each day. Jess suspected that this inclusion was Miller’s effort to embed aspects of his own research in the text: a way of getting ahead of any pesky reader questions as to how he could possibly be privy to the things he claimed to know. The scene suggested that he had gained access to the journal during his research; that he could describe Isabel’s thoughts because he’d read them from her own pen.
But Jess found herself wondering whether Miller’s own encounter with the continent, his emotional response, whatever it might have been, had also colored his depiction of his subject. To an extent, all writers of nonfiction relied upon a palette of personal experience to animate their subjects; at what point was the line crossed and too much liberty taken?
“How are we?” Aimee was back, moving toward the bed to make another hourly note of Nora’s vital signs.
“She’s still sleeping,” said Jess.
“Good for her. She looks peaceful, doesn’t she?”
Jess supposed that she did.
“I’m afraid visiting hours are over,” said the nurse with a smile of apology. “But I’ll take good care of her while you’re gone.”
Jess gave Nora a gentle kiss on the forehead and promised she’d be back soon.
She found a taxi waiting outside the hospital and gave the driver the address for the playground where she was meeting Mrs. Robinson. As the cabbie executed a U-turn and started weaving his way among the other traffic, Jess watched unseeing through the window. She was still thinking about Miller and the ethics of his project; how he’d approached the task of turning the lives of real people—including some who were no longer available for interview—into a book. How, for that matter, an American journalist had happened to be in South Australia to write about the crime firsthand. What was it about the Turner family story that had drawn him, and then kept him in the one spot long enough to make their tragic deaths the subject of a book? All journalists hoped for a lucky break. Had he simply found himself in the right place at the right time?
She whipped out her phone and googled “Daniel Miller” and “As If They Were Asleep.” She’d hoped to find some interviews with him, but there was little of use and—weirdly—nothing at all relating to the 1980 edition. Miller appeared to be the sort of reporter who was more comfortable asking questions than answering them. It was possible that, if she were to read his other essays, she’d find the clues necessary to glean his approach, but it was going to take some time to track them down...
Jess brightened as a new idea occurred.As If They Were Asleephad been published by Quill Press. She typed the name into her phone’s search engine, and it returned a number of results, none of them a direct link to a website. The imprint appeared to have been absorbed over time into Crown Publishing, which was a division of Penguin Random House. If all else failed, she could send an email to their general contact address, but Jess wanted information quickly and was concerned that her request would disappear into the black hole of unsolicited correspondence.
She typed “Daniel Miller website” into the search bar and found links to Wikipedia, an entry on Brittanica.com, and a website that raised herhopes but turned out to be a single page, written by a fan, containing little more than a short biography and some reader messages. What she really wanted was to locate someone who had known Daniel Miller personally. She deleted “website” and replaced the word with “estate.” The results contained links to a few pages referencing a Daniel Miller Literary Trust. Jess followed one to the Foundation Directory Online, where she learned that a charitable trust had been established after Daniel Miller’s death, offering scholarships to young writers. There was a street address in Los Angeles, but nothing more direct.
Jess searched for “Daniel Miller Trust.” The first return was a news article referencing Columbia University, announcing the proposed establishment of a journalism lectureship. It named the administrator of the trust as Daniel Miller’s longtime lawyer, Ben Schultz. At the bottom of the article was an email link inviting “Media Inquiries.” Jess drafted an email, explaining her interest in learning more about Daniel Miller’s time in Australia. After a moment spent debating whether it was best to avoid seemingtoointerested—she’d dealt with lawyers before and knew them to be expert in deflecting attention from their clients’ affairs—Jess decided that she didn’t have time to be coy. She added a sentence outlining her connection to the Turner family and saved the email draft just as she arrived at the playground to meet Mrs. Robinson.
A group of teenagers with bikes and phones lolled on the grass near the water fountain while a harried mum in Lycra trailed a deliriously exuberant toddler from one potential danger to the next. Her grandmother’s housekeeper, Jess saw as the taxi pulled away, was standing near the swing set.
Jess waved in greeting, and they both moved, by tacit agreement, to sit at the picnic table beneath a large gum on the eastern edge of the playground.
“Thank you for coming,” said Jess, as a yellow-eyed currawong on the rim of a nearby bin spread its wings and flew away.
“I came out of concern for Nora,” Mrs. Robinson replied crisply. Her arms were wrapped tightly across her middle. She was nervous, Jess realized. “I’m not one to talk out of turn,” she continued. “Your grandmother’s more than an employer to me, she’s a loyal friend, and I don’t want to feel that I’m gossiping when her back’s turned.”
“Of course not.”
“If she hasn’t spoken to you about these things, she has her reasons.”
Jess knew she was on shaky ground. She drew on every bit of experience she’d gained coaxing wary subjects to engage with the interview process and, betraying only mild curiosity, asked, “Why doyouthink she didn’t tell me about the Turner family?”
“I expect she felt there was no reason you should be blighted by such a terrible happening in your family’s past.”
“She wanted to protect me?”
“That’s just the sort of thing your grandmother would do. As I think I’ve said before, I’ve never known a mother—or grandmother—to be so protective, so focused on making sure nothing could hurt the ones she loves.”
Perhaps this explained why she’d kept the secret from Jess when she was a child, but Jess was an adult now. She’d been an adult for over two decades. She didn’t feel personally tarnished by the actions of a great-aunt (by marriage) sixty years before. “Well,” she said lightly, “it’s too late for any of that now. It’s all over the internet.”
“Bloody internet. It’s got a lot to answer for.” Mrs. Robinson’s tone was brusque, but she allowed the hint of a helpless smile to pull at the edges of her mouth.
It was enough for Jess to see that her grandmother’s housekeeper’s resolve was crumbling, and she followed up with a nice, gentle question. “Was Nora close to Isabel Turner?”
