This professed love of the weird might go some way to explaining Evie’s particular interests in the world of fauna and flora. Not for her the “obvious” choices like koalas and kangaroos; her favorite animals were monotremes. And while she loved the smells and sights of gums and banksias and wattles, it was the primeval expanse of the forest floor that excited her. Evie was mystified when her classmates spoke of magic and make-believe, and by the stories Reverend Lawson told in church on Sundays of water turning to wine and angels appearing to men. Why, she puzzled, did people seek refuge in such fantasies, when the natural world offered endless wonder? She delighted in entering the cool, dark realm of the bush after rain, searching through sopping leaf muck to discover that a whole new variety of fungi had sprouted overnight, an array of unimaginable shapes and sizes and colors waiting to be explored and catalogued.
But in the early hours of Christmas Eve morning, when Evie Turner crossed the Onkaparinga Valley Road at the end of Willner Road and headed into the deep woods that grew on the other side, she was not seeking to explore. She knew precisely where she was going and what she was expecting to find.
The wildest, thickest patch of bush remaining in Tambilla was on land belonging to a man by the name of Merlin Stamp. Stamp, a lean, lanky fellow with dishwater hair somewhat longer than was usual, was the town hermit. His age was unknown, and for as long as anyone could remember he’d lived in a caravan on the sprawling bushland property that had once belonged to his parents.
Fictions love a gap in which to grow, and the lack of verified information surrounding Stamp was fertile ground. Some said he’d been damaged in the Great War. For them, he was a figure of pity, whose impressive mind (“I heard he used to be a scientist down at one of the universities”) had been shattered by the unrelenting horror of it all. Others swore that in fact he was a former felon, whose connections, stretching right back to the founding of the colony, had kept him out of prison. “He had a family of his own once,” went a common whisper, which then expanded to explain (in rather nebulous terms) that they’d been lost in “suspicious circumstances.”There was a child, said some, who had drowned—but no, interjected others, it was his wife and she’d fallen... been pushed... been smothered in her bed...
Whether these rumors met young Evie’s ears is unknown, but regardless, she was not afraid of Merlin Stamp. She spent a lot of time in his woods and knew the platypus gorge well. She knew, too, though police were unable to establish how, the shed that Mr. Stamp kept nearby. Little more than a shack, really; when, in the aftermath of the Turner tragedy, the police searched it thoroughly, they found a panoply of exotic items: microscopes and saucepans, countless jars containing plant samples and strange animal parts bearing handwritten labels with indecipherable descriptions and the initialsm.s. There were spiderwebs and curious wall charts and shelves of moldy books and countless piles of hessian sacks. Police didn’t know what they were looking for exactly, not at that point, and they didn’t find it.
This much, though, was known: early on December 24, Evie Turner located the hidden key to the shack and let herself into the dim room, sorting through the jars until she found what she had come for. Later, when he arrived at the shed to start his work, Merlin Stamp noticed that the key was not precisely where he’d put it, but it would be some days before, under police questioning, he realized why and who had been responsible and what had been taken. He would claim never to have shown Evie where he kept it; indeed, he professed to have spoken only a word or two to “the girl,” despite having glimpsed her in “his woods” now and then.
In any respect, half an hour after she’d locked the shed door behind her, Evie was back at the house, picking over the breakfast table pans for scraps that John had left. No one questioned the fact that she was already dressed for the day, her customary leather satchel over her shoulder and dirty boots on her feet. Perhaps they assumed she was on her way outside? Perhaps they had long ago given up trying to discern the purpose of this very independent littlegirl? Perhaps, with everything else that was going on in each of their busy lives, they just did not notice?
Whatever the case, on the last morning of her life, after her aunt retired upstairs to rest, and her sister threw down her napkin and slipped away, and her mother left the room to speak with Becky in the parlor, Evie ate breakfast alone. The only person remaining in the room with her was the baby, sleeping peacefully in the woven basket that their mother liked to take outside on clear, warm days and suspend from a tree branch.
When Evie had eaten an elegant sufficiency, it was thus only to the walls and the sleeping baby that she excused herself, before leaving the table and making her way upstairs. She did not go immediately to her own room. Instead, on the far side of the landing, she knocked on her older sister’s door and waited to be admitted.
***
8
When Evie knocked on the bedroom door, Matilda had been waiting for an excruciating fifteen minutes, pacing back and forth across the length of her small room, pausing every so often to rest her hands on the windowsill and glare out across the hills. All hint of dawn’s soft light was gone, and the long grasses, dried by weeks of sunshine, shifted between silver and gold as the morning breeze moved between them. But Matilda was too tense to notice the scenery (or the distant figure of Matthew McKenzie approaching John by the far-off fence). She had left the breakfast table as soon as mention of Kurt threatened to send her anxiety spilling over. The last thing she’d needed was for Isabel to notice how jumpy she was that morning.
Matilda had recently stopped calling her mother “Mum.” At fifteen, she was impatient to grow up and eager to shed the lastvestiges of childhood. She was tall for her age and had a striking tendency to look people directly in the eye. She did not suffer fools gladly and lately found that more and more people could that way be described. Even her teachers, with whom she’d once shared pleasant and collegial relationships, were now proving to be disappointments.
Why, just the other day, Mr. Collins, the neat, pencil-thin head of mathematics, with whom she’d always got along very well, had made a series of incorrect calculations in the algebra problem on the blackboard. Matilda had raised her hand to point them out and instead of rewarding her perspicacity, he’d colored like a sun-ripened apple and made her stay behind to clean the erasers after class. Writing about the event in her diary that evening, Matilda had noted:It isn’t the first time he’s frozen me out. Ever since The Episode, he’s gone out of his way to treat me as if I’m invisible.
The Episode, important enough to occupy a full page in the diary, had involved Mr. Collins surprising Matilda and Kurt Summers behind the school gardener’s shed during lunch break. (Any awkwardness had evidently been forgotten by the time of the funeral, where Mr. Desmond Collins was to remember Matilda to other mourners as “a terribly bright girl. So much promise, in music as much as in mathematics.”)
With her father away so often that year, Matilda had come to consider herself the second adult in the house, and had thus been somewhat irked by the arrival of her aunt Nora and what she saw as her own demotion to second-class citizen. When she’d first heard the news of her aunt’s imminent arrival, she had imagined that they might be three women together, retiring to the parlor in the evenings, analyzing world news and comparing opinions on art and music and faraway places. But the moment Aunt Nora arrived from Sydney, her swollen belly announcing her presence long before the rest of her made it through the door, it was clear that Matilda’s fantasy was not going to be realized.
For one thing, the subjects raised for discussion were not at all what she had hoped. Matilda had fast become tired of pregnant bellies and exasperated by talk of babies and milk and sleeping times. As she listened to her mother and aunt, she had decided she was never going to have a child of her own.I can’t imagine anything more hateful than being tied down by a mewling, puking, helpless creature,she had written on November 27. Worse than having to endure the drudgery itself was what babies did to otherwise intelligent women. Her own mother was almost unrecognizable. She had been distracted, and weakened, both physically and mentally, by the birth of baby Thea.
Matilda’s bedroom, which she had occupied since she was a baby herself, was on the front corner of the house and looked toward the north. It had been decorated at great expense by Mr. Wentworth’s English designer and was at its bones a quintessential Victorian infant’s nursery of the type that would once have been adjoined by a nanny’s bedroom and a schoolroom. The wallpaper depicted a series of cheerless Victorian nursery rhyme characters, which Matilda had done her best to cover with posters of her favorite musicians—John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong. A steel music stand occupied the spot by the window, a saxophone balanced upright on a prop beside it.
Before Evie knocked, Matilda made two adjustments to her appearance: she fastened the fine necklace chain she’d received recently as a gift from Kurt Summers behind her hair, and she changed her blouse, choosing one that buttoned all the way to the collar. That evening, Dr. Larry Smythson, the chief medical examiner at the West Terrace morgue, who had stayed back late as a favor to his longtime colleague Sergeant Peter Duke, would notice, when he removed the piece of jewelry from Matilda’s neck, that the clasp had been bent slightly, in a manner suggesting a hurried, possibly frustrated, fastening technique. Her aunt, during an interview with police, would say that she had noticed her niecewas wearing a different outfit when she returned downstairs that morning, but that she’d thought little of it.
“Girls of that age are sensitive about their appearances—about almost everything—and Matilda had been especially changeable since I’d arrived.”
“In what way changeable?”
“She would sit with us in the evenings, agree to a cup of tea, and then just as we were pouring decide that she didn’t want one after all. She didn’t seem to know if she was coming or going.”
Matildahadbeen out of sorts in the weeks leading up to Christmas Eve, 1959. She’d spent a great deal of time alone in her bedroom with her diary open on her lap, counting the calendar dates again and again, all the way back to the day at the hollow tree. This date she had circled carefully. It had been seven weeks ago now, and she was still late. Matilda had always been like clockwork. She’d prided herself on the fact, even though she knew it was nothing more than a quirk of nature and biology.
For the past month or so, Matilda had waited and hoped and prayed and cried. And then, a week ago, she’d told Kurt. She’d debated whether to say anything. Her preference was to keep it to herself and deal with the situation in private. But she hadn’t a driver’s license or access to a car, and she needed to get to the city.
But Kurt had refused. He was in love with her, he said. He was also an optimistic young man whose perspective was yet untroubled by the ambivalence that would come with time. Life was sacred, he reminded her. “We can do this. Together, we can do it. We’ll get married.”
“Married! How would we afford that?”
“I’ll get a job.”
“You’re going to university when you finish school.”
“I don’t have to.”
“But it’s your dream.”
