How about now?
Jess typed back quickly:Great. Give me five minutes and I’ll call you.
She ran downstairs into the dark kitchen, boiled the kettle, and dunked a tea bag, all the while sifting through her thoughts to set them in order. She still wanted to know more about how Daniel Miller came to be in South Australia, why he wrote about the Turner family, how he’d conducted his research. But now, having read more of his book, she was also interested in how well he’d known Nora, how often they had spoken.
Jess took her cup of steaming tea back up to her room and sat cross-legged on the floor. In her notebook, she wrote the date at the top of a fresh page, along withInterview—Nancy Davis,and underlined both.
Nancy answered on the third ring. “Jess?”
“Nancy, it’s lovely to speak with you. Thank you for getting in touch so quickly.”
“The pleasure is mine.” Her voice was warm, and her accent carried a trace of the South. “I was surprised to get your message, but very glad. We’re proud of my uncle’s book in my family. I first read it when I was fourteen years old, and I felt as if the characters in the story—your family—became people I knew. They’ve been with me all my life, and I’m over sixty now. Your email to Ben Schultz said that you were looking for background information. I hope I can help, though I suspect you know the book and its people every bit as well as I do.”
“Actually...” Jess hesitated—she was used to asking questions, not answering them—“I only started reading it for the first time this week. I’ve just finished Part One.” There was silence at the other end of the line, in which Jess sensed considerable surprise; she felt compelled to explain. “My grandmother never told me about Halcyon and what happened to her brother’s family. She had an idea, I think, that it would be too great a burden to carry. That’s why I’m getting in touch—I’ve got so many questions about the book, but Nora’s not able to answer them at the moment. She’s in the hospital.”
“I’m so sorry—I hope she’s okay?”
“She had a fall, which is worrying at her age, of course, but she’s receiving excellent care. She’d been rereading your uncle’s book—that’s how I discovered it. I’m a journalist, too, and I was curious about how Daniel Miller—how your uncle—came to write the book. I couldn’t find anything useful online.”
“There’s very little. Uncle Dan was always modest, turning down publicity requests, saying the book could speak for itself, but I’m happy to help. As I said, we’re very proud of him. What was it you wanted to know?”
“How he happened to be in Australia, for starters. How he came across the story in the first place.”
Nancy paused. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “in a way, I’ve always felt it was because my dad died. I never knew him—my mom was seven months pregnant with me when it happened—but Uncle Dan took his death very hard. They were supposed to be going out of town together that weekend, but Dan had canceled at the last minute. After Dad’s death, he lost his faith; he almost lost his job. He’d been working as a scoop reporter in New York City, filing news stories at a punishing pace, but afterward, he wanted—needed—his writing to do more. His editor kept hauling him into the office, telling him to pick up the speed and stop trying to find the meaning of life. He became very unhappy and he went off the rails a bit—all-night benders, that sort of thing. My grandparents were very worried about him; they thought they were going to lose a second son.”
Gently, Jess asked: “How did your father die?”
“Suicide. He’d been a bit depressed, according to my mom, but there was no red flag; he left no note. Uncle Dan couldn’t accept that.He searched for answers, tried to solve the mystery, and in the absence of a better option, he blamed himself. Then one morning, after a night of heavy drinking, his father’s brother called from Australia. Mike said he’d heard things were a bit rough and that maybe Dan would like to come over for a while.”
“And Mike lived in Tambilla?”
“Near enough. He and his partner, Nell—lovely woman—had a small place outside Hahndorf and a caravan at the back of the property that they used for traveling. They told Dan it was his for as long as he wanted it.”
“So he was in the right place at the right time.”
“Sort of. Once he got the idea to leave New York City, Dan moved quickly. He quit his job, sublet his apartment, and was all packed to go when Clay Felker atEsquirethrew him a line. Have you heard of him?”
Jess had. Clay Felker was a legendary editor, longtime friend of Tom Wolfe and credited with giving Gloria Steinem her first big break as a writer.
“Dan had pitched him the idea of a regular column—dispatch from Down Under, reporter on the road, that sort of thing—and Felker offered him a gig filing two and a half thousand words every fortnight. Uncle Dan started in Sydney, worked his way north all the way to the Top End and then down to Alice Springs. Wrote about whatever struck him on his journey—the laid-back surf culture of Bondi Beach, the spectacular orange-and-red rock of Katherine Gorge at sunset, incidental things that happened along the way. He was out at Uluru that Christmas and put in a call to his uncle to wish him season’s greetings. That’s when Mike told him what had been going on in Tambilla. Dan got himself on a train south as quick as you can say ‘scoop.’”
That made sense. Jess could well imagine how an event like the Turner tragedy—a whole family, Christmas Eve, a grand old estate—would have got her professional curiosity firing.
“Have you ever done that journey, the Ghan?” asked Nancy.
Jess admitted that she hadn’t. When she added that she’d never seen Uluru, nor set foot in the Territory, she felt a flicker of shame.
“Ah, you must,” Nancy said. “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a flock of luminous green-and-yellow budgerigars take off in the vast red outback. Magic.”
“I wondered,” Jess offered, “when I was reading about Isabel and her feelings of homesickness—her sense that Australia was a beautiful place, but utterly foreign and desperately far away from her own home country—whether that was also your uncle speaking? It seemed to me to have an extra ring of truth to it.”
“I know he was deeply affected by his time there,” said Nancy, considering. “He used to talk often about Uluru. He met a guy in Alice Springs called Tony whose family had been there since the start of time, who agreed to act as a guide. He took Dan out to the rock and explained it as a church, a holy place. Dan said it had a profound effect on him. Not just Uluru itself, but Tony’s connection to his country. He said it was the first time he’d been aware of his own dislocation. He wrote about craving the other man’s certainty, his knowledge that he truly belonged exactly where he was.”
Something in Jess, an absence that she hadn’t realized was there but could suddenly feel, recognized this state; she thought of the pangs of unnameable melancholy she’d experienced during the years of coming and going, of late nights in airports, of living between landscapes, between cultures. She had considered herself a global citizen, her jet-setting a destination in itself, but what if it wasn’t? If she was honest, wasn’t the love she felt for the sights and sounds of her life in London always experienced at a slight but unbridgeable distance? As if she knew on a cellular level that she didn’t truly belong.
Jess shook off the feeling. She didn’t have time for navel-gazing. The other woman’s admission that Daniel Miller had used some of his own experiences to inform his writing gave her a convenient lead-in to the tricky question of truthfulness and authenticity. “I’d been wondering how your uncle came to write the book; how he wentfrom being a journalist to an author of... well, I suppose it’s true crime?”
Nancy laughed. “He called it a ‘nonfiction novel.’ He believed that the tools used by novelists should be available to journalists, too.”
