“He fictionalized at times?”
“I wouldn’t say that. His aim was to capture the truth, to tell the story, but he didn’t much care if he was one hundred percent accurate as to whether a bird flew overhead at a particular point in time. He couldn’t know everything. The fact that Mrs. Turner had observed her son John to become ‘effervescent’ when he was excited was more important to him than whether she reflected on it at the precise moment he records her having such a thought in his book, if you know what I mean.”
Jess considered this. Nancy’s description chimed with everything she understood of New Journalism. That Miller was published in the early 1960s helped to explain how a book about the people of a small town in South Australia had reached the top of theNew York Timesbestseller list; it had been carried on a wave of literary fashion. Jess pushed a little harder. “It sounds like he might have taken some license?”
“Only of the poetic variety. His concern was to be truthful to the Turners and their story, and I believe that he was. He did an enormous amount of research—his notebooks are full of it—and there was evidence, whether in an interview or a diary entry or a letter, for every claim he made. In fact, he built up so much trust with his subjects that he was able to render important assistance to the police.”
“Really?” Jess put aside the tantalizing mention of notebooks for a second to explore this claim. She remembered Mrs. Robinson’s comment that police had received a consequential tip-off as to Isabel’s state of mind. Mrs. Robinson had thought it came from a priest, but perhaps it had been delivered via Daniel Miller. “Did he interview a priest, by any chance?”
“A reverend, yes—Reverend Lawson from the local Anglican church.”
“And Reverend Lawson had information about Isabel’s mindset?”
“As you can imagine, in his position he was privy to all sorts of intimate thoughts and feelings; he also kept a fastidious record.”
“A written record?”
Nancy made a small noise of agreement. “The reverend fancied himself a novelist, so he was extremely eager to talk to Dan, a real-life writer.”
“And your uncle passed what the reverend told him on to the police?”
“Dan came to know the sergeant who headed up the investigation quite well. He had a lucky break there. Sergeant Duke was married to an American woman. Her people came from Atlanta, Georgia—same as my grandparents. She’d been living away from home for the better part of two decades, and once she learned there was a newcomer up in the Hills hailing from her hometown, well, she did what any self-respecting Southern woman would do and insisted he come for dinner. You said you’d finished Part One, I think? Part Two is when the investigation begins. You’re about to meet the reverend and Sergeant Duke.”
Jess was only half listening; she’d been considering how to discern precisely what Daniel Miller had learned from the reverend, when it occurred to her there was a surefire way of discovering what he’d discussed with all of his subjects, including, presumably, Nora. “You mentioned your uncle’s notebooks,” she said. “Are they still around?”
“They are,” Nancy replied. “I inherited them after he died.” She laughed. “Let’s just say, my uncle was an excellent journalist, but his penmanship left much to be desired. I retired last year, and I’ve been spending my spare time going through them. You know, I loved my uncle’s book when I first read it—was obsessed with it, really—but I can’t tell you how much more vivid the world of Tambilla and Halcyon became to me after reading the notebooks—so many extra layers.”
“I’m really interested in how he worked. Can you give me an ideaof the notebooks’ contents? Are they interview transcripts? Detailed descriptions? Notes to himself?”
“All of the above, and some whole scenes, too—almost like drafts that didn’t make the final cut. He seems to have had two ways of working: the first, as you’d probably expect, was formal, in that he would set up an interview and take his notebook with him, full of questions. But where he was most successful, I think, was his informal research. Dan was a humanist. He liked people and he was interested in them. He had the knack of making whomever he was speaking to feel as if he were really listening. More so, that he understood them. His favorite thing to do when he was working was what he called ‘finding the story.’ He would arrive without a preconceived notion of what he expected, or even hoped, to hear, and then just strike up a conversation. And for the book—well, he moved into his uncle’s old caravan at the back of the block and became something of a local himself. People trusted him, and he grew genuinely fond of them. Mr. Drumming, young Becky Baker, Meg and Percy Summers—Percy was the one who found them, of course, poor man. He moved away in the end. He’d lost his wife by then. Terribly hard on him; he and dear Meg were childhood sweethearts.”
Not for the first time, Jess found herself noting the way Nancy spoke as if she’d known the residents of Tambilla in 1959 personally. She appeared to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the people and place. How much extra information about Nora and the Turner family must be contained within the notebooks?
“As for Becky,” Nancy was saying, a certain “memory lane” quality softening her voice, “I always felt quite sorry for her. I don’t know the truth of what happened with the netsuke, but you couldn’t blame her for being hurt when Isabel scolded her. And I can only imagine what it must have been like for her to lose the Turner family. She idolized Isabel, and she loved little Thea as if she were her own. She cried andcried when she spoke to my uncle. Awful, loud sobbing. It was very hard to sit through.”
Jess was taken aback at first, and then she realized. “They’re on tape?” she said. “The interviews were recorded?”
“Not in 1959—that was a few years too early for him to have been carrying a portable tape recorder—but he went back to Tambilla twenty years later and spoke with some of the townsfolk again.”
“After Thea’s remains were found,” Jess said softly.
“That’s right. I’m not sure which edition you have there, but from 1980 onward, the book contained a final chapter. It was important to Uncle Dan that it was republished with an addendum, to bring closure to that little baby’s story.”
“It must have given him great satisfaction, being able to tie off that thread.”
“You’d think so,” Nancy said musingly, “but I seem to remember he came home from Australia unsettled. He wrote the final chapter, but he didn’t promote the book again and he barely wanted to talk about it, even with family. I guess it brought the whole thing back to mind. Reminded him that he hadn’t been able to find answers for the rest of them. No investigator likes to be left with mysteries.”
Jess could agree with that.
“He was glad to return, though,” Nancy said. “He never forgot them. They were all bonded together. You have to remember, when he met them he was also trying to understand an inexplicable death in his own life. Like them, he was grappling with grief and guilt and the bitter, creeping sense that he might have been able to prevent my dad’s death if he’d done things differently. It’s devastating to lose someone so close, like losing a part of yourself.”
Jess thought of Nora. Mrs. Robinson said she’d loved Isabel like a sister and had suffered her own guilt and grief at not having been able to save her. It struck Jess that Nora and Daniel Miller must have had rather a lot in common. Did that explain the familiar, almost tender way he wrote about her? The scene at the end of Part One, inwhich Nora was alone at the house, waiting for her family to return, had been very poignant. It seemed to bring the focus back once more to Nora as the human face of an unimaginable loss. The person left behind.
“Your uncle spoke with my grandmother.”
“She was one of his most important sources,” Nancy agreed. “For all that Isabel had been a well-liked member of the community, Nora was the only person who knew the Turner family intimately and could offer a real insight into who Isabel was.”
“What did she say?”
