“I’m sure we’ve all written things that embarrassed us later,” she said, with a sad smile. And then, with the baby growing fractious, she excused herself to go inside.
Dan spent the day with the journal, his head bowed as he read it line by line. Nora appeared every so often, bringing him a cup of tea or a slice of cake, and each time he was dazed and surprised to see her.
At the end of the day, when he was preparing to leave, he sensed her hovering by the door to the verandah.
“Do you see?” she said hopefully. “Do you see how wrong they are? Do you see what kind of person she was? Wry and ironic at times, but a happy person, in the main.”
Dan nodded agreement, as he knew she needed him to, but allhe could think about were those missing entries. It plagued him the whole way home and all through the night, wondering what had been written on them, and why they’d been ripped out.
He didn’t say as much. He let Nora think the journal was watertight evidence of Isabel’s good character. The problem was, Dan had been speaking with Sergeant Duke, and knew that as the police conducted their interviews and investigated further, they were becoming increasingly convinced that they were dealing with a murder-suicide. He couldn’t help but wonder if the missing entries had contained guilty sentiments, or a confession of some sort, or even a description of her plans.
He didn’t tell Nora any of this. It wasn’t his remit to convince Nora of her sister-in-law’s possible guilt. And he’d noticed a real improvement in her condition since she’d shown him the journal. On the first morning he’d met her, she’d been utterly bereft, but she’d begun to rally. If the test of resilience was a person’s ability to find a chink of light even in their darkest days, then Nora Turner-Bridges was a master of it.
Dan knew better than to give himself any credit for her renewal. The answer did not lie in the friendship they’d forged. Nora’s glimmer of light, the place she’d found to channel every bit of love and hope she could find for the future, was her new baby. Her face was radiant as she shone attention on Polly, whispering softly in the child’s tiny ears. It was divine. The infant was always in her arms. Understandable, Dan reasoned, given what had happened to her baby niece. The fate of the child preyed on everyone’s mind. No one wanted to think of the little one denied the dignity of a proper resting place. But Dan’s aunt Nell was family to the tracker working with police, and she said the heavy rain on Christmas Eve had washed away any hope of following the path of the wild dogs.
In the end, it was an unpleasant event in the village that caused the blinders to fall from Nora’s eyes. Her precious baby was threatened in the episode, and the shock of what might have been refocused her. Dan had learned through his work never to be surprised at the way cause and effect played out; in Nora’s case, her abiding determination to defend Isabel shifted, and she began to think more of her nieces and nephew.
When Dan arrived the morning after, she seemed different: nervous, but also decided. Even as he emerged from the driveway, he could see that something was afoot in the rigidity of her neck, the set of her shoulders, the clip of her gait as she paced the verandah.
As he approached, a hand leapt to her throat. “Oh, Mr. Miller, there you are. I was awake half the night with a thought that won’t leave me.”
Dan sat down. Close up, she looked wretched. Her face was drawn and her eyes bloodshot. He could well believe she’d hardly slept.
“You must promise me that you will not put this in your book. You must keep it to yourself.”
“What is it?”
“Do you promise?”
“Sure.” She was so worked up, he found himself speaking slowly to calm her down. “Of course.”
“It’s only that I have no one else to talk to here, and I feel—I don’t think wrongly—that you and I share a friendship of sorts.”
“We do.”
“I still don’t believe that Isabel could ever have done what they’re saying.”
“I know.” Dan waited and then, when she didn’t continue, prompted gently: “But?”
Nora glanced down at Polly, her hands caressing the tinyback. “I haven’t told you what I went through to have this little baby. I’ve only known her for a matter of weeks, but she is my world. Even now, I know that on my deathbed I’ll be able to look back and say that I did everything I could to protect her.”
“I can see that,” said Dan softly.
“I loved Isabel, but I loved those children, too, and I have to honor them. Sergeant Duke asked me something the other day. Whether I’d ever seen Isabel behave violently toward any of them. I said, No, of course not. I was offended by his question. To harm a child, in my view, is the greatest evil. Only, later...”
“Yes?”
“I remembered something. It came to me, not in a flash—people say that, but it’s not a flash, it’s more gradual than that; I think I’d convinced myself that I’d imagined it. But when I first arrived here, back in early December, I knew almost at once that Issy wasn’t herself. I’ve heard of women suffering with low spirits after a birth. One afternoon, I heard the baby crying. That girl, Becky, who comes in to help, had already left, and Isabel didn’t seem to be responding. I thought perhaps I could help. I reached the nursery, and when I got there, I saw Isabel by the crib.” Nora swallowed the last word as she uttered a sob. “Oh, Mr. Miller, something must have possessed her, it’s the only explanation.”
“What was it? What did you see?”
“It makes me ill to say it, ill to remember it, but she was holding a pillow—a cushion—and she was...” Nora’s eyes met his beseechingly. Then, her voice little more than a whisper: “She was lowering it toward the little one’s face.”
Part VII
24
Brisbane
