“It’s not an accusation.”
“Wild guesses, then.”
“I wouldn’t have to guess if you would just tell me.”
“I have told you: I found you in the dahlia patch.”
Polly, who never lost her temper, was incensed. “I deserve to know the truth. I deserve to know who I am.”
“You’re you! You’re mine! Isn’t that enough?”
“No!”
Nora sighed then, irritated. “Why do you care so much? What does it matter? Look how lucky you are.”
“Please, Mummy!” The childish moniker had come from nowhere; Polly hadn’t uttered it in more than a decade and was as surprised as Nora by its appearance. It sat between them, a declaration of desperation.
A maddening placatory look came across her mother’s face then, and she softened her voice to say, “I’ll tell you one day, I promise, when the time is right. But you must stop asking me now. It’s my story totell and you’re upsetting me. You’re upsetting yourself, too—it isn’t good for the baby, you know.”
Inside her hand luggage, Polly dug about for her earplugs. The leather bag was ever so slightly too deep, and everything became lost inside it. Her fingers brushed against the dreamcatcher, which she’d brought with her wrapped in a tea towel. She took it out and inspected her long-ago knots, the driftwood she and Jess had found on the beach. Silly and sentimental, but she’d seen the thing propped on the shelf as she hurried down the hallway to leave and run back to get it. She was nervous about seeing Jess. Particularly seeing Jess without Nora, being alone together at Darling House. She found herself besieged with memories of the other period of her life in which it had felt like the two of them against the world, back when they moved into the apartment on the promontory.
A lot had happened since then. Polly had been so positive when she finally took that step. The decision to move had been inspired, in part, by her mother’s refusal to answer her questions. After Jess was born, knowing the truth had felt even more urgent. Polly couldn’t shake the feeling that parts of her daughter were a mystery. She would stare at Jess’s sleeping face and see elements of herself, and Jonathan, but there were other traits there, too: fleeting expressions that her baby had inherited from unnamed people further up the chain.
The unknowing created a distance between Polly and Jess, a gap that Nora didn’t suffer. The more Polly faded, the brighter Nora shone. The love between them started to curdle; what had once seemed protective now began to suffocate. Polly felt trapped by her mother’s attention, particularly her confidence and expertise with Jess. She started dreaming about going away. The idea came to her that she might somehow, with a little extra space, find it all a bit easier.
Polly sighed and returned the dreamcatcher to her bag. She continued grasping about, hoping her fingers would find her earplugs. She needed to take her mind off the flight and what would confront her at the other end. She had meant to buy a magazine at the airport but been unable to bring herself to select anything on offer. All she had with her was the copy ofAs If They Were Asleep, which she’d brought because Mrs. Robinson said that Jess was asking questions about the events back then. Polly had hoped it might serve as a bridge, a way to assuage some of the grief she knew Jess would be feeling after Nora’s death. And, if she was honest, a way of pleasing the daughter with whom she could never quite seem to connect.
The familiar cover, the yellowing paper, the library barcode—all of it brought back memories of the first time she’d read it. The spell that the book had cast—its tragic atmosphere of summer and heat, the big old house and magpie songs, the ill-starred children on their final day—returned to her now, like an old coat she’d forgotten in the back of the closet. As the plane started to accelerate, Polly put in her earplugs and let the old library copy of Daniel Miller’s book fall open.
As If They Were Asleep
Daniel Miller
14
Peter Duke knew in his heart that Mrs. Turner had poisoned her family on the edge of the creek that baking Christmas Eve. Any policeman worth his salt developed an instinct for crimes and those who commit them. But convinced as Duke was, a hunch meant nothing if he couldn’t prove it.
The report hadn’t yet come from the government analyst, but there was a good chance, Duke knew, that his team would uncover what poison she’d used before Larry Smythson finished his tests. Initial searches at the house had left him hopeful. In the days following the discovery, Duke sent two of the local officers up the hill to look around. Mrs. Turner’s sister-in-law answered the door. The poor woman, who had been expecting a time of restful family engagement as she waited out the last weeks of a difficult pregnancy, had instead found herself coping alone with a family tragedy. Little wonder the shock brought forward her baby’s birth.
“How’s the little one going?” Mounted Constable Doyle asked as she admitted them to the house.
“A bit dazed. Like all of us, I’m sure.”
Noticing suddenly how tired the young woman looked and remembering back into the distant past of his own children’s births and his wife’s refusal to get out of bed for the first seven days after each, Doyle said: “You should have your feet up. Is there someone we can call?”
“Thank you, but Mrs. Summers has been helping, and Mrs. Pike will be here later in the week.”
They found the barbital bottle first, in the bedside table drawer in Mrs. Turner’s room. The unexpected name on the label caused Doyle and Jerosch to exchange a glance. They both knew Eliza Drumming—Doyle had been at school with her—but as far as either was aware she’d been down at Parkside for as long as the Turners had been around. Even Jerosch, the more imaginative of the pair, had a hard time coming up with a plausible explanation as to how Mrs. Drumming’s pills might have wound up in Mrs. Turner’s bedside table.
Henrik Drumming was ashen-faced when asked to explain. He confessed to having supplied Mrs. Turner with a bottle of his wife’s barbital tablets because “she was having a terrible time sleeping,” and Doyle, who knew Henrik as well as one could know such a private fellow, took the explanation at face value. Henrik was a good man, devoted to his wife, and just the sort to render assistance where and when he could. But Duke’s expression when he heard the admission was one of curiosity and inference.
In Matilda Turner’s room, they found a jar containing a dried plant sample that piqued their interest. A handwritten label featuring the initialsm.s. marked it the property of Merlin Stamp, and Probationary Constable Jerosch, drawing the short straw, was sent back.
The interview didn’t last long. “He’s not one for talking,” Jerosch explained late that afternoon when the officers met again in the small back room of the Tambilla police station to make their report to Duke. “But he said it’s pennyroyal.”
“Deadly?”
Jerosch was a fresh young officer whose ears protruded just enough to suggest boyish alertness and an eagerness to please. At this, he gained a slight pall of queasiness. The tips of his ears were pink. “Yes and no.”
