“And you’re her executor?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you Mrs. Turner-Bridges’s only surviving descendant?”
He was being a careful lawyer, seeking to ascertain that she had authority to speak to him on matters relating to Nora. As if somehow intuiting that she’d become the subject of conversation, even if only tangentially, Polly chose that moment to walk past the closed library door. Jess stayed silent, waiting until she heard her mother on her way downstairs before saying, “My mother and grandmother weren’t particularly close; Nora all but raised me. She trusted me with her affairs.” She added the whitest of lies: “In fact, my grandmother spoke to me about your letter before she died. She had been meaning to contact you.”
There was a beat of silence, but, whatever his considerations, when Marcus Summers spoke, his tone was decisive. “Are you familiar with what happened to your grandmother’s family in Tambilla all those years ago?”
“Understandably, my grandmother didn’t speak of it often, but I’ve read Daniel Miller’s book. If there’s something your client wanted to discuss with Nora, then I’m able to speak in her stead.”
Marcus Summers let out a long, considering sigh. “I wrote to your grandmother because I have it on good authority that her niece, Thea Turner, wasn’t taken from the picnic that day by wild dogs.”
“What?” It was on the tip of Jess’s tongue to ask how his client could possibly know such a thing, but she paced herself. “You’re saying that Daniel Miller—and the police, and the coroner—got it wrong?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Do you know whatdidhappen?”
“I’d prefer not to speak about it further over the phone. I have business in Sydney next week. Perhaps we can meet then?”
She could hear Polly downstairs in the kitchen, fishing out cutlery again. Thursday, the day of her mother’s return to Brisbane, suddenly seemed a long way off. Jess didn’t need to think longer than a second. “I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “I’ll come and see you. Are you free tomorrow?”
28
Adelaide Hills
December 18, 2018
The country road was narrow, and dusk was falling faster now that she had left the freeway. Jess proceeded quickly but carefully, one eye on the unfamiliar road, the other glancing sideways to the passenger seat, where she’d put her phone with Google Maps and the sheet of paper listing directions she’d jotted down on the plane to help pinpoint the house. She’d rented the car at Adelaide Airport and, after a shaky start, was getting used to it, even if she still hadn’t stopped engaging the windscreen wipers whenever she wanted to indicate a turn.
The drive up into the Hills had been easy enough, the freeway surprisingly uncongested. The stark gums and long, scrappy grasses that had punctuated the parched earth either side of the road on the flats had given way to lush maples and giant cedars when she approached the villages of Crafers and Stirling, before opening out again to farmland as she headed east. Now, having taken the Hahndorf exit, Jess was winding along the Onkaparinga Valley Road, passing tiny country schools, and fields planted with grapevines, and stone houses with long driveways.
At last she saw signs pointing the way to Tambilla, where she’d managed with some difficulty to find herself an Airbnb at short notice. Check-in was scheduled for eight, but Jess had no intention of spending the night in South Australia without first catching a glimpse of Halcyon. She’d been hampered by her flight’s late landing and was now in a race against the setting sun. According to the directions she’d put together, she needed to make a left turn approximately four kilometers beyond the town of Verdun.
Ahead of her, the road appeared to diverge. Slowing slightly, Jess leaned forward, her chest pressed against the steering wheel. She spotted a street sign, obscured in part by a low branch, and squinted to see what was written on it. Willner Road. Jess recognized the name with satisfaction, flicked on the wipers by mistake, then switched quickly to the blinker and took the turn.
She drove for what felt like a long time, her impatience growing in step with her anticipation. The road, which had been narrow to start with, thinned further, bitumen margins unraveling on either side so that any pretense of two lanes was soon abandoned. The gum trees were giants, and although the faraway sky continued blue, and late sunlight was turning the trunks silver, evening had already arrived in the cool, shaded underbrush at their base.
Jess flinched as an animal—a kangaroo, she guessed—lurched in the verge to her right, a dark flash of motion, before darting back into the bush behind. The shock made her slow the car almost to a standstill. She had been away too long. Driving the gentle country lanes of England, where a stray sheep taking a gentlemanly stroll was the gravest risk one might face, had made her forget the danger of kangaroos at dusk.
Daniel Miller’s description was all she had to go by: “The house on the hill, in the middle of the steep-rising fields at the end of Willner Road.” She’d lost track of how far she’d gone but was running out of road and beginning to suspect she’d missed the property. She was looking for a wide enough shoulder to turn the car around when she noticed, among the dense grove of tree trunks to her right, something running parallel to the road: masses of ivy had tangled with other voracious climbers, covering what must once have been a fence. Thick clumps of agapanthus grew sporadically at its base, long glossy leaves and a celebration of bright purple flowers shooting skyward.
Jess let the car crawl forward, looking for markers, until finally she reached a pair of old farm gates shut tight across what had once been a gravel driveway. Each gate was anchored to a stone pillar with aconcrete sphere on top, barely visible anymore as creepers had grown unimpeded, tendrils adhering to every surface. Jess brought the car to a stop, scanning for some signal that she was in the right place. At last, on the left-hand pillar, she saw the edge of what appeared to be a property name.
She parked the car and climbed out. The foliage was pulled aside easily enough, revealing beneath it a rectangular sign of black metal on which spotted silver lettering spelled out the single wordhalcyon. A large padlock bound the two gates together, and a quick shake confirmed that it was locked. Though not brand-new, the lock appeared to be in working order. Jess wondered who might hold the key.
She shot a look back down the road. Parrots chattered excitedly in the treetops, and far above her the branches basked in the last lingering rays of sun. A group of cockatoos arced across the sky toward where the house presumably stood—descendants, she supposed, of the birds Nora had watched in the walnut tree from the window of her bedroom at Halcyon. No one else was around. Before she could think better of it, Jess hoisted herself up and climbed over the top of the gate.
She walked along the shaded driveway, expectation making the tips of her fingers tingle as she drew farther away from the road. The driveway went steeply up the hill, enormous trees all around. Birds moved loud but invisible in the canopy, and somewhere, a distance away, Jess could hear the faint rush of water. She remembered Daniel Miller’s chapters about the crime scene, the picnic laid out beneath the willow where the creek widened to a water hole. All at once, she was struck anew by the gravity of past events.
Jess had traveled far enough that the gate, her car, the path back, could no longer be seen; the bush through which she’d walked was thick, and the effect from where she now stood was as if the trees had closed to encircle her. There was something quintessential about the landscape here. This place was new to her, and yet the clarity ofthe light, the air, the smell of the earth beneath her feet, was deeply familiar.
The driveway wound on through a profusion of changing foliage, lusher and denser than the bush through which she’d already come. Enormous hydrangeas with vibrant pink sponge-like blooms, rhododendrons and impatiens, tall spears of flowering oyster plants jostled together with Jurassic-looking philodendron leaves and tree ferns, a mixed bag all tied by a wild creeper with bell-shaped blue flowers. The damp smell of the garden reminded Jess of places she’d visited in Cornwall, like St. Just in Roseland, where fertile ground spoke of layers of different generations, civilizations past.
At last, beyond the tangled greenery, Jess glimpsed the jutting white chimneys of a large roof. She realized she was holding her breath. She turned a final corner, just like Daniel Miller had done on his way to meet Nora, and there it was. Grand and magnificent, yet even from a distance she could see that the house was in a state of disrepair. It was perched upon a stone plinth that rose about a meter off the ground. A clinging ficus with tiny leaves had grown to cover most of the stones and moss stained the rest, so that the house appeared to sit upon an ocean of greenery. Jess was reminded of the houses in fairy tales, hidden and then forgotten, ignored by the human world only to be reclaimed by nature.
Protruding from one corner of the plinth was a lion’s head, its mouth open to reveal a void from which a stream of spring water must once have flowed. On the ground beneath sat a stone bowl, half-filled with stale rainwater. As Jess watched, a blue-breasted fairy wren flew down to perch upon the edge of the bowl; after observing Jess for a moment, the little bird made a graceful dive across the surface of the water, skimming himself clean before disappearing once more into the folds of the garden.
