The rustling sound of something in the foliage, the thud of footfall.
Percy went deeper. He shone his torch once more. Here, then there. Nothing. The only thing making noise, movement, now was him. Whatever—whoever—it had been was gone.
He tucked his torch back into his pocket and returned to his vantage spot. Blaze, waiting patiently, nosed Percy’s shoulder as he took up position. Percy trained his eye once more on the farthest garden bed.
His heart caught midbeat as he scanned the rosebushes in the breaking dawn, and he felt a spike of adrenaline. The baby was gone.
All day, back at the shop, Percy waited. It made him nervous that he hadn’t seen Mrs. Turner-Bridges find the child, but he knew she walked a lap of the rose garden each morning with the dawn; the whole plan had been predicated on that fact. His back had been turned for a few minutes, five at most; surely in that time she had emerged from the house, seen the baby, and taken her inside. Any hour now, word would come that the child had been found and the search could end.
Information spread like plague in Tambilla and Percy spent that first day on tenterhooks, certain that each person who came through the door would bring with them the good news. As the afternoon waned, and still no announcement came, he told himself that the police must have lots of official things to do in the event of a missing child turning up; there was nothing strange in the delay.
But it was the same again the next day. Percy waited, he listened to the news on the wireless, he even saw the police officers conducting interviews in the main street, eating lunch at Betty’s. No word. Not even a hint of it.
He checked the newspaper daily, he and Meg each in silent competition to bring the bundles in from where the delivery had been left on the doorstep before dawn. Under the pretense of getting the grocery shelves stocked, whichever of them got there first would release the papers from their ties and scan the pages.
“Anything of interest?” Meg would say.
“Doesn’t seem to be.”
With every day that passed, as he remained stuck in a quagmire of uncertainty, Percy waited for Meg to reproach him, to say:I trusted you,andWhat went wrong?But to her credit, she never did.
Even so, Percy berated himself. It made no sense. He had returnedthe child. He had looked away, yes, he had pursued whatever it was that had followed him into the glen, but he had only been gone for a matter of minutes.
Percy held on to the last shreds of hope for as long as he could, until the day he saw Mrs. Turner-Bridges and the perambulator in the street. She was still in mourning dress, and it was apparent that nothing about her situation had altered from when he’d glimpsed her at the community meeting. He knew then that things had not gone as he’d planned. She hadn’t found the baby, and he had made a terrible, terrible mistake.
31
Sydney
December 19, 2018
It was eight on Wednesday night when Jess arrived back at Darling House; the last of the day’s light was cooling to purple and the dusk birds were gathering in the cove. She’d spent the entire two-hour flight from Adelaide mulling over the conversation with Marcus Summers, transported back to Tambilla on that stormy Christmas Eve of 1959: the horrifying discovery; the long, rain-drenched hours at the Summers house; the agonizing days and decisions that followed.
Marcus had been relieved to have finally told the story. His father had carried a heavy burden of guilt, he said, and now, at last, it was discharged. For Marcus, too, there’d been a personal comfort in taking up his father’s confession.
“I’d got back from making a delivery that afternoon,” he explained to Jess, “and I was telling my mum about the gift that I’d passed along to Mrs. Turner, but she was distracted, baking a cake for my dad’s birthday. She looked overwhelmed, and I felt bad for her—she was always doing things for other people. I decided that I wanted to head out to meet my dad on his return and make sure that he came straight home.
“I must have just missed him. Going on what I learned later of the timing, I must have arrived at the scene beneath the willow soon after he’d been and gone. I was in complete shock at what I saw—but then I heard the baby crying. She was in her crib, hanging from a branch of the tree. I wasn’t thinking straight. I was still wearing my delivery sling, so I slipped her inside and got out of there as fast as I could, through the paddocks, avoiding the roads, back to my mum, with all the confidence of a fourteen-year-old lad that she’d be able to fix things.”
And Meg had tried to do so. “She telephoned the police station,” Marcus continued, “but they were too busy to take the call—told her there was an emergency and hung up the phone. She already knew all about it, of course—I’d told her what I’d seen—so she sent me to bring my brother, Kurt, home. He’d been seeing Matilda Turner, and I suppose Mum had an inkling that the police were bound to start looking his way. She wanted him close.”
His father had held on to hope, Marcus said, for as long as possible, imagining that the child had somehow survived—that someone else had come upon her and snatched her away, and she had led a happy life elsewhere, none the wiser. But in 1979, when her remains were found in the rose garden, not far from where he’d left her, Percy had been forced to accept the truth. Marcus said that his father had tried to contact Nora then, but she’d wanted nothing to do with him.
“And so you made one last attempt to tell her,” said Jess. “That’s why you wrote the letter. It was on behalf of your father.”
“It was the anniversary of his death and I figured it was worth another try. I owed it to him—I was responsible, after all, for everything that happened.”
“Because you brought Thea home from the picnic.”
“And because I was the one who followed him that night, when he took her up to Halcyon. I was a busybody at that age. I was trying to understand the adult world, and I saw a damn sight more than I should’ve.”
Jess remembered from Daniel Miller’s book the reverend’s admission that young Marcus Summers had come to talk to him, confused and upset, having witnessed Kurt and Matilda together.
Knowing that he had distracted his father at the vital moment, so that neither of them saw what happened, that they weren’t then able to protect the baby, had changed the course of Marcus’s life.
“It’s why I pursued the law,” he told Jess. “I committed myself to putting things right. I couldn’t change what happened to Thea Turner, but I could help fix other things. I had a bloody naive viewof the legal system back then—took me a while to learn that what’s lawful and what’s right aren’t always the same, but I’ve done my best.”
Jess had the sense, honed over decades of asking questions for a living and drawing together an airtight narrative, that there were loose threads to be teased out. But she’d wanted to consider this new information first—and she’d needed to run for her flight. She wondered what Nora had made of Marcus Summers’s letter. What had she thought he wanted to tell her? She had thrown it away, but it had caused her to take up Daniel Miller’s book and brave the stairs to the attic. And she’d written Marcus’s initials in her diary, implying that she’d meant to call him. If only she had. Perhaps she’d be here still, walking beside Jess as the two of them returned together from a visit to Tambilla.
