‘Is she going to come back?’ Sienna asks, sniffing again, unselfconsciously.
‘Are you getting a cold?’
‘Nup.’
I suppose she’s allergic to the dust she has been attacking with her cloth. She is relatively bad at cleaning, so she has probably just stirred it up and sniffed it down. I pull a tissue from the box on the desk and hand it to her. Then I grab antihistamine tablets from the drawer. ‘Are you allowed to take these?’ I ask.
She looks at me blankly and shrugs.
‘Text your mum to find out.’
She pulls out her phone and I immediately regret the suggestion, because I have put temptation right into her hand.
‘Phyllida will be back,’ I say. ‘She’s a fighter.’ I don’t feel in any way as certain as I sound, but kids need to feel secure, don’t they? Not that Sienna knows Phyllida, so maybe the false certainty is me trying to convince myself.
I pick a book from the pile on the counter and show Sienna how to operate Book Collector, the system we use to track inventory, purchases and sales. She’s bright and understands immediately. I watch her enter data—the codes and details and prices I have written on pieces of paper that I have slipped inside front covers—for the first three books. She whizzes throughthe screens like a pro. ‘Will you be okay to mind the shop for twenty minutes if I pop out?’ I ask. ‘Do you remember how to use the Eftpos?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘I’m not an idiot.’
‘You most certainly are not.’ I feel a flush of warmth towards Sienna. Her energy brightens the bookshop and seeps into the dark, dusty corners that feel eerily watchful in Phyllida’s absence. When I’m alone here, surrounded by this silent forest, the implications of the search for Francis Fitzhenry can seem overwhelming.
I have finished reading the 1975 diary. The entries stop suddenly, a few days after Edward-the-bully throws his son off the jetty. There is a month of nothing, including the dates around when it was reported in the English newspapers that Lord Edward Fitzhenry had been shot. The diary entries begin again with Phyllida having moved to Sydney, then soon after that, to Brookbank village.
She finds herself a cottage to live in and talks about meeting Mary next door; day-to-day entries about her delight at spotting kangaroos in the paddocks at dusk and water dragons and wombats on her walks. She is perplexed at the lack of tea choices in the supermarkets and seems surprised that people persist in calling her Phylly, instead of Phyllida. She is delighted by the sun and the screeching of cockatoos. But, although these observations are obviously in stark contrast to her former life, she makes no mention of her homeland, or why she left. She begins referring to the baby as ‘Louis David’. Previously she had called him Louis.
There seems no doubt now that Phyllida Banks is Dorothea Stewart. Phyllida is a wanted woman. The knowledge feels deeply embedded, as if I have been carrying it with me for years, eventhough I only began to suspect it a few days ago. But why would she commit murder? Why steal a baby?
I have reread her letter to me so many times. It is currently sitting in the little alcove near Sienna. She looks at her phone when a text comes in and says, ‘Mum reckons I can have a tablet.’ She picks up the medication packet sitting next to the letter. She knows the envelope—knows what is in it—and I feel annoyed by my carelessness at not putting it away, because it feels like a precious relic; a sort of final gift from Phyllida that I hope won’t be final. I put it back in my handbag.
‘You know that letter,’ says Sienna, sniffing again.
‘Yes.’
‘Phyllida wants you to find Francis, right?’
‘Yes.’ I sigh.
‘Did you check Facebook? Lots of old people are on there.’
‘Already checked.’
She wrinkles her nose. ‘Maybe he’s gone underground. He probably changed his name and ditched the fancy title. I would if that stuff happened in my family history.’
I think of this boy, Francis. Phyllida loved him and must have been trying to protect him from his psycho father. Something terrible must have driven her to kill, or she had done so in self-defence, because there is no other way I can imagine she would pick up a gun. I need to find Francis. I need him to come here, so when Phyllida recovers her strength she can see he is here, and that (hopefully) he does not blame her.
‘I don’t want to compromise Phyllida,’ I tell Sienna, ‘but I need to talk to Francis Fitzhenry.’
‘You should ring up his house.’
‘I tried that,’ I say. ‘It’s a tourist operation. Nobody would talk to me.’
‘You could go there,’ she says, with the confidence of someone who has never had to pay for an international airfare on a maxed-out credit card. ‘Someone there will probably know where he is. Don’t you reckon? He’s probably a celebrity or something, from the murder.’
I turn this possibility over in my mind, then she adds, ‘They might remember Dorothea too. She’s probably super famous, because Ivan Milat is super famous around here for his murders. They might all still talk about her from bringing down the reputation of the place back then.’
‘Infamous,’ I murmur.
‘What?’
