‘In here, Mum!’ Suzette’s voice came from her old bedroom up the hall.
Katharine walked up and looked through the doorway. Suzette was leaning over an open suitcase that was half-packed. It was a sign of how effectively the Close women had been avoiding one another; Katharine had no idea her daughter was returning to Sydney today.
‘Almost done?’ she asked lightly.
‘Almost,’ agreed Suzette. ‘I’ll have to ring a cab. Black and White or Yellow?’
‘Stork or Flora?’ replied Katharine. ‘They’re much of a muchness.’
Suzette nodded; she’d figured as much.
‘Your brother all right?’ asked Katharine.
‘I think so. A bit. .’ Suzette stopped folding clothes and thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think it’s good for him here. I’ll go home, and maybe talk him into moving down.’ She fixed Katharine with a look. ‘Then I’ll get you down.’
‘I’d have to sell both kidneys to afford to live in Sydney, and then where would I be?’
Suzette shrugged. ‘I could help.’
Katharine bristled, and fought back the stubborn urge to bite. ‘Thank you, love, but I own this place and it’s fine.’
Suzette smiled thinly, as if hearing a safe bet won.
‘Listen,’ began Katharine. ‘The other morning, over breakfast. .’
‘It was fine, Mum, I just don’t like porridge-’
‘No, no. You asked me about. . about Mrs Quill.’
Katharine saw her daughter’s hands freeze for a moment in midair, before they continued their busy packing.
‘Yep,’ agreed Suzette.
‘Why?’ asked Katharine, still trying to keep her voice as airy as possible. ‘What made you think about her?’
Suzette cocked her head. ‘I thought you couldn’t remember her?’
Katharine shrugged. ‘Since you mentioned her. . bits and bobs. Little old thing. Pleasant enough. Hardly saw her outside her shop. I don’t know where she lived, but it couldn’t have been far.’
Suzette was looking at her hard. ‘What makes you think that?’
Katharine thought. What did make her think that?
‘I never saw her drive. And on the odd evening I saw her walking with her silly little dog-’
Katharine fell silent as Suzette’s face became a hard mask.
‘Little dog?’ she repeated.
‘Yes, I think. . a little — I don’t know — Maltese or something. .’
Suzette was staring at her. ‘What colour was it?’
Katharine frowned. ‘Honestly, it’s so long-’
‘Mum?’
‘White. But why. .?’
Suzette didn’t answer. She dropped the clothes she was folding and hurried out past Katharine.
A moment later, Katharine heard the fluff of an umbrella opening, the door slamming and her daughter’s footsteps hurrying down the road.
14
Rain on the windows turned the world into a smear, making car headlights larger but stealing their form, fusing blues and greens, killing reds and yellows. It was sometime after four in the afternoon, but low-throated winter rain clouds conspired to induce evening early.
Steam rose as Nicholas poured tea.
‘Sugar?’ he asked, and placed a packet of cubes in front of his sister.
‘Given up,’ Suzette replied, taking the cup with a nod. She hesitated, then dropped three cubes into her tea. ‘Fuck it.’
Her gaze slipped down to Nicholas’s hand. He remembered her expression changing from mild cynicism to pale fear when she saw the puncture wounds in his hand. Right now, she looked ready to cry. And why not? He just piped her aboard the good ship Flip-out and set sail for Crazy Island.
They sipped their tea without speaking, listening to the ocean wash of distant tyres on wet road.
It had been about an hour since he’d heard the sharp rap on his front door. He’d hurried to hide away the papers he’d been laying out on the scarred and peeling coffee table, and opened the door on his drenched, dreadfully pale sister.
‘I believe you,’ she’d said.
He let her in, gave her a towel, boiled the kettle. He asked her what made her change her mind.
‘Quill had a little white dog,’ explained Suzette. That was when Nicholas felt the mug slip from his dumb fingers, and hot tea and shards of ceramic scattered everywhere. She was helping him clean up when she noticed the pile of papers he’d hurriedly hidden under the coffee table.
‘What are those?’ she’d asked.
He’d lied so badly that she simply walked over, picked them up and started flicking through them. Then it was her turn to be struck silent.
Now, on the coffee table, the A4 pages were spread out again: printouts of old black and white photographs from Nicholas’s search at the State Library. Bullock team and the abandoned water pipe. The funerals of the surveyors and auctioneers. The old real estate flyers. The unnerving image of the Myrtle Street shop in 1905, with the ghostly blur of Victoria Sedgely holding her white dog.
He’d talked her through them all one by one. The last printout was now face down on Suzette’s lap; on its hidden side was the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton laying the foundation stone of the Anglican church. When Suzette first saw it, her lips thinned and her eyes grew as wet and unfocused as the rain-smeared windows.
‘Quill,’ she’d whispered, then turned the image over so she didn’t have to look at it.
He’d made another pot of tea while she collected herself. And then they sat, brother and sister, trying to believe the impossible.
‘It’s. .’ Suzette shook her head.
‘It takes a while,’ said Nicholas. He watched her carefully.
‘Did you look up other records for Eleanor Bretherton?’
He nodded.
‘And?’
‘One paragraph in the Ipswich Times mentioning a donation for children with rickets from “philanthropist spinster E. Bretherton”. That’s all.’
Suzette fell silent. She turned her head and looked out the window in the direction of the woods.
‘I don’t know what to think.’
She put down her tea and delicately picked up the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton by its corner, stared at the old woman’s hard face. She was in her sixties, her brow furrowed, staring at the lens, trying to penetrate it and memorise the photographer for retribution later. This was the face they’d passed almost daily on their way home from school, coolly looking out from her gloomy shop over her tall counter or her sewing machine. Suzette handed the offensive image back to Nicholas and he placed the sheet with the others.
‘It is her, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Mrs Quill? Yes.’ She crooked her arm around a knee.
Nicholas nodded. ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘You okay to see it?’ She looked at him and shrugged.
Am I okay, though? he wondered. He took a breath and reached into his satchel and produced another handful of A4 pages held with a bulldog clip. ‘I had to go into the microfiche catalogue for these.’
The printouts were of enlarged newspaper articles.
‘Two thousand and seven,’ he said, and laid down the first. The headline read ‘Confessed Killer Charged with Murder’. It showed thin, harried cleaner Elliot Guyatt stepping awkwardly from a police paddy wagon behind the Magistrates’ Court.
Nicholas laid down the next. ‘Nineteen eighty-two.’ The bold text read: ‘Missing Boy Found Murdered’. The half-tone black and white photograph was a portrait of Tristram Boye smiling at the camera, forever ten years old. Suzette let out a sad sigh like a tiny ‘Oh’.
‘Late fifties,’ Nicholas said. ‘Local Twelve-Year-Old Found Dead — Tragedy’. The photograph captured two distraught parents being comforted by police detectives wearing fedoras.
‘Early forties,’ sandwiched between an item on jungle troops and ration changes: ‘Young Girl Missing — Public Asked for Information’.
‘Nineteen thirty, 1912, 1905.’ He laid down three that were just paragraphs without pictures: ‘Western Suburbs Boy Missing’; ‘Oliver Girl Found Murdered, Killer Confesses’; ‘Police Lose Hope for Missing Child — Presumed Dead’.