Now he had a piece of new information that he’d exhumed from his father’s musty suitcases in the garage. He’d come into the house ready to tell Suzette about the child who went missing in 1964, but now he was glad she was out.
Don’t tell her. Keep her safe and send her home.
As he dried himself, his head began to throb again. Missing children. Dead children. Confessing murderers. Dead murderers. A strange mark.
Tristram touched the bird, but it should have been you.
As he dressed, Nicholas made a decision.
He would go to Gavin Boye’s funeral.
S uzette waved down a young waiter with a very nice bum and ordered her third long black with hot skim milk on the side.
A notepad with a page full of newly written notes was open in front of her, alongside a small pile of stapled cost projection reports, their margins crammed with her comments, all of which were now lined through. With one hand she clicked on icons on the laptop screen, shrinking her address book, restoring her mailbox, opening an accounts summary spreadsheet, highlighting days in her diary. In her other hand was her mobile phone; on the other end was Ola, her PA, a blocky and unattractive girl with a voice that was as lovely as her face was not. It was Ola’s good phone manner and skill at mail merging that got her the job.
Suzette was pleased. In the last hour and a half she’d concluded most of a day’s business, and the strong coffees removed most traces of her mother’s awful porridge from her tongue. She asked Ola to send out a tender to a few architect firms, and confirmed she’d be back in Sydney in a day or two. Then she rang home. Bryan answered.
“Hello?”
“Hello yourself. What happened to ‘Hello beautiful wife, I miss you and can’t bear another hour without you’?”
“Oh, hey gorgeous! Uh, yeah… the caller ID is down.”
Suzette frowned. “Down?”
“Nelson found my screwdriver set and did a bit of exploratory surgery on the handset. This is an old phone I found downstairs. I think it may have been used to convey the terms for the Treaty of Versailles. It’s got a spinny thingy.”
“Rotary dial?”
“I think you’ll find in telecommunications circles it’s called a ‘spinny thingy.’ ”
“Okay, Captain Hilarious. Why isn’t Nelson at school?”
Her husband chuckled. He sounded much more than a thousand kilometers away. “You won’t like this.”
“Try me.”
“He didn’t want to go.”
Suzette took a breath and told herself not to get snarky.
“Didn’t want to go. Did he have a good reason?”
“He said he doesn’t like his teacher because she isn’t nice to her husband.”
“Not nice… to her… what? I don’t get it.”
“Nels said she was married to her husband but kisses another man.”
Suzette’s new coffee arrived, and she tried not to watch the taut young waiter saunter away. “I still don’t understand. Did he see her kissing another teacher?”
“No.”
“Then how-”
She suddenly understood. Nelson just knew.
“Aaah.”
“Yep,” agreed Bryan.
Inklings. Feelings. Nelson had them. Quincy didn’t. She shivered at the prospect that Nelson might turn out like Nicholas.
“He’s napping now,” explained Bryan. “I guess gutting a two-hundred-dollar phone takes it out of a bloke. Maybe call later, explain to him some stuff about women and kissing and misplaced love and all that stuff I don’t understand because I’m married to the woman of my dreams?”
“You’ll go far, charmer. I’ll ring and tell him he’s going to school or going to sea.”
Bryan laughed. “How’s Nicholas?”
“He’s… I honestly don’t know. Sick, Mum said.”
“Hm. And you?”
She could hear the caring gravity in his voice. She knew what he meant. The image of Gavin’s broken teeth in his shattered jaw leapt again into the front of her mind and her stomach tightened.
“I’m okay.”
“Okay. Call later. Come home soon.”
They said their goodbyes, and then Suzette was staring at the cooling coffee with the disconnected phone on her lap. The thought of Gavin Boye crumpled on the porch stole all the joy out of her conversation with Bryan. There were a thousand reasons a man might kill himself, from tax fraud to child porn and everything in between. But this man was no stranger in the papers; this was someone she’d once lived near to. Why had Gavin Boye shot himself in front of her brother?
Tristram. Tristram was the link. She was sure of it.
She sipped her coffee and started to put away her paperwork. At the bottom of the pile was the small notepad she always carried with her. This was the last job she’d left for herself. Two nights ago, she’d been excited about this, but now, for some reason, it was a task she felt like avoiding. She flipped open the pad. Drawn there was the strange mark she’d copied from the doorway of Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. Quill’s shop, she thought.
She clicked open her Internet browser and started to hunt.
Chapter 9
N icholas couldn’t help but admire the clerk at the convenience store. The young Filipino man managed to scan, bag, and total Nicholas’s purchase of milk, bread, peanut butter, toiletries, and a newspaper without once looking up from the swimsuit pictorial in the men’s magazine he held between his face and Nicholas’s.
Nicholas carried the bags out into the angled afternoon light. The pearly clouds had cleared and faintly warm sunlight fell softly between the leaves of jacaranda and satinwood trees. In sober daylight, the Myrtle Street shops held no menace and the nostalgia he’d expected here with Suzette two evenings ago finally arrived-the excitement about what sweet treasures would be in forty cents’ worth of mixed lollies (Cobbers? Freckles? Milk bottles? Mint leaves?) or how many pecans Mrs. Ferguson the greengrocer would sell him for a dodecagon fifty-cent piece, or the tactile pleasure of stroking a burnished silver chrysalis found in the oleander bushes out front, now gone and replaced with topiary trees.
Nicholas strayed to the door of Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. The shop within was dark. A Closed sign hung inside the door, with the shop’s hours handwritten on it: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. He checked his watch. It was five to ten. His eyes slid up to the doorframe. In the flat, friendly light of day, the mark was invisible under layers of gloss white paint.
He walked over to the curved galvanized steel handrail that separated the tiles outside the shops from the footpath, and then-with an easy swoop that defied the quarter-century since he’d done it last-he grabbed the rail in an underhand grip and swung to sit underneath it, legs dangling over the concrete buttress. Quietly pleased, he opened the newspaper on his lap.
A low sports car buzzed lazily past, chased by its longboat bass drumming. High in shadowed branches, a family of noisy miners quarreled with a magpie, forcing it to fly beyond the distant rooftops.
Nicholas felt slightly cold and a little light-headed, but his flu symptoms seemed to have eased. He opened the paper and flicked through to the personal advertisements section and scanned for funeral notices. The page was
