Her face a mixture of hope and fear, she held onto Father’s hand. “Help me, please.” He slipped his arm around her shoulders and grabbed one of the door handles, she gripped the other. Together they pulled. Resistant at first, the doors eventually gave to the pressure, opening in slow motion to reveal the contents inside.
Mother let out an agonizing cry, her hand going to her mouth. “Oh, Wilz. My darling, Wilz.” Father pulled her into his arms, burying her face against his chest.
Billie pushed forward, desperate to see if she had been right. It would be a blessing for all concerned to put Wilz to rest. Two stone shelves on either side of the small building. held coffins. But it was the shovel lying in the dirt on top of a small mound that had startled her mother.
“He buried her in here.” A sense of sadness rise in Billie’s heart. How terrible to be hidden away like this.
“We’ll have to tell the police about this.” Hamish placed his hand on her back and peered over her shoulder. “Frederick?”
“Yes, of course we will.” He smoothed down Mother’s hair, kissed her forehead before speaking again. “Then you must decide what to do, my darling.”
“One thing at a time, Frederick. I can only process so much.” She looked back at the crypt again. “My grandparents are on the left, that is Mama on the right.” She leaned into Billie. “This means more to me than I can say, my darling girl. Thank you for all you’ve done.”
Billie wrapped her arm around her mother’s shoulders at a loss for words.
“After all I said, the horrible way I treated you when you were growing up, all those things I believed about you. To say nothing of how I spoke recently. I didn’t give you the credit you deserve.”
“I never really told you the whole story either, so I guess we’re both to blame. And some of those things you blamed me for, I fully deserved. I wasn’t the nicest teenage to have around. I made my share of mistakes as an adult too, I’m sure.”
“Care to share the truth? Get it off your chest, Billie while we’re both purging our souls.” Mother smiled encouragingly. “Tell me what really happened that night in America when they arrested you. I knew you couldn’t be a murder. That’s not you at all.”
Bille glanced over the lake, thinking back to one of the most difficult times in her life as she tried to find the right words. “It was drummed into me very early on, never to reveal your snitch.” She smiled. “A crime reporter’s number-one rule. When it became obvious that all hell was going to break loose, I spoke to him, begged him to come in and get police protection. He refused.”
“Not your fault, then?” Hamish joined the conversation.
“Yes, it was because I was followed. I’d insisted on another meeting and I should have known that they would try to get to him through me. My ego took over.” A shiver prickled over her skin and the perpetual guilt gnawed at her gut. “I’d lost snitches before, part of the job of course. I considered myself invincible, but I wanted one last chance to encourage him to come in. I led the killers right to him. It was so stupid of me so of course I was to blame.”
“Hardly your fault, I would have thought.” Father smiled at her, his face changing as he considered her options.
“It was my fault. If I’d grieved Stephen’s death like any normal person, my head might have been clearer, I might have been more rational but I wasn’t. I have to live with that and sadly, Alex has taken the brunt of it.” She brushed a hand over her son’s messy hair, damp with sweat from running wild on the ancestral estate.
“I’ve misjudged you, Billie.” Mother sighed, her gaze on the small mound in the ground again. “If it wasn’t for your dogged nature, I doubt Wilz would have picked you to find her. I firmly believe that’s what happened. You were chosen.”
“Perhaps I was.”
Epilogue
Sydney 1980
“I don’t know, Sam. You fired me in my absence, remember?” Billie sat on the couch, the phone on her shoulder, a gin and tonic in her hand as her old boss tried to plead his case.
“I know that, you’d have done the same. Admit it, girl. You went AWOL, what did you fucking expect?”
“A bit more tolerance might have been nice.” She accepted the bowl of nuts Father handed to her, popped a couple into her mouth.
“I’m not crawling here, understand? At least not when anyone’s listening.” He hurried on. “Listen, I want you back, you have your job, okay? And your first assignment, I want you to write a serialized version of what happened. Think you can do it?”
“I’ll have to discuss it with the family first. Some things need to remain secret regardless to protect their privacy, but let me get back to you.” She smiled. “Bye, Sam.” When she hung up, he was still talking.
“Sounds like you have your job back.” Hamish sat down beside her, leaning back and resting his arm across the back of the couch. He toyed with a strand of her hair.
“Yes, I do. Not sure whether I want it or whether to take the time off and get to know my family again. If I go back to work and do as he’s asking, I’d have tweak the events to safeguard the family’s privacy somehow. That goes against my beliefs. The truth should always win. I don’t know if I want to put the everyone through that.”
“You’d do that for us?” Mother put her hand to her chest.
“Why, of course I would. What a question.”
