Inevitably, Heather found herself turning back to the letters of Michael Reave himself, the ones apparently so precious to her mother she had hidden them carefully away in the attic.
… I know you couldnt be with me Colleen. I am happyer here under the sky. Would be happyer with you, but I cant have everything. Ive always known that …
… in all my life Ive never been close to anyone but you …
Heather put the letter down. The foundations of her life seemed weak and ghostly, something that could vanish entirely in just the right shade of moonlight. She thought again of the bird that had managed to trap itself in her bathroom. Even in a busy café, smelling of bacon and coffee, it was hard not to think of that as an omen … At that moment, the woman arrived with her sandwich and tea, and she seized on this normal interaction desperately, nodding and smiling at the woman so much that she looked quite put out. When the waitress had retreated back to the safety of the counter, Heather returned to the letters.
… Ive never seen a storm like it. They said on the television that it would pass over without damage, but they couldnt have been more wrong. You should have been out here Colleen where it gets really dark. The howling of the wind was so loud it was like a voice. And so many trees down. It hurts me to see the woods so broken …
… Theyre selling the big house at Fiddlers Mill. Its going to be a retreat for the rich can you believe it? Men and women who want to get out of the city and be in the green but don’t understand why, so they wear dressing gowns and get massarges …
Heather put the letters down and pulled her laptop from her bag. There was, unsurprisingly, no wi-fi in the café so she piggybacked off her phone again. A quick bit of googling told her several things: that a big stretch of land known as Fiddler’s Mill had indeed been the location of a commune in the 1970s, outstaying its welcome slightly but still supposedly dedicated to the ideals of peace, free love, and copious drug use. Now the big house known as Fiddler’s Mill was partly home to a fancy spa complex, which had been in existence since the early ’90s. The land and the spa were partly owned by an environmental charity called Oak Leaf, and indeed the emphasis was on the environment, healthy living, detoxes, and other things Heather was naturally repelled by. It looked, to a woman recently booted out of a modest salaried journalism job, mind-bogglingly expensive.
She opened a new page and delved a little deeper into the old Fiddler’s Mill, the one that existed before the fancy spa. Very quickly she found herself down a rabbit hole crammed with erratically written blogs and ugly webpages awkwardly chucked together by people too old to be comfortable online but too keen to share their memories to give up. At first it seemed fairly innocuous, with most recalling a lot of music, a lot of drink, a lot of young people having a good time. There were a few photographs scattered about, showing people with long hair and a relaxed attitude to grooming, more acoustic guitars than Heather thought was healthy, and a lot of food being cooked outdoors. There was the central building, a reasonably impressive eighteenth-century house and its grounds, and a number of tents and caravans, a few temporary shed-like things thrown up, and lots of cars.
There was an edge to it all, though. Perhaps it was because they had left the ’60s behind and were ensconced in the grottiness of the ’70s, but in the photographs Heather saw a lot of hard eyes, a lot of people who were thinner than they should have been. She saw one photo of a pregnant woman sitting by a campfire, one hand resting on her distended belly; far from glowing with maternal satisfaction, her face was hard and distant, as if carved from flint. Heather wondered, looking at the photographs, if weed was the only drug of choice at Fiddler’s Mill—she doubted it. And in the blogs and diaries and articles, she unearthed a line of discontent that spoke of poor facilities, abuse, and even fraud.
“My mum was here,” she muttered to herself. Saying it out loud seemed to edge it closer to reality. “My mum. She must have been very different back then.”
Following back some of the more outraged accounts, she found a handful of posts by a woman calling herself whytewitch59 who seemed to be claiming that all sorts of shadowy things went on at Fiddler’s Mill in the ’70s and even the ’80s, although she never quite managed to name them. There was a picture of the woman in the top right-hand corner of her webpage, revealing a ratty face topped with a woolly hat that had to be home made. Heather combed through these accounts, looking for the sorts of details that a story could be built on, but ultimately came away with the impression that the woman had probably been looking for a place to find connections, and instead had done a lot of drugs, only to end up lonelier than before.
Her pictures, though, were something else. Clicking on a “gallery” tab at the top pulled up a long page of
