Bereft (11 page)

“Can you take me now?”

The girl shook her head. “It's too dangerous with Mr. Dalton walking around.” She was right.

“What is this place, anyway?”

“I don't know. Been empty for years. Old miner's shack, I suppose.”

“Why don't you stay at your father's house? Somewhere better than this.”

“I told you, my father left. My mother is dead. Mr. Dalton knows my old house. This is better, safer. He'll never find us up here.” She crossed her arms and leaned against a crumbling wall. “You know what he's like.”

Quinn did indeed know all about Robert Dalton. His mother's younger brother was ill-suited to life in a town as small and rudimentary as Flint. He thought the people were fools. He was always bothered by the heat and the flies, and would talk fondly of his former life in his beloved England, a life to which—for reasons that were unclear—he was unable to return.

“You should stay away from him,” said Quinn.

“Oh, I do.” She twisted her fingers. “He used to come around even when Mother was alive, when Thomas had left for the war. Said he was seeing if he could help us, but Mother told him we were fine, thanks all the same,
no one's taking my daughter away from me. Bloody do-gooder
, she used to call him. He came around a lot. I used to hide.”

“Hide up here?”

“Other places, too. I have very good hiding places. He came again after Mother died but I ran off. Tried to catch me. Said he'd take me to a church place in Bathurst. He's been up in the hills searching for me. He can't find me by himself, but that tracker Gracie is away in Bathurst hunting for a bloke that killed his wife. He won't be back for weeks, they all reckon.”

“When did your mother die?”

She grew pensive. “Couple of weeks ago. She was sick for only five days.”

“What's your name?”

“Sadie Fox,” she said, but without conviction. She pushed greasy hair from her face. “You're Quinn, aren't you?”

“How do you know my name?”

“Quinn
Walker
,” she said with relish. “Everyone knows about you.”

“What do you mean? I haven't been here for years.”

“I know. They all think you're dead in the war.”

Quinn thought of the telegram that his mother had shown him. He sighed and crouched to pick burrs from his khaki trousers.

“Do you know what they call you?”

He glanced up. “Who?”

The girl was thrilled at what she knew. She stepped from foot to foot in excitement. “In town. People in town. What they call you? They still talk about what you done. I hear them.”

Quinn paced about, picking at the peeling walls and jabbing shards of broken wood with the toe of his boot. “What?” he asked, trying in vain to sound uninterested.

“There was even a reward, I heard them—”

“What?” he hissed. “What do they call me?”

She shrank back but remained defiant. “They all call you the Murderer.”

He halted at the cold stove, partly sunken into the rotted floor and peppered with animal droppings. He ran a finger over its rusty surface. In fleeing this town and traversing the world he had imagined, foolishly, that he might be able to escape the major fact of his life; but there it was, contained in the prison of two words. It was both the reason he had never come back, and why he had now returned.
The Murderer.

“They say you stabbed your sister,” the girl went on. “Years ago. And other things, too. They say you did
worse
things to her—”

“I didn't do it.”

“Then who did?”

He hesitated, wondering whether to tell her the truth he had never told anyone. “God, I would
never
do anything like that …”

Still she watched him, waited.

“You can't tell anyone. If I tell you, my mother can't know.”

The girl took a step forward. “I won't tell. Promise. Cross my heart.”

“It was my uncle,” he said eventually. “And someone else. Another man, I don't know who”

Sadie did not look surprised. She cleared her throat. “That's what Mr. Dalton wants with me, isn't it?”

Quinn didn't answer. It was grotesque a girl should have even the barest inkling of what such a man would want with her.

“What happened? What did you see?” she persisted.

He shook his head. “I can't tell you.”

“Are you here for revenge?” she asked.

“No—” He caught himself. “I don't know.”

“You should be. Especially if everyone thinks you did it.”

He waved her away. “Maybe I'll go to the police. I'll tell them what happened. Who it was.”

She gave him a queer look and shook her head. “Didn't anyone tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“You don't know?”

“What?”

“Robert Dalton
is
the police.”

Quinn's heart grew limp. “I don't believe you.”

She stared at him. Her eyes were lit with a fierce glow. “Robert Dalton is the constable in Flint. For the whole district. He took over from Mr. Mackey ages ago. No one will ever believe he killed your sister. You know that, anyway. They love him. They think he is honourable and upstanding. I have heard them. All of them. Even though he drinks grog. They talk about him like he was a saint. Even your mother.
Especially
your mother.”

Quinn sat in stunned silence. He felt sick, as if the air had drained from the room.

“You were there, though,” she continued. “That's what your father says.”

He bent down until their eyes were level. “Why aren't
you
afraid of me then, if that's what they all call me? If I'm the Murderer?”

She stood her ground. “Because. Because I can tell you are as afraid of Mr. Dalton as I am.”

When it was dark, they ate cold beans and dry bread, and Sadie told Quinn of other things: Mrs. Taylor, who wept every night over the deaths of her three sons in the war; the McClaren boy, who died from the plague and how a slug of blood leaked from his ear when they carried him from the house; how the Reverend's daughter Casey Smail got pregnant by a travelling salesman and they took her to the Chinaman to drink a potion that dissolved her baby; the Harman boy, who came back from the war possessed by the Devil; that his uncle Robert Dalton sometimes visited the widowed Mrs. Higgins late at night. Who was dead, who married—the events that tangle and weave, over time, to make a town's history.

The girl spoke quickly, laughing, barking out details at random, as if desperate to divest herself of the information she had gathered. “I go down into town at night and peek in the windows,” she said with a shrug when Quinn asked how she knew so much of the town's happenings. “I have for years. I listen to things. People don't even know I'm there. I hide under their house or in a bush. People talk about all kinds of things. I've heard all sorts of secrets. That's what I mean when I say I can help you. I'm good at finding things out.”

She told him about her brother Thomas, who took care of her when their seamstress mother went to Bathurst for supplies or to run errands. He had gone to fly planes in the war. “I have to wait for Thomas to get back. The war's over, isn't it? He'll know what to do, he'll look after me. He'll be back any day now, I reckon.”

Quinn tore off a hunk of bread and placed it into his mouth. “Yes, the war's been over for a few months.”

She beamed at this. She said she had no other relatives she knew about, perhaps an uncle in Perth but she didn't know his name, and Perth was such a long way away, wasn't it? There was nowhere else for her to go. She had to wait here for Thomas, who must be delayed by this plague, that was why things were taking so long.

Later that night, as he lay in the darkness on the floor, Sadie began singing a hymn in the next room.

In the sweet bye and bye

We shall meet on that beautiful shore

In the sweet bye and bye

We shall meet on that beautiful shore

Quinn thought back to the evening of the séance when he had been trapped in that Marylebone parlour. Mrs. Cranshaw assured the gathering that the Lord was with them in their endeavours, reminded them not to approach her girls at
any
stage and launched into a ramshackle version of that very same hymn, turning from her piano keyboard to the audience with encouraging smiles at the start of each verse. The mixture of the theatrical and the pious was unsettling and powerful; by the time the last notes had died away, one or two ladies were weeping. Then Mrs. Cranshaw, formal, head bowed, stepped aside and vanished into the shadows, leaving the three girls at their table. Quinn's view was blocked momentarily by a shoulder, then by the ostrich feathers of a lady's hat. A young man whispered something to his companion. Fletcher stood with his hands at his sides and a hopeful light in his eyes. The room hummed with anticipation.

The three girls sat with palms flat upon the table and closed their eyes. They were about fourteen years of age, Quinn guessed. Each of them wore a white dress and had her hair tied back with ribbons. Their faces were pale as small moons atop their fragile necks. Quinn stepped from foot to foot. A carriage passed in the street outside. It would be dark by the time he and Fletcher got away from here. The damp washcloth of evening would already be falling over the London streets, and it was at that moment that Quinn yearned for Australia, where the light was sheer and full, without edges or mercy.

One of the blonde girls jerked upright and mouthed something. Then her entire body convulsed. Her eyelids quivered and she began, with eyes still shut, to scrawl on the paper with a pencil. Her blonde companion emitted a low hum and followed suit. Neither of them took much notice of what they were doing. The first girl allowed her head to bob about this way and that on her shoulders as if manipulated by unseen hands.

Despite Quinn's scepticism, the entire scene—with its flickering lamps and droning girls, its sharp fug of tobacco smoke—terrified him. He was aware of the prickle of sweat on his skin. The last girl, the redhaired one, just sat there and gradually the room fell away—the curtains, the furniture, the shelves of books—until it was as if she and Quinn alone remained. Her eyes were closed and her face upturned, catlike, as if whatever she hoped to detect would come through her nostrils. Her skin was lit by an inner light. After several minutes she opened her eyes, and her gaze settled on Quinn as if his had been the face she had sought all along.

She stared at Quinn for so long that people began to glance at him, whispering, as if he were the instigator of their mute exchange. Eventually, the girl bent to the desk and started to write, stopping every few seconds as if listening to and deciphering instructions. A limp curl of red hair fell across her face, but she did not brush it away. Her mouth puckered and twitched.

After fifteen minutes, the girls ceased moaning and fell still with their chins upon their chests. The audience watched in rapt silence as Mrs. Cranshaw detached herself from the shadows, roused each of the girls in turn and guided them away, uttering maternal sounds as she did so. Quinn was unsure what he had witnessed, but applause rippled through the assembly before it dissolved into twitters and exclamations of amazement. “
Extraordinary
,” a nearby woman whispered. “My, my,” said another. “Did you see how they looked?”

There followed a hubbub as Mrs. Cranshaw re-emerged with shards of paper that Quinn recognised as having been torn from the rolls on which the girls had been writing. She then proceeded to call out the names that were scrawled there: “Mr. Wright? A message for Mr. Wright. Thank you, sir, that will be ten shillings. Is there someone known to Emily …
Masters
, is it? Pasters? Marsden? A child, I believe. The … mother, perhaps? An aunt? No? Aaah, Miss Wilcox. Glad you were able to come this week. I
know
, it's rained non-stop, hasn't it? Still, it could be worse. Mr. Conroy. Mr. Conroy, is your wife feeling better? Good, good …”