Morgan's Law (5 page)

That afternoon Sarah and Tash found Mick Howle sitting out the front of the pub, drinking beer from a tall frosty glass. After Tash introduced her, Sarah ordered him another beer and herself a soda water, then explained what she was trying to find out.

Reaching out a gnarled old hand, he took the photo Sarah pulled out of her bag and peered at it through surprised eyes. ‘Who'd you say you thought this was?'

‘My grandmother, Eliza Jones.'

‘I don't know who Eliza Jones is, but the girl in this picture is Rose Morgan,' said Mick, handing back the photo.

‘But that's my grandmother, and her name was Eliza Jones.'

‘Oh, I can tell it's your gran all right,' he said. ‘You look a lot like her. But her name wasn't Eliza Jones when I knew her.'

‘Really?'

‘Yep. You don't forget the face of the girl half the district had a crush on. I may be old now, but once I had an eye for a pretty girl . . . Some things don't change with age, I might add,' he said, giving her a wink.

Sarah smiled, unable to take offence. There was a grandfatherly appeal to Mick, despite the suggestive twinkle in his eye.

‘So what happened to Rose Morgan?' asked Sarah.

Mick dropped his gaze. ‘No one knows. She went into town one day and was never seen again.'

Sarah sat back in her chair and stared at the photo of her gran in surprise. Could what Mick said be true? Could her gran really be Rose Morgan? It would explain why no one had ever heard of Eliza Jones. It could also explain why she and her mother hadn't heard of Negallan before either, but . . .
why
?

‘You said she was never seen again? What did
you
think happened to her, Mick?' she asked.

‘No idea. Most people round here think she met with foul play, including her family. They denied she'd left town of her own free will.' He shrugged.

Sarah opened her mouth to ask another question but was interrupted by an elderly man with a walking stick who'd stopped by the table to talk to Mick.

‘This young lady is asking about Rose Morgan,' Mick informed the other man as he took a seat.

‘Rose Morgan? Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
Rose Morgan
,' the man's voice took on a wistful tone. ‘I was going to marry that woman, you know,' he said.

Sarah leaned forward eagerly at the man's declaration, until Mick's hoot of laughter cut short her moment of hope.

‘Marry her! As if she would have even given the likes of you and me the time of day.'

Sarah saw the other man frown briefly before he added with a resigned huff, ‘Yeah, well, a man can dream, can't he?'

‘I don't understand,' Sarah said. ‘Was Rose some kind of snob?'

‘No, Rose was a bonza girl—it was her father who put the fear of God into anyone stupid enough to think they could give his daughter the life she deserved. Rose was never going to marry any local.'

‘And she never did.' The other man shook his head sadly.

Over the next hour, two more men joined the party and she found herself charmed by these gruff old-timers. The years seemed to melt from their craggy faces as they relived stories of the old days, and Sarah loved listening to the camaraderie of the old friends as they tried to outdo each other with outrageous stories of their youthful
When Sarah walked back into the Royal, she saw Tash talking with a couple at a table in the far corner.

Something about the way she placed a comforting hand on the woman's arm made Sarah pause. She noticed the strain around the woman's eyes, and the man beside her seemed equally drained. She wondered who these people were and what had made them so sad. Leaving them to their privacy, she continued upstairs.

Later, when her stomach grumbled too loudly to ignore, Sarah headed back downstairs to seek out dinner. If she continued to eat like this she wasn't going to fit into any of the clothes she'd packed. The home-cooked food was just too irresistible and, at this point, going up a dress size was almost worth it.

Tash stopped by her table on her break and the two of them ordered dessert. As Sarah took a spoonful of the rich sticky-date pudding, she hesitated before asking the question that had been playing on her mind. ‘The couple I saw you with earlier . . . they looked a bit upset. Is everything okay?'

Tash nodded. ‘Paula and Frank. It's such a shame. The family's been in the district forever, but it's been tough out here lately and they just can't keep their place going.' Her voice softened. ‘They signed the papers, to sell, this morning. It's so damn sad.'

‘Are there a lot of people in the same situation?'

‘Too many.'

‘But doesn't farming always go like that? Bad runs followed by good ones?'

Tash poked at the dessert on her plate. ‘Yeah, but lately it's been too many of the bad and not enough of the good. This used to be a cotton-growing area, but a few years back the gin closed down.'

‘Sorry? The what?' Sarah asked.

‘The gin, you know, where they separate the cotton seed and all the sticks and rubbish from the cotton.'

‘Oh. Okay.'

‘Anyway, the company went bankrupt and about forty local people lost their jobs—not to mention that the rest of the district was suddenly left with no economical way of continuing to grow cotton when the cost of transport to the closest gin was so high. Since then, things have gone downhill fast. Farmers had to find other avenues of income. Some were successful, some weren't, and then the last drought knocked a lot of them around while they were still trying to get on their feet with new crops or cattle.'

Sarah shook her head sadly. To lose so many jobs in such a small town must have been devastating.

‘To make matters worse, families are losing their kids to the cities for work. There's not enough money in farming to support the two or three generations that would usually be working properties. We keep losing good, solid people from our community.' She ran a finger distractedly through the moisture on the outside of her glass. ‘Did you know there've been four suicides in the last eighteen months out here?' She looked up and Sarah could see the torment in her eyes. ‘How can a community survive that kind of loss? How much more can we take? I hate seeing my town like this—lately there's been nothing but pain.'

The helplessness in Tash's voice caught at Sarah's heart, and she saw her blink rapidly and take a deep breath to regain her composure. ‘Anyway, hopefully things will begin to pick up soon,' Tash said.

Sarah couldn't think of any reply that wouldn't sound trite or condescending so she just sat in silence. How
did
a community recover after that kind of trauma? Could it
ever
recover?

‘How'd it go with Mick?' Tash asked, changing the subject.

‘Mick's convinced my grandmother was someone else.'

‘Who did he think she was?'

‘A woman by the name of Rose Morgan, who disappeared years ago.'

‘Rose Morgan?' asked Tash, surprised.

‘Yep.'

‘It would actually make a lot of sense, you know. Rose Morgan was the daughter of a prominent local family and she just vanished one day. There was a huge search at the time but no trace of her was ever found. Everyone assumed she was dead.'

‘So, if this theory is correct, then my grandmother, who I only ever knew as Eliza Jones, is really Rose Morgan and she left town without telling anyone, then changed her name and never contacted her family again? It just doesn't make any sense. Gran was such a straightforward and dependable person. Creating a new identity and hiding a secret past life seems so melodramatic—it just doesn't fit with the woman I knew.'

Tash shrugged. ‘I dunno, but if it's true, there'll be a lot of people interested in finding out what really happened to her.'

‘Do you know the Morgans?' said Sarah.

‘
Everyone
knows the Morgans,' Tash said with a dry chuckle.

‘Would there be any of them left who would remember when Eliza—Rose—went missing?'

‘Rose's brother Albert and his wife Ruth still live out at Burrapine, the family farm, though they're both getting on now. Their son Keith and his wife Carmel have two kids, Trent and Kelly. It's Keith and Trent who run the place now.'

If this was true, thought Sarah, then these people were her gran's family . . .
her
family. ‘What are they like?' she asked.

She could see Tash weighing up her answer carefully. ‘Albert's a nice old fella—one of those quiet blokes with a dominating, bossy wife. The Morgans keep to themselves pretty much. Do their own thing.'

Sarah thought for a while. ‘I wonder if the Morgans would mind me going out to talk to them.'

‘Why don't you give them a call and see?' said Tash, leaving the table to retrieve a phone and a tattered-looking phone book from beneath the bar.

Sarah ran her finger down the Ms in the White Pages until she found
Morgan, Albert
. As she waited for someone to pick up, she found herself battling butterflies in her stomach. Eventually a woman answered and Sarah quickly introduced herself as a visitor to the area, asking if it would be possible to drop by and see if they could help her identify someone in an old photo from the district.

As Sarah put down the phone, Tash looked at her expectantly. ‘Well?' she asked.

‘I spoke to Carmel Morgan and she's invited me out there tomorrow.'

‘Great. I'll give you directions,' said Tash.

Four

As she drove out to the Morgans' place the next day, Sarah took in the patchwork of colours in the paddocks she passed, which varied from greens to browns to yellows. She also admired the beautiful wildflowers scattered along the side of the road. Gran had always been a big fan of wildflowers, filling vases with them whenever she found them on her long walks.

Sarah wondered what on earth could have made her grandmother stage her own disappearance. It was hard to believe the woman she knew could have done that. Was this the reason she'd sent Sarah out here to the back of beyond? But why now? Why wait until after her death to reveal all this? Then again, thought Sarah ruefully, over the last few years she hadn't given her grandmother many opportunities to talk about the past. She'd been too wrapped up in her own life for that.

Pulling to a halt where the wildflowers were particularly abundant, Sarah got out of the car to look at them. As she shut the car door behind her she took a deep breath and wondered what it was about the country that made it smell so good. It was nothing like the citified smell of London or even Sydney, with its urban mix of beach, traffic and people.

Carefully she picked her way across the uneven ground towards a large patch of the little daisy-like flowers, glad she hadn't decided to wear her strappy sandals today. She looked up and saw that paddock after paddock surrounded her, stretching as far as the eye could see. She felt so insignificant in the midst of all this wide open space.

She couldn't think of a time she'd ever been this isolated. Certainly not in London with crowds of people always around her, or growing up in bustling Sydney. The thought that she was completely alone like this should have terrified her, but she realised after a moment that it didn't. In fact it felt liberating.

Maybe she didn't need to be in such a rush to leave after she found Gran's tree . . . What did she really have to hurry back to anyway? A confrontation with Giles she could live without, even though she knew eventually they'd come face to face—they knew too many people in the same social circles to never bump into one another again, no matter how big London was.

She'd tentatively asked for three weeks off, knowing she wouldn't be up to another rushed twenty-two-hour trip across the globe straightaway. She'd originally allowed two or three days at most for this part of the trip, then a week or so to rest back in Sydney with her mother, before returning to London. Her boss Celeste, however, would be less than thrilled if Sarah decided to take the company directors up on their offer to
take all the time you need.
Celeste wasn't the kind of person who believed in compassionate leave.

Filling her lungs once more with the pungent yet sweet scent of the nearby ploughed fields, Sarah considered the prospect of staying a few days longer. This place was obviously good for her. There was definitely something to be said about fresh air and good old-fashioned comfort food. She could almost feel the energy seeping back into her tired body and soul.

As she moved back towards her car she remembered the reason she'd stopped in the first place. The delicate little flowers at her feet were gorgeous and, on impulse, she bent down and picked a large handful to brighten up her room at the Royal.