The Dead Path (20 page)

The house was quiet. Even a week ago, returning to this silence would have been welcoming, a cocooning balm for her to luxuriate in, a private hush in which she could curl up, read a book, doodle designs on a sketchpad, stare idly out the window at the hibiscus. But today, the silence was eerie. The furtive whisper of the rain on the roof made it even more unnerving.

“Suzette?” she called. For a moment, she had the terrible feeling that her daughter was down at Myrtle Street with the greengrocer Pamela Ferguson and something bad was about to happen. Then she remembered Suzette was a grown woman now. She was in no danger.

“In here, Mum!” Suzette’s voice came from her old bedroom up the hall.

Katharine walked up and looked through the doorway. Suzette was leaning over an open suitcase that was half-packed. It was a sign of how effectively the Close women had been avoiding one another; Katharine had no idea her daughter was returning to Sydney today.

“Almost done?” she asked lightly.

“Almost,” agreed Suzette. “I’ll have to ring a cab. Black and White or Yellow?”

“They’re much of a muchness,” replied Katharine.

Suzette nodded.

“Your brother all right?” asked Katharine.

“I think so. A bit …” Suzette stopped folding clothes and thought for a moment. “I don’t think it’s good for him here. I’ll go home, and maybe talk him into moving down.” She fixed Katharine with a look. “Then I’ll get you down.”

“I’d have to sell both kidneys to afford to live in Sydney, and then where would I be?”

Suzette shrugged. “I could help.”

Katharine bristled, and fought back the stubborn urge to bite. “Thank you, love, but I own this place and it’s fine.”

Suzette smiled thinly, as if hearing a safe bet won.

“Listen,” began Katharine. “The other morning, over breakfast …”

“It was fine, Mum, I just don’t like porridge—”

“No, no. You asked me about … about the seamstress. Mrs. Quill.”

Katharine saw her daughter’s hands freeze for a moment in midair, before they continued their busy packing.

“Yep,” agreed Suzette.

“What made you think about her?” asked Katharine, still trying to keep her voice as airy as possible.

Suzette cocked her head. “I thought you couldn’t remember her?”

Katharine shrugged. “Oh, bits and bobs. Little old thing. Pleasant enough. Hardly saw her outside her shop. I don’t know where she lived, but it couldn’t have been far.”

Suzette was looking at her hard. “What makes you think that?”

Katharine thought. What
did
make her think that?

“I never saw her drive. And on the odd evening I saw her walking with her silly little dog—”

Katharine fell silent as Suzette’s face became a hard mask.

“Little dog?” she repeated.

“Yes, I think … a little—I don’t know—Maltese or something …”

Suzette was staring at her. “What color was it?”

Katharine frowned. “Honestly, it’s so long—”

“Mum?”

“White. But why?”

Suzette didn’t answer. She dropped the clothes she was folding and hurried out past Katharine.

A moment later, Katharine heard the fluff of an umbrella opening, the door slamming, and her daughter’s footsteps hurrying down the road.

Chapter
14
   

  R
ain on the windows turned the world into a smear, making car headlights larger but stealing their form, fusing blues and greens, killing reds and yellows. It was sometime after four in the afternoon, but low-throated winter rain clouds conspired to induce evening early.

Steam rose as Nicholas poured tea for his sister.

“Sugar?” he asked, and placed a bowl of cubes in front of his sister.

“Given up,” Suzette replied, taking the cup with a nod. She hesitated, then dropped three cubes into her tea. “Fuck it.”

Her gaze slipped down to Nicholas’s hand. He remembered her expression changing from mild cynicism to pale fear when she saw the puncture wounds in his hand. Right now, she looked ready to cry. And why not? He just piped her aboard the good ship
Flip-out
and set sail for Crazy Island.

They sipped their tea without speaking, listening to the ocean wash of distant tires on wet bitumen.

It had been about an hour since he’d heard the sharp rap on his front door. He’d hurried to hide away the papers he’d been laying out on the scarred and peeling coffee table, and opened the door on his drenched, dreadfully pale sister.

“I believe you,” she’d said.

He let her in, gave her a towel, put on the kettle. He asked her what made her change her mind.

“Quill had a little white dog,” explained Suzette. That was when Nicholas felt the mug slip from his dumb fingers, and hot tea and shards of ceramic scattered everywhere. She was helping him clean up when she noticed the pile of papers he’d hurriedly hidden under the coffee table.

“What are those?” she’d asked.

He’d lied so badly that she simply walked over, picked them up, and started flicking through them. Then it was her turn to be struck silent.

Now, on the coffee table, the photocopies were spread out again: printouts of old black-and-white photographs from the State Library. Bullock team and the abandoned water pipe. The funerals of the surveyors and auctioneers. The old real estate flyers. The unnerving image of the Myrtle Street shop in 1905, with the ghostly blur of Victoria Sedgely holding her white dog.

He’d talked her through them all one by one. The last printout was now facedown on Suzette’s lap; on its hidden side was the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton laying the foundation stone of the Anglican church. When Suzette first saw it, her lips thinned and her eyes grew as wet and unfocused as the rain-smeared windows.

“Quill,” she’d whispered, then turned the image over so she didn’t have to look at it.

He’d made another pot of tea while she collected herself. And then they sat, brother and sister, trying to believe the impossible.

“It’s …” Suzette shook her head.

“It takes awhile,” said Nicholas. He watched her carefully.

“Did you look up other records for Eleanor Bretherton?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“One paragraph in the
Ipswich Times
mentioning a donation for children with rickets from ‘philanthropist spinster E. Bretherton.’ That’s all.”

Suzette fell silent. She turned her head and looked out the window in the direction of the woods.

“I don’t know what to think.”

She put down her tea, delicately picked up the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton by its corner, and stared at the old woman’s hard face. She was in her sixties, her brow furrowed, staring at the lens, trying to penetrate it and memorize the photographer for retribution later. This was the face they’d passed almost daily on their way home from school, coolly looking out from her gloomy shop over her tall counter or her sewing machine. Suzette handed the offensive image back to Nicholas and he placed the sheet with the others.

“Could it be Quill’s grandmother?” he asked. “I mean, it could be.”

She only crooked her arm around a knee.

Nicholas slumped. “There’s more,” he said. “You okay to see it?”

She looked at him and shrugged.

He took a breath and reached into his satchel and produced another handful of pages held with a bulldog clip. “I had to go into the microfiche catalogue for some of these.”

The printouts were of enlarged newspaper articles.

“Dylan Thomas, 2007,” he said, and laid down the first. The headline read “Child Killer Charged.” It showed thin, harried cleaner Elliot Guyatt stepping awkwardly from a police paddywagon behind the Magistrates’ Court.

Nicholas laid down the next. “Nineteen eighty-two.” The bold text read: “Missing Boy Found Murdered.” The black-and-white photograph was a portrait of Tristram Boye smiling at the camera, forever ten years old. Suzette let out a sad sigh like a tiny “Oh.”

“Late fifties,” Nicholas said. “Norman Merriot.” The photograph captured two distraught parents being comforted by police detectives wearing fedoras, under the headline: “Local Nine-Year-Old Found Dead—Tragedy.”

He put down yet another. “Early forties. Esther Garvie.” Sandwiched between an item on jungle troops and ration changes: “Young Girl Missing—Public Asked for Information.” The halftone photograph showed the barefoot girl in the sundress Nicholas had seen on the path outside the woods.

“Nineteen thirty: Cecil MacKenniffe; 1912: Bernice Oliver; 1905: Alfred Clarke.” He laid down three clippings that were just paragraphs without pictures: “Western Suburbs Boy Missing”; “Oliver Girl Found Murdered, Killer Confesses”; “Police Lose Hope for Missing Child—Presumed Dead.”

He watched Suzette. Her face was almost white.

“Third-last one,” he said. “From the
Moreton Bay Courier,
1888.” The small paragraph was headed “Murdered Boy Had Throat Cut.”

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. The pile of papers sat between them, and Nicholas could almost feel their presence, as if something alive and poisonous was lying on the table. The rain drummed on the road, on the tiled roof of the flat, the window.

“Mostly boys. Some girls. Average fourteen years, three months apart,” said Suzette.

Nicholas raised his eyebrows, impressed.

“Economist,” she explained. “Statistics are my thing.” She lined up the papers, moving them around quickly like cups on the table of a sideshow swindler. She frowned. “Three of the child murders occurred in the same years as other events.”

Nicholas nodded in grudging admiration. It had taken him over an hour to make that connection. One child was murdered in the same year the auctioneer Thorneton died; another child had been found dead the year the pipeline was abandoned; another was killed the year Eleanor Bretherton funded construction of the Anglican church in 1888.

“How far back does it go?” she asked.

“I checked back as far as I could, right back to the first year of the
Courier
in 1846. There were lots of gaps, sometimes weeks without entries, so any articles about child murders or missing children could have been in papers that weren’t archived. But I did find this.” He placed down the last printout. “It’s an excerpt from the captain’s log of a ketch named the
Aurora
.” Nicholas read aloud: “ ‘Monday, 24 April 1853. Posted notice to positively sail for Wide Bay from Kangaroo Point on 6 May. Discussed with First and agent an increase of charges to 30s per ton, agreed same. Commenced taking cargo this afternoon. Received news that William Tundall (cabin boy) missing. Raised volunteers from crew to search nearby bushland tomorrow.’ ”

He looked at Suzette. She lifted her chin and gazed out the window. No light was left in the day outside, and the rain fell steadily. He felt a sudden pang of fear. He wanted Suze as far away from this mess as possible.

“You can see why I wanted you to just go home—”

She cut him off with a glare.

“I’d never have forgiven you,” she said. “Where’s the last one?”

“What?”

“Before, you said ‘third-last.’ There’s one more clipping.”

Nicholas nodded. From his pocket he withdrew the folded sheet of paper that had slipped out of the Tallong High School yearbook he’d found in their father’s suitcase. He opened it up and let her read about how young Owen Liddy never made it to his model railway exhibition in 1964. Suzette delicately picked up the old clipping, turned it in her fingers.

“Where did this one come from?”

“Dad’s suitcase.”

She blinked at him. “Dad knew?”

Nicholas shook his head as if to say, your guess is as good as mine.

Outside, the rain grew heavier. They were silent a long while. Suzette finally spoke.

“A lot of children,” she whispered.

Nicholas nodded. “Have you ever heard of this. Have you ever, in your readings about witchy shit, ever come across this kind of thing?”

She sent him a quick glare, then took in a long breath, composing her thoughts.

“Blood is an ingredient for some of the most powerful magics,” she explained. “Blood is the only element that satisfies some spells. Some quite … extreme spells.”

Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.

The flesh on Nicholas’s arm raised in goosebumps. Suzette’s words were frighteningly similar to Mrs. Boye’s outburst in the church.

“Like staying alive for a hundred and fifty years?” he asked. He’d meant it to come out jokingly, but the words hung in the air.

Suzette wrapped her arms tighter around herself. “Yes,” she said, and looked up at Nicholas. “Quill put herself in a quiet shop at the center of a quiet, working-class neighborhood so she could sit and watch. See for herself which families had children. Learn who lived where, who was happy, who was alone. Tiny, patient questions. Hatching plans.”

“Like a spider in her web,” he said.

The simile had slipped easily off his tongue, but struck both of them keenly. That’s exactly what she had been. A hungry, perched thing, ever observant, watching and spinning thread while she waited.

“And …” Suzette seemed unwilling to take the next logical step.

“And killing children,” said Nicholas.

“Yes,” she agreed softly.

Night had fallen outside. Streetlamps turned droplets sliding down the windows into slowly descending diamonds.

“I don’t understand the connections. The church? The woods?”

Suzette shook her head. Neither did she.

“And the men,” she said. “The men who confessed? Teale. Guyatt. Maybe others. She found ways to influence them.”

Nicholas remembered jetting into the old woman’s hungry palm, and the memory sent his stomach into a nauseating roll.

“There’s something else I haven’t told you,” he said. He slowly, carefully, recounted coming across the old woman in the woods, her dog Garnock biting him, the pleasant veil of the world dissolving to reveal the woods darker than ever and Garnock the terrier as the largest spider Nicholas had ever seen. Then, waking in the grounds of her cottage, and the way the old woman had reached into his pants, milked him, and saved his spurtings in a jar. He’d never spoken about things sexual in front of his sister, and by the end of it felt a fool for blushing like an adolescent. He looked up at Suzette.

She was as pale as the stack of paper in front of her.

“Spider?” she whispered.

He nodded, watching her stare down at the floor, expecting any second for her to laugh aloud and call what he’d just said drivel. But instead she leaned forward and again shuffled the photographs and picked out the image of a blurred Victoria Sedgely outside her confectionery shop cradling a small, white dog. She stared at the picture for a long moment.

“What does she want?” she whispered to herself. She looked up at Nicholas. “Have you been in the health food store?”

Nicholas recalled the pretty girl with the brown eyes and easy smile. Rowena. There was no similarity between her and the flint-faced Bretherton or the watchful crone Quill. So the lie came easily.

“No.”

Suzette watched him for a few seconds, then nodded again. “We should go in sometime,” she said. “Together.”

“Sure,” he agreed. He was already regretting the lie, but decided to deal with it later.

“The rune makes some sense,” Suzette went on. “The mark on Quill’s door—the blood rune, Thurisaz. I don’t quite get it, but it makes sense she’d use it.”

Nicholas stared at the floor. He felt Suzette looking at him.

“What?” she said.

“Quill’s door isn’t the only place I’ve seen that mark.”

“Where else?” she asked. “Nicky?”

He told her about the dead bird talismans with their macabre faux heads made of twigs. He told her about the same mark on Gavin’s rifle.

“Fucking tosser,” she whispered, and looked up at him. “But I’m glad you told me. Better late than never.”

Neither spoke for a long while. The rain grew more insistent on the roof. The refrigerator compressor suddenly chugged nearby, and Suzette jerked.

“Suze? Are you okay?”

She shook her head slowly. “I think I’m pretty scared.”

Nicholas nodded. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”

He checked his watch. It was nearly seven.

Suzette pulled out her mobile phone. “Where’s your phone book? I’m canceling my flight.” Her expression dared him to argue. He went to the linen press and produced a grubby White Pages directory.