The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  Nicholas pulled another name from the flyer and typed: “Surveyor, Raff, Patterson.” He bit his lip, then typed, “Funeral.”

  He sipped water while the search bar filled.

  The first photograph was unrelated-it showed the tombstone of a Glynnis Patterson from Toowoomba. But the second made Nicholas’s breath hiss in through clenched teeth. “Funeral Service for Elliot Raff, Surveyor, 1891, Henry Mohoupt, Undertaker.” The image was cracked, making the dull gray sky look fatally wounded. A crowd of mourners beside a horse-drawn hearse outside Pritam’s church. The trees were shorter and the dresses were fuller, but otherwise the photograph was almost identical to the one taken twenty years later. But, again, the church. Solid and brooding.

  He sat back and rubbed his eyes. It was midday. The surrounding carrels were full. He looked outside. The river ran alongside the library, swollen and brown. Its opposite bank was laced tight with an expressway that ducked and weaved in and out of itself, feeding into a business district studded thickly with skyscrapers and office buildings. Bruise-blue clouds loitered discontentedly at the horizon.

  Nicholas stretched his neck, trying to get all the new facts straight in his head. Auctioneers plan to sell the woods; each dies the same year. Surveyors plan to divide the woods; each dies the very year he plans to slice them up.

  He turned back to the monitor and typed “Water pipe, construction.”

  It took him ten minutes to reach the last, telling image. The caption didn’t surprise him: “August 3, 1928. Workers boycott construction of water pipeline through western suburbs following multiple fatalities.” The photograph showed a bullock team and an empty dray beside dislocated sections of three-meter-high pipe. Behind the dour men and lumpish oxen, the woods glowered. He skipped to the end of the text accompanying the photograph and read the words: “… the unpopular pipeline was diverted through a neighboring suburb.”

  He reached into his satchel and pulled out Gavin’s cigarettes, slipped one into his mouth. A woman opposite leveled a scornful stare at him. The middle-aged man sitting next to him sent him a thundery look, then got up and walked away. Nicholas jiggled the cigarette in his mouth; the dry whisper of the filter on his lips was comforting. The woods had been unassailable. Auctioneers, subdividers, council pipes-something wanted no one in those woods. But the church… why did the church keep cropping up?

  He typed “Anglican church,” then hesitated. He closed his eyes and concentrated. Standing outside the cold, mossy church in the rain, peering over at the marble cornerstone, reading the lead letters: “Dedicated to the Glory of God, 1888.” He typed the year. Search.

  “The Right Reverend Nathaniel de Witt stands beside Mrs. Eleanor Bretherton who lays foundation stone for Tallong Anglican Church, 1888.” While the Reverend de Witt smiled, Bretherton looked at the camera with undisguised contempt. In one gloved hand, she held a guide rope attached to the heavy stone that was suspended by an overhead crane outside the frame. But it wasn’t her expression that held Nicholas’s stare. It was that he recognized her.

  Eleanor Bretherton looked exactly like the old seamstress from Jay Jay’s haberdashery that he remembered from his childhood. The old woman who’d freaked out Suzette. Mrs. Quill.

  It was impossible. Bretherton must be her grandmother or great-aunt. But those explanations rang hollow. Certainly, Nicholas was trusting memories twenty years old, but the similarity between Bretherton and Quill was uncanny.

  Only the voice in his head said it was no coincidence.

  He typed “Quill, Haberdasher.” Search.

  “Search results: 0 hits.”

  He thought a moment, then typed “Myrtle Street, Tallong,” hesitated, then, “shop.” Search.

  His jaw tightened as he watched the search bar fill.

  An old image appeared. “Sedgely Confectionery Shop, Myrtle Street, Tallong, c. 1905.” A solitary, timber-clad shop with a deep awning sat alone on the corner of unpaved Myrtle Street. Words painted in its windows proclaimed “Boiled sweets,” “Choicest Fruits of the Season,” and “Teas, Light Refreshments and Ices.” Nicholas peered. It was in the same place where the group of shops stood today-the convenience store, Rowena’s health food store, the computer repair shop. In front of the confectionery store stood a woman in a white dress. She must have turned away from the camera as the photograph was taken because her head and face were smoky and blurred. The caption read: “Possibly proprietress Victoria Sedgely.”

  Nicholas’s mouth went dry as a crypt.

  The woman in the photograph held in her arms a small, white terrier.

  K atharine swore as the spinning clay collapsed in on itself and what was to have been a tureen folded into a damp, malformed thing that brought suddenly to mind a birthing film a nurse had shown her when she was pregnant with Nicholas-the folded, exhausted clay lips looked horribly like that film’s mother’s bloody vulva. Katharine ground the spinning wheel to a halt with the heel of her hand, scooped the aborted pot off, and pounded it into a ball that she slapped onto the block of clay at her feet.

  Normally, a few hours in her under-house studio was distracting enough to wick away any vexed thoughts. Not today. She switched off the wheel with her toe. In the new quiet she could hear the steady patter of rain on the bushes outside the window. The day was dark. She rose and went to the tubs to wash the already drying patina of pale clay from her hands.

  What would Don have said?

  Katharine shut off the tap with an irritated twist. What would Don have said? “ Can you make that a double, love? ” she thought bitterly.

  Ah. But the drinking came afterward. What did he say about Quill before all that?

  Katharine dried her hands. She didn’t need to think about that. Don was long dead; dead, in a way, even before he died. Quill was long gone, too. Life was for the living.

  “Stuff and nonsense,” she said to herself, and reached to switch off the light. The warm yellow of the tungsten bulb clicked off, leaving the room a dull aquarium slate; light swimming in through the window fell on the distorted lump of clay under clear plastic. It looked horribly like a broken head, and in Katharine’s mind appeared a vivid memory of Gavin Boye’s shattered face as a white plastic bag was zipped up around him. Yes, life was for the living, but the living were dying again. She closed the door and hurried upstairs.

  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, an
d 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 side
show 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?”