Chapter Eleven
Jodie ran nervous hands down her short denim skirt. Any minute now, the bell beside the flyscreen door was going to sound throughout the house and then—
Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong …
Huh. Will’s parents, Robbo and Patty, had impatient fingers. One ding would have sufficed.
‘That’ll be them,’ she called to Carol, who was fussing about in her room doing heaven knew what. A waft of gardenia had floated out of the bedroom door earlier and she’d heard beads clinking. Clearly, being taken to a matinee theatre performance in Lismore was a big deal.
‘Keep them out of my kitchen,’ Carol said.
‘Robbo is one of the judges this year and I’m not having my cake entry disqualified over some technicality like him being in my kitchen during the cakefeeding process.
You never know who’s driving by, reporting on the comings and goings through my front door. ’
Jodie had been as jumpy as a possum on a powerline since dawn, waiting for the day’s secret squirrel plan to unfold.
She felt slightly guilty that she (well, Will, really) had only come up with the idea as a ruse to get Carol out of Clarence for a few hours.
Why hadn’t she been organising outings for Carol?
Why hadn’t she thought about how much joy Carol might feel at the opportunity to be driven somewhere and entertained?
Because you’ve been morose. And healing. Which takes time.
Yeah, maybe so, but note to self: Ask Carol what day trips she’d like to do since you’re ready and willing to drive her anywhere .
She pulled open the door, and there they were, the parents of the man she’d wantonly snogged in the rock pool two days ago. They were looking at her with wide eyes and absolute fullblown curiosity and her first thought was, Oh my God, did Will tell them?
‘You must be Jodie,’ said the woman. Will had described his mother as a town matriarch every bit as involved and meddlesome as Carol, but in appearance, Patty Miles was as unlike Carol as it was possible to be.
Where her great aunt favoured colourful, flowery dresses and sensible sandals and steel-grey hair cut in a no-nonsense fashion, this woman looked like she’d stepped out of one of those Hollywood movies from the sixties set in the Sahara, where flowing linen robes and lashings of eyeliner were de rigueur.
Come to think of it, Will’s dad had a bit of an Omar Sharif vibe to him.
Now she knew where Will had got his looks.
‘Hi,’ she said. And then, inanely, ‘Carol says you can’t go into the kitchen.’
‘I thought I could smell baked fruit and whisky,’ said Patty, as the pair of them came inside. The tiny foyer felt very crowded all of a sudden—mostly because Patty’s outfit had more fabric in it than a linen closet.
‘Will tells us you’ve been helping him set up the pub gardens for the Twilight Markets.’
Those bright eyes looking into hers and Jodie could almost convince herself the woman was using the term ‘helping’ as a euphemism for ‘seducing my son’.
But maybe that was Jodie’s subconscious speaking. She had, indeed, been wondering what ‘helping’ Will would be like.
Carol finally appeared from her room. She’d dug out a little eye shadow and pink court shoes, and she was carrying a gold Glomesh purse.
Sweet , Jodie thought, and told herself not to get choked up.
‘We’ll have a cup of tea and a sandwich somewhere after the matinee,’ said Robbo, dropping Jodie a ghost of a wink. ‘So we won’t be back until after two o’clock.’
She nodded. Will had prepared his parents well for their role. She tucked her hand under Carol’s arm as they all took themselves off to the Mileses’ car, then stood in the front garden waving until they’d disappeared out of sight up Lillypilly Street.
‘Will?’ she said into her phone. ‘The coast is clear.’
Will’s parents had been the ones to suggest the genealogy records at the Historical Society.
Carol had herself set up the family history records room, and encouraged families new and old to explore their ancestry and map where lives may have intersected.
They just needed a clue, the end of a thread they could pull, and whatever secret Carol was holding so close could begin to unravel.
Jodie called her mum, Janelle.
‘Carol’s life? I only know the bare bones. Born during the war, earned herself a scholarship to All Hallow’s Girls School in Brisbane, first in the family to go to university, became a teacher, never married, loves a committee, needs to move into a home before she breaks her other hip.’
Jodie had never felt so out of charity with her mother.
‘What about her mother … your grandmother?’
‘She lived quietly like most war widows did, I suppose.’
‘Carol’s mum was a war widow?’
‘Oh, yes. My mother and Carol were sisters, but there was a big age gap, and they weren’t close. It was only after Mum died that Carol and I reconnected.’
The thump thump of a heavy tread on the front stairs told Jodie that Will had arrived. ‘Mum, I have to go.’
‘Why? What do you have to do? Have you finally stopped moping?’
She sighed and hit the End Call button. The idea of telling her mother she’d been right—Jodie had needed a distraction—rankled.
She met Will at the door. ‘Hello. I feel half naughty and half like I’m on an Indiana Jones quest.’
‘Why naughty?’
‘Oh, you know. Prying around in Carol’s past.’
‘She’s a retired history teacher. She made a living out of prying into the past.’
‘I guess.’
‘You ready to go?’
‘Almost. I’ve been thinking about the scrapbook she brought home. It might tell us everything we need to know.’
‘Why am I sensing a “but”?’
‘Carol’s not brought it out when I’ve been around, not once.’
‘You’d feel bad about poking around for it.’
She was relieved he understood.
A tall woman with a long ponytail, longer legs and dusty workboots was hopping off an aqua moped in front of the Historical Society building when Jodie and Will arrived on foot from Carol’s house.
She gave Will a boisterous kiss on the cheek followed up by a hug and a hair ruffle.
His sister-in-law, it seemed, was quite fond of him.
‘Where’s the big ugly bloke?’ Will said.
Jodie had seen a photo of Joey Miles, Will’s oldest brother, in a frame in Will’s upstairs flat at the pub. Ugly, he was not.
‘He and Gus have secret men’s business going on in the macadamia trees this morning.
Something to do with irrigation spigots and ant nests.
Come have a beer with us one evening when you’re not on shift and you can see how he is for yourself.
’ The woman’s gaze shifted to Jodie. It read as frank, friendly and curious. ‘Hello.’
‘Jodie, this is my sister-in-law, Kirsty. She’s done some research work here herself, finding out about her father’s family, so she’s our secret weapon today.’
Kirsty smiled. ‘To say I did the work is a bit of an exaggeration. Mostly I opened packets of Iced VoVos and handed Carol boxes from the high shelves. But come on in. Margie Woo is rostered on today, and she’s expecting us.
I told her we’re looking into Jodie’s family history—a slight misdirection, to keep curious eyes at bay—but we don’t have to travel far up the family tree to get from Jodie to Carol, and from there? Well, hopefully we’ll find out.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Jodie. ‘Let’s do this.’
Turns out, Carol really had done the work for them when she’d set up the genealogy records for the local families.
Over the years, since she’d retired from the school and had time to devote to projects, she’d been involved in many of the Historical Society pursuits.
Margie, custodian of the collection for the day, had been so delighted to have a relative of Carol’s in that she’d wanted to talk them through every one of Carol’s endless contributions to Clarence history.
There’d been the work with the museum to provide story cards to go with exhibits, like the story card that went with an exhibit of an axe and rope, about Charles Kingsford Smith—before he became famous—saving a mail plane that had crash landed in a cow paddock.
The set up of a dedicated space for school kids and interested families to do research.
The sharing project with the Aboriginal Corporations to fill in gaps in local stories.
But Carol’s first project, when she’d been a lowly newbie volunteer historian, had been her own story.
‘Why don’t you start there, Jodie?’ Margie said.
Excellent idea. It took some deft words to convince Margie she had better things to do than help them, but finally Jodie, Will and Kirsty were on their own.
Carol’s story wasn’t on display, it was filed neatly away in the genealogy archives where local family histories were stored, both digitally and on paper, and it was this paper box that Kirsty found and brought over to Will and Jodie at the big table where Jodie had first sat with Carol the other week.
‘You guys go through this,’ Kirsty said, ‘while I read Joan’s article so I know what I’m looking for. ’
It didn’t take long to find the reference to the 2/9th Australian Infantry Battalion. ‘Kaboom,’ whispered Jodie, not wanting to have Margie scurrying over.
Will abandoned the land titles records from the 1940s he’d been reading and looked over her shoulder. She pointed to the annotation beneath a black and white photograph. ‘Same battalion as in Joan’s article.’
Names were listed, and they found Sergeant Sloane in the back row.
The soldier beside him, grinning in that heartbreaking way young men in old war photos do (so the person looking at the photo eighty years later can feel staked in the heart because they know the young man was one of the many that age would not weary), was listed as Sergeant Bruce Wallace.
‘This has to be the connection,’ Will said. ‘Carol’s father and Joan’s father in the same battalion?’
‘But her father’s friend was called Bluey.’