THIRTY-FOUR
Thirty-four
Lottie used the time over the next few days to clean out her house. She’d been eyeing her wardrobe space, frowning at the clothing squished in tightly, and realised there wasn’t a lot of room if Damian was going to be moving his stuff in. There was nothing else for it—it was time for a cull.
She’d only ever shared a house with flatmates while she was at university, and none of those times had required the sharing of wardrobe space. How did people actually do that? she wondered.
An hour later, she’d changed her mind. This is so satisfying , she thought after pulling out items and discarding them into piles of keep, give away and not-quite-sure-yet. The giveaway pile was growing at an alarming rate, closely followed by the not-quite-sure pile. She filled garbage bags with the donations and piled them at the door, feeling extremely accomplished by the end of the day. When she finally stood back to admire her handiwork, she called Damian in and waved her hand towards the wardrobe with a flourish.
‘What am I looking at?’ he asked, sounding a little bit confused.
‘I cleared out space in my wardrobe.’
‘Where?’
‘There!’ She pointed at the empty space on the far side.
‘I get the whole ten centimetres of hanging space?’ he asked, lifting an eyebrow.
‘There’s heaps of room.’ She rolled her eyes and let out a small huff. ‘It was the best I could do.’
‘It’s a good thing most of my clothes fold into a drawer then, I suppose,’ he said dryly.
She really had tried, but the not-quite-sure pile was proving a lot harder to sort through.
‘While you’ve been busy,’ he said, eyeing the garbage bags he had to step over as they left the bedroom and went into the kitchen, ‘Mike emailed to say he’d got some early findings from the coroner.’ He sat down and opened the email, and she read over his shoulder:
The body had been wrapped in a heavy woollen blanket, which was still partially preserved. That helped protect some of the other evidence that was found in the grave, namely strands of hair—interestingly, two distinct types of hair was found. One type was long and blonde, but there was a second set of strands collected from a small oval locket that appears to have been clutched in the woman’s hand upon burial and which, over time, as the body eroded, settled around where the hand bones of the skeleton were found. Samples of hair and bone are still undergoing testing and analysis in the lab. Whether this is significant to the investigation is yet to be seen.
‘Do you think this locket and the hair is going to tell us something?’ Lottie asked slowly.
‘I guess it depends on what that hair sample comes back with.’
‘It’s interesting that she was still wearing the necklace, but the locket wasn’t on it, it was in her hand. I mean, if it’s a locket with something in it, that sounds pretty significant. Maybe it broke off the chain?’
‘It’s a fairly solid piece, and that chain was pretty thin. I think it would have been damaged if a locket that size was ripped from it, or somehow came off.’
‘So what are you thinking?’
‘That it was put there after she passed. To be buried with her.’
‘By whom? Jack?’
‘Possibly. It’s the fact that it’s a locket with hair inside it, like a special keepsake. It feels like that’s something significant,’ Damian said. ‘My mum has a baby book for all of us and she kept all sorts of weird stuff in it that we still roll our eyes at—our first teeth, handprints and a small piece of our baby hair. She said they were important things she wanted to keep, to remember us as babies.’
‘You think it could be baby hair?’ Lottie asked. ‘Catherine’s baby?’
‘That’s what we’re hoping for. I mean, if this locket was somehow Catherine’s, it could be Catherine’s own hair, or maybe even a lock of Alexander’s hair. It wasn’t uncommon for people to keep locks of hair of their loved ones. But, again, the positioning of it in the grave makes it feel as though it was put in later, in which case, who would have taken the time to do that? I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe I’m just clutching at straws, but if they can find something significant about this hair sample, it might be another clue she’s left us.’
It did feel very much like this whole time Catherine had been leaving little breadcrumbs of information like a trail for them to follow. Maybe this was another one.
‘If it does come back as baby hair, that would mean that Catherine either had the baby with her or had the baby at some point after the robbery,’ Lottie said slowly. ‘But they didn’t find any baby bones.’
There were so many variables in this thing. If Catherine had the baby, maybe it was buried somewhere else; if she didn’t have the baby, when did she lose it? Was there even a baby? Maybe they’d gotten everything wrong in those letters and diaries and she wasn’t even pregnant.
It was all giving her a headache. ‘I keep thinking about the rose bush,’ Lottie said, changing tack. ‘Someone planted it at the gravesite—there’s no way it would have grown from a flower left on the grave. But it doesn’t feel like something Jack would have done, or had the time to think about doing. It’s the same with the locket. It’s almost like your mother with your hair. It feels kind of like something a woman might do for another woman.’ Or a mother might do for another mother. ‘Maybe the locket belonged to Kate.’
Damian shook his head. ‘Kate and her family, like most settlers out here at the time, probably didn’t have gold jewellery lying around.’
‘Most settlers also didn’t have Jack McNally as a brother,’ Lottie argued back. ‘Maybe Jack gave Kate the locket from a previous robbery as a gift. Maybe he gave it to Kate to put in with Catherine, out of respect?’
‘Both are things that would fit Jack’s profile. He did do random acts of kindness throughout his career,’ Damian said, nodding. ‘But it all comes back to the fact that inside that locket is a tiny lock of hair.’
‘But if it is Catherine’s baby’s hair, it only leads to more questions,’ Lottie said with a frown. ‘Like, what happened to the baby?’
In the following weeks, life got busy for everyone. Damian was constantly on the phone, dealing with the Catherine project. There were reports to type up and funding to secure for ongoing research—and his book to write, which was having constant updates as new evidence came to light—and handling quite a good deal of local media. The interest in what had been going on had never gone away, and the fact that much of it was still being kept quiet was only fuelling interest.
‘Well, I don’t know why they can’t just leave those people in peace,’ she overheard some people say around town and in the shop after news broke about the excavation. ‘It’s not right, digging up graves.’
Since Damian’s involvement in the project had come to light, Lottie had been constantly fielding curious questions about what was going on.
‘I think the point of this is that they don’t actually know how they died. If this is who they think it might be, she went missing and they’re trying to work out what happened to her,’ Lottie would point out calmly.
While Lottie wasn’t overly concerned about disturbing the dead, she did wonder about what would happen to Catherine after they’d finished with their examination. And she’d brought it up with Damian.
‘I’m thinking maybe the progress committee can organise some kind of funding or raise money to re-inter her next to Alexander,’ she said. ‘It has historical relevance to the town and I’m sure they’ll find a way to link all this to the festival next year, since it seems to be entwined with Jack’s story.’
‘If they can’t do something, I’m sure there’ll be a way to get it done. Although there might be some interest shown from descendants of Catherine’s family. They might want her returned to England.’
Lottie hadn’t thought about that. Catherine’s disappearance would have been a story passed down within her family for generations, much like Emeline’s story had been in her own. ‘How sad that she’d come all this way to be with Alexander, and even now can’t be buried with him.’
‘One step at a time,’ Damian said, planting a kiss on her forehead. She hadn’t realised, when she’d first heard about Catherine just how attached she would become to this woman.
She stared down now at the notes she’d been going through for her book over the last few days, pulling it out after a long break. Her mum had been right—it was time to get back into it. But as soon as she had sat down, she’d realised it was all still just as confusing as before. Ever since discovering the connection with Catherine and the ring, it had taken on a whole new bunch of chapters. What had started out as a chapter on the ring and the curse had developed into a whole saga involving Catherine, Alexander, Jack and Emeline. It changed everything and had left her with more than a little bit of a headache.
‘I’m really struggling to figure out how to move forward with my book,’ she said, closing the laptop and leaning against the kitchen counter as he turned back to his computer.
‘Oh?’ he asked, opening his emails.
‘I mean, it was just going to be a little book about the women in my family, but now there’s this whole other story. My original storyline isn’t even true anymore. The entire origin of the ring is nothing like the story we were told.’
‘That’s true.’ He nodded, squinting at the screen as he read through an email.
Lottie chewed on the inside of her lip as she watched him. ‘I’m actually a bit stuck.’
‘You’ll figure it out,’ he said reassuringly.
‘But that’s the problem! I don’t know how to figure it out. I don’t know where to go from here. Can you maybe take a look and give me a few ideas?’
‘Babe, I’d love to, but I’ve got a ton of work I need to get through and I’m still trying to write my own book. Why don’t you just go for a walk or put it aside for a bit? Something will come to you eventually.’
‘That’s it? That’s your advice?’
Her tone obviously managed to cut through his preoccupation, and he looked up from his screen. ‘What?’
‘I’m telling you that I’m really struggling and you’re too busy with your own stuff to really care. As usual.’
‘Of course I care,’ he said, frowning across at her. ‘But I’m also on a deadline and—you may have noticed—I’m having the same issue with my book. I can’t finish it until we get everything back from the coroner. I can only give you the same advice I’m giving myself.’
‘That something will come to you eventually?’ she replied with a slight snap in her tone.
‘It will. That’s part of the writing process. Ideas eventually come to you, usually when you least expect them.’ He turned away from the computer and reached for her hand. ‘I know I’ve been preoccupied, and I’m sorry. I promise, once all this is out of the way, I’ll give you and your book my complete attention. Okay?’
Well, now she felt like a whining child. She knew his work was important and why should she expect him to drop everything to help her with her book, when it was nothing more than a project and he was a successful author with his own book to write? Not to mention part of an important archaeological team working on one of the most exciting discoveries in years.
But it really was beginning to feel like she was constantly putting her own dreams on hold to support his. She was spending far less time at the shop than she normally would, closing a little earlier some days to come home and spend time with him, not to mention the days she actually shut the shop entirely to go to places with him.
Those were all her decisions, and she’d been happy to make them, but maybe it was time to prioritise herself for a while.