Chapter 19
Adrian Gorecki was right. The cafeteria at the service station between Hartwell and Lindsay was deserted at eight thirty in the morning.
Meg sat at a table with her back to the wall, sipping a flat white that was too weak and too milky.
It barely tasted like coffee. Every time a beep announced the arrival of a new customer, she would look towards the automatic doors, hoping to see the bespectacled face of the council planner.
Instead, it was a succession of tradesmen paying for petrol and takeaway sausage rolls.
She monitored the time on a clock behind the counter, wondering how long she should wait before accepting that Adrian wasn’t coming. She didn’t have a mobile number for him, so she couldn’t ring him. After twenty minutes, she sent him a message through LinkedIn.
Hi Adrian, I’m at the Roadhouse Cafe. Are you on your way?
Who knew if he would even get it.
A few minutes later, there was a ping from her phone, but it was an Instagram notification, not Adrian. Still, she felt a little flutter of adrenalin, remembering the message she’d sent to Dan James the day before.
The hopeful buzz subsided as she read his response.
I moved away from Hartwell after the protest. I got sick of having my tyres slashed. I have no interest in talking about it further. I’m at a place of peace in my life.
She tapped out a reply, an attempt to change his mind, but it felt futile. She added a second message: Would you be able to put me in touch with the other protester who was arrested?
The reply came quickly. He had a motorcycle accident which left him with a severe brain injury. He won’t be willing or able to talk to you.
The door beeped again and she looked up. Not Adrian. It was nine fifteen. He wasn’t coming. What a waste of time this was panning out to be. She was running out of leads.
Remembering Chrissy’s comments about the local councillors, she googled Lindsay council and studied their faces.
Seven out of nine were grey-haired men in suits and ties.
Pale, stale and male, Deb would say. The mayor had a moustache and a smirk that made him look more like a seventies porn star than a politician.
Still no Adrian. She rested her head in her hands, her elbows on the table. What now? She didn’t want to give up too easily, but she was starting to suspect there was no story here after all. She should probably go to the jail, see if she could get someone talking, but it felt pointless.
She exhaled loudly. She was rapidly losing interest in the story altogether.
Nothing she’d found so far seemed particularly newsworthy.
There were rich arseholes all over the country bending the rules to increase their already obscene fortunes and the Ashworths didn’t seem any different.
The only story here seemed to be the one about Jenny and her past.
A pink-haired waitress reached for her cup and saucer. ‘Can I get you anything else?’
‘No, thanks.’
Meg put her laptop back in her bag. It was time to talk to Chrissy again.
‘She’s not working till later today,’ a bearded man behind the café counter said when Meg asked for Chrissy. ‘What’s your name? I’ll tell her you stopped by.’
‘No worries,’ Meg said. ‘Thanks anyway.’
She got back in the car and checked Facebook, searching for clues to Chrissy’s address.
A few minutes later, she found an old photo of Georgie and an older girl posing on bikes in front of a neat, bland, beige-brick house.
Meg could see a house number on the front fence behind them.
She tapped to enlarge the photo, squinting at the blurry number.
Thirty … seven? Yes, thirty-seven. How many streets were there in this town, she wondered, turning the key in the ignition.
She started on the south side of town, where the houses didn’t look like the ones in the glossy real estate magazine in the Saturday papers.
Ten minutes and fourteen streets later, there it was in real life.
Thirty-seven Barton Drive. It was just as dull and nondescript as it was in the photo, but now the paint was peeling above the front door and the gate hung crooked on its hinges.
It squealed as Meg pushed it open. Her heartbeat picked up as she reached the front door, which was propped open behind a flyscreen door. The lounge room beyond was dark and still, except for a fan whirring overhead. Meg pressed the doorbell, but didn’t hear it ring.
While she waited, she pulled up a photo of Jenny, which she’d taken on her mother’s fiftieth birthday.
Jenny hated having her picture taken. She usually managed to turn away or shield herself with a hand, but that day her guard was down and Meg had been able to capture her, long hair flowing over her shoulders, bewitching eyes sparkling behind tortoiseshell frames.
It was just over a year ago, but already she looked different.
Less like herself than the disease that was gradually taking her.
Meg looked back into the darkness behind the door, straining to hear some sign of life from inside the house. Nothing. She knocked on the screen door, which made a tinny rattle.
‘Chrissy!’ a man’s voice called from somewhere inside. ‘There’s someone at the door!’
There were footsteps, then Chrissy appeared from a back room. She wore a shapeless cotton dress, her dark hair bundled up on her head. She looked at Meg from behind the screen, then she opened it and exhaled loudly.
‘You again.’
‘Sorry.’ Meg swallowed. ‘I hope you don’t mind me coming here.’
Chrissy said nothing, so Meg went on.
‘I just wondered if you recognise this woman.’ She held out the phone.
Chrissy glanced at it quickly, then shook her head. ‘No. Why?
Should I?’
Meg took a deep breath. ‘Do you have a sister?’
‘I did.’
Meg’s heart raced. ‘Would you mind if I asked … what happened to her?’
Chrissy frowned. Meg could almost see her thinking.
‘Please?’ she said, her voice cracking slightly.
‘She got involved with a cult and cut off all contact with us.’ Chrissy’s voice was sharp. ‘Then she died suddenly, a few years after she left.’
Meg’s mind raced. ‘This is my mother.’ She gestured towards the photo. ‘I think she might be your sister.’
A flash of emotion crossed Chrissy’s face, then her expression hardened. ‘Why?’ Her tone was wary now.
‘Because … Because she’s never told me anything about her past, or her family, until now. She has dementia and she’s started to say things, about Hartwell and about … Tina.’
There was a twitch of recognition in Chrissy’s eyes.
Meg held out the phone. ‘Do you want to have another look?’ she asked, her voice soft, trying not to startle the woman. She sensed that if she made one wrong move, the conversation would be over, like what had happened at the pub.
Chrissy didn’t move to take the phone. Her dark eyes searched Meg’s face as though she was looking for something familiar.
She put a hand to her head, pushing her hair back off her glistening forehead, then, exhaling heavily, took the phone and stared at the image for a long time.
Meg felt hope fading. If only she had an older photo, one which might more closely resemble Jenny as she was when Chrissy knew her. If she knew her.
‘Could it be her?’ Meg whispered.
Chrissy shook her head very slowly. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘But it could be?’
Chrissy gave a slight shrug. ‘I haven’t seen her since the day before my seventeenth birthday,’ she said, dark eyes flashing. It still hurt.
‘How do you know that she joined a cult?’ Meg’s voice was gentle.
‘She was seeing this guy who was a bit older. Late twenties, maybe? I don’t know. He got her involved with a weird church up in Lindsay. They were supposed to recruit people, so she took me to one of the meetings.’
‘What did they do there?’
‘Chanting, babbling, weird nonsense words, which they believed was God speaking through them.’ Chrissy snorted. ‘It was really wacko. Even at sixteen I could see that.’ She looked out at a passing car and waved to the driver.
‘What happened next?’
‘She became really distant.’ Chrissy shrugged.
‘I can’t remember it that clearly, to be honest. It was a long time ago.
I was in year eleven, I was busy with friends, boys, you know.
She was twenty-one by then. She was studying nursing up in Lindsay, going to the cult meetings, spending all her spare time working or with her boyfriend. Then one day, she left.’
‘She didn’t tell you where she was going? She didn’t say goodbye?’
Chrissy shook her head. ‘About a month later, we got a letter from her saying that she wasn’t coming back, cutting off all contact.
’ She paused for a long time. When she spoke again there was a harder edge in her voice.
‘It destroyed my parents, especially my mum. It was as though I’d lost her too after that. ’
‘I’m sorry,’ Meg said. It felt inadequate. How could someone do that to their family? Cause them so much pain? She wanted to say something more, something which would capture the enormity of Chrissy’s loss, but she couldn’t find the words.
They stood, silent, as a hot breeze rustled the leaves in a nearby gum tree.
‘I’m so sorry to ask, but how do you know she—’ Meg faltered. It felt like she was pressing a bruise, but she had to know. ‘How do you know she died?’
‘A couple of years later, we were visited by someone from the church. A man. It was a brain aneurysm. She was twenty-three.’
Meg’s thoughts raced as she tried to reconcile Chrissy’s story with what she knew about her mother. Did the timing work? Without pressing for more details, she couldn’t be sure, but maybe it did. Meg was twenty-nine. She could have been born after Chrissy’s sister left Hartwell.
‘Did this man, the one who visited, did he say anything about her having a daughter?’
‘No, he just told us about the aneurysm. They’d already had a funeral by then. He just gave us a box of some of her things.’
‘He did? Where would that box be now?’
‘Probably somewhere in my garage. That’s where we put everything after Mum and Dad sold up a few months back.’
Meg wanted to ask if she could look through the box, but she could sense Chrissy putting her walls up again. ‘I really appreciate you talking to me about this. I know it must be difficult.’
‘All this happened a really long time ago. It’s not something I think about much these days.’
Meg looked back at the photo. ‘Do you think there’s any chance this could be her? Any chance at all? The timing would work, I think.’
Chrissy looked at the photo again. ‘No,’ she said, more certainty in her voice now. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Chrissy?’ the man’s voice called out.
‘Just a sec!’ She turned back to Meg. ‘I’ve gotta go. Good luck. I hope you find the answers you’re looking for.’
She went to shut the screen door.
‘Chrissy? Can I ask you one last question?’
She gave her a weary smile. ‘Sure.’
‘What was your sister’s name?’
‘Anna.’ Her voice was little more than a whisper. ‘I called her Annie.’ She held Meg’s gaze for a long time before she closed the door.
Meg stood on the doorstep, her mind racing. Anna? Anna was her own middle name. Megan Anna Hunter.