Chapter 27
Meg kicked open the door of her room, then locked it behind her and slumped onto the bed.
The ceiling spun above her, the pendant light moving in a slow circle.
She blinked a few times, then sat up, trying to calculate how many drinks she’d had.
She’d stayed longer than she intended, watching Isobel Ashworth and Hugh Thorburn from a distance, wondering if she knew how he flirted with eighteen-year-old barmaids.
She woke with a start sometime later to a moaning sound coming from the room next door. Then another. Was that …? Oh, no. A rhythmic banging started as something—a bed?—hit the shared wall. A second voice joined in, the pace speeding up, the banging louder now. Then one last moan, longer.
After a moment of silence there was a bang and some shuffling sounds, then a voice, sharp-edged. Meg froze, sensing conflict. She strained to hear, but couldn’t make out the words.
Her heart pounded. What should she do? Lie still.
That’s what her instincts said. The voices rose again.
She could hear her own breathing, shallow and fast. But what if someone was in trouble?
Could she really do nothing? She covered her face with her hands, took a steadying breath.
She could walk past—pretend she was going to the bathroom—just to check everything was okay.
She opened the door quietly and slipped into the hall, but all she could hear were muffled voices, quieter now.
She kept walking to the bathroom. Just as she was about to step back into the hallway to return to her room, she heard voices again and looked up to see Georgie standing at the door, talking to someone inside the room, out of sight.
Meg’s heart pounded. She quickly retreated into the bathroom again, behind the wall, listening.
There was a man’s voice, but she couldn’t make out the words.
After a moment, the door closed with a thud and Georgie hurried up the hall.
Meg held her breath as she passed just inches away and disappeared down the stairs.
Meg exhaled, waited for her heart rate to settle, before she looked out into the hallway again. It was quiet. She slipped out of the bathroom and tiptoed up the corridor to her room, locking the door behind her.
There was a roar as Georgie heaved up the rusty garage door. Meg stood by her side, surveying the sight in front of them. She’d been expecting a car, or at least a space where one would fit. Maybe some shelves and a few bikes.
Not this garage. The whole space was packed full. From where she stood, she could see an old treadmill, a couple of fishing rods, at least five rusty bikes and countless cardboard boxes.
‘Oh my God,’ Meg whispered, under her breath.
‘It’s actually not as bad as it looks,’ Georgie said.
‘All the packing boxes came from Nan and Pop’s place.
Anna’s box is probably in there somewhere.
’ She squeezed her way to a tallboy in the back corner and started rummaging through a drawer.
She pulled out a Stanley knife and held it up.
‘I’ll slice ’em, you check ’em.’ She looked at the time on her phone.
‘I’ve got an hour, then I’ve got some work to do. ’
‘At the pub?’ Meg asked.
‘Nah, my other job,’ she said, yawning. She pierced the tape on the top of a box.
Meg nodded, thinking about Georgie’s OnlyFans profile. How much was she making? At five bucks a month, it couldn’t be much.
Her mind flicked back to the night before, when she’d watched Georgie creep down the hallway.
She’d been having sex with whoever was staying in that room.
Was it recreational? Or another income stream?
Hugh Thorburn had been talking to Sue at the bar that morning, around nine o’clock, when Meg was on her way out.
Was it him in that room? The way he’d been flirting with Georgie the night before, she wouldn’t put it past him.
Meg sighed, deciding it was none of her business, and flipped open the top of the closest box, dust tickling her nose. She sneezed, then rummaged through the contents. Cookbooks, mostly. She moved on to the next one. Quilting materials.
Once Georgie had opened all the boxes, she started checking them too.
After an hour, they’d found nothing.
Georgie sat down on one of the smaller boxes. ‘Looks like it’s not here.’
‘Thanks, anyway.’ Meg reached for her bag and handed Georgie four fifties. Georgie tucked the notes into her bra top. What a waste of money.
‘Can I ask you for a favour?’ Meg said.
‘Another favour, you mean.’
Meg bit her tongue, thinking about the two hundred bucks she’d just parted with. Georgie was hardly doing this out of the goodness of her heart. ‘Would you do a DNA test? It’s really easy, just spitting into a tube. It’ll confirm one way or another if Anna is my mother.’
‘Ah, I dunno,’ Georgie said, hesitant. ‘Mum doesn’t seem too keen on all this Anna stuff.’
‘I’d pay you, obviously.’
‘How much?’
‘Fifty bucks?’
‘A hundred.’
‘Done.’
Georgie stood up. ‘Alright, I’ve gotta—’ She stopped abruptly, frowning. ‘I wonder what that is.’
Meg followed her gaze to an archive box that sat high up on the shelves on the other side of the garage.
It was dark brown cardboard with a wood-grain print and the lid was torn at one corner.
Someone had reinforced the bottom with masking tape that came halfway up the sides of the box.
As they got closer, they could see that someone had written Anna Mitchell on the side in texta, barely legible on the dark background.
‘How the hell are we going to reach it?’ Georgie said.
Meg pulled on the metal shelving to see if it was secured to the wall. It seemed solid enough. She stepped up onto the first shelf.
‘Spot me from behind, in case I fall.’
She managed to get up to the third shelf. Her fingertips brushed the box, but how was she going to grab hold of it without letting go? She jumped back down.
‘I’ll go get a stool from inside,’ Georgie said.
A few minutes later, she reappeared holding a kitchen stool. ‘Dad asked me what I was doing. I told him I was cleaning out the garage.’ She snorted. ‘As if.’
Meg climbed onto the stool and reached for the box. It felt fragile in her hands, as though the bottom might collapse. She passed it down to Georgie, who put it on the floor. She waited until Meg had her feet back on the ground before she took off the lid.
At first glance, it didn’t look too different from Georgie’s grandparents’ belongings. Random objects. Nothing special. Meg picked up a hairbrush, turning it over in her hand.
Georgie reached for a woollen jumper, embroidered with tiny roses, and held it up, modelling it. ‘Mmm, nice,’ she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
It wouldn’t have been fashionable even thirty years ago.
Meg couldn’t imagine her mother wearing it.
Underneath where the jumper sat there was a notebook with a gold embossed cover.
Meg’s heart fluttered. A diary? She opened it and read the name written inside the cover.
Anna Elizabeth Mitchell. The writer had a heavy hand so that the letters made indentations in the page.
Meg ran a finger gently over the words as though it was Braille. She could feel Georgie watching her.
‘Does it look like your mum’s writing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Meg said. ‘Kind of.’
She turned the page. A quote from Tolstoy. Everyone thinks of changing the world. No one thinks of changing himself. Anna had written ‘or herself’ in brackets on the next line.
She turned the page again.
There was fog on the lake this morning. Sunlight beamed through the branches of the red gums and it was so beautiful I felt like I might cry. I took a photo of it in my mind so that I’ll remember it forever. There were no quotation marks, no name. Anna’s own words, Meg supposed.
She flicked ahead, skimming the next few pages, then stopped abruptly when she saw words she recognised.
A wave of emotion swelled in Meg’s chest as she heard Stevie Nick’s soulful voice singing ‘Landslide’. She knew it well. Sometimes, Jenny would play it on repeat as silent tears ran over her cheeks.
‘Why do you listen to it, if it makes you so sad?’ Meg had asked her once.
‘Not all pain is bad pain,’ Jenny had said, a faraway look in her eyes. Meg had added the moment to the list of things she didn’t understand about her mother.
Her thoughts raced as she ran her finger over the lyrics. What did this mean? Could it be a coincidence? What were the chances?
Georgie had stopped checking boxes. ‘What is it? Did you find something?’
‘This …’ Meg said. ‘These words, they’re lyrics from “Landslide”. Fleetwood Mac. You know it?’
‘Yeah, my mum loves it.’
‘She does?’
Georgie nodded.
‘So does mine,’ Meg whispered.
‘You think …’
‘I don’t know.’ Meg shrugged, struggling to judge where coincidence ended and truth began. ‘It doesn’t prove anything.’
She flipped the page, but there was nothing else.
‘That’s pretty.’ Georgie reached for something Meg couldn’t see. She held up a gold locket on a fine chain. She studied the engraving. ‘Scales. That’s the symbol for Libra, I think?’
‘Don’t know.’ Meg wasn’t into star signs. ‘Is there anything inside?’
Georgie opened it, but it was empty. ‘Sorry.’ Her phone beeped. She passed the locket to Meg and reached for the phone. ‘I really do have to go.’
‘Do you mind if I stay a bit longer?’ Meg asked. ‘I just want to look through the rest of this.’
‘Sure.’ Georgie smiled. ‘Pull the door down when you go. Dad will just think it’s me.’
‘What if he comes out?’
‘He won’t come out. Sorry it wasn’t …’ Georgie shrugged.
Better? Useful? The answer? It all hung in the air between them.
‘Thanks.’ She was a sweet girl. Even if she was an extortionist.
Once Georgie was gone, Meg lay the locket flat on her palm and studied it.
The scales of justice were embossed on the yellow gold.
She ran her finger over them. Libra. What month was Libra?
Jenny’s birthday was in June, June seventeenth, although it struck her now that if Jenny was once Anna, even the date of her birthday was probably a lie.
Meg shook her head. Even the little she knew about her mother was likely to be wrong.
But this, this locket, was real. Was it Jenny’s once?
On an impulse, she put the chain around her neck, fumbling with the delicate clasp a few times before she fastened it.
Once she’d done it, she placed a flat hand on her décolletage, pressing the locket to her skin, waiting to feel something.
Some sense of clarity or connection, as though, if it had belonged to her mother, she should feel it.
But there was nothing. It just felt cold on her skin.
She looked into the box again. At first glance she thought it was empty, but something caught her eye. A pen, lying against the side of the box where the cardboard folded. She reached for it. There was something written on it in an old-fashioned, curly script.
The Ashworth Park Hotel.
Heart racing, Meg slipped it into her pocket, then flicked back through the notebook to check she hadn’t missed anything. She hadn’t. She took a photo of each page of the notebook. Once she’d put everything back, she climbed up and placed it on the highest shelf, exactly where it was before.
She thought she heard something then, a call from inside the house perhaps, but she wasn’t sure. After a moment it came again, louder.
‘Georgie!’
Meg grabbed her bag and rushed out, heaving the heavy door down behind her.
She was heading up Barton Drive when Pete rang.
‘The same buyer’s agent has bought six houses on that street in the last twelve months,’ he said, without bothering with a greeting, ‘but he’s signed an NDA so he won’t talk. There’s definitely something going on there, and all my spidey senses say the Ashworths are involved.’
‘Interesting,’ Meg said, her mind still on the pen.
‘I’ll keep digging,’ Pete said. ‘See what you can find out down there.’
A few minutes later, she reached Chrissy’s café. The bells tinkled as she entered, announcing her arrival. Chrissy looked over from where she stood taking an order from a young family. She narrowed her eyes and picked up the menus, ignoring Meg as she walked to the counter.
‘Sorry to bother you again.’ Meg felt like a broken record. ‘I just have one last question.’
‘I really don’t want to talk about this again.’
‘You said Anna was working while she studied nursing,’ Meg said. ‘Was she working for the Ashworths?’
She saw a flicker of something on Chrissy’s face. ‘She was, wasn’t she? She worked at the hotel.’
Chrissy shook her head. ‘Not at the hotel. She was working as a baby nurse at their home.’
Meg’s mind raced. ‘When Isobel was a baby?’
Chrissy nodded. ‘Heather was sick. Anna was employed to look after the baby overnight.’
There was a tinkle from the door and Chrissy smiled at a customer.
‘She was living with them?’ Meg asked.
‘She spent most nights there, if that’s what you mean.’ Chrissy reached for a menu. ‘I’m not sure how relevant this is, though. I told you about the boyfriend.’
‘I guess so,’ Meg said. ‘Thanks.’
She sat in her car outside the café, pen in hand, studying the ornate writing.
The Ashworth Park Hotel.
If Jenny was the riddle, she was starting to suspect the Ashworths had something to do with the answer.