Chapter 32 LOTTIE
LOTTIE
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
The blackness is almost complete, clouds shrouding the earlier hint of moonlight.
As I walk towards the bookshop there is the rustle and scurry of a possum up a tree, the distant hum of the highway and the high-pitched sounds of night insects.
My phone torch is a feeble shimmer into the pre-dawn darkness.
I couldn’t sleep, and a sense of disquiet has settled through me since we found the newspaper articles.
A feeling that the past needs to be shaken free. Sooner rather than later.
Streetlights in our village are sparse and the towering cypress hedges cast walls of shadows onto the already black footpaths.
At the granary door, I fiddle with Phyllida’s shop keys, stabbing in near blindness at the lock.
Inside, I lock the door behind me and step carefully, with only the light of my phone until I reach the lights further along the wall.
I breathe deeply to keep my nerves in check.
It’s not as if I’m breaking in. I’m in charge, at least until Phyllida gets better.
I’m supposed to be here. There is a burgeoning sense of something opening up inside me; a sense of arrival.
I can no longer rely on my mother. She is doing her best, sorting through her own problems in therapy, but I need to create some distance between us until I work out my feelings about all this.
And now the tables have turned, I need to provide the support for Phyllida that she’s always provided for me.
What must she have gone through if she really is Dorothea Stewart?
What could cause her to kill someone? Could she really have taken a baby from that house and raised him as her son?
It had all felt impenetrably difficult to comprehend, and then it occurred to me yesterday, there must be something in the locked room below the shop.
Is that why Phyllida has never let me down there?
I picture her face. Her kind, calm way of distracting me from things she does not wish to discuss.
She has done this for my whole life. But I’m not a child anymore, and if she needs my help, this feels like the obvious next step.
I stand at the trapdoor to the cellar, examining the padlock, then remove the bolt-cutters from my bag.
Last night I’d asked the guy at the hardware shop for some big-arse metal snippers that would break the padlock into a secret underground cellar, and he had looked at me as if I might be the most incompetent serial killer he’d ever met.
He’d then mansplained the history of bolt-cutters and their limitations unless the padlock was bad quality, in which case I could get lucky.
This padlock is small, and as I fit the blades and push, there is a satisfying thwunk as the metal breaks.
My mouth is dry as I step into the blackness of the cellar, heart thumping wildly in my chest. I feel around for a light switch.
Nothing. I head back to the kitchenette and grab Phyllida’s torch from beneath the sink.
The stairs are narrow and I have to step carefully.
The roof is barely six feet high and the temperature has dropped markedly.
I edge forward, feeling around, until I eventually find a light switch.
A bulb flares from across the room. Cobwebs hang in artistic patterns across the faces of the sandstone blocks.
Along one wall are four clear plastic tubs that appear to hold paperwork.
I open one. It is full of sealed letters.
I pick up a handful and look through them.
All of the envelopes are pristine. They are sealed, stamped and addressed but have never been postmarked.
It seems they were never sent. Each letter is addressed to the same person.
Francis Fitzhenry.