The Stolen, page 23
‘And Dawn is my … daughter?’ Andy looked mystified.
Mum’s lip quivered. ‘And my granddaughter?’
Then Nan. ‘And my great-granddaughter?’
And then it was tissues all round. Again.
CHAPTER 30
THE NIECE
It took hours to get to sleep that night. The wonder of a new brother filled my thoughts. Mum, Nan and I had interrogated Andy about his life and his upbringing, wanting to absorb every detail of those lost years into our collective story. Andy in turn was treated to a Pollard history. Nan got out the old photo album and regaled us with stories of Pollards past. The great-grandma who liked a whisky and once made two innocent fishermen leap over the side of a local bridge when she swerved too close to them in her car. The long line of farmers. The great-uncles lost to war. Andy soaked it all up, his eyes gleaming in the firelight.
And as I tossed and turned in bed that night, our discoveries made me wonder if Maddy might not see baby Ethan again until he was a grown man taking a DNA test by chance. The thought brought more tears to my eyes before an exhausted sleep finally claimed me.
The early-morning sun had a heat to it that promised a scorcher uncharacteristic of our otherwise mild summer. Waffles and I headed off for our run as the dawn chased the shadows away. I wanted to see Maddy first thing to check how she was going. It was hard to know which was worse—my mum being told her baby had died when he was really alive, or Maddy not knowing either way.
As I pounded the dry dirt road on the way back to the farmhouse. I wondered where the media would focus their attention today.
Mum and Nan were up and making breakfast by the time Waffles and I panted in the back door. Waffles scurried over to his big water bowl and slurped happily for a long while.
‘How are you both feeling?’ I asked as I carried plates to the table.
‘Mentally exhausted,’ said Mum.
‘Happy,’ said Nan. ‘I have a new grandson, and a new great-granddaughter who seemed lovely when we chatted the other night at the pizza restaurant.’
They’d both summed up the situation perfectly. On one side there were the complexities of rediscovering a lost connection and on the flip side was the simplicity of Andy and Dawn.
The previous night, everyone had agreed that I should be the one to speak to Dawn since I knew her better than they did. Every time I thought I’d had enough tough conversations to last a lifetime, another always landed on my to-do list.
Wheels was giving a press conference when I drove up to the police station. The usual media throng that had been there since Ethan went missing were all back. In fact, I thought their numbers might have been growing. In the media, these kinds of cases have a life of their own. I kept well out of their way and drove around the back of the police station. By the time I’d parked and come inside, the TV was on in the muster room and everyone was gathered around watching Wheels.
‘We expect to find the baby any day now,’ said Wheels, his chest puffed out.
‘How can he say that?’ Jane groaned.
‘He’s an idiot,’ said Wozza. ‘I hope Maddy isn’t watching.’
On the screen, a reporter asked, ‘Has the door-knock yielded any important information?’
‘We have several new and promising leads,’ said Wheels. ‘Of course, I can’t go into details.’ His voice was authoritative and the reporter nodded solemnly.
‘What leads?’ said Randall.
‘He’s making it up as he goes along,’ said Wozza in disgust.
I followed Woz into our office; neither of us could be bothered to stay and hear whatever else Wheels had to say.
Wozza grabbed his keys. ‘We’ve got to head over to see Maddy,’ he said. ‘That press conference will need damage control.’
We were driving out just as the media throng began dissipating.
‘Turn on the radio,’ said Wozza, speaking with none of his usual good-natured humour. ‘Three Triple P with that tosser Drew Nayle. We need to stay on top of this.’
Sure enough, Drew Nayle was in fine form, criticising the Deception Bay police, me in particular. People were phoning in with wild theories and Lincoln Steele came on, repeating Wheels’s promise that the baby would soon be found.
‘Jeez,’ said Wozza, driving a little faster than he should to get us to Maddy’s house as quickly as possible.
We beat the reporters there and Maddy swung open the door as soon as we parked in her driveway.
‘Have you found him?’ she cried. ‘I just saw the press conference on TV.’
I hurried over to her. ‘No,’ I said, and watched her deflate. ‘I’m so sorry he made it seem like we were close.’
Maddy burst into tears and we led her back inside before the press could show up and catch her on film.
‘I hope Wheels burns in hell for this,’ muttered Wozza, keeping his voice so quiet that only I could hear. The pressure was getting to all of us.
It was late afternoon before I even thought about Dawn. Wozza, Kasparas and I had spent the day following up people who’d attended the funeral to find out if they knew anything that could be helpful. There had been a couple of new leads, but mostly our efforts amounted to a big fat nothing. I needed to head to the pharmacy, but in all the crazy of the day, I realised I’d forgotten to ask Wozza about his visit there yesterday, when he’d gone to talk to Norma about our ‘four dead’ theories. Since it wasn’t part of the current investigation, I waited till Wozza and I had a moment alone.
‘How did you go yesterday with Norma?’ I asked him in a low voice after following him to the station kitchen when he got up to make tea.
‘She doesn’t remember seeing a spate of deaths like this before,’ he said. ‘She looked a little worried, I reckon. Told me to keep my eyes open.’
‘Why was she worried? Does she think there will be more deaths?’ I could hear the shock in my voice.
Woz thought for a moment. ‘She didn’t say those exact words … but I’m a world champion at jumping to conclusions.’
By the time I got to the pharmacy, both Dawn and Crystal were already finished for the day and Norma was locking up. It gave me the chance to talk to her about our ‘four dead’ theories. Wozza was right. She did look concerned, and I promised her I’d stay vigilant.
When I told her I needed to speak to Dawn she suggested I pop around to her house. ‘She’s in the little cottage next to Holy Trinity.’
It was easier to walk around the corner than drive so I set off on foot, wondering what on earth I was going to say. We had fitted Andy into the jigsaw puzzle of our family and now it was Dawn’s turn to fit the Pollards into her family. I didn’t know her well enough to guess how she’d take the news, but I bet she already knew part of it, from the way she’d reacted to Andy’s name at the birthday dinner.
The little cottage nestled next to the Holy Trinity church looked like something out of a picture book. Rose vines climbed across an arched arbour and fragrant jasmine perfumed the air. Someone in the family had a green thumb. I stepped up onto the neatly swept wooden verandah and knocked on the door. Footsteps sounded inside the house, then the door opened a crack. It was Dawn.
‘Antigone?’ she said in a low voice.
‘Hey, Dawn,’ I said. ‘I was hoping you might have a minute to talk.’
Dawn squeezed herself through the door and closed it behind her. ‘Now isn’t a good time,’ she said, looking pensive. ‘Mum’s having a bad day. I don’t want to disturb her.’
‘Oh, okay,’ I said, stepping back on the verandah to give her some space. ‘Can we talk out here?’
Dawn looked back at the closed door then at me, and suggested we take a walk. She seemed to relax after we’d put some distance between ourselves and the house. I wondered about her mother, the woman my brother had loved when he was eighteen and desperate for connection, then left without knowing she was pregnant.
‘Is everything okay?’ Dawn sounded nervous.
I mentally kicked myself. I’d been knocking on her door as an aunty, but of course she saw a cop. ‘Dawn, I wanted to talk to you about a personal matter.’
‘Yes?’
‘I noticed how you reacted the other night at the restaurant when you found out Andy’s surname.’ I stopped, hoping that would be enough to prompt her to tell me what she knew so far.
At first, she didn’t take the bait, and we kept walking in silence. Finally, though, she spoke. ‘Two years ago when I first started pharmacy studies, we talked about DNA in class. I took one of those online tests, and the name Andrew Gilbert came up as a match. My mum never told me much about my father. She was really young when she had me. I asked her about him and she told me he’d left town. And then the other night when you said his name, I figured he’d come back.’ Dawn looked shaken, hurt.
‘Dawn, he didn’t know about you,’ I said, stopping.
‘Have you spoken to him about me?’ she said, panicked. ‘You have no right!’
‘Dawn.’ I put a hand on her arm and felt her trembling. ‘It’s not what you think. Your name and his name both came up when I did a DNA test. I got the results yesterday.’
‘What?’ She stepped back from me. ‘What are you trying to say?’
I looked around. This was not going the way I’d hoped. Dawn looked spooked and I didn’t blame her. There was a park bench nearby, in the little community garden on the other side of Holy Trinity. ‘Come over here and let’s sit down.’
Once we were settled, I explained the whole story to Dawn. Her eyes widened in disbelief when I told her how my mum’s baby had been taken and raised by the doctor who had delivered him, when Mum thought the baby had died. And then I told her about how Andy had left town because that same doctor had been a father he wanted to escape from, and how he never knew Dawn’s mother was pregnant.
At the end of the story, Dawn sat back on the park bench and stared at the sky for a long while. Now that I knew who she was, I could see shadows of her father and echoes of Pollards in her face.
‘So your mum lost her baby. Kind of like how Maddy has lost Ethan,’ Dawn said.
I stared out at the street. ‘I can feel Maddy’s pain because I was feeling my mum’s pain at the same time. She never spoke about losing her baby, but I can see now that she’s been tortured by it all these years. I mean, you met my mum and nan the other night. They’re good people. They didn’t deserve this.’
Dawn nodded solemnly. ‘So you’re my aunty?’ she said finally, a smile creasing the corners of her mouth.
‘Welcome to the family,’ I said, giving her a hug. I was pleased when she hugged me back.
When she let me go, she told me she needed time. Unlike Andy who wanted to meet the family immediately, she didn’t.
‘It’s going to be a shock to my mum to hear about all of this, especially Andy being back. I didn’t tell her about meeting him the other night.’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘take as long as you need.’ I meant it, but I hoped she wouldn’t take too long.
I reluctantly left Dawn when she said she had to get back to her mother.
After swinging by the farm to collect Waffles, I had a maths tutoring date I had to honour. Waffles loved Crystal’s farm and had also formed a weird attachment to Crystal’s horse, Black Beauty. He’d run over and bark at her and she would neigh back at him, then the two would follow each other around the paddock. It was funny to watch.
After we finished maths and I was satisfied Crystal seemed to understand fractions a little better than she had when we’d started, Russell suggested a run. It was just what I needed. Running with Crystal and Russell and Waffles through the state forest just outside of town was a great way to take my mind off not finding the baby and getting a new brother. A cool change had come through and so it was the perfect evening for it. Russell had been nearly as gobsmacked as me when I told him that Andy was my long-lost brother. He hadn’t really known Andy’s dad but he had been really fond of Andy’s ‘mum’. ‘She was always kind to kids,’ he said. ‘You know, the type who always had a jug of ice-cold cordial and freshly baked cake ready when you went round.’
I ran at an easy pace with Russell and Crystal, not speaking, just thinking. Not all cases ended well and that had nothing to do with how hard we tried. Breathing in deeply, and out … in and out … running rhythmic footsteps … I used the almost hypnotic motion to clear thoughts of failure with the beginnings of acceptance that the baby might be gone. That Maddy might never know what had happened to him. Australian history was full of lost children. Artists like Frederick McCubbin had painted them back in the late 1800s. I remembered looking at the pictures in the National Gallery; it was unthinkably sad that children could disappear into the bush and never be found but it happened often enough for painters to immortalise the lost ones on canvas.
Crystal called out that she wanted to hide from Waffles again. It was a good excuse for Russell and me to stop for a breather. I jogged to a halt and called Waffles over to me. I went down on one knee and ruffled the fur around his neck. He licked my face.
‘Dude!’ I said, wiping my cheek.
Crystal took off into the bush. Soon the sounds of footfalls and snapping twigs faded.
‘How are you doing?’ Russell said. ‘This week can’t have been easy.’
‘It’s been a bit of a roller-coaster,’ I agreed.
He nodded.
I straightened and Waffles positioned himself against my leg. ‘And as for the missing baby, we will eventually exhaust all our avenues. And if we don’t find him …’
‘It seems inconceivable that a baby could just vanish into thin air,’ said Russell, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
Visions of Maddy and her visceral grief sprang to my mind. ‘That’s the thing. He didn’t vanish. Either Josh hid him somewhere or someone took him.’
Noises of Crystal had faded completely.
‘Find Crystal,’ I said to Waffles, taking my hand off his collar. He took off like a shot, weaving in and out between trees before disappearing. Moments later, Russell and I heard delighted squeals and a couple of playful barks. Soon, Crystal and Waffles burst from the bushes, Crystal pink-cheeked and Waffles with his tongue hanging out in a pant.
‘Wish he could find Maddy’s baby as easily as he finds me,’ said Crystal, patting Waffles on the head.
‘Me too,’ I said.
‘It’s all we talk about at work,’ she said. ‘And how weird was it when you saw Norma and Dawn on the CCTV right behind Josh? They were so upset about that.’
‘Well, they wouldn’t have realised at the time,’ I said. ‘They would have just had a normal lunchbreak and come back none the wiser.’
‘Only Norma came back after lunch,’ Crystal said, bending down to retie her shoelace.
‘What?’ I said, careful to keep my voice at a mixture of casual and disinterested.
‘Dawn left early on Monday to take her mum to an appointment. She didn’t come back.’
It took one phone call to Doc Caldicott’s medical practice and a quick conversation with my friend Gail on the front desk. She confirmed that Dawn’s mum, Kelly Denholm, did indeed have an afternoon appointment on the day Ethan went missing.
‘Just one more question, Gail,’ I said trying to sound casual. ‘Does Kelly’s daughter usually come with her to her appointments?’
‘She has a couple of times. MS is a funny thing. Sometimes you’re good and sometimes you’re not good. Dawn tends to come with her when she’s not good.’
‘Was she there at that last appointment?’
Gail clicked the keyboard. ‘I don’t think I was working that day. Let me check the roster.’ More clicks. ‘Yep, that’s right. I wasn’t on that afternoon so I’m not sure.’
I wondered why Dawn hadn’t mentioned leaving early. But then another thought occurred to me. Maybe she was trying to protect her mother, like she did earlier when I’d gone to her house. If Dawn did go with her mum to the medical appointment, maybe that meant she was really sick at the moment. I made a mental note to ask after Kelly. Now that we were almost family, maybe there was something I could do to help.
THERAPY JOURNAL, PRIVATE PROPERTY OF DAWN DENHOLM
Wednesday, 22 January
Sometimes you feel like Frankenstein’s monster. Like the monster, you have been created piece by piece, but your creators didn’t steal your body parts from cemeteries and stitch you together; they moulded you from experiences. Your heart, once open and generous, beating at a regular rate, shrinks and hardens, then pounds in your chest like a prisoner wanting to escape. Your mind, once free to think and learn, becomes obsessed with finding justice. Your immune system, once healthy, becomes infected with syphilis, which announces itself with a sore … down there. The sore makes it real because when they came for you, you shut down. Froze. And when it was over, your mind willed it away, willed that it never happened, and you relegated it to the stuff of nightmares.
But the sore says it did happen. The rash says it did happen. And then you are the monster under construction. And then you realise there is something else growing inside the monster.
You study and learn that the infected become infectors, which means you are tainted. You learn that women with untreated syphilis who become pregnant have a fifty per cent chance of losing the baby. And when that happens, when you do lose the baby one lonely night in the uni dorm, you are torn in equal measure by the greatest relief and the greatest sorrow. The miscarriage is blood rather than baby because you’re not that far along. No one knows, only your mum who promised to be there for you regardless of what happened. The doctor who tried to fix you tells you that you’ll be okay, but you know better. The damage has been done. Your construction is complete. You are infertile. Destined to be alone.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, you move through the world trying to find out who you are, where you fit. Like Frankenstein’s monster, you can’t partner, because a monster can only partner with another monster and your creator cannot build you a mate. And so, like Frankenstein’s monster, you lash out at your creator. Creators. The ones that made you who you are. They’re all over town. Down the pub. In the streets. Coming into the pharmacy for their antibiotics and their EpiPen replacements … right after you’ve sat through a class on the molecular basis of peanut allergies. Peanut proteins injected into capsules, taken with food. No one will ever know where those deadly traces came from.
