To the Sea Read online

  ‘Unfortunately I’m not, Sergeant. I’m a realist.’

  They were quiet as they stood under the dripping trees, letting their thoughts slowly return to the case.

  ‘Do you want me to follow those leads up with the principal now?’

  ‘No, I want you with me when I interview the strange Mrs Kennett. Call the principal back later today. You and Paul can follow up the boys she gives you. What did you say the principal’s name was?’

  ‘Canning, Annette Canning.’

  ‘Miss Canning. You’re kidding!’ said Tony laughing. ‘She was the principal there when I was at school. Don’t worry, she would’ve seen everything that happened at the formal. She once found me where I shouldn’t have been at a school social and she made damn sure Clare Medding and I didn’t get another minute alone for the rest of the night. I will leave Miss Canning to you, Narelle.’

  God, it was a small town.

  ‘More police today?’ asked Sadie as Tony, with Ben walking beside him, and Narelle came around the side of the house and onto the wide front verandah facing the ocean. The water was grey and choppy. There were only two small sailboats out in the channel. The weather looked like it could turn either way so the local fishermen were probably wise to wait and see. A nasty southerly change when you were too far out was hardly worth a few flathead.

  ‘You don’t think Zoe has drowned, do you?’ she continued.

  ‘As I said last night, I don’t know where Zoe is but we are looking for her,’ Tony replied.

  ‘All these police. Two in full crime scene investigation gear. A sniffer dog. You obviously have some ideas and I think we can all assume your ideas are not very nice.’

  ‘It’s never very nice when young girls go missing,’ said Tony as he watched Sadie grip the verandah rail. Her knuckles were white. He remembered her doing the same thing in this very spot yesterday. Her face was drawn and she looked older than she had then.

  ‘Just tell me,’ said Sadie. ‘What do you think has happened to Zoe? What are you all looking for?’

  ‘We are looking for Zoe,’ said Tony. He could see Col down on the jetty and one of the forensics in their blue coveralls. Col was in full SOCO kit. Carl and a couple of the teenage girls were down there too.

  ‘If Zoe didn’t drown, and we’re not ruling that out, she’s still missing. She may have run away or been abducted. She may have gone for a walk and be lying injured somewhere. She may have come to harm at the hands of a person or persons unknown. I’m sure you and your family have thought all these things too.’ He turned to look at Sadie. She was looking at the activity down on the jetty too and she had tears running down her face.

  ‘How could this happen to Zoe? To us?’ Her voice was breaking up as she tried to speak. ‘How can any of those things happen on a sunny evening at our own house? Oh God.’ Sadie began to cry, hard. Cecile came out onto the verandah.

  ‘Has something happened?’ she asked fearfully. ‘Have you found Zoe?’

  ‘No,’ said Tony. ‘I was simply telling your sister of some of the possibilities we are investigating. It’s a lot to take in.’

  ‘Zoe must have drowned,’ said Cecile firmly. ‘The idea of anything else happening to her is absurd.’

  ‘More absurd than her drowning in a shallow bay in broad daylight not fifty metres from her entire family?’ asked Tony.

  Cecile bit her lip.

  ‘We are considering everything,’ said Narelle.

  ‘If Zoe went into the water, as you all are saying she did, then she has certainly drowned,’ said Tony. ‘And the marines will find her. My job is to ensure we explore every other possibility.’

  Cecile would not look at him.

  ‘I would like to speak to your mother.’

  ‘Our mother will not be able to help you, Detective,’ said Cecile.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Tony, quietly but firmly, ‘unless she is medically incapacitated, I need to meet with her. She is the only witness we have not spoken to.’

  Sadie and Cecile looked at each other. It was a nervous look.

  ‘Is your mother unwell?’

  Neither woman responded.

  ‘You’re a doctor, as is your father,’ said Tony, directly addressing Cecile, ‘and I’ll be guided by your professional opinion. Is your mother too unwell to meet with DS Clarke and myself?’

  ‘I’m not my mother’s doctor,’ snapped Cecile. ‘My mother is not unwell. She is fragile.’

  ‘My wife will meet with you now, Detective,’ said John Kennett from behind them. Tony didn’t know how long he’d been standing there in the shadow of the deep verandah or how much he had heard. ‘Please come upstairs when you are ready.’

  Cecile wiped away a lone tear and folded her arms. She stood looking at Tony for a moment and then she walked off the verandah and across the lawn towards the small beach.

  Tony knew she was angry, but he had to keep moving forward with this investigation. The family would have to fall in behind him or fall away.

  ‘If my parents need me, just let them know I’m in the library,’ Sadie said. ‘That’s where your people are fingerprinting everyone. Max and I will be in there with the children.’ She paused and looked Tony in the eye. She went on more quietly than before, ‘Please do not tell my mother what you think might have happened to Zoe. She won’t be able to cope. Mum’s grip on reality is fragile at the best of times. We’ve lost our sister. We cannot lose our mother too. We cannot take any more.’

  She walked into the house, up the few stairs on the far side of the lounge room and out of sight.

  Tony said nothing but he knew that this family, like every family, could take more. A lot more. This was a long way from over.

  Narelle looked at him.

  Tony wondered how his mother would cope with a conversation such as he was about to have with Zoe’s mother. How would Lucia Vincent bear the news that her last-born child was missing, presumed dead? However strange Eva Kennett might be under normal circumstances, Tony wouldn’t judge her by his meeting with her today. Her baby was gone. That would break you every time.

  Eva

  WHEN SHE WAS A SMALL CHILD, CHRISTMAS AT ROSETTA WAS THE TIME of year Eva loved best. Childhood Christmases and the long summer months at Rosetta were the times against which Eva would measure life’s peace and joy for the rest of her life. Now she was old and the summers were a busier, shorter time, overrun with people and noise. Time passed differently as an adult, she had noticed. But she would never be too old to love Rosetta.

  Rosetta was a mix of the homes of so many of the women who had lived within its protective walls. It held memories of all the old places – vague whispers of Connaught, Connemara, the Crimea, hunting lodges of the Scottish Highlands, old sailing boats. No definitive style. More the shadow of a curved beam as the sun filtered across an upstairs hallway, a whiff of sandalwood as a book slid across the library desk, stonework chimneys of oddly exquisite craftsmanship, sandstone and golden Huon floors from ancient quarries and forests.

  Rosetta was from somewhere else. Not an Australian house and yet it was at home here.

  Eva’s life had begun at Rosetta. She was born in the bedroom which was now Zoe’s. The story of her birth was one of Eva’s favourites and her mother and grandmother had told it to her many times. Even when Branna was sick and hardly seemed to know who Eva was, she would tell Eva this story. The story of how Eva was born on a cool afternoon when the mutton birds were swarming and the seals had come into shore. On that day, Branna stood watching the screeching mutton birds blacken the sky as they worked the little bay for fish. The sea boiled as the thrashing fish were driven into the shallow bottleneck of Driving Sound from where there was no escape from the beaks of the birds and the sharp teeth of the waiting seals. By evening, hundreds of fish lay dead or flapping away the last of their short lives on the shore as the seals and birds turned their backs on the rotting feast and returned to sea.

  On that day all those years ago, when Branna wa
s still happy, she had stood at the open bedroom window in a pretty nightdress embroidered by her mother, Getha, enjoying the cool sea wind, letting her body rest between the shuddering spasms of Eva coming closer and closer. Only Getha was with her. Don was away in the Branna Bheith somewhere off the continental shelf in the deep blue south with the rest of his fleet. He had been gone for three days and would not be back for another four. Eva’s grandfather, Tom, was downstairs leaving the women to their business. Eva had started her journey into this world weeks before she was expected and Branna had realised too late what was happening. Her contractions were too strong and Tom would not risk a day’s sail on a choppy sea. Eva was to be born at Rosetta.

  Branna wasn’t scared. She was ready. She and Don wanted a baby. Don would be so surprised when he got back. On that cool afternoon, as Branna’s huge belly stretched and shuddered with one rolling contraction after another, she knew who this baby was.

  On the rocks below a mother seal was sitting high on the shore at the bottom of the dunes and with her was a small white baby seal born this season, maybe only hours or days ago. A large male was lying on the sand watching the mutton birds, occasionally turning his head to keep a protective eye on his female and new pup. Branna was looking at this little family when the mother seal looked up at her with her big black eyes. All female seals are pretty and coquettish. Branna watched the mother seal hold her baby under her large flipper and nuzzle it. From the bedroom window, it looked like the mother seal was cradling her baby in her flippers and suckling it. She smiled up at Branna, as seals do, and Branna smiled back.

  Branna’s whole body was shaken by another mighty contraction which lowered her to her knees. Getha told her the baby was coming and helped Branna on to the bed. One minute later, Eva was born. Branna held her in her arms and nuzzled the top of her little daughter’s blonde head. Through the open window, mother and daughter heard the mother seal singing loudly on the wind, the way they sometimes do.

  ‘And who is this?’ asked Getha.

  ‘This is Aoife.’

  Grandma frowned. Branna was breaking a tradition of generations.

  The two women looked at the pretty pink baby girl with her damp blonde hair sticking up on her tiny head. Getha accepted Branna’s decision.

  Getha quietly began the remembrance of the long line of names which had led up to this moment. She held the newborn Aoife and slowly spoke her name. She spoke all the names. Before Aoife came Branna, and then her own name, Getha and her mother, Meara, unhappy Ceasg and way back to the strong-willed Dorcha who, with her husband Douglas, had crossed the oceans in a creaking wooden ship to this southerly place and settled here. She did not stop with Dorcha, but told of Ciara and Malise, those remarkable women who made their fortune in the east and passed it down through the generations to them all. She remembered the women all the way back to the ancient names of Keera, Deidra and Wynne and finally to the black lonely shores of South Mayo and the oldest name of all, Ornice. The names trilled slowly into the room on the cold late afternoon wind. No other words were spoken. When Getha had finished, Aoife knew who she was.

  When Don came home, he was surprised that the baby hadn’t waited for him. He loved his new daughter and he loved his young wife for bringing her to him. He tried to convince Branna to give the baby a different name, a name not so difficult. He suggested Daphne, after his mother, or Elsie, his latest favourite. He told her that a little girl in Tasmania would have a hard life with a name no one could pronounce or spell. But Branna said that she could not change it. It was the baby’s name. She had not chosen it so how could she change it?

  Don tried to wind his mouth around the strange ancient sounds of Aoife. It never sounded right. And so he decided that he would call his baby daughter Eva. For all his short life, that was her name. And just as he had predicted, people could not say her name the way it was meant to be said. And so the little girl’s name became Eva. Except to Branna and Getha who always called her by her first name. Her Irish name.

  Sadie

  SADIE AND CARL HAD ALWAYS STARTED THE DAY TOGETHER. LIKE THEIR father, they were the early risers in the house. When they were kids, their father would wake with them but then he would make Eva a cup of tea and take it to her in bed. And he would stay there with her until he left for the surgery.

  When Sadie and Carl were little, Frau Hessen was in charge. Somewhere along the way, Sadie had taken over. Cecile and Edie had always looked to her and Carl for guidance. The ‘big kids’ and the ‘littlies’ they had been. And Sadie had always felt the need to keep a protective eye on the littlies when her father’s eyes could not be drawn away from their mother. She had been there when five-year-old Cecile had insisted on riding her bike on busy Sandy Bay Road or toddler Edie took to sleeping across the doorway of their parents’ bedroom, waiting for the mother who would never come and pick her up in her arms and carry her off to bed. She had been there a million times. But not this time.

  Something as simple as dinner on the lawn at Rosetta and snorkelling not fifty metres away had turned into a police investigation and their sister was dead. Sadie knew that the police must continue to call it a disappearance as there was no body and, technically, they were right: Zoe had disappeared into the blue water of Driving Sound.

  But she wasn’t going to reappear. Even if she was found, Zoe would not come over the sand dunes with her red snorkel in her hand and walk up the lawn in her long casual stride with Ben trotting along beside her; she would not slump into the hammock and call out ‘Mamai’ in her strange sing-song way to tell their mother she was back safe; she would not put her headphones on and sway slowly in the hammock with one leg hanging down so her toes could rub Ben’s old ears; she would not lie there quietly smiling her lovely smile at everyone as they walked by. Her body may eventually be recovered but Zoe wasn’t coming back.

  Sadie knew she should have done more. They all loved Zoe, of course they did, but she needed parents and a family, not a group of adoring strangers watching her grow up but not really helping her do it.

  Sadie had consoled herself when she was younger that her mother gave them all she could. It still consoled her. But as kids, the four of them were there for each other all the time, on top of each other, in each other’s heads, in each other’s faces. They pretty much raised themselves under Frau Hessen’s watchful guidance, and then when they were grown and gone, Zoe had arrived and Sadie forgot that her youngest sister would need someone too. Sadie forgot what it was like to live so close but always on the cooler edge of that great thing between their parents.

  When Zoe was a tiny girl, Sadie could see what their mother was doing. They all could. No one said anything. That was the Kennett way. Their father would never allow them to challenge their mother. And they knew better than to make him choose. So they left it to him to make sure Zoe was all right.

  Sadie had told herself that it would be different for Zoe. Their mother would give Zoe what she had never given her other children. It wasn’t Sadie’s responsibility. She had her own kids, her own life, a marriage that was already in trouble.

  Who did Zoe have? She had their mother and now here they were.

  Leaving home at seventeen to go to university in Melbourne had been the best and biggest decision of Sadie’s young life and the one she had fought the hardest to achieve. If she hadn’t gone, she would not have met Tim. And if that hadn’t happened, Sadie would have lived the rest of her life completely unaware of the happiness that love can bring. Seventeen-year-old Sadie had travelled a lot for a Tasmanian girl. The Kennett family spent long holidays in Ireland every few years on the windswept coast of South Mayo, with Sadie’s great-grandfather. Her mother was always happy at Kindea with her extended family, but never more happy than with her beloved grandfather. And if her mother was happy, they were all happy.

  On the way to and from these regular visits, the family stopped over in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and other transit countries to shop and holiday on beaches like ot
her families. So going to Melbourne wasn’t Sadie’s first trip off the small island but it was her first trip on her own. She was leaving home.

  And there, at Melbourne Uni studying Classics and Philosophy and working in the Monkey Bar on weekends, she met Tim. He was a painter. A Fine Arts student, at Swinburne on a scholarship from Ireland. Tall, black-haired Tim who changed everything.

  His sharp blue eyes were always focused and everyone thought Tim was looking just at them and enjoying all that he saw. But it was Sadie that he looked at the most often. And then one Friday night, he leaned over the bar and touched her hand. He asked if she’d like to go with him to the gardens to see some friends of his performing Shakespeare on Sunday afternoon. She would like to. On that magical day sitting on the tartan blanket watching Twelfth Night with Tim’s arms wrapped around her, and afterwards wandering through the parkland along the river and stopping for long kisses in the cold Melbourne night, she fell in love with him.

  One Saturday six weeks into this new phase of her life, Sadie said that she would like to see some of Tim’s paintings. They caught the train to Hawthorn and walked the short distance to the old mansion he shared with seven other art students. There were statues on the front lawn and along the wide driveway, sculptures in the main hallway, canvases leaning against walls and the upstairs bathroom had been converted into a dark room. Strange lifelike mannequins stood around in casual poses in most of the downstairs rooms.

  Tim had the long stone and brick building out the back all to himself. It was still identifiably a stable but it had a new concrete floor, electricity and a bathtub with running water at one end. Parts of the old roof had been filled in with glass and it was light even on the gloomiest of days. There was a large mattress on a couple of pallets underneath one of the skylights at one end of the room. Several old Persian style rugs, mostly threadbare and tatty, covered the painted concrete floor and the only pieces of furniture were an old dark wardrobe and a chest of drawers. There was a pot-bellied stove and a large old wicker basket filled with logs on the long side wall near the bed. Sadie could see a few white shirts scattered around the place and the bed was a rumpled heap of rainbow-striped flannelette sheets and an old, unzipped sleeping bag as a quilt.