‘There really wasn’t any other way for me to become a’—she drew scare quotes in the air—‘real person, legally. I honestly had no idea where I came from—no idea who my birth parents were, no last name—so we just said my birth parents had failed to register me when I was born. Filled out the forms, paid the fine and voila, I had my birth certificate.’
Judging by her expression, the potential gravity of admitting this to two police officers must have occurred to her a second after confessing. ‘We can’t be in any trouble, surely? I wouldn’t have been able to get a driver’s licence, or a job, or do my taxes, or vote—or anything—if I didn’t get one.’
Jake waved a dismissive hand in the air. ‘We won’t look into that. But we do want to know what happened in that home. Did you genuinely not know you came from Tasmania?’
‘I’d never even heard of Tasmania before coming here. Our school work was mostly religion and European history, not really anything about where we lived. I knew we were in Australia, but I didn’t really learn about the states until I started going to school here in Melbourne.’
‘Do you remember other children at the girls’ home?’
‘Melia and Lottie, of course, and some of the other girls who were there before.’
‘You never wanted to contact them?’
‘I missed them, specially Melia, and I’ve always wanted to know where they are and if they’re okay. But I had no way of finding them or contacting them.’ She shook her head like a dog shimmying after a swim again. ‘It’s so strange to think that I might be able to talk to them again.’
Jake picked up the small ceramic tumbler with Chinese patterning Lilith had placed in front of him and tested the contents. A rich jasmine green tea, surprisingly refreshing. ‘So you could remember how old you were?’
‘I remember candles on my cake when I turned fourteen, and Melia and Charlotte clapping when I blew them out. My birthday was fourteenth of March, the twelfth birthday in the year.’
‘The twelfth birthday?’
‘Our birthdays were all about a week apart, going from oldest to youngest. I know I was the twelfth birthday in the year because when I was little one of the oldest girls said she could remember the girl who had the first birthday in the year so we counted from there. There were twelve up to me, then Melia and Lottie at the end.’
‘So, as far as you know, there were fourteen girls living in the home at one point or another?’ Jake said.
She nodded. ‘But I could be wrong.’
‘Charlotte mentioned she thought they weren’t your real birthdays,’ Murphy added.
Lilith looked taken aback. ‘You know Lottie?’
‘She’s my adopted cousin.’ Murphy said.
‘Oh my God. How is she? Is she okay? Did she do the same thing to her?’
Jake needed her to stay calm and keep talking. ‘The home closed about a year after you left, Lilith. Only Amelia and Charlotte remained and they were both adopted by local families.’
‘Oh.’
‘I need to ask about your time at the home. What can you remember of it?’
Lilith glanced at the canvasses on the walls. ‘Please talk about it in biological, non-emotional terms. I worked out with my counsellor that I can handle talking about it as long as it’s in a matter-of-fact way.’
‘When did you discover you were, ah, different physically?’
‘Oh.’ Murphy finally cottoned on.
‘I knew something was gone, of course, but I didn’t understand I’d been mutilated until I’d spent a fair bit of time with a counsellor.’
‘I see,’ Jake said cautiously.
‘My parents helped me access as much treatment as possible to reduce the scarring, though reconstructive surgery would’ve been too expensive and traumatising.’
Jake couldn’t help but compare Lilith and Amelia’s current situations. Lilith appeared to have been drugged, stuffed in a car boot, smuggled across Bass Strait, then dumped on a beach. But somehow she had ended up in a much better situation both mentally and physically than the younger girl.
‘You’re okay to discuss what you suffered through at the house?’ Murphy said.
‘Please don’t use the word suffered. It’s loaded …’ She narrowed her eyes at the constable. ‘And I can’t stand pity.’
Murphy huffed.
‘We’ll do our best,’ Jake said. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
Lilith described a scenario almost identical to that which Amelia had outlined. She, too, assumed Ava was the perpetrator.
‘Did Ms O’Brien ever talk to you about it?’
‘She refused to. I brought it up but she always shut me down.’
‘Was that the only time something like that happened?’
‘Something similar, but different, happened again about a year later.’ There was a catch in her voice as she played with a gold locket around her neck.
‘Were your fingernails taken?’ Murphy said.
Lilith pinned him with a glare. ‘I thought it was just something that happened at the beginning of the year as you got older, because I remembered the older girls staying in their rooms and all being sad in summer. After it happened to me, I figured this was why.’
‘Was there a long period of time between the second … Are you okay if I use the term attack?’
She nodded.
‘… The second attack and when you woke up on St Kilda beach?’
‘About another year. When I realised I was somewhere brand new and alone, I thought my prayers had been answered to be honest.’
‘You seem so matter-of-fact about all this,’ Jake couldn’t help commenting.
She smiled, radiating self-assurance. ‘I can maintain equilibrium most of the time, and when I can’t I pour my emotions into my art.’ Her gaze became piercing. ‘At my core, though, I’m still a seething ball of white-hot rage …’
While Murphy leant back in his chair, Jake wanted to sit forward, putting himself directly in the path of her gaze.
‘…so I throw it on to the canvas rather than directing it at myself or anyone else.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But look, you don’t have to dance around the topic. You can ask me straight out—I’ll do whatever I can to help them.’
‘Whatever you can do for who?’ Murphy asked.
Jake wasn’t sure what she was referring to either. ‘Lilith, as I said yesterday we’re here because Ava O’Brien was killed in suspicious circumstances.’
‘I’m not going to pretend to be sorry,’ she said with grim satisfaction. ‘But that’s not the main reason you’re here, is it?’
Jake took in her expectant, almost hopeful countenance. ‘Why do you think we’re here?’
‘Because you found my baby?’
‘You had a baby?’ Murphy said almost incredulously.
‘After the second time I woke up—after the painful thing she did to me—I found out I was pregnant.’
Jake’s mind was racing.
‘As soon as I gave birth she took them away.’ Her voice became gravelly, her face contorted with loss. ‘Aren’t you here because you found them? Did I have a girl or a boy? Do they want to meet me?’
Jake looked at his hands. He had no answers for her.
Chapter Eleven
Melbourne, Victoria
Tuesday, 3.06 p.m.
‘I’m sorry, we didn’t know that you’d had a child,’ Jake said, aware that his words were almost physically painful to Lilith as they dropped from his mouth.
‘They’d be about eleven now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jake repeated. ‘If we find any information about your child in the course of our investigation, I’ll let you know straight away …’ he blurted helplessly.
Given the unusual mutilation of at least two of the girls in the home, Jake reminded himse
lf he couldn’t make any assumptions about what else may have happened to Lilith.
‘What can you tell us about the pregnancy?’
Lilith lifted her chin. ‘A few weeks after the second attack I started getting sick, couldn’t keep any food down. I became so weak I stopped being able to walk very far. I lost weight, but then my stomach started to poke out. I thought I was dying. I had no idea what was going on, but Ms O’Brien did.’
‘Did she say anything to you directly regarding the pregnancy?’
‘She kept me locked in my room and only let me out to go to the toilet. She told me I was going to hell for being a strumpet.’
The most likely scenario was that Ava had drugged Lilith then allowed her to be raped by someone—but could something else have occurred?
‘Did she tell you or imply to you in any way who the father might be?’ Jake asked.
‘I honestly thought I’d somehow angered God and he’d made me pregnant as punishment. After the baby was born she kept telling me the pain was penance for my sin, so until my parents explained reproduction to me I thought that’s what had happened. I know it sounds ridiculous now, but you have to understand—we were isolated and she had complete control over us. She brainwashed us. It was like a cult.’
It occurred to Jake that there was a possibility Ava had acted alone—that she had gotten hold of semen and inseminated Lilith while unconscious. Given the suspicious behaviour of both Liam O’Brien and Mason Campbell in the hospital though, Jake was more inclined to think those two may have worked with Ava to … what? Traffic the girls? Pimp them to a paedophile ring?
‘I’m very sorry to hear what happened to you,’ Murphy said, showing some compassion for once. Jake hoped it was a sign of things to come.
Lilith touched the gold locket around her neck again, ignoring Murphy. ‘Even through all that I kept a tiny part of my baby so I would always have it with me though.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Jake.
‘After Ms O’Brien cut the cord and took the baby away, she left the scissors where I could reach them. I still had the afterbirth next to me. I could feel my heartbeat pounding through my whole body and I really thought I was about to die. I wanted to be buried with part of my baby, so I cut some of the cord off and tucked it under my armpit.
‘And you kept it to this day?’
‘When I didn’t die I decided to keep the piece of cord—dried it out so it wouldn’t decay—so I’d always have a piece of my baby with me.’
‘What happened to your baby according to Ava?’
‘She said they’d died before they came out of me, but that wasn’t true. I heard them crying. She definitely lied—my baby lived.’
‘Thinking back, Lilith, who do you think was the most likely person to have been, uh, the father?’
‘You mean, do I know who raped me?’
Jake tried not to look away. ‘Yes.’
‘Once I understood what had happened, I assumed it was Mr O’Brien, her brother. No other men ever came to the house.’
‘Not ever?’
‘Only once that I can remember. When I was really, really little, a man with a gun came to the house to bring Sam back.’
‘Who was Sam?’ Murphy asked.
‘She was a lot older than me—eight birthdays ahead, I think.’
‘Why was she being brought back?’ Jake asked.
‘She’d had a fight with … her … and said she wasn’t going to stay anymore. She was sent to bed without dinner that night, but in the morning she was gone.’
‘Did Ms O’Brien search for her?’
‘I don’t think so. We asked her where Sam was and she didn’t answer. We all thought she must have sent Sam to hell, because that’s where she said girls who disobeyed her went. But then Mr O’Brien turned up with this other man and brought Sam back.’
‘Do you know who the other man was?’
‘No. I’d never seen him before, and never saw him again.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Just big. He had dark hair and Mr O’Brien acted like he was in charge.’
‘Did Sam tell you where she went?’
‘She said she’d gotten up in the middle of the night, taken food from the kitchen, and walked the road into town.’
A young teenage girl alone in Dunton’s wild countryside in the middle of the night … Jake could now imagine what had driven her to leave the relative safety of a warm bed. ‘How long was she gone?’
‘She said after she walked into town she wasn’t sure what to do.’
‘And?’ Murphy prompted.
‘She said she found bins behind the supermarket where the staff dumped a lot of food. She said there was heaps, and it tasted really good, probably because we never had enough to eat at the home. She said it made running away worth it. But after a few days a woman found her asleep near the bins and got angry.’
‘Did Sam tell anyone she came from the girls’ home?’
‘She said she refused to talk to anyone, but the woman said she was going to call the police. Sam said the woman wouldn’t let her go, and then Mr O’Brien came with the other man and brought her back.’
Which all suggested that someone in Dunton knew exactly who the girl Sam was and where she belonged, even if she hadn’t spent much time in the town.
‘How did Ms O’Brien react to Sam being brought home?’
‘She locked Sam in her room around the clock. We could only talk to her under the door at night. The rest of us even had to sit in the kitchen when Sam went to the toilet.’
‘She must have been let out again at some point?’
Lilith shook her head, her Mohawk swaying from side to side. ‘After a while we realised Sam was gone again. We thought she’d run away, but now I assume she was dumped in Melbourne like me.’
‘So, we’ll be looking for a girl named Samantha who was about twelve or thirteen years of age at the time, and who may have appeared in Melbourne around twenty years ago?’ Jake said.
Lilith calculated using her fingers. ‘About twenty years, maybe one or two less.’
‘Could you describe what she looked like?’
‘Tall. She had brown curly hair and blue eyes. And she was really nice to the younger girls.’
Older children were generally described as tall by younger children, although that was also the age when girls often went through their growth spurt. It wasn’t much to go on. ‘Did any of the other girls try to run away?’
’No.’ She frowned. ‘From then on everyone stayed in line because none of us wanted to be locked away in our rooms the whole time. So we all just waited for time to pass. The oldest girls gradually disappeared as they were adopted—or at least that’s what she told us. I guess that’s what she said to Amelia and Charlotte when I disappeared?’
‘They both believed that you had been adopted,’ Jake said.
‘Do you think what happened to you—both the attacks and being brought to Melbourne—happened to other girls in the home?’
‘I have to hope so. She went to all the trouble of dumping me in Melbourne when she could simply have killed me. So if none of us were adopted I can only hope she dumped the others too.’
Is that what had happened to all of them? It would explain why Jake couldn’t find any adoption records for other girls from the home. It also opened the possibility that one of the dumped girls had found her way back to Dunton and taken revenge on the woman who had abused her. Did that mean Jake was looking at another ten or eleven potentially untraceable suspects in the death of Ava O’Brien?
‘And no-one else ever came to the house?’ Murphy asked again.
‘The only other people we saw were townies on our shopping trip each year.’
Although Charlotte had mentioned clothes shopping, Jake had been under the impression the gir
ls had rarely left the house. ‘How did that work?’
‘Every summer we went to K-Mart to buy new clothes. It took hours and hours, and some of the girls threw up in the car, but it didn’t matter because it was the best day of the year. We’d drive into this huge underground car park, then ride up the escalator—which we called the escape-a-later.’ She smiled. ‘Then we spent the day in this enormous shiny building with sparkly things and food everywhere and music. And we got a new dress, shoes and a coat every time.’ Her face shone. ‘It was our favourite day of the year.’
‘Do you remember if Ms O’Brien paid in cash or used a card?’
‘Always cash. We did see people using cards—and we asked her what they were—but she said she didn’t know.’
‘Going back to the attacks …’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I ask about your fingernails?’
She held out one hand, twinkling her fingers so her polished nails caught the light. ‘You want to know if they were removed.’
‘That tells me they were,’ Jake said.
‘After the second attack they were gone. When I’ve mentioned it to other people they’ve been horrified, but I had so much abdominal pain that I barely noticed my hands.’
‘Did it only happen that once?’ Murphy asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Did Ms O’Brien ever say anything about that aspect of the attack?’ Jake asked.
‘She just soaked my hands in salt water every day to stop them getting infected.’
‘Geezus, that must have stung.’ Murphy winced.
‘I had to wear gloves until the nails grew back.’
‘One more question …’
‘Just one?’
She seemed to be teasing him.
‘How do you feel about strawberries?’
She shuddered. ‘Can’t stand them. I think I liked them when I was a kid, but now even the smell of them gives me chills.’
‘Were you forced to eat them?’
‘Not that I remember. I just know they turn my stomach.’
Jake was surprised by how calm Lilith had remained throughout the conservation. ‘Can I say that you’re doing incredibly well considering what you experienced?’
The Great Divide Page 14