‘He made certain you were the only counsellor in the area, and he was the one who assigned your work so he could gather information on the people of Dunton. And he used it to keep the town under his thumb.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘He’d send you to talk to victims to find out things they wouldn’t tell the police, then he’d pump you for information afterwards. He essentially used you to spy on crime victims.’
She looked away. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Why did you tell him about Charlotte’s private conversation with Ava O’Brien?’
‘That was just our regular review. It’s part of my employment conditions to do that.’
Jake shook his head. ‘Gossiping with your father about everything you hear from clients is not part of your job.’
‘It still doesn’t mean he had anything to do with the other counsellors leaving town.’
‘I think he did. Every attack on their premises happened at a time when he happened to be off-duty, and he was the officer who investigated all of them. Unsurprisingly, he came to the same conclusion in each case—that it was vandals from elsewhere passing through town.’
‘So? It probably was. Most of the crime that happens here is people from out of town.’
Jake despaired. ‘That’s completely false.’
‘Whatever. I’m not responsible for what happened to those people or Ava O’Brien. And it sounds like you don’t have anything you can possibly charge me with.’
Jake lost all patience with her.
‘So, did your father know about your baby? Did Max?’
Stony silence.
‘Evelyn? Did Max know you were pregnant when he left to live with his mother?’
A barely perceptible shake of her head. ‘How did you …?’
‘Your reaction when Murphy told you about the source of the children in the home.’
‘We were supposed to go and live on the mainland together,’ she said, ‘Max and me. I was going to tell him about our baby after we arrived.’ She looked back toward the manor house. ‘He didn’t even warn me he was leaving. I came over one day and Mason just said he’d gone. Left, just like that, without even a goodbye. Then Mason laughed at me and called me a little slut, said I was stupid to think his son would ever settle for a cop’s daughter.’
‘And you were still angry enough after all these years to sneak up here and attack him this week, weren’t you?’
She clamped her lips firmly shut.
‘This is only the third time Max has been back since leaving, isn’t it?’
She offered him a slight shrug.
‘And you thought it might be your last chance to tell him what happened?’
A shake of her head.
‘Or maybe you just wanted a sliver of revenge on him for abandoning you and your child?’
Another head-shake.
‘Come on, Evelyn. Admit it. You came up here on Sunday using the fire trails, and you crept down to the manor with the intention of … what? Confronting Max? Then you thought you saw him alone in the kitchen and decided to attack him from behind with a cast-iron pan? Or had you planned to attack him all along?’
Evelyn was holding her breath.
‘You blamed Max for not helping you keep your baby.’
Silence.
‘He couldn’t have, you know that,’ he said.
Evelyn was incandescent with rage. ‘Of course he could have!’
‘But you mistook Mason for Max and hit him from behind instead, didn’t you?’
She returned to silence.
‘Did your father know about the baby?’
Terror flooded her eyes. Even knowing Aiden Kelly had been arrested, Evelyn’s world still revolved around her father.
‘He would have killed me.’
Her voice shook.
‘Did Mason know?’
‘I doubt it. He was blind to everything but this stupid vineyard.’
‘Either way, you weren’t unhappy when you realised it was Mason you attacked instead of Max, were you?’
Defiance returned to her eyes.
‘So none of the men knew about your baby—not Max, not Mason, and not your father?’
‘No.’
Jake paused. The foundations of Evelyn’s world had crumbled mere hours ago when her father tried to murder her. The veneer of lies and delusion that formed her self-image had already taken a battering today.
But Jake was out of sympathy for her. ‘And you thought she died at birth?’
Evelyn looked at him sharply. ‘It was a boy. A son, not a daughter. And yes, he died when he was born.’
‘Did Ava tell you it was a boy?’
‘I just knew he was.’ A shadow of regret scudded across her face. ‘I was going to be able to leave here because of him. I’d live with Max in the city, then one day my son would inherit this place.’
‘Did you hold your baby?’
‘Ava gave me such a heavy dose of sedative so I wouldn’t scream that it knocked me out. When I woke up he was gone. Mum said the baby hadn’t made it, and Ava had already taken it away.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Evelyn’—he took her gently by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him—‘listen to me. It wasn’t a boy. It was a girl. And she didn’t die.’
‘What?’ her voice cracked. ‘But, but … What? Do you mean he … she … lived?’ Her eyes widened. ‘They were here all along?’
Jake inclined his head slightly.
Evelyn’s eyes widened. ‘Oh God, is Amelia my baby?’
He shook his head. ‘Not Amelia.’
‘But it can’t have been Charlotte, she’s too young.’
‘No, someone else.’
‘Can I … can I see her? Talk to her?’
A piercing gaze of one blue eye and one brown drifted through Jake’s mind. He doubted Evelyn’s daughter would ever want to meet her, but he would give Lilith the option. ‘I can ask. You have to be prepared for her to say no.’
‘But … he, I mean she, she is alive? And okay? And healthy? And she was here the whole time. Oh …’ Evelyn began to sag. ‘You only found one other girl, didn’t you?’
Jake reached out to ease her gently to the ground as realisation of who was buried beneath the desiccated vines dawned on Evelyn.
She stared at the members of the CSI team scouring the vineyard with ground-penetrating radar, searching for pockets of disturbed earth that might indicate a burial.
‘Which means … I had a grandson.’ She sounded very far away. Then, ‘No, no, no!’, her voice rising with each protest.
He placed a hand on one of her shoulders. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Evelyn Kelly began to keen—deep, soul-wrenching wails that drew shivers along Jake’s spine. Her fingers dug through the decaying leaves beneath her into the soil below.
Some distance away, an officer cleared her throat. ‘Phone call, sir. It’s for you. Headquarters.’
Epilogue
Jake eased into the harness, double-checked his clips and rope and stood back to admire the slick stone wall he was about to ascend. He had more than earnt this climb.
With a new, temporary senior sergeant installed in Dunton, Jake had finally secured a weekend off. Kelly and Mason Campbell were being held until their initial court dates some months hence; he had put Amelia, Charlotte and Lilith in touch with each other—which had apparently resulted in much squealing followed by copious tears; and he had sat at the Campbell manor kitchen table and gently explained to Max the wretched series of events that had led to him having both a grown daughter in Melbourne and a tiny, deceased grandson buried in the vineyard outside.
Seeing how deeply affected Max was by this news, on top to the revelations of his father’s gruesome crimes, Jake had ensured he was
given a police escort to and from the airport when he returned to his dying wife. It was the least Jake could do for a man whose entire world was crumbling around him, genuinely through no fault of his own. And Jake would have blamed himself if Max had been in a car accident on the way home.
Which meant, as of today, there were no loose ends left for him to tie up in this case. Two glorious days of his body pressed against the rockface, walks on the beach with Meena and not having to put up with Murphy’s pathetic moping lay ahead.
Stretching his admittedly tight hamstrings, Jake wondered why he hadn’t heard from either Pete or Nic in the past week. Had Pete finally come clean? Was Nic now devastated? Furious with both brothers? Jake held no illusions that if she ever discovered his complicity in Pete’s betrayal she would ruthlessly cut him from her life.
Clasping his hands together and swinging them overhead to loosen his shoulders, he worried at his lack of plan for moving forward. Would he remain in Dunton for the balance of his two-year secondment or take up Hobart’s offer of a transfer to headquarters? They needed an answer by Monday and he still had no idea which way he was leaning.
And he didn’t want to give a moment’s thought to where things might be headed with Meena. That shouldn’t be a factor in where he decided to take his career. She was lovely, as was her ball-of-energy dog, but he’d known her less than a month. How long could he spend with her free of any future plans without becoming the stereotypical non-committal guy?
For now, at least, he didn’t have to make a decision.
Jake reached for the first cold, solid handhold on the cliff face and felt all thoughts of the future and past slip away as he and the mountain became one.
Dr L.J.M. Owen has degrees in archaeology, forensic science and librarianship. She speaks five languages and has travelled extensively through Europe and Asia. L.J. was inspired to write the Dr Pimms series by the neglected women’s stories she discovered between the cracks of popular archaeology. Three books in this series have been published by Echo Publishing. L.J.’s new novel, The Great Divide, introduces a new story world and characters. L.J. is also the Festival Director of the Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival, a celebration of literature and literacy in southern Tasmania, and divides her time between Canberra and southern Tasmania.
Echo Publishing
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Copyright © L.J.M. Owen, 2019
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First published 2019
This ebook edition published 2019
Cover design by Josh Durham
Page design, typesetting and ebook creation by Shaun Jury
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
ISBN: 9781760685829 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781760686093 (ebook)
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