The Astrologer's Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

  Up a wide, hilly street graced with massive old-growth elms on either side, we come to a ten-foot-high red-brick wall covered in balding winter-grade ivy. As the blank steel gates swing open, I see that it’s the kind of estate that comes with its own double-storey gatehouse, CCTV security system and central flagpole. Huge cast-iron lampposts are strung out all along the sweeping gravel driveway and the trees are all towering, bare-branched things I can’t name, each one big enough to take down a house if it ever fell in a storm.

  Don pulls up with a spray of gravel, muttering, ‘Wait there.’ Pointing through the windscreen, he indicates the return veranda of a sprawling, single-storey Victorian-era mansion built out of the same dark brick as the gatehouse, with leafless canes of wisteria threaded through the intricate iron fretwork.

  As I get out of the car and head towards the bluestone front steps, Don drives the early-model Mercedes into a four-car carport with clear glass doors. I watch him park the gleaming car between a compact grey delivery van—the kind with double swing doors at the back—and a boxy white Range Rover, both with heavily mud-encrusted tyres and plates.

  While Don’s still crossing the driveway, the front door opens above me and Eleanor steps out onto the mosaic-tiled veranda. She’s wearing another oversized jumper and blue jeans, looking elfin, with an expression on her ruined face that isn’t hope exactly—more a willingness to be taken by surprise.

  And I curse Don Sturt for the coward he is. I can tell he told her I was coming to see her this afternoon, but none of the rest.

  ‘I’m so grateful,’ is all Eleanor says as she shuts the heavy front door behind us. We move down a long central corridor bounded by rainbows thrown by stained-glass windows. The Persian hall runner under my feet is thick and soft and muted, and the walls are crowded with etchings, mirrors, wall sconces and artwork in heavy gold frames. I’m a major art dyslexic, but even I recognise some of the names in the lower right-hand corners of the paintings. They aren’t prints—I can actually see individual brush strokes and surface cracking—which means Eleanor is just as loaded as those four men whose charts are stuffed inside my backpack. Fleur would have been, too, had she lived. She would have been one of those mythical girls with everything: wealth, love, elegance, beauty.

  The air smells like tea roses and clean linen, baking cookies, and I suddenly understand, in a way I didn’t before, that those four men must be people just like Eleanor Charters. Once her friends, or the children of her friends, her neighbours; they are intricately bound to her in some way. The thought makes me rub the backs of my arms, as if I’m cold.

  Eleanor leads me into a large, high-ceilinged room that must have once functioned as a formal dining room. But the twelve-seater Victorian dining suite in the centre of the carpeted space, lit by a matched pair of crystal chandeliers, is now a repository for books and papers and manila folders, computer equipment, crime-scene photographs and tomes on true crime and police procedure. There’s a repeating pattern of fleur-de-lis picked out in gold thread running across the dark-blue carpet, and heavy, marble-topped mahogany sideboards against the walls; that feature flocked wallpaper and gilt mirrors.

  It is a beautiful room, with heavy curtains thrown open at the floor-to-ceiling sash windows that are now a faded salmon colour from never having been drawn for years. As Eleanor settles into a sagging velvet wing armchair standing next to a carved white marble fireplace dominating one wall, I gather this is her nerve centre, the place where she spends most of her days, sifting for answers that will not come.

  Eleanor indicates the matching armchair across the marble hearth and I lower myself tentatively into its collapsed depths, feeling the displaced springs shift and protest beneath my weight.

  Seconds later, a matronly woman with silvery short hair in a dark skirt and dark blouse brings in a silver tray set with an antique silver pot and three paper-thin matching china cups on saucers. The tray also holds a plate of tiny scones and dainty biscuits with oozy, jammy centres, a dish of cream and another holding the same yellow-gold jam that’s inside the biscuits. When the woman places the tray down on a low, marble-topped mahogany table standing between Eleanor’s chair and mine, I shake my head apologetically. ‘I’m more of a coffee person, sorry, and I don’t really like, uh, jam. Mum never had it in the house.’

  Eleanor’s housekeeper murmurs, ‘Your mother did mention that when she was here, so I’ve made coffee. But the preserve is Don’s particular weakness; so there’s something for everyone.’ The elderly woman flushes at the expression of shock on my face, leaving the room quickly as Eleanor dismisses her with barely suppressed eagerness.

  Removing her leather slippers, Eleanor now tucks her small, bare feet up under her like a kid and says, ‘Well, well? What did you find?’

  Flustered, I dig around in my bag, about to answer, when Don Sturt lopes into the room, pulling up a dining chair beside Eleanor’s armchair. She pours him a cup of coffee, placing a jam biscuit on the saucer accompanying his cup before handing it to him. ‘Cook made your favourites,’ she murmurs as Don’s eyes drop to the surface of the hot liquid. He pours a long slug of milk from a pretty porcelain jug into its ebony depths, stirring in two teaspoons of sugar from the pretty silver pot on the tray. He takes a sip, the jam biscuit disappearing in two bites before he takes another, all without looking up.

  ‘So? Tell her the upshot,’ Don says, in a faux-airy voice that makes me want to reach across the afternoon tea things and strangle him.

  Putting my papers in order, I clear my throat and begin to speak.

  16

  As I run through the results for Mallory Bloch, Eleanor’s eyes grow cloudy, distant. When I reach the end of my notes on the man, Don turns to her and says, ‘He was a long-shot anyway, remember? Just because no one remembered seeing him at the house party in Mount Eliza didn’t mean he wasn’t there, or coming back from there, the way he insisted. Even though the man’s an abusive, officious prick, and there was never any proof, I never thought he was a liar.’

  Eleanor picks at one of her cuticles and says nothing as I push on with the reading for Ferwerder.

  Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla.

  As I shuffle the notes for Ferwerder to the back of the pack, Eleanor insists unhappily, ‘But Chris Ferwerder knows something. He couldn’t look me in the eye back then, and he still can’t. I have seen him leave a function, just to avoid me.’

  ‘He might know something,’ I answer gently, ‘but it’s not something I can tell you from the question you asked me to address. There’s just nothing in his stars.’

  ‘She was supposed to be at a party at his place,’ Eleanor whispers. She places a miniature scone absently onto the edge of Don’s saucer and I watch as he saws it in two with a butter knife before slathering it in jam and eating the thing whole; flushing slightly when he catches me watching. ‘Geoff Kidston used to drive her everywhere,’ Eleanor continues with quiet anguish. ‘I trusted him to do it because he was Margaret’s son. He and Lew Boardman used to take her around, like she was their mascot: drive her to school, pick her up from parties, never a hint of trouble. They were supposed to be good boys; fine young men. I knew them when they were children.’

  I exchange a helpless look with Don, who is busying himself pouring another coffee.

  The moment I tell Eleanor Charte
rs that Lewis Boardman possesses the stars of a serial sex fiend and womaniser—but that he didn’t do it—she pushes herself out of her chair, hands over her mouth, and leaves the room. After a second’s hesitation, Don walks out, too, and I’m reminded that I still don’t get the vibe around these two, why they are even together; how this gaunt, hard-worn, stick of a man became a kind of general dog’s body, driver-cum-servant, to a haunted rich lady.

  When Don returns a moment later, he is alone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him as he dips an entire scone into the dish of jam, cross-contaminating the cream with it, before stuffing the whole catastrophe into his mouth. ‘These are what their charts say.’

  ‘Well, what about Kidston’s?’ he counters, wiping self-consciously at the corners of his lips with the knuckles of one hand.

  ‘Yes,’ Eleanor begs as she sweeps back into the room. ‘What about his?’

  Her eyes are very red, but she sits back down in her chair, her posture rigid. I give Don a hard look, and he tells Eleanor sheepishly about the transposition error he made with Kidston’s birthtime. I read out my original summary and Eleanor tilts her head to one side, saying, ‘And now? How does this one mistake change anything?’

  I tell her that taking Kidston’s birthtime backward by several hours intensifies the apparently secretive, selfish side of his nature, and his phenomenal sensitivity. ‘I’m seeing a lot more arrogance and snobbery, ego, the pursuit of people and things that make him look good, or befit his perception of himself.’

  ‘Fleur would have fit right into that category,’ Don says musingly.

  ‘Fleur treated him like an annoying older brother,’ Eleanor snaps back. ‘Fleur was a young fifteen. She wasn’t even thinking about boys or…’

  Her eyes go shinier, and Don and I exchange furtive glances as Eleanor blinks rapidly and looks down. I know that when I was fifteen I was thinking about boys and cars and riding around in cars with boys. But I was never a young fifteen, after all, with this rack, and this face, and I don’t say anything because it won’t help.

  After a while, Eleanor looks back up at me and murmurs, ‘Did he or didn’t he do it?’

  I hesitate before shaking my head, and she covers her mouth with her hands and rocks forward, wordlessly, in her seat. ‘But,’ I say tentatively over her bowed head, grey hair swept into its signature, elegant chignon at the nape of her slender neck, ‘there is something in Kidston’s progressed chart. Something the others don’t have.’

  She raises her eyes to mine like a threatened animal, and I say quickly, glossing over the finer detail because it would make no sense to someone like her, ‘That night? The way Kidston’s ascendant was conjunct progressed Neptune indicates that he was brewing some weird plan or deception. Looking at where Uranus sits with regard to his natal moon, and how Mercury is moving into square with Mars, all this signifies some kind of conflict or fight, some issue to do with travel or…delivery? Is that making any sense to you?’

  Eleanor’s eyes have grown very wide, and she shakes her head, mystified, while Don struggles to write it all down in his little notebook between bouts of nervous eating. ‘If you look at the way Saturn is transiting through here.’ I indicate a portion of the rough handwritten chart I threw together between PE and the final bell. ‘The interrelationship between Mercury, Mars and Saturn indicates a conflict with someone he considered an authority figure. Someone he was afraid of, or maybe wanted to impress? It can also mean a forced farewell of some kind.’

  Eleanor actually inhales with horror at my words, and begins crying in earnest, plucking at the front of her sweater, rocking and shuddering in her chair.

  I actually jump out of my own seat then and hold out my notes to Don, wanting to be free of these people and their horrific burden. ‘I’m sorry,’ I babble. ‘I’m so sorry, that’s the best I could do. You asked me to do it; I didn’t want to.’

  Don takes the untidy sheaf of notes and diagrams out of my clenched fist. He looks at Eleanor, but she’s gone to that place beyond speaking. I see him hesitate before reaching out and placing his free hand—thin, sun-damaged, hairy-backed—onto her frail and shaking shoulder.

  The juxtaposition between his hand on her, and the elegant, jewel-coloured room—lit with rainbows from sunlight hitting all the glass—brings on something like hot panic, or nausea, and my own hands rise to my face in horror.

  Some things have no answers. God, let that not be true.

  I swing my pack onto my shoulder, already backing away from the two of them, seated in awful tableau. The roaring in my ears seems to grow louder. Jesus, I don’t even know where I am. I’m so far out of my narrow comfort zone, it’s like I’m in a parallel universe. ‘If you could just tell me what tram or bus I need to take?’ I plead. ‘To get home? It’s kind of late. I just need to get there. I need to go home.’

  Don looks up, an arrested, almost pained, expression on his face. And it strikes me again how wasted and out-of-place he looks, despite his expensive clothes, his expensive surroundings. He’s like a grey, weathered tree—uprooted from the side of a dusty bush track somewhere—that’s been replanted in a hothouse.

  Don’s eyes slide away even as he mutters, ‘I’m to see you home. It’s all been fixed.’

  And I nod once, sharply, before fleeing the room, and the howling old woman in her bright, jewel-box house, who will never find peace. It’s like looking into my own future.

  While Don brings the car around to where I’m standing like I’m too delicate or posh to walk the short distance to the carport, I check my phone and see at least a dozen missed calls. A couple of the early ones are from Wurbik, but there’s one from a mystery landline, one from the mystery mobile caller of this morning—the inhaler, I’ve taken to calling that one—and the rest are from Malcolm Cheung.

  Malcolm Cheung: who’s Homicide.

  I climb numbly into the front passenger seat of the royal blue Mercedes, agonising over which of them to call first—Malcolm or Wurbik.

  The light is fading.

  Where they are, the searchers, the light would be fading, too. Most likely they’d all be reporting in after a long day of bush-bashing. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter that Don’s driving and that I’m stuck driving with him. Don could be wallpaper. Don doesn’t matter. As he shifts the big car into gear and we sail out of Eleanor’s grounds straight into peak-hour traffic, like a coward I speed-dial Wurbik first. Wurbik is a known entity. While I continue to deal with Wurbik, it will continue to be just a missing persons case.

  That’s all, I tell myself, she’s just missing and they’re just checking in.

  But Wurbik’s unmistakably cagey; unwilling or unable to give anything away. ‘You need to hear it from Mal, who’s been trying to reach you for hours. Where have you been?’

  I tell him I’ve been to afternoon tea at Eleanor’s place—me and Eleanor and Don—and Wurbik makes this unhappy noise that could be exasperation, or sympathy. ‘Call Mal before you do, see or hear anything else,’ he insists. ‘Got that? You need it all put into context.’

  ‘Context?’ I parrot dumbly.

  ‘Just call him,’ Wurbik says with a harshness I recognise as checked emotion, ‘especially if you don’t already know.’

  ‘Know what?’
I mumble, staring out blindly at shiny shop windows that proclaim: Versace, Miyake, Provence, Saldi, Boss.

  ‘Do it now,’ Wurbik replies by way of not replying, and hangs up.

  ‘At least Eleanor had a body to bury,’ I find myself saying in a dazed voice and I swear I see Don wince out of the corner of my eye.

  I’m still dumbly staring down at my phone when the thing rings in my hand—how I freaking hate when that happens—and I freeze.

  But it’s the mystery landline number that’s flashing up at me, not Malcolm Cheung’s, of Homicide. And it’s not an anonymous number (the kind favoured by dickless sickos who like to make calls to young girls) so I answer it.

  ‘Hello? Am I speaking with Simon Thorn?’ says a woman—brisk, efficient, harassed. Immediately I sit up straighter because this is something I can handle; it’s not about me.

  ‘No, but he’s just in the bathroom…’

  I see Don’s eyes dart sideways before hastily refocusing on the red light we are waiting at. Thank God he didn’t decide to put on the radio.

  ‘…and I can give Simon a message as soon as he gets out,’ I finish smoothly.

  ‘He’s not answering the primary number he gave us,’ the woman says, ‘and he needs to make a decision. I’m sorry, but we need it today. And there are forms to fill out, if he’s really serious about what he agreed verbally with Dr Gurung. He needs to come back in and speak with the specialists in charge because things need to move quickly from here—if he’s serious. Can he come in right away?’