by Maddy Hunter
She tossed me a dismissive look before clutching Heath’s forearm. “I don’t know that girl. Who is she?” Then in a more animated voice, “Is she from the orphanage?”
“Imily’s a gist on our tour. A Yank. You like Yanks.”
She nodded docilely. “My da might have been a Yank.”
“You coming?” Heath asked me, looking as if he’d appreciate the company.
“So how hot does it get in Coober Pedy?” I asked, as we strolled down the path with Nora between us.
“Midsummah will average a hundred eighteen degrees Farenheit. Hotter on some days. Not much greenery survives back home. The sun cooks everything.”
Including skin. No wonder Nora’s face was so wrinkled. I’d probably look the same way under similar circumstances, then be forced to squander so much of my savings on miracle creams that I’d have to declare bankruptcy. Wow. Who’d have guessed that overexposure to the sun had the potential of being as disastrous to a person’s finances as investing in survival equipment for Y2K?
“You wanna see my picture?” Nora asked, thrusting her well-handled photo at me.
I angled it into the light, picking out details I’d been unable to see in the visitor center yesterday. A field-stone wall. An ornamental bench. A young woman with bobbed hair smiling shyly into the camera. She wore a plain housedress and against her bosom hugged two toddlers in frilled pinafores, their heads a riot of pipe curls.
“That’s my mum,” Nora said proudly. “She lived in England.”
“She’s beautiful.” I held the photo gingerly, fearful that one of the dog-eared corners was going to fall off. “And the children are so adorable. They must be about—what? Two years old? I have five nephews who all went through the terrible twos. Is that you in one of the pinafores?”
“Me and Beverley. See the writing on the back? It says Nora—that’s me, and Beverley—that’s my sister. Do you see we’re dressed alike?”
“Yup. Exactly alike. Are you twins?”
Her breath rattled noisily in her throat and she grew agitated. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I want my picture back.” She grabbed it from my hand. “You’re walking too slow,” she snapped at Heath. “Slow, slow, slow.”
“You go on ahid then.” He released her arm. “You won’t git lost. I’ll find you.”
I grimaced apologetically as she barreled down the path with impossible speed. No small feat for a woman with legs like Bilbo Baggins. “Sorry. Wrong question to ask?”
“No worries. As old as she is, talking about that picture still sinds her on an emotional rollah coastah.”
“Why did she ask if I was from the orphanage?” I asked as we continued walking slowly down the path.
“Because her mum put her in an orphanage not long after that photo was taken. We think her da died in the war, and her mum didn’t have the means to raise her, so the orphanage was the only answer. It was common practice in those days.”
“Did her mother eventually go back for her?”
“Don’t know. After the war, the child wilfare groups elected to ease overcrowding by transporting hundreds of orphans to Australia. Mind you, they had the bist of intintions. They thought warmth and sunshine would be bitter for English orphans than damp and rain, but the consequinces were horrid. Children were separated from their siblings. Birth certificates were lost. Personal records misplaced. Not Mother England’s finest hour.”
“Is that what happened to Nora?”
“She inded up in Sydney with only airy fairy memories of her life in England. That photo of her mum is her only link to her childhood. But she was adopted by fine people, who made a home for her in Coober Pedy.”
“Did they adopt Beverley, too?”
“She lost Biverley back in England. Her mum put the girls in separate orphanages.”
I stared at Heath in disbelief. “Why would a mother separate her own children from each other?”
“To give thim a bitter chance at being adopted. People couldn’t afford to adopt two children, and most filt guilty about parting twins, so it was actually an act of kindness on her mum’s part. She had to have loved thim a great deal.”
“Those poor little girls.”
“We’ve been tracking Biverley down for years, but there’s not much of a paper trail to follow. She could still be in England; she could be here in Australia. We’ve dug up a few documents that’s hilped with birth and emigration dates. And there’s a couple of new sites on the internet that deal specifically with the English orphan problem. They’ve given me some good leads. I haven’t told Mum yit because I don’t want to git her hopes up, but the information is so good, we may be only weeks away from locating Biverley. That would be a happy day indeed.”
“Mum?” My voiced cracked in surprise. “Nora’s your…mother? But she’s—” I stirred my hand aimlessly, unable to think of a charitable alternate to “a thousand years old.”
Heath laughed. “She’s not aged will, but she’s fared bitter than most. Life’s harsh in the Outback.”
As I looked down the path toward the eagle cage, I noticed a small commotion, followed by a scene that I knew was going to end in disaster. I sighed as I turned toward Heath. “Park officials wouldn’t allow large, man-eating birds to roam freely around the park, would they?”
“Hard to find man-eating birds in Australia,” he assured me. “The bist we can come up with is an emu, and they’re harmliss.”
I regarded the ostrich-sized bird chasing Bernice across the glade and smiled brightly. “Gee, that’s a relief.”
“I don’t care how much money you collected,” Bernice sniped, “you’re not gettin’ my T-shirt. You’ll have to kill me first.”
“Told you she was gonna be trouble,” Nana said in an undertone.
We’d arrived at Sovereign Hill Park and Living History Museum ten minutes ago and were in the souvenir shop portion of the entrance building, waiting for Henry to hand out tickets. Gold fever had hit Australia a decade after the California Gold Rush, and according to what Henry had told us on the way over, Sovereign Hill had proven to be one of the country’s richest deposits. No serious mining took place here anymore, but an authentic gold-mining town had been re-created over the footprint of the original diggings to allow tourists to step back in time and experience a typical day in 1851, from panning for gold to slogging through the mud of the wheel-rutted streets.
“All those in favor of killing Bernice say ‘Aye,’” Osmond called out.
Bernice thwacked him with a plastic souvenir pickax. “Stay away from me. All of you! My shirt stays on my back.” She swung the pick in a threatening arc. “Don’t make me use this.”
Dick Teig hitched up the waistband of his trousers and took a brave step forward, which was weird, because Dick never stepped up to the plate to solve problems; he was usually the one who caused them! Wow. This was huge.
“Stow the ax and listen good to what I’m about to say, Bernice.” His voice was nasally from the tissue he’d stuffed up his nose. His cheeks ballooned with righteous bluster. “Emily has something to say to you.”
Everyone took a giant step backward, leaving me front and center. “Look, Bernice, I’m sorry about your shirt, but wouldn’t you agree that your health is more important than an article of clothing?”
“No.”
“It’s a scientific fact that inhaling noxious fumes can kill you!”
“Emily’s right,” Alice said helpfully. “You can keel over dead if you inhale carbon monoxide.”
“And smoke,” said Margi.
“And Helen’s perfume when she puts too much on,” said Dick Teig.
“You stink, Bernice!” Dick Stolee wailed. “Lose the shirt!”
“All those in favor of Bernice losing her shirt—”
Yup. This was going well.
“Bernice! Just the person I was looking for.” Guy Madelyn flagged her down with a black T-shirt with gold lettering. “How hard would I have to twist your arm to be my pho
tographic model for the afternoon? I need someone with great bone structure and presence, and you fit the bill. I’ll even buy lunch and provide your wardrobe.” He shook out the shirt so we could read the block letters: GO FOR THE GOLD AT SOVEREIGN HILL, BALLARAT, AUSTRALIA.
“Lunch and the T-shirt?” She plucked the shirt from his grasp. “Deal. I used to be a magazine model years ago, but you probably figured that out already. Once you have it, you never lose it.”
He handed her a zippered storage bag. “For your monster truck shirt.”
“My, my.” She smiled coquettishly. “You think of everything.”
We held our collective breath as she sashayed toward the fitting room and erupted into spontaneous whoops as she disappeared behind the curtain. Dick Teig hammered Guy gratefully on the back. Margi yanked streamers of toilet paper from her nose. Helen grabbed Dick’s ear and dragged him off behind her.
“What’s this problem you have with my perfume?”
“Sorry about the wait, folks,” Henry announced from the turnstiles at the front door. “I have your tickets and visitor maps. The queue starts here. Synchronize your watches. It’s twelve-thirty now; we’ll meet back in this building at four o’clock.”
The group dispersed helter-skelter, leaving me alone with Guy. He winked good-naturedly. I stared at him in awe. “You do realize that you’re about to commit one of the most generous acts in recorded history?”
“I had no choice. I sit directly in front of her on the bus and the drive back to Melbourne will take over an hour. We’re talking life or death here.”
“I’ve gotta warn you, she’s a handful.”
“I cut my teeth on mothers of the bride. Trust me. This should be a cakewalk by comparison.”
The fitting room curtain flew open and Bernice stepped out, a vision in black and gold. “How do you feel about my nose? You think I should get rid of the zinc oxide? I’m not sure pistachio fits our color scheme.”
Guy’s attentiveness to Bernice boded more than unpolluted air; it meant Etienne and Duncan would be freed up all afternoon! All I had to do was find them. I scanned the souvenir shop and, not finding them in the midst of a buying spree, headed for the next most logical place for them to be.
Conrad Carver occupied a bench in the waiting area outside the men’s room, talking heatedly into a cell phone. “Tell them to look harder! I don’t accept that. I hope you’ll have better news for me later.” He punched a button to end the conversation, then muttered a few unintelligible syllables that I suspected might be Polish swear words.
“Problems?” I asked, sitting down beside him.
“Fools.” He stared at the phone as if willing it to disappear. “Blind fools.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“You can say a prayer to St. Anthony. Ellie always tells me, ‘If you lose something, St. Anthony will help you find it.’ Ellie’s a believer. Me, I’m not what you’d call a religious man.”
“Hey! I pray to St. Anthony when I lose things, and he’s never let me down. Honest. It’s freaking amazing. And the best part is, he’s an equal opportunity saint. He operates under a nondenominational policy.”
Conrad looked too depressed to crack a smile. I gave his knee a sympathetic pat. “So, what did you lose?”
“Your grandmother’s angiosperms.”
Chapter 7
“What?”
He squeezed the phone until his hand turned white. “Dr. Limeburner and his team have been at Port Campbell all morning. They can’t find anything that resembles the angiosperm I described. They’re going to continue searching, but he didn’t sound hopeful about finding anything. I could hear the censure in his voice, Emily. He thinks I’ve lost my edge. He thinks I made a mistake. But I didn’t! I know what I saw in your grandmother’s photo!” He looked about the room impatiently. “If I wasn’t stuck in this damnable place, I’d go look for it myself.”
I leaned back in the bench, deflated. “Nana’s plant is extinct again?”
“No! If it was there yesterday, it has to be there today. They’re not looking hard enough. A plant of that size doesn’t disappear overnight, not unless someone dug it up deliberately. And who would have done that? No one even knew it was there until I phoned Limeburner.”
Which wasn’t precisely true. The person who stole Nana’s photo knew the plant was there, so they could have done the digging. But I’d like to think that if someone had dragged a large chunk of landscape onto the bus yesterday, I might have noticed.
“Sorry to make you wait so long, Connie.” Ellie bustled over to us. “They ran out of paper towels in the ladies’ room, so I had to blow dry my hands. The buzz is that they offer stagecoach rides here. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“I have to use the facilities,” he said in a dull voice, “and return Henry’s phone.”
“I’ll do that.” I stood up. “I’m headed in that direction anyway. But would you do me a favor? If you see Etienne and Duncan while you’re in there, would you tell them I’m heading up Main Street, so they can look for me there?”
Henry was still at the turnstiles, passing out tickets and maps. I took my place at the back of the line and tried not to think about how disappointed Nana was going to be when she heard the news about her angiosperms. Was Dr. Limeburner right? Had Conrad simply identified them incorrectly? Was it possible that a renowned expert could be so wrong about something?
I scanned the shop while I waited, my gaze lighting on Diana Squires’s ponytail as she hefted a huge backpack onto the PACKAGE CHECK counter at the opposite end of the room. Yikes. That thing was big enough to hold a gas tank! I gave myself a mental slap as I gaped. Had she been wearing it earlier today when I talked to her? Had she been wearing it yesterday? Was I blind in one eye and unable to see out the other?
I handed Henry his phone in exchange for my ticket, then idly studied my site map while Diana passed through the turnstile.
“Where are you off to?” she asked, her map already open. “Panning for gold sounds like fun, but that involves water, and I’d prefer not to get wet. Accidents can happen even in shallow water.”
Hmm. The Wicked Witch of the West had melted when she got wet. I wondered what would happen to Diana Squires. “Did you bring a change of clothes with you?”
“We’re on a nine-hour tour. Why would I do that?”
She’d obviously never watched Gilligan’s Island. “That backpack you left at the package check counter was a pretty good size. Looked like you could fit your entire wardrobe into it.”
“Just the essentials. You know how it is. The older you get, the more essentials you need.”
“Were you wearing it yesterday?”
“I wear it every day when I’m on vacation. I guess you were one of the few people I didn’t sideswipe with it. How’d you luck out? I get some pretty mean looks when I move the wrong way.”
“Were you wearing it at the wildlife park earlier?”
“Sure was.”
“How did I not notice something that big strapped to your back?”
“Because it wasn’t that big earlier. It’s expandable. I buy the expandable model of everything, but I’m downsizing at the moment.” She patted the fanny pack at her waist. “I turned the wrong way in the ladies’ room and pulled something in my lower back, so I’m giving my muscles a rest.” She whacked my arm with her map. “The aging process. See what you have to look forward to?”
“In the oft-spoken words of my grandmother, it beats the alternative.”
“Speaking of your grandmother—” She snugged her hand around my forearm and spoke to me from the heart. “I’m afraid I might have scared her off with the price of our product, which is too bad, because it’s women like your grandmother—elderly ladies living on fixed incomes—who could benefit most from what Perfecta has to offer.”
“Actually, Nana isn’t on a fixed—”
“So I’m going to let you in on a little secret that you can share with her. Tell her one of the
reasons our product is so pricey is because we have to synthesize a key ingredient in the lab, and we’re forced to pass the expense on to the consumer. But I happen to know that one of my colleagues has recently stumbled upon an alternative that grows freely in nature, so there’s a possibility we could lower the price to something every woman can afford. Isn’t that exciting?” She squeezed my arm as if it were a lemon that needed juicing.
Yow! I looked down at her hand, jerking to attention when I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. “Has anyone ever told you you don’t know your own strength?”
“All the time. When I’m not in the lab, I’m exercising.” She clenched her fist several times. “I’m especially fond of handgrips.”
“Is that how you got all those scratches?”
She rotated her hands to examine the angry red nicks that scored her fingers and knuckles. “They’re an eyesore, aren’t they? Got them yesterday at the Twelve Apostles.”
“Really?” I angled my head for a better look. “How’d that happen?”
She hesitated. “You know how most woman go into a clothing store and have to finger all the soft fabrics and fur collars? Botanists are like that, too, except instead of touching merchandise, we’re all over the local flora. We can’t keep our hands off those unfamiliar leaves and flowers, and unfortunately, nature tends to be thorny.” She regarded her hands again. “I had a veritable field day yesterday, but it does look as if I’ve been clawed by a cat, doesn’t it?”
Yeah, a cat with long, manicured nails.
“I’ll have to keep applying antibacterial cream. The last thing I need on this trip is a skin infection.” She consulted her map. “If I’m going to sign up for the gold mine tour, looks like I walk straight up the street and bang a left. You want to join me?”
I couldn’t tell if her smile was sincere, or a dare. “I’m supposed to be hooking up with a couple of people somewhere along the main street, so you’d better go on without me.”
“Suit yourself. Catch you later.”
My heart pounded in my ears as I watched Diana hike up Main Street. Uff da! Had Peter Blunt made the wrong call yesterday? He said they’d found no evidence of foul play, but was there a chance they’d overlooked something as obvious as skin particles under Claire Bellows’s fingernails? Was it humanly possible for a technician processing a noncelebrity case outside LA to make a mistake like that?