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  In memory of Stella Vera

  Star of Truth

  PROLOGUE

  1926

  They keep saying “the body” and Flora thinks this might make her scream and never stop. Speaking in whispers that are not quiet enough, as men do, they say it over and over. “We can’t have the body simply lying in a room here.” “If we put the body in the bathing pool, then it might appear to be a drowning.” “But when they examine the body they’ll find no water in the lungs.” And so on. All the while Flora, locked in the grim prison of her mind, unable to comprehend anything since she discovered the poor, pale remains, shivers against the icy breeze that licks through the open door and stalks the tall eucalypts that line the dark valley.

  “If the old man gets wind of this,” Tony says, punctuating his observation with a short puff of his cigarette, “he’ll slam that bank vault shut and Flora here won’t get a thing.”

  She wants to say she doesn’t care about the money, that death has never seemed so vast and present and final than in this moment, standing by the remains of a real person who only yesterday breathed and cried. Her lips move, but no sound emerges.

  “What do you want to do, Florrie?” Sweetie asks her.

  “No point speaking to her,” Tony says, shaking his head in the low light of the hurricane lamp. “She’s going to need a few belts of whiskey to snap her out of it. Look, the only thing we’re certain about is that people can’t know. It must seem to have been an accident. A fall while out walking the bush track.”

  “In the snow? Will anybody believe that?”

  “Ask yourself what this person’s reputation has been,” he says, and—oh, dear God—he pushes the toe of his patent-leather wing tip gently against the body so that it lifts then sags back onto the floor. “Not really a solid citizen.” Tony seems to realize Flora is listening and checks himself. “Apologies, Florrie. I’m just being practical. You have to trust us.”

  Flora nods, in shock, unable to make sense of the situation.

  “How far shall we take it, then?” Sweetie asks.

  “As close as we can get to the Falls.”

  Sweetie nods and reaches down to lift the limp legs in his meaty hands. Flora moves to help, but Tony pushes her away, gently but firmly.

  “You wait here. You’re no use to us as you are, and it’s murderously cold. I don’t want two bodies on my hands.” He flicks his cigarette butt out the door ahead of him, and it arcs into the snow, a brief ember soon extinguished.

  Flora watches them go. They lumber into the dark and the cold, until they become small figures at the boundary of the garden, then disappear down the stone steps that lead into the valley. Rain has begun to fall, fat drops from the swirling night sky landing silently on the snow. She stands at the door, her fingers turning numb, and watches for their return.

  The rain will wash their heavy footprints out of the snow, along with the possible track of limp, dead arms that drag between them. But the rain will also wash over the body, a wet shroud, a sodden burial. Flora puts her head in her hands and weeps, for her shock and her disappointment and her loss and for the horrors that are no doubt to come. Poor Violet, she says over and over in her mind. Poor, poor Violet.

  CHAPTER ONE

  2014

  If I’d had any experience with men, if I wasn’t a thirty-year-old virgin working in my first job, I might have known how to speak to Tomas Lindegaard without sounding like a babbling fool.

  “The usual?” I said as he approached the counter. “You know, you can sit down and wait for table service. If you like. Or not. I mean, I don’t want to boss you.”

  Tomas smiled, his bright blue eyes crinkling at the corners. “I might surprise you today and order something different,” he said.

  I laughed, then realized I was laughing too loudly and stopped abruptly.

  “Short black,” he said.

  “But that’s what you always . . . oh.”

  He was smiling again, and I smiled back, intoxicated a moment by him as I always was. Then I saw Mrs. Tait arrive and hurried off to help her. As independent as she wanted to be, she needed help to get herself into a chair with her walking stick and her stiff joints.

  “Thank you, my dear,” she said as she settled in her seat. “A double-shot latte and a cigarette, please.”

  It was the same joke she always made. Mrs. Tait had given up smoking thirty years ago, but maintained that she missed it every day, no time more so than while drinking coffee.

  “Got it,” I said, and made my way back to the counter where Penny had fired up the coffee machine. The sound of steam drowned out the clattering noise of the café and the dull pulse of the music. Tomas had taken his regular table, right in the middle of the room.

  Penny looked at me and inclined her head slightly in Tomas’s direction, giving me a meaningful smile.

  I shrugged. I had no idea whether Tomas was as interested in me as I was in him, despite our daily interactions. He was one of a team of architects working on the refurbishment of the historic Evergreen Spa Hotel, especially flown in from Denmark to design rooms and break my heart. Penny owned the café, a sparkling glass-and-chrome nook at the end of the freshly renovated east wing of the Evergreen Spa. I was certain Tomas would be more interested in her, with her gym-toned body and Spanish genes on her mother’s side. Surely a skinny blonde with pale eyebrows couldn’t compete.

  Penny shoved two saucers at me: one holding Mrs. Tait’s latte, the other with Tomas’s short black. “Take Mrs. T’s first,” she advised in a low voice, “then linger, okay? You know how to linger?”

  I nodded, delivered Mrs. Tait’s latte and then took Tomas his coffee.

  “Thanks, Lauren,” he said, shaking two sugar packs between thumb and forefinger before dumping the contents in his coffee. “Quiet this morning?”

  This was my opportunity to linger. “Yes, though I quite like it when it’s busy. You get into a rhythm.”

  Small talk. Here I was making small talk. Not as hard as I’d thought it would be.

  “Would you like to join me for a moment?” Tomas said with a lovely smile.

  A prickle of excitement. I glanced back at Penny, who motioned I should. I heard my mobile phone start to ring in my bag under the counter, but I ignored it. Back and forth we went, light topics, slightly deeper topics—he was divorced, no children—eye contact, laughing. Flirting. We were flirting. The thought caught me with a warm rush. I heard my phone again.

  Then Penny was at my shoulder. “Sorry, Lauren.” She held out my phone, which had just started to ring again. “It says it’s your mum and she keeps calling. Might be an emergency.”

  The three letters MUM flashed on the phone’s screen. “I’m sorry,” I said to Tomas. “I’d better take this.”

  “Of course,” he said, draining his coffee. “I’d best get going anyway.”

  I took the phone from Penny and hurried to the corner behind the magazine stand. “Mum?”

  “Where were you? I called three times!”

  “I’m at work. I can’t just drop everything . . .” Then I told myself not to be so harsh with her. “It’s hard when I’m at work, that’s all. I was serving a customer.” I glanced over my shoulder. Tomas was gone. But he’d left something on the table. I made my way over.

  “I got worried when you didn’t answer. Why are you there so early?”

  “The early shift. For p
eople on their way to work.” It was a key, attached to a plastic key tag. Written in the window on one side was Tomas Lindegaard. I flipped it over and on the other was Old West Wing. I went to the door and pushed it open. The street was lined with workmen’s vehicles and tall pines. In the distance, a man on a ride-on mower was tidying the footpath. No slow-moving tourist cars crawled for parking spaces near the Falls walk yet. No sign of Tomas.

  “I’m sorry. You know how I worry,” Mum said.

  “Yes, I know how you worry.” I pocketed the key in my little black apron and let the door close behind me. Penny was clearing Mrs. Tait’s coffee and chatting to her, but otherwise, the café was empty. “Is it urgent?” I said to Mum.

  “Not really. It’s just . . . Adam’s books . . .” The catch in her throat.

  “I’ll take them,” I said, decisively. “Ship them up here.”

  “You’re going to stay, then?”

  “Yes, of course.” I took a breath, preparing myself for what I knew would come next.

  “It’s a long way from home.”

  “It is home now.”

  “I worry, is all . . .”

  Worry. That word again.

  “I’m fine up here.” More than fine. Better than I’d ever been. I was away from my hometown on the coast of Tasmania, living in the Blue Mountains behind Sydney, by myself. Learning how to do things other people discovered as teenagers: pay rent, manage my own laundry, budget for groceries. So much later than I should have.

  “It seems wrong for you to be that far away. The house is so empty and . . . are you sure you’re okay? I don’t want something to . . . go wrong.”

  Two to three times a day Mum phoned me, and two to three times a day she raised the specter of something “going wrong.” It frustrated me so much that my teeth ached, but it also made my heart ache. We weren’t an ordinary family. I wasn’t an ordinary daughter. Nothing about our circumstances was ordinary.

  “I promise you,” I said, for the hundredth time, “you don’t need to worry about me.”

  She sighed. “Nobody can promise that.”

  “I’m going to lose my job if I spend any longer on the phone,” I lied. “We’re so busy this morning. Send up those books. I could use something to occupy me in the evenings.” The evenings were long and empty. The television reception was patchy, Penny was my only friend so far, and I couldn’t rely on her to entertain me every night. I’d taken to going to bed early with a cup of tea and a slice of fruitcake, and reading out-of-date celebrity magazines from the back of the rack.

  “All right, I will, but—”

  “Bye, Mum.”

  Penny watched as I slid my phone into my bag and got back to work.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Always is,” I said.

  * * *

  It was only later, much later, that I remembered Tomas’s key. I had slung my apron on the bed when I got home, and headed straight for the bath. My granny flat in Evergreen Falls, behind Mrs. Tait’s house and five minutes’ walk from the café, had a bathroom barely wide enough for me to spread my arms in, but the bath was deep and the window beside it opened onto the enclosed and private courtyard garden. I luxuriated in bubbles for a while, but when I put on a load of laundry I heard something clunk against the inside of the washing machine. As I pulled the key out of my dirty apron, I felt faintly guilty.

  I left the key on the kitchen bench while I ate dinner—another frozen microwave meal for one: beef stroganoff this time—and considered it under the overhead light. Tomas Lindegaard. Such a lovely surname. Outside the windows, dusk was deepening. The construction site would be deserted now. Even Penny would have flipped the CLOSED sign in the café window. I knew where Tomas was staying while working on this project: I’d seen his rental car outside a cottage with a long, oak-lined driveway four blocks away. My heart thudded a little harder at the thought of knocking on his door.

  I changed out of my bathrobe and into a clean T-shirt and jeans, pulled on my shoes, and left the flat.

  The evening was warm and soft, the air thick with the smell of pine and eucalypt. I’d moved here at the start of the summer, and three months later, in March, I hadn’t suffered through a hot day. The breeze was up and the sky was pale amber streaked with pink clouds. I took the hill up towards the main road, my feet crunching over dropped branches and pine needles.

  No car outside Tomas’s house. The disappointment gripped me keenly. What had I hoped for? Events of the past meant I had no chance of forming any kind of normal relationship. Though I longed for one with all my heart.

  I sighed, turned, and headed home.

  But I didn’t want to go home. Perhaps he was still at the site, I told myself. I set a course for the Evergreen Spa Hotel.

  She was a rambling beauty, sunset colors staining her lichen-spotted stone walls. The grounds stretched a kilometer across, perched on the edge of an escarpment and gazing down over valleys and hills as far as the eye could see. Two towering, century-old pine trees flanked the front entrance, each encircled by a meter-high garden bed that overflowed with weeds and yellow flowers. The hotel had been built in the 1880s, enjoyed its heyday in the early twentieth century, and then fell into disrepair after World War Two, when it was used as a dispatch center for the military. A halfhearted attempt to renovate it in the 1960s had seen the east wing restored sufficiently for weddings and functions. Then that, too, had been boarded up. Last year, the developers had moved in. Tomas had come. Penny had leased the café. I had fled my parents in Tasmania and begged her for a job, serving locals and tourists but mostly site workers. The east wing of the Evergreen Spa was on track to open later in the year.

  But the west wing, the original two-story stone structure with its ornate Italianate arched windows and bracketed cornices: well, hardly anyone had been in there for decades.

  And I had the key.

  * * *

  My life to this point had been spent avoiding spontaneous things, all to save my mother’s nerves. I’d never climbed trees, I’d never gone around in cars with boys, I’d never flitted off to the beach if friends asked me (when I had friends, which was rarely, because I was no fun to be around). I’d grown up considering everything through the prism of my mother’s perspective. She would have hated me inserting the key into the lock and turning it until it snicked. She would have hated me taking that one last look around the deserted site, serenaded by trees that rustled softly and distant traffic on the highway. She would have hated me stepping inside and closing the door behind me, to find myself in darkness. Because she would have hated it, I did it.

  The windows had all been boarded over in some dim, distant past, and of course the electricity was not connected, so I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and switched on the torch. It was a narrow, short beam, but it would stop me from tripping over anything. Shining it around, I realized I was in some kind of foyer, with swollen parquetry, high ceilings and peeling cornices, flocked wallpaper whose corners sagged unhappily from stained walls, as well as a dusty broken chandelier that picked up the light from my torch beam and refracted it into a thousand crystalline sparks across the walls. I caught my breath, and in doing so inhaled a lungful of dust that made me cough for thirty seconds without stopping.

  I stood there for a long time, in the middle of the foyer, trying to imagine what it had looked like in its prime; what it might look like in a few years when Tomas and his team had refurbished it. I felt a strange sense of privilege, seeing it like this. Raw, untouched, the layers of years still thick around me.

  I shone my light about. On one side, a hallway branched off in front of me, on the other, a set of stairs. I didn’t trust the stairs to hold me, so I headed down the hallway, past a few empty rooms, and found myself in a large scullery. The floor was lined with uneven tiles, and a giant cast-iron oven dominated one wall. The big square sinks were full of silt. One of the boards was missing, and through the grimy window I saw the underside of an outdoor stai
rcase, across which hung a DANGER, KEEP OUT sign. I felt a distinctly guilty prickle. I knew I should leave.

  I made my way back down the hallway and across the foyer to the door, only to find that it wouldn’t open. There was no hole for the key on this side, and the handle was missing, leaving only a protruding stalk of metal. I put my phone between my teeth where it could illuminate my guilty feet, and twisted my hands around the stalk with all my might. My hands slipped off red and sore and smelling like old metal.

  My heart fluttered as I realized I was locked in and nobody knew I was here. I could call Penny or Mrs. Tait. Or my mother—that idea made me laugh out loud, dispelling my initial alarm. I switched off the torch in my phone to preserve the battery while I thought it through.

  But of course, this building was so vast, there would be other ways out. I headed back down the hallway and checked for exits in the empty rooms. The scullery door was boarded shut. Right at the end of the hallway were two doors: one with clear access, the second under the long slope of a staircase. I tried the first, but the handle wouldn’t budge. I inserted the key, and it gave a millimeter and then gave no more. So I tried the second door, and that was my big mistake.

  The key slotted in and turned with a wrench, I pushed the door in and met with resistance. So, I pushed harder and—crash!

  My pulse shot up. The initial crash was followed by a second, and a third, and then thud after thud as whatever I’d shoved the door into collapsed onto the floor. I gingerly switched on my torch and looked into what appeared to be a storeroom, the ceiling only just above head height. Judging by the mess, when I’d pushed the door in, I’d inadvertently knocked a heavy ceramic urn against the leg of an old table. The table leg had given way, and all of the things on it—suitcases, boxes of bric-a-brac, books, lamps, other items I had no hope of identifying—had slid to the floor in a jumble. The urn had survived, but an entire tea set had not.

  I was faced with a dilemma: use the rest of my phone battery in lighting the scene of the crime sufficiently to clean up and hide the evidence, or call Penny and tell her what I’d done and suffer the humiliation.