The Astrologer's Daughter (15 page)

I think of being trapped in a car with Don Sturt and his nervous, yellow-flecked
eyes and gangly teenage awkwardness that sit so at odds with his old-guy body. ‘Do
I have a choice?’ I reply as Ozzie pretends, laboriously, to read. He’s either checking
out my rack again at close quarters, or running interference for Vicki; because all
the Greek kids at Collegiate have each other’s backs. It’s an unspoken rule. I turn
my back on Oz, leaning up against the edge of the table so that all he sees is a
big expanse of dark-purple polar fleece and maybe half an inch of my squashed-down
backside.

‘Please,’ Don rasps. ‘You do this for Eleanor and I promise you’re out, you’ve done
your bit. Some things—as tragic as they are—they don’t have answers. I told her
that—that
having some person do a bunch of horoscopes wouldn’t prove a bloody thing.’

I want to say:
I could’ve told you that.

But instead I say brusquely, ‘I’m already late for Chem. Meet me outside the Catholic
hospice two doors down from school at 3.30. And you have one hour of my time, right?
If you don’t make it, Don, you don’t make it; there aren’t any re-runs and I’m not
waiting. My mother is
missing
, don’t you people understand?’

I’m almost in tears as I cut the call, and I’m sure Ozzie can hear it in my voice,
so I don’t meet his eyes, or anyone else’s, as I careen out of the library. I just
head to Chemistry like nothing’s happened, and all Dr Terrasson says dryly is: ‘Well,
look who’s decided to grace us with her presence today,’ and then it’s business as
usual from his perspective, no special favours, which I’m grateful for.

Though, again, there’s that weight of eyes. And no one will partner with me until
the Doc forces Candice Ong to do it and she insists on doing everything herself like
I’m injured or retarded: gathering up all the materials with her own tweezers, doing
all the measurements, firing the Bunsen burner up so that the flame blazes between
us like a boundary that may not be crossed; all in silence. It’s like I turned up
at school with no hands, rather than with no mother, but I don’t make a fuss.

As Candice burns shit and I look on helplessly, I think:

Right now, Cenna, right now, there are people out there in the bush looking for her,
thousands of kilometres away.

In the meantime, all I can do is put my head down, pick up my ballpoint pen and swim.
Swim for the distant shores of
normal
—even though I know I may never make it back
again.

Something about Don Sturt makes me sit very straight on the edge of my seat, my pack
between my knees, hands on my kneecaps, wishing like hell that the car ride was over.
I’ve never been this close to the guy. It’s not that he’s a talker—he’s not, he’s
silent and hunched-over—but there’s just…something. It’s like his body is emanating
some weird, screamy vibe so supersonic I should be able to read it. It’s possible
that he’s even more uncomfortable about the whole situation than I am. The phone
call earlier was bad enough, but this? A whole other level of
awkward
. Maybe he doesn’t
like girls, I dunno. When I sneak glances at him between the stops, I sense he doesn’t
like me. It’s in the pinched lines of his gaunt face. He wants me away from him somehow,
even though he suggested the ride, and the knowledge makes me almost want to leap
out of the car while it’s still moving. Even his driving seems erratic, twitchy;
the car drifting across lane boundaries
and skidding on the tram tracks when he accelerates
at the lights.

When we leave the known universe that is bounded to the south by St Kilda Road and
the Shrine of Remembrance, turning off to points leafy and even more traffic-jammed,
I’m officially lost. We’re not far from town, I know that much. But the inner-city
suburbs that surround Collegiate High do not remotely resemble what we are driving
through now. It’s like we’ve entered that part of the map that some higher power
has designated:
the better part
. Once we leave the ritzy strip shops, art galleries
and tram-clogged main road behind, the side streets are broad and alien, with houses
and accompanying grounds that are enormous, almost unfeasible, surrounded by high
walls or spear-topped iron fences that seem to go on for miles.

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 Charters 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?’

I have no idea, but I say, ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll let him know. Sorry, tell me again,
where were you calling from?’

The woman tells me
Royal Melbourne Hospital
and I ask for directions, and she tells
me, suspiciously, ‘Intensive Care Unit. His mum’s situation’s worsened. Tell him
it’s critical that he comes back in, as soon as possible. Her organs…’

She thanks me, and I thank her and hang up while we’re passing some snobby boys’
school all decked out in bluestone and ivy and broad skirts of emerald-green playing
field. I turn to Don and tell him quite calmly that if it’s all right with him, could
he drop me outside the Emergency Department at the Royal Melbourne instead of taking
me home?

Don doesn’t actually answer. But instead of cutting right at Flinders Street Station,
he turns left and does a sharp U-turn into Elizabeth Street, sending up a flock of
dirty pigeons. While he negotiates the giant nightmare roundabout just before Parkville
with five hundred other angry drivers, I send a quick message to the mystery mobile
caller who keeps calling me, but doesn’t leave messages.

You need to go back to the hospital NOW and make a decision. They said something
about her organs. I’m very sorry.

I’m not dumb. I can put two and two together. He wants to talk but he can’t. I get
that.

The mystery guy may be one of the raft of random mouth-breathers I seem to have attracted
in the days since Mum’s story got out. But I don’t think so. What had Eleanor said?
Gut feeling
. Even the sound of him drawing breath has become familiar to me, and
necessary.

A moment later Don’s pulling into the hospital’s front courtyard and I’m out of there
without a backward glance, asking for directions to the ICU ward.