There is total silence around me and I’m not sure if I have said all this out loud or shouted it in my heart.
I hand the photo to Raffy and she does what I can’t. She bursts into tears.
This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen, it’s a different kind of devastating.
Later we walk to the police station to ask Santangelo’s dad if his sister can stay at the school for the night. I feel numb with a sort of anger at no one in particular but I feel it brew inside me and I want to lash out at anyone.
Santangelo’s dad comes outside. I watch his daughter jump onto him and he piggybacks her to us and I see the look on her face that says that nothing can happen to her if she is holding on to her dad. It kills me to hate them so much for having that.
“She can stay with us for the night,” Raffy says. “There are spare beds in the dorm.”
Tilly and Jessa are crazy with excitement.
“Take care of my little girl,” Santangelo’s dad says to me and for a moment my blood runs cold.
“What? What did you say?”
He is confused. “Tilly. Take care of her.”
And then the moment is gone but the words still ring in my ears.
“I think he’s worried about the serial killer,” Jessa tells me.
“No mention of the serial killer,” Santangelo’s dad says warningly as he takes both girls inside to ring Santangelo’s mum.
The three of us sit on the footpath and I can tell they want to say something. Anything.
“At least it means that your father wasn’t weak and didn’t leave you,” Santangelo says.
I stare at him. “Dead or weak? Are they my options? I think I just might say yes to a weak father rather than a dead one, if you don’t mind.”
He tries to find something else to talk about and I want to make it easier for him because it’s not his fault, but all I can think of is Hannah’s story. My aunt’s story. How strange it is to use those words for the first time. I have an aunt and I don’t even know where she is. But I do know that I yearn for her in a way I never thought possible, and that she’s somehow written the story of my family’s life. And part of that story is sitting in the Brigadier’s tent. Halfway through Santangelo’s spiel about Club House stuff, Raffy looks at me and she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
“We’re going into Cadet territory,” she interrupts him. “Tonight. And you’re coming with us.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I need to get something out of the Brigadier’s tent,” I explain to him. “He’s not there and I’m breaking in.”
“Are you nuts?” he says, as though we couldn’t possibly be serious. “Both of you?”
“He has something of mine…well, kind of mine.”
“I’m not breaking into the Brigadier’s tent and neither are you!”
“Come on, Chaz,” Raffy says. “You and Joe Salvatore are experts on locks.” She looks at me. “Joe’s father’s a locksmith and Chaz worked there part-time for a while. He broke into the high school once for my mum when she left her teacher’s chronicle there.”
“Wow.”
“Breaking and entering is a crime,” he reminds us, not falling for the feigned enthusiasm. “Can we just get back to what I was saying? Stevie reckons he’s got hold of an espresso machine and—”
“You broke into your father’s police station,” I remind him. “That’s a crime.”
“To help you,” he says forcefully, giving up on telling us about the Club House.
“Santangelo, I promise you,” I say, “somewhere deep down I have a feeling that the thing in the Brigadier’s tent is going to help me. Please.”
“I’m going home,” Santangelo says. “You’re going back to your House and no one is invading Cadet territory.”
“What are you going to do? Arrest us?” Raffy asks.
Santangelo is irritated. “We’re not supposed to be collaborating. It’s supposed to be a war and you’re supposed to stick to the boundaries.”
“We’ve seen you in your jocks,” she reminds him. “Taylor and Griggs have pashed. You’ve broken into your father’s police station for us. Don’t you think the war has lost a bit of its tension?”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t seem to have lost the tension between them,” he says, presumably referring to Griggs and me.
“Why? What has he said to you?” I ask.
“I’m going home,” he says, ignoring my question. “Count me out.”
Raffy dismisses him with a shrug. “We’ll do it on our own, Taylor. Joe Salvatore said he was hopeless under pressure, anyway.”
It doesn’t take Santangelo long to get the lock open. I am very impressed by Raffy’s and Santangelo’s abilities to commit crimes with such finesse.
“You keep watch,” I whisper, looking at the rows of tents around us. Once or twice I see a flashlight on in one of them, but the chances of anyone going for a walk at this time of night should be low. I find myself wondering which one is Jonah Griggs’s tent. There’s a part of me that desperately wants to see him, to make him promise two trillion times over that he will never do anything to hurt himself. But I’m a coward and I know that he will never realise how much he means to me.
“Griggs will kill us,” Santangelo whispers back.
“You don’t owe Griggs anything,” I say as I open the flap. I walk into the tent, taking out the small flashlight and trying to be as discreet as possible. I’m surprised at how big the tent actually is—almost the size of an office, with a bed in one corner and a desk and cabinet in the other, as well as tea-and coffee making facilities alongside it. When I approach the desk, I look for locks, ready to call Santangelo in, but there doesn’t seem to be any and there’s no mystery about where anything is. In the largest drawer I find the manuscript and alongside it is something else that belongs to Hannah. It’s a stationery box that she has always kept in her bedroom in the Lachlan House cottage, and I realise that not only has the Brigadier been in the unfinished house by the river but on school territory as well. I’ve never been curious about the stationery box but I am now that the Brigadier thinks it’s important enough to steal.
I open it slowly and shine the torch on the contents: Hannah’s passport and birth certificate and those of Xavier Webster Schroeder, a tape cassette, a couple of newspaper clippings, and a few photos. My heart begins to beat hard as I touch the photographs. I am about to see my first images of the five. I wonder if they will live up to my expectations and answer my questions. But the first few photos are of a child, about three years old, with eyes that are big and wide and a mullet that the Townies would envy. Although I have never seen a photograph of myself as a child, I know it is me. Whoever I was back then, I looked happy and whoever I was looking at was the very person who made me happy. How can someone who made me look this happy no longer be in my life?
I turn my attention to the two newspaper articles. One is small and looks older than the other. It’s about the disappearance of Xavier Webster Schroeder. Just fifty words or so. Is that all he was worth? When I think of the screaming headlines of the teenagers who have gone missing over the years, I can’t help wondering how many words they would spend on me if I disappeared. It mentions the Jellicoe School and calls for any information to be forwarded to the police station and I’m not surprised to see the Santangelo name there, back when Chaz’s dad was a constable. I pick up the second article but can hardly read the print. It’s as if the words have faded with too much sun, but the photo and the headline are clear and they send a chill right through me. Because looking straight at me, thinner in the face, younger by almost ten years, is the Brigadier. But it’s not the photograph that shatters me the most. It’s the headline above it. KIDNAPPING CHARGES DROPPED. I feel woozy and nauseous and for the first time in four weeks I a
ccept the fact that Chloe P. and Jessa might be right about the Brigadier and that I may never ever see Hannah again. I feel a sob rising in my throat, but suddenly a hand is placed over my mouth.
“Are you insane?” Griggs whispers in my ear. When he feels me relax, he lets go and I pull away. I put everything back in the box and pick it up, ignoring him.
“You can’t take that,” he whispers loudly, turning me to face him. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in clothes other than his fatigues. He’s wearing boxer shorts and a long-sleeved South Sydney football T-shirt. He looks exactly how I feel. Like shit.
“It’s mine,” I manage to say.
“Why would the Brigadier have what’s yours?”
“Because it’s Hannah’s.”
“Then it’s not yours.”
“Well, it’s not his,” I say as forcefully as I can but I feel sick at heart. I take a few deep breaths, still clutching the box and the manuscript. “I need to go,” I say, turning off the flashlight. He tries to take my hand.
“Don’t,” he says.
But I pull free again. “I need to go, Jonah.”
“They must have a history, Taylor. It has nothing to do with you.”
I switch the flashlight back on angrily and thrust the box in his hand, pulling out a photo and holding it up to his face.
“Would you say this has something to do with me?”
He puts down the box and takes the photograph out of my hand, looking at it carefully. All of a sudden I see the look on his face that says it’s not so simple anymore.
“What if I told you that I think the Brigadier is the serial killer and Hannah knew and he’s done something to her?”
“Jesus, Taylor! Please don’t be crazy.”
“Maybe I am,” I say, nodding, and I’m trying so hard not to cry but my voice keeps cracking. “What if I told you that some kid who looks exactly like me is probably my father and probably dead and I think he comes visiting me at night and I’m going crazy because he’s trying to tell me that something bad is going to happen.”
I grab the photo out of his hand. “What if I told you that from when this photo was taken until I was ten years old I didn’t exist? There is no proof of my existence. I didn’t even go to school, so no school records, no school friends.”
“You have a mother.”
“Just say I made her up? Just say she doesn’t exist, either? Where’s the proof? Where’s my birth certificate? Where’s my father? Where’s Hannah?”
I try to control myself, attempting to concentrate on something else. A thought occurs to me and I move away, yanking open the other drawers of the desk. “I bet I know his writing,” I say, throwing things out of the way. Griggs grabs hold of me and I pull away but I fall back against the chair and it tumbles, making a crashing sound and the manuscript and the box go flying. He grabs me again, pushing me against the table, trying to keep me still and I try to break free, but his grip is hurting me and his face is so close to mine that it’s like he can see inside my soul.
“What if I told you that if you took me to that train right now, I’d throw myself in front of it without a moment’s hesitation?” I whisper. “I swear to God I would, Jonah.”
Santangelo pokes his head through the flaps.
“Get out!” Griggs says forcefully, not looking away from me.
“Let go of her, Griggs.”
“I said get the fuck out!”
“You’ve got one minute and I’m taking her with me,” Santangelo says just as forcefully.
I’m shaking so hard and it feels like I’ll never be able to stop.
“Please don’t be crazy, Taylor,” Griggs whispers, leaning his head against mine. “Please don’t be crazy.” He kisses me, holding my face between his hands, whispering over and over again, “Please.”
It’s the pleading in his voice that calms my heart rate.
“Will you listen to me?” I whisper.
He gently pushes the hair out of my face, tucking it behind my ears and then he nods.
“I think he did something to my father and Hannah knew stuff about him and now she’s gone,” I try to explain. “Remember when he picked us up in Yass and the same day those kids disappeared? Do you think it’s a coincidence he was in that town on the same day?”
“I was with him all night after we dropped you off. He drove me back to Sydney.”
“They could have been taken in the morning. Who knows how long he was out there before he caught up with us in the mailman’s van?”
“Taylor, he’s sat at my table and eaten with my family, in my home.”
“Your father was in your home and he ate at your table and he was your biggest threat.”
He is silent for a moment. “There are no similarities between my father and the Brigadier,” he says at last.
“I bet if I found his handwriting in this room it would be the same as the writing on Hannah’s note.”
“That only proves he’s a friend of Hannah’s.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “He’s not. I remember the one time he was around her. She couldn’t even look him in the eye. He was all rigid and something else, like he knew that she was on to him.”
“Maybe they’ve got a…thing going. You’ve only seen them together once. Maybe they see each other when you’re not around. Sometimes he’s come to my house after being ‘out bush’ as he calls it. He’s more relaxed. Like someone’s calmed him down. Just say this place is ‘out bush’?”
“Is he relaxed out here with you guys?”
“No. Do you know who he reminds me of? You. Distracted and lost and whatever else. Has it occurred to you that the reason you both keep on meeting each other around Hannah’s house might be because you are both desperately missing the same person?”
I shake my head. “Why wouldn’t she have told me?”
“The same reason she hasn’t told you anything else. Maybe she promised someone she wouldn’t. I was there when they returned you to her that day, Taylor. She was crazy. I’ve seen that craziness on my mother’s face when she thinks something’s happened to me or my brother. You and Hannah are connected big-time in some way.”
“I’ve just found out that she’s my father’s sister. I think I’m all she has left. But I’ll never understand why she wouldn’t tell me.”
“Knowing what you’ve told me about her, there would have to be a good explanation.”
I show him the newspaper article about the Brigadier. “Can you explain this?”
He takes a moment to read it. “No, but if I told you what the headlines were the day after my father died, would you think I was a murderer?”
Santangelo looks in again. “Let’s go, Taylor.”
I look at him and nod and he doesn’t move.
“Can we have a bit of privacy?” Griggs asks him, seething.
“Why? So you can make her go crazy?”
“Who was the dickhead who let her break in here tonight? Don’t think for one moment that I’ve forgotten that!”
Raffy pushes Santangelo out of the way and pokes her head in. “Someone is out here,” she hisses, “so can you both tone down the testosterone levels.”
I look up at Griggs and disentangle myself from his grip. “I’ve got to go,” I say, picking up the manuscript and the box from the floor and trying to grab as much of the stuff that fell out as possible. Under the table in the corner, out of my reach, I can see some photos and I stretch to get them but Raffy is urgently beckoning to me and I can’t quite reach.
As I turn to leave, Griggs catches me by the arm. “You’ve always had it wrong about that day,” he whispers. “I had never seen the Brigadier before. He didn’t come looking for me, Taylor. He came looking for you.”
The next morning, Jessa comes into my room and climbs into bed next to me.
“It was on the news,” she whispers. “Two kids from Mittagong have gone missing.” She’s shaking hard so I hold on to her until I feel her heart stop racing and tell he
r the story of the boy on the stolen bike who saved the lives of those kids on the Jellicoe Road and became our hero.
Chapter 19
I go to see Santangelo’s dad at the police station. He’s working with his head down and when he looks up, he is startled for a moment, like he’s seen a ghost.
“Who do I remind you of?” I ask quietly.
He grimaces, as though he regrets me seeing that look.
“Narnie Schroeder,” he says with a sigh.
“Why did they call her Narnie?”
He walks to the counter and leans forward. I like his face. I trust it.
“She told me once it was what her brother called her when they were toddlers. Couldn’t say Hannah; somehow it ended up being Narnie.”
I nod.
“What can I do for you, Taylor?” he asks, like he’s dreading the answer.
What can he do for me? He can tell me everything he knows.
“I know you’re not going to tell me where Hannah is because she’s probably made you promise not to, so I’m going to make this easy for you. I want to make contact with Fitz and I know you would know where he is.”
He’s shaking his head. The grimace is back but there is even more emotion.
“Please,” I say. “I just want to see him. I need to. Because I’ve worked out that my father is dead and Fitz knew him and Fitz would be here because he was a Townie and I want to know someone who knew my father. Is that so much to ask?”
“I can’t do that, Taylor.”
“Why?” I say, and I realise that I’m close to tears. “Just give me one reason.”
He pauses for a moment and I realise that the tears aren’t just in my eyes.