Homecoming

Jess arrives in Tambilla in the afternoon and drives out to Halcyon. The gate is padlocked, so she climbs over it. The long-abandoned house is elegant and grand. The scene is oddly familiar after reading the book, and she finds the remnants of the rose garden, where Thea’s remains were found.

The next day, Jess meets Marcus Summers in his office. He has information about the Halcyon tragedy. His father, who also knew this information, tried to contact Nora long ago. Marcus recently decided to try again and now wants to pass the information along to Jess.

To relate the information that Marcus gives to Jess, the narrative shifts to Percy’s perspective, just after the Turner Tragedy in 1959. Percy returns home from Halcyon and realizes that the local gossip about the murders has already reached Meg. Kurt and Marcus are both out searching for the missing Thea. Meg takes Percy to the coach house behind their own home, where Thea is sleeping soundly. Meg claims that she found Thea while she was walking by the river. While Percy’s instinct is to call the police, they both worry that doing so would cause the police to suspect their family, including Kurt, of the murders. Instead, they decide that after a few days, they will leave the baby somewhere that she will be found. Afterward, Percy goes for a walk. He misses his dog, Buddy, who was recently poisoned by a pufferfish. When Percy comes home and cleans his muddy boots, he notices that one of his son’s boots is muddy as well and becomes worried about Kurt again. He wonders if Kurt brought the baby home and suspects that Meg might be covering for him.

The narrative continues to relate events from the 1959 timeline. Meg goes to Halcyon early on Christmas morning to look in on Nora and Polly. Percy remembers Isabel’s comment that Nora walked in the rose garden early each morning, and he decides that they can leave the baby with Nora. Meg surprises him by easily agreeing.

On New Year’s Eve morning, before dawn, Percy takes Thea to Halcyon. He leaves her in the rose garden, then hides and watches to make sure that Nora finds her. When he hears a noise behind him, he turns to find the source, and when he turns back, the baby is gone. All day, he waits at home to hear about the baby’s discovery, but there is no news. After several days, Percy sees Nora in Tambilla with only one baby and realizes that she must never have found Thea.

The narrative returns to 2018. Jess returns to Darling House, thinking about Marcus’s story. In addition to Percy’s story, he added his own. On the day of the murders, he went to Halcyon to meet his father, Percy. Marcus found the crime scene just after Percy left and heard the baby crying. Not knowing what to do, he brought her home to Meg. He also followed Percy on the morning that Percy left Thea in the rose garden. Marcus’s activity was the source of the noise that distracted Percy. He and Percy both held out hope that Thea lived, but their hopes were dashed in 1979, when the baby’s remains were found in the rose garden.

Jess knows there are still questions to be answered, but she needs to think over the information. When she returns to Darling House, Polly gives her two packages that came while she was gone: the copy of Daniel Miller’s book that she’d ordered, and a package from Nancy. The book is a used copy, marked with notes about poisons and possible cyanotoxins. Online, she discovers that cyanotoxins are connected to blue-green algae, which is a problem in the area. It is possible that the family drank contaminated water from the water hole. Jess contacts the professor again to ask if it was possible to test for blue-green algae in 1959.

In the other package from Nancy, she finds a cassette tape and a letter. The letter insists that the cassette be given to Polly. It is labeled “NORA TURNER-BRIDGES, DECEMBER 14, 1979,” and Jess realizes that this is the interview from when Miller wrote the addendum. Polly remembers the day he came to talk to Nora—she was in the garden with Jess, who was just a baby.

As the tape starts, Nora’s voice jars them both. The interview is casual and polite, but when Miller brings up the discovery of Thea’s remains, Nora begins to cry. On the tape, Nora asks after the Tambilla locals, and Miller tells her that Meg Summers has died. Nora remembers Meg coming to Halcyon on Christmas Day with food and cleaning up the kitchen. When Miller brings up Becky, Nora is sharp and disdainful, with a tone that Jess has never heard before.

The interview ends without any new answers, and Jess is disappointed. Polly finds a letter tucked in the cassette case, addressed to her from Miller. He writes of seeing Polly and Jess that day and coming to a surprising conclusion that Nora didn’t deny. When he and Nora went inside to discuss his discovery, Miller, in a breach of journalistic ethics that troubled him forever afterward, secretly recorded the conversation on the other side of the cassette. After reading the letter, Jess and Polly decide to flip the tape over and listen.

On the tape, Nora relates the story of her baby’s birth on Christmas Eve. Her baby was quiet and small, and Nora could not get her to eat. Nora fell asleep from exhaustion, and when she woke up, she discovered that her baby had died. She held the baby for the rest of the day and into the next, even when she went to the police station for her interview.

The next morning, she went for her usual walk in the garden and found Thea amid the roses. As the phone lines were down because of the storm, she was alone with the baby for several days. When the police returned, they commented on how much her baby had grown, and she did not correct them. She decided to keep Thea and never told Thomas the truth, feeling justified in her decision because he never returned to Australia.

On the tape, Miller asks Nora about Becky’s outburst, which indicated that Becky had clearly recognized the baby as Thea. Meg, however, covered for Nora, and Nora still doesn’t know why. Before Nora left for Sydney, she buried her own baby in the rose garden. When she returned to Sydney with Thea, now renamed Polly, no one ever knew the difference.

Early the next morning, Jess looks out the window and sees Polly going down to the cove. Jess still wonders why Meg kept Nora’s secret, never even telling her own family. Nora lived the rest of her life wondering when her secret would be exposed. The professor whom Jess emailed about the poisons responds to confirm that in 1959, the coroner would have tested for blue-green algae. The professor mentions other poisons which couldn’t be tested for then, including tetrodotoxin, which was found numerous places, including porcupine fish, pufferfish, triggerfish, and toadfish. Jess is disappointed, for she had convinced herself that blue-green algae was the answer.

Standing on the shore of the cove, Polly considers the fact that she is Thea. Certain aspects of her life make sense now, like Nora’s overprotectiveness. While her mother always blamed Polly for sensitivity and fragility, she realizes now that Nora was the anxious one and the cause of their tension. She finds it almost funny that, amid all of Nora’s lies, she told the truth when she said that she found Polly in the garden. Now, Polly floats in the water and thinks about her visit to Tambilla in 1989. Nora had canceled Jess’s two-week stay in Brisbane with Polly, and when Polly had objected, Nora reminded her that she hadn’t always been a good mother, pointing to an incident when Nora witnessed Polly standing over Jess’s crib with a pillow. Polly doesn’t even remember such an event, but over time, she came to believe that Jess was better off in Nora’s hands.

Now, Jess waves to her from shore, and Polly swims in. She puts her dress and necklace back on. Her pendants, which include images of a baby rattle, a jacaranda tree, and a bird she’d found in Tambilla in 1989, chime softly. Polly brings up a memory from the cove, when she saved Jess from high tide, but Jess gives no indication that she remembers, making Polly feel more isolated.

Walking back to the house, Jess is troubled. She remembers Nora saving her from the tide and wonders if Polly’s memory is confused. Nora’s solicitor comes to the house and explains Nora’s will, in which everything is split between Jess and Polly. He also gives Jess a special request from Nora: that she go into the secret room in the attic, which is hidden behind the bookshelf, and burn the traveling case she finds there without opening it.

Jess immediately goes to look for the case, realizing that Nora wanted her to stay out of the attic as a child so that she wouldn’t stumble on the secret room. Inside, she finds a travel case labeled with the name of Isabel’s mother. Despite Nora’s request, Jess opens the case, knowing that she and Polly have a right to see the contents.

The trunk is full of personal items from Isabel and her children, and at the bottom, she finds Isabel’s journal. The missing pages are inserted in it as well, and this is what Nora wanted destroyed. In the pages, Isabel confesses that she is in love and is having an affair with a man from Tambilla; he is Thea’s father. She also states that she plans to take her children to England. The man has cut their affair short, and she cannot stay at Halcyon any longer. One final note mentions Isabel’s intention to give the rabbit netsuke to Becky. Reading this, Jess realizes that everyone misinterpreted Isabel’s words to the reverend. Furthermore, she realizes that Nora removed the journal pages to protect Isabel’s reputation and Thea. However, that doesn’t explain why Nora removed the entry about Isabel’s plans to move to England, for this revelation would have exonerated Isabel of the murders. This find reopens the possibility of accidental death.

Jess shows the journal to Polly and tells her about the similarities of Nora’s stories in which both Isabel and Polly supposedly stood over their babies’ cribs with pillows. She feels sure that Isabel’s lover is Henrik Drumming. While fiddling with the journal, Polly finds a slit in the lining with a folded paper inside. It is a clumsily written letter that threatens to expose Isabel’s affair. After a moment of thought, Polly says that the Isabel’s lover isn’t Henrik Drumming, but she thinks she knows who it might be.

The narrative shifts to 1989. After young Jess’s visit to Brisbane is cancelled, Polly visits Halcyon and sees a man mowing the lawn. He introduces himself as Kurt, and she tells him that Thomas Turner, the house’s owner, is her uncle. Upon finding that she is staying in Tambilla overnight, Kurt invites Polly to join his family at the hotel for dinner that night.

Polly is nervous about meeting the family but is curious about Percy, whom she knows from Miller’s book. He is quiet until the end of the meal. They discuss books, but when he sees her necklace, he becomes curious, asking her where she found the little bird pendant. She tells him that she found it at Halcyon, near the water hole, and he explains that it is a carving of a fairy wren, a common bird in the area. He tells her that she looks like her mother, but Polly is confused, knowing that she looks nothing like Nora. He asks her to come back and visit, but she never does.

The narrative continues in 1989. After leaving Polly at the hotel, Kurt drives Percy to his new home on the beach, nearly an hour away. Percy moved there after Meg died. When Percy saw Polly, he knew immediately that she was Thea, and he now knows that Nora found the baby in the garden all those years ago. He has suspected as much over the years, but Meg refuted the idea. She saw the baby on Christmas Day when she went to Halcyon to clean the kitchen on Christmas morning.

Upon meeting Polly, he was shocked to see the wren pendant that he bought for Isabel on Polly’s necklace. He bought it at the end of their affair, after recognizing his son Marcus’s handwriting on the letter that Isabel showed him. Their affair began slowly over a common love of books, and when it ended, she told him that she was taking her family to England and had seen a solicitor about arranging their passports.

After Meg’s death, Percy and Marcus talked frankly, and Marcus apologized for the letter he sent all those years ago. He also admitted that in his anger, he caught a pufferfish, wanting to make Isabel sick with it. In the end, he didn’t follow through on this plan. Meg caught him with the fish, and when he confessed his plan, she took it away from him. When Marcus confessed this, Percy finally understood the solution to the mystery of the deaths. Toward the end of her life, when Meg was drugged and in pain, she told him that after she took the pufferfish from Marcus, she put it into her fish paste, a favorite of Isabel’s. Meg didn’t think that anyone else would eat it, as Isabel told her that she never shared it. That was why she had cleaned the Halcyon kitchen on Christmas Day, and it also explains how Nora found Thea in the garden so quickly—Meg called to tell her. Contemplating all of these past events, Percy now lies in bed, reminiscing about meeting Isabel by the water hole, a pile of books between them.

On Christmas Eve, 2018, Jess is in the Tambilla bookstore in Adelaide Hills, where the Summers’s grocery used to be. She and Polly have traveled to Tambilla together, and last night, her mother told her about meeting the Summers family in 1989. Recognizing that secrets had shaped both their lives, Polly has decided to be honest with Jess and tells her about Jonathan James. She talks about stories from when Jess was young as well. Jess doesn’t remember any of them and realizes how profoundly her own sense of the truth has been skewed by Nora’s stories. However, she does share that she remembers Polly rescuing her at high tide, and her mother’s happiness at the shared memory surprises her.

After wondering why Isabel’s solicitor never came forward, Jess finds his obituary and realizes that he died on the same day that the deaths occurred. She also wants to talk to Marcus about the pufferfish and Meg’s fish paste, for she realizes that the two women, Meg and Nora, were bound together by their shared secrets. Nora kept the journal pages just in case she ever needed to expose Meg. The story is even more complicated than Jess could have imagined, as is her own. Although Polly abandoned her, Jess realizes that her mother needed to break away from Nora. Jess, on the other hand, thrived under Nora’s care and became the person she is today.

Now, she and Polly drive out to Halcyon, where they meet the local real estate agent. While exploring the house, Jess looks out a window and sees Polly walking on the property. She realizes that just as Miller’s book brought this place alive for her, the books she read as a child made England seem instantly familiar when she moved there. It complicated the idea of home. Polly, who is now talking to the agent, may want more out of this visit than nostalgia; she may be interested in buying the property. Together, they walk down to the water hole, disturbing a flock of fairy wrens along the way. For the first time in a long time, Jess doesn’t feel lonely.