Suellyn pushed back the glass sliding doors to the wardrobe. With Tommy in the garden she decided to make herself useful by going through his clothes looking for anything to give away to the local charity store. As she bent over to pick up a pair of trousers which had fallen from a hanger, she noticed a cardboard storage box at the back of the wardrobe, hidden behind a pile of old blankets and a set of rusty golf clubs. Her curiosity was aroused. She wanted to know more about Tommy Dwyer - she wanted to know who he really was. She calculated that she wouldn’t be disturbed for a while. Tommy enjoyed working in the garden and if he was left alone, he wouldn’t reappear for hours.
Suellyn sat cross legged on the carpeted floor and began rummaging through the contents of the cardboard box. She found old school books belonging to Tommy, his parent’s personal letters to each other, a few family snaps with people who looked like his extended family and bank books dating back to the late sixties and seventies. She casually opened them and noticed they were in Tommy’s mother’s name. At the bottom of the box, amongst a collection of bank statements, insurance bonds and other mundanities, she found a baby photo. The baby in the photo looked to be about seven months old, with chubby cheeks and a wide toothless grin. The child was sitting upright, straight-backed - William Phillips stared back at her.
‘How did a baby photo of William end up amongst all this stuff?’
William at eight months was written on the back of the photo, scribbled in faded ink in her mother-in-law’s scratchy hand writing. She recognised the photo from the one in the photo frame that Rose kept on her bedside table. Amongst Isabelle’s papers, were letters from Rose thanking her for the money. What money? Suellyn noticed a bundle of letters held together by a rubber band at the bottom of the box. Written in Tommy’s hand was an envelope addressed to Isabelle Dwyer. She removed the letter from the envelope, held it up to the light which was streaming through the bedroom window and began reading.
Dear Mother
I’m strapped for cash and I was hoping that you could help me out. I have plans to travel overseas and I need $50,000 immediately. I know you won’t deprive me of the experience that international travel has to offer, so please transfer funds immediately to my bank account or I will be forced to act on our conversation yesterday, something I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to do.
Your loving son as always,
Tommy
The menacing tone of the letter surprised even Suellyn. She wondered what he meant by ‘acting on their conversation.’ Was Tommy blackmailing his mother? Tommy’s family was wealthy, but fifty-thousand dollars was still a lot of money in anyone’s books. However, there was something else that bothered Suellyn. Tommy had told her that he had never travelled outside of Australia and that was why he was so keen to travel overseas now, before he got too much older. She wondered if Isabelle had given him the money and if she had, what he had done with it.
Suellyn reached deeper into the box and found another envelope – this one was addressed to Rose. She carefully broke the envelope’s seal and unfolded the letter. She was surprised to find that it was a carbon copy. Carbon paper went out with the ark and Suellyn wondered if you could still buy it.
She assumed the original of the letter had been sent to Rose and wondered why Tommy’s mother had gone to the trouble of keeping a copy. Was this her way of protecting herself from him? The contents of the neatly written letter startled her. Surely the Tommy she knew wasn’t capable of what he was being accused of by his mother. Suellyn stood up from the floor. Pins and needles shot down her left leg and she massaged her calf with her hands until the blood began to flow. She quickly walked out of the bedroom down the hall towards the study and placed one of the letters on the glass plate of the fax machine and pressed the copy button. As she waited for the machine to warm up she watched Tommy through the window. He was down on his knees, his back was to her and a hessian bag of weeds was by his side.
After the fax machine spewed out a copy of the letters, she returned them to the envelopes and shoved the warm sheets of A4 paper into the pocket of her silk robe. She returned the letters to the box and began to flip through the yellowed pages of bank books. The books were filled with transfers written in smudged black ink, monthly withdrawals for several hundred dollars over a period of years, withdrawals recorded by bank tellers, probably long dead, the same amount, the same date, every month. She didn’t find a withdrawal for fifty-thousand dollars recorded; perhaps Isabelle had money invested elsewhere…
Suellyn concentrated hard and gathered her thoughts. None of what she had just read made any sense. Tommy knew she was married to William. They had talked openly about William and Rose. Tommy had asked her questions about her husband and her mother-in-law when they first met and she remembered at the time she had been flattered by the fact that he wanted to know everything about her. She had been surprised by his interest in Rose. He had even asked her where she lived, her habits and about the state of her health. She’d not given it much thought at the time and assumed that he was just curious about her family but now it all made sense.
Both letters had a terrible tone to them and Suellyn’s mind raced as she tried to think what she would or should do about the information that she had just discovered.