SPOILERS!!!
A great part of the novel is the chapters of a book about the deaths of the Turners, written by an American journalist, Mike Miller. Jess discovers the book under her grandmother's pillow. She is intrigued when her grandmother mentions Halcyon. That reminds her of a time when she heard the name during Nora's brother's funeral. Her grandmother was talking about Halcyon about a burden and how she wanted it sold as soon as possible. When Jess asked her mother, she just told her that Halcyon was a house.
Jess asks Mrs Robinson, the housekeeper, who tells her that Halcyon belonged to her grandmother's brother, and there was a tragedy there. His wife and his children were found dead. The investigations that followed concluded that Isabel Turner had killed her self and her children. The baby, Thea, was not found at the time, but years later her bones were found buried nearby, which means that an animal may have taken her.
Jess starts reading the book, which gives us a bigger picture of the characters. Nora was visiting at the time, pregnant, and we discover that she gave birth after learning about the tragedy. In the book Nora says that Isabel was very distracted that morning, and she thought she was not herself.
The book describes the circumstances of every character. John, the thirteen-year-old son, had always been friends with Marcus Summers, but that friendship was ruined as Marcus had stopped talking to him, and John had turned to his new neighbour, Matt. The reason why John had lost his friend lay on the relationship between Matilda, her sister, and Kurt, Marcus's brother. Apparently, Marcus had caught the two of them in an intimate moment, and from that moment, he hated the Turners, which included his friend.
Matilda was nervous because she was late and feared she might be pregnant. When she told Kurt, he wanted to marry her, but Matilda didn't have marriage among her dreams. She wanted to travel and to go to university, and a baby couldn't spoil her plans, so she wanted to have an abortion. She and Kurt had a heated argument that day.
After the tragedy several people were questioned. One was Becky, who had been hired to look after baby Thea. We understand that Becky was, we could say, slow. A figurine that had belonged to Isabel was found in her possession, and Becky claimed that Isabel had given it to her as a givt, something strange as it was Isabel's favourite object. Becky also told the police that some days ago she clumsily dropped and broken a gravy boat, which had belonged to Issy's mother, and Isabel had snapped at her, adn she had left the room crying. When asked if Isabel had intended to fire her, she said that she never said such thing.
Another person who was questioned was Henrik Drumming. Henrik worked as a caretaker for the Turners, and his wife was in a mental hospital as she had developed some mental problems. Henrik was very unhappy about it because his wife was nothing but a shadow of what she had been. Henrik had given Isabel some tablets when she had told him that she had problems sleeping, and maybe this was what she used to kill herself and her children. The thing is that nobody found out how they were killed. There are other possibilities. The fish paste that Mrs Summer sent her as a present may have been poisoned, or the sugar that she used to sweeten the cold tea.
Another person to be questioned was Reverend Lawson. He remembered that when Isabel talked to him once. She asked whether it was okay for a mother to leave her children behind if she were to go away, and the vicar told her that there was no justification and a mother should always find the way to take her children with her. So maybe Isabel took his words to herat and that is why she decided to kill her children.
We have not read the whole book yet through Jess. The young woman has contacted Mr Miller's niece, Nancy, who sends her some scanned pages of the notebooks her uncle kept. There were also tapes, and Jess wants her to send as well.
I thought that Nora had taken baby Thea, and Polly was that missing child. Now, though, I have doubts. Everybody in the book mentions Nora being pregnant and having the baby, and Thea's bones were found years ago. So my theory doesn't tally. Then why was Nora so nervous about Polly or Jess finding out about what happened in Tabilla?
Nora dies, and the first person that is notified is Polly. The book adds another narrator, Polly. We discover that unlike what Nora told Jess about her father, Polly did fall in love with an American lecturer, Jonathan James. He also fell for her, and he had asked her to marry him and moved to America, where his father was a senator. Yet, Nora convinced her that she couldn't marry him because her past, meaning what had happened to the Turners, would harm Jonathan and his family, so she told Polly that she needed to prove her love and leave him. So Polly broke it off with him, and Jonathan returned home, without knowing that Polly was pregnant, and he married someone else and had children. I think Polly was a fool to let her mother persuade her to leave the man she loved. I have the hunch that Nora was manipulative, and I bet that she also manipulated Polly into leaving Jess with her.
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