Meet Me at Lennon's by Melanie Myers

Author:Melanie Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2019-08-13T03:16:57+00:00

– 9 –

A direct private entrance from George Street leads to the Private Bar, whose modern serpentine counters faced with dark green marble provide a cool contrasting note to the creamy tan Wombeyan marble of the walls.

—Lennon’s of Brisbane Brochure, 1941

Clio had dropped Olivia home in her ’95 yellow Corolla. Olivia, she’d declared, was a genius for working out who ‘KS’ was. She’d been happy for Olivia to take the tin and its contents and ‘just return it whenever’. Clio hadn’t read the letter from Gloria Graham to June about a girl being strangled and dumped by the river, confessing she hadn’t read all the letters; she cited the callowness of youth for her lack of interest. Olivia was grateful for Clio’s callow youth as that meant she was probably the first one to set eyes on the potentially game-changing letter since its intended recipient. Olivia didn’t know what it all meant in terms of her thesis yet and would have to sit down and think about it, but thank goddess she hadn’t sent that email about quitting to her supervisor, Mandy.

To consider the letter when her faculties weren’t wholly operational was futile. She went out to the balcony without any goal in mind except to take stock of the day outside. Its temperate, twittering cheerfulness felt like an assault. Her jaw was tight and her eyeballs actually ached. There was no evidence of last night’s revelry; Cheryl would have taken care of that. She dropped into a rattan chair and closed her eyes, letting the sun massage her face. Her synapses screamed for coffee, but that would only deter sleep, which was the only thing she had planned for the next few hours.

It was only an impression; a phrase she’d skimmed over: River Girl. She got up so fast she hit a knee on the table. She limped inside and fired up her Mac, bringing it over to the dining table. The radio transcript was still open in her browser.

She read it all the way through, the implications simmering low in her spine. The silence around the young woman’s death was staggering: she was murdered, there was a nylon stocking tied around her neck, her body was found dumped in the mangroves by the river, yet it had not been sensationalised as front-page news. Even by the censorship standards of the time, this seemed heavy-handed. She wondered what else was kept from the good citizens of Brisbane during the war years ‘for their own good’.

Wanting to check for herself, Olivia opened the National Library’s Trove website to search their digitised newspapers. She needed some dates to search first. The transcript mentioned 1943, but that was all. She grabbed the tin box from the other end of the table and retrieved the letter: it was dated 11 February 1943. The best she could find for anything more specific was Gloria’s mention of ‘mulling over it for two weeks’. That put the conversation Gloria overheard around 28 January, though the girl must have been killed at least a few days before that.

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