Winter by John Marsden Read Free Book Online

aunt, so she thought her aunt was a giant. All the way to Mount Isa she was excited, expecting to meet an aunt five metres tall. She was tragically disappointed when they introduced her to a shrunken little old lady.
    Maybe that silly story had lodged itself somewhere inside my head, because I think from the moment I heard about Mrs Harrison from Bruce McGill she started to grow bigger and bigger to me. The way Mr McGill talked about her, then the way Sylvia talked about her . . . it sounded like she had them both a bit nervous.
    Ever since I’d started my campaign to return to Warriewood I’d felt I was running on my own fuel, with no-one around who I could trust to fill my tank. These last few days I was down to my reserves, with no sign of a new supply on the horizon.
    So I chickened out from visiting Mrs Harrison. I told myself that I was exhausted from the walk to the lookout, too tired for the long hike to her place. Instead I decided to start playing detective in earnest.
    First I rang Mr Carruthers’ secretary and asked if he could come to Warriewood tomorrow. She said she’d check and call me back.
    Then I set myself up for some serious research. I had my notebook computer, and for the first time since the telephone lines were reconnected, I hooked up to my e-mail provider. I nearly fell over when I found forty-eight messages waiting. Maybe I was more popular than I realised. Maybe they were all junk mail. Whatever, I downloaded them without opening them, then switched to the Internet and clicked onto the search engine.
    Like with most Internet searches, I spent quite a while chasing shadows. I was scrolling through newspaper archives, concentrating on one date, 9 July 1989. It was a bit of a long shot. If she’d died in a car accident, for example, there might have been only one or two mentions of her name. Forget the one or two. There might have been no mention at all. Quite often newspapers just say things like ‘the name has not been released’.
    On the other hand, according to Bruce McGill, she had been well known in the district. And I knew from the souvenirs I had of my parents that she’d been a star in two areas at least: shooting and horse riding. She’d held two Australian records for marksmanship, and won the Garryowen three times at the Royal Melbourne Show. The Garryowen is named after a woman who died trying to save her horse, Garryowen, from a stable fire, and it’s the most prestigious riding event in Australia. So that should have been worth a paragraph when she died.
    Eventually I connected with the Age for 1989. But it seemed like only the major stories for the year were available. I searched for her name, but with no success. Perhaps she hadn’t died in the kind of spectacular accident that made the front pages of the papers, like a plane crash.
    I realised that my best hope lay in the death notices, the little classified ads that people put in when someone dies. I’d been leaving them for last, because I knew they don’t give many details. A lot of them give no details at all. But I opened them for 9 July.
    Nothing. Nothing. It was as though she hadn’t existed. I sat staring at the screen, dumbfounded. Why wouldn’t there be a death notice?
    Then, just as I was about to give up and disconnect, I realised how stupid I was. If she had died on 9 July there wouldn’t have been a death notice on 9 July. At best it wouldn’t go in till 10 July. Probably not till 11 July.
    I tried 10 July and drew a blank. Then hit the jackpot.
    The first thing I saw was my own name. I guess your own name always jumps out when you see it in print. But there it was all right, ‘loving mother of Winter’.
    I read the notice with tears in my eyes. For a few moments I forgot the reason I was on the Internet. All I cared about was that again, for the second time this day, I was in touch with my mother, my parents. These little connections were