Where the Air Buzzed

Sarah Lahey sat at her desk with her coffee gone cold and a paperwork pile that had been accumulating on the surface since yesterday without her having laid a hand on it. Karl's desk across from hers was empty. It had been empty all morning, and she had stopped glancing at it around the time she had stopped glancing at the courtyard windows down the corridor, which was to say not quite.

She woke the monitor and typed Louise Jeffries's name into the internal database.

No results.

She typed Kain Jeffries.

No results.

The absence was too clean to be an oversight. Louise Jeffries was a forty-something financial analyst who had lived in Hobart her entire adult life, and a person did not live a life of that shape and that length in a city of that size without generating at least one traffic fine or noise complaint or petty piece of electoral paperwork. Kain should have produced at least one juvenile record, one motor vehicle file, one entry in the system somewhere. The database flatly insisted neither of them had ever existed.

Sarah did not yet have the authority to ask the question the flat insistence raised. She opened a browser tab instead and typed the two words that had more substance than any name she had been handed this week.

Jeffries Manor.

The results came up the way results came up when a thing had been written about by a great many people for a great many years. Tourist pages. Ghost forums. Heritage listings. Real estate speculation. And near the top, a masthead Sarah recognised as the kind of masthead that meant the document underneath had been checked — the Tassie Independent, a long-form piece written by a journalist called Adam Panchak, whose byline had put politicians in front of royal commissions and whose name on a story meant the archives had been walked.

She clicked, and the photograph of the manor loaded slowly down the screen — sandstone façade, widow's walk on the roof, the overgrown lawns of a property nobody was now pretending to manicure. Beneath it, the headline.

Jeffries Manor: Legacy, Land, and the Vanishing of William Jeffries.

What Sarah read across the next fifteen minutes was not what she had come to the article looking for.

William Jeffries had been a convict. Transported in 1808 for theft. Time served in New South Wales. Arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1815. Built himself a sandstone house on stolen land in 1817 and married a merchant's daughter named Madelyn Bally in 1819 and fathered a son in 1820. And in 1821 he vanished from the manor.

Madelyn had sealed herself inside the manor in the weeks that followed. Letters preserved in the Tasmanian State Archives — neighbour correspondence quoted in full in the body of the article — recorded that she had stood at her windows at odd hours and told callers that her husband had not left. That he had changed. That he was still there, somehow, and was simply no longer something she knew how to describe.

Twenty years later, in 1841, a woman calling herself a spiritual medium by the name of Rita Larkin had arrived at the property claiming to have been summoned by visions. She had spent several weeks on the grounds before her increasingly unsettling behaviour had been considered grounds for committal, and she had been taken to the New Norfolk Asylum in 1842.

Her diary had survived. Adam Panchak had reproduced several pages of it in photographed yellowed entries across the body of the article — the handwriting slanted and frantic, ink faded to brown — and the entries contained, in language Sarah was reading two centuries later in a police bullpen on the other side of the island, an account of a place in the orchard behind the manor where the air buzzed. Rita had used the specific word repeatedly. Where the dogs would not go. Where the birds would not land. Where she had described, in the careful exact prose of someone testifying to something she had actually seen, a hole in the sky. A rainbow gate. A shimmer in the air that appeared at certain times under certain conditions she could not herself articulate.

In 1844, Rita Larkin had vanished from her locked asylum room at New Norfolk. The window was latched from the inside. The door was locked from the outside with the key in the possession of staff who had not opened it overnight. The asylum's own incident report, which Adam Panchak had sourced from State Archives and quoted in full, noted no marks on the lock or the door, no trace of her on the grounds despite extensive search, and the careful closing phrase that the disappearance remained unexplained by conventional means.

Sarah sat very still at her desk.

Then she read the next paragraph of the article, and the case she thought she had been working on quietly stopped being that case.

Louise Jeffries, whose composure across the scarred table in Interview Room Three yesterday morning Sarah had been carrying inside her chest ever since, had been born Louise Greyson. She had married Thomas Jeffries in 1995. Thomas was the current patriarch of the Jeffries estate — the great-great-great-grandson of William Jeffries junior, the infant son who had been left behind in the sandstone house in 1821 when his father had disappeared.

Jamie Greyson was not the first name in this ledger. The ledger went back two centuries. And whatever had taken Jamie Greyson and Kain Jeffries had taken people from the same patch of ground in Tasmania before.

Sarah closed the browser window. The paperwork on her desk had not diminished. The coffee beside her keyboard had gone fully cold. Across the bullpen, Karl's empty chair sat where it had been sitting all morning, and for the first time since she had met him Sarah found herself looking at the shape of his absence and asking a question she had not previously permitted herself to ask inside this building.

How much of any of this did he already know.