The Ripple Effect Read Free Page B

maybe your father had been one of the casualties.”
    “But he wasn’t.”
    “Not that we know. A woman and her baby died in their farmhouse over Toolac way. Their bodies were completely incinerated the fire was so intense. An elderly man died of smoke inhalation trying to save his house out along Mac’s Reef Road and a fire fighter was trapped, cut off from his truck. Everyone knew him—John Tooley—left a widow and three teenagers. Doubt whether he would have taken up with a young girl.” She smiled. “Or vice versa.”
    Shay nodded. He knew all those details. They’d become part of the folk lore of the town—the fires of ’81.
    “She was seventeen, we discovered,” said Olive. “Your mother.”
    He listened while she told him the same story he’d heard over and over. “She was a runaway and Stan found her on the missing person’s register. She came from Toowoomba but her parents didn’t want to have anything to do with her or her children. They were religious and very strict. That type doesn’t have much to do with Christianity in my view,” she said. “For all their holier than thou attitude. Fancy turning your back on your daughter and her babies in their hour of need and calling yourself a Christian. They’ve both passed on now.”
    Olive snorted with disgust and slurped a mouthful of tea.
    Shay put his empty mug on her desk. He needed more. He didn’t need the same story again, he knew it inside out. “Olive, I’ve decided to try to find my sister. I mean, I’m going to find my sister.”
    Olive waited. She swallowed the mouthful of tea and took another.
    “Do you have any idea who adopted her?”
    “I couldn’t tell you even if I did,” she said, meeting his eyes and holding firm.
    “Do you know anything about them? Were they a local family? Did they come from the city?”
    “I can tell you she wasn’t brought up around here. We all would have known, wouldn’t we?”
    “But where did they take her after she left here?”
    Olive sighed. “Why do you want to know this now, Shay? You never asked before.”
    “I didn’t ask but I always wanted to know,” he replied. “All my life I’ve had in the back of my mind I would find her one day. I knew I couldn’t do it when I was a kid. I knew it had to be when I was grown up. It’s just always been there in my life.”
    “You were a happy child, weren’t you?” She spoke as if somehow the town as a whole was responsible for his happiness.
    “It’s got nothing to do with Stan and Amy and my brothers and sister.” He leaned forward. “It’s not about happy or unhappy. Of course I was happy. I couldn’t have had a better family, not in a million years. They are my family but she’s different. She’s my real sister, we had the same mother, Emily Grayson. We have something together no-one else has.”
    Shay realised he’d begun thumping his clenched fists on Olive’s desk. He grimaced and flexed his fingers, gave a small, tight laugh. “Sorry.”
    Olive smiled faintly. She held her bottom lip lightly between her teeth as she stared at the top most page on the report in front of her. She raised her head suddenly.
    “She went to Sydney to a children’s hospital and from there she would have been given to her new family by the adoption agency.”
    “I’m her family,” said Shay almost under his breath but Olive heard.
    “Shay, she may not know that.”
    “Not know she has a brother?”
    “Not necessarily. Some adoptive parents choose not to tell their children about siblings. She was only two weeks old when they took her in, remember.”
    “Olive, tell me which hospital she went to…please?”
    Olive sighed. “I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. The Madeleine Wright Children’s Hospital in Chatswood. It’s a small private one. I don’t even know if it’s still functioning. And I want my name kept right out of it.”
    Shay leapt to his feet. “Thank you, Olive. You’re a saint of a woman.” He darted