Dee Digs
May 3, 2022
3pm
Adelaide Police HQ
Dee
After the phone call to Fifi, Dee leaned back in her chair. ‘Gotcha, Mr. Renard. Gotcha!’
She couldn’t believe her good fortune in Fifi. Didn’t take that “Rannga” much to turn against her former friend.
However, youth group rumours were not enough to “hang” Lillie, she needed hard facts—evidence. She started with the local council office at Glen Huon. After all, most apple picking happened in the Huon Valley, Tasmania. So, a good place to commence digging dirt on her nemesis.
Thankful that she woke up the sleepy young man in the office before the council chambers closed, she trawled through the files he sent her. She was glad that such information about payrolls and workers in the area in 1981, had been digitised. Lillie von Erikson was listed as working for apple orchard owners, Greg and Janine Thomas. However, no mention of a baby or her being pregnant. Dee puzzled over the fact that Lillie, according to Fifi, seemed to have been in Tasmania long after the apple-picking season was over.
What was she doing there after apple picking? Dee wondered.
She moved onto Trove, an online digital archive, that has recorded historic newspaper articles and publications. Searched Lillie’s name in the local and state newspapers from the day.
Nothing.
She calculated when the baby would arrive if conceived in November. Then scrutinized state and also national papers for a birth in the personal pages. August—September 1981, in particular. Nothing. Still, all is not lost. Perhaps she didn’t put the birth in the paper if she adopted the child out.
But a quick check of newspaper dates available revealed that Trove only published papers up to 1950. What a disappointment!
A visit to the South Australian State Library was the next step in the search. There she trawled through the microfiche files for the Tasmanian newspapers, concentrating on births around August and September.
After an unsatisfactory August, she scanned the first week in September.
‘Ah! That looks more like it,’ Dee murmured.
She zoomed in on the notice of a daughter, Zoe, born to Lillie’s apple picking bosses, Greg and Janine Thomas. Detective Dee Berry smiled while resting her clasped hands on her belly. September 1, right in the timeframe too.
‘Interesting,’ she murmured. ‘Did the moll stay to help Mrs Thomas? Or did she give the baby to Mrs. Thomas?’
A check of the births, deaths, and marriages register, and confirmed. Mrs. Janine Thomas was over 40 when she had her first child, Zoe.
‘Not impossible, but suspicious,’ Dee muttered. ‘I think a little trip to Tasmania is what I must do.’
After saving the information onto a file labelled “Moll”, she put in an application for a visit to Tasmania courtesy of the government. After all, it was an enquiry into a murder investigation.
Who knows, Dee smirked, my enemy may be a suspect that needs to be eliminated; one way or another I’ll get her.
Up the Apple Isle
Part 1
Thursday May 5, 2022
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Dee
Dee gripped the leather-bound steering wheel of Toyota Corolla hire car as it rumbled up the unsealed road. Won’t tell the hire company about that little detour, she thought. From the Council records, the Thomas farm was hidden way out west, close to the “Great Western wilderness”. The further west she drove, the thinner and rougher the road became.
She passed a tiny town with houses painted in gaudy orange and pastel greens. A purple house stood sentinel at a fork in the road. Dee took the left track hoping to reach her destination soon. She’d given up on the Sat Nav. The designated voice, named Jilly was vague and hadn’t a clue where to go.
Dee was proud that she could still read maps and follow the directions of an old local manning the service station at Glen Huon. He said he’d remembered someone like Lillie 40-odd years back. Strangers were a rarity in a small town of fifty-odd people from where he had come. He said Lillie had walked into the church, and all twenty heads turned to size up the blonde from the mainland.
‘It wasn’t long before rumours were flying,’ the station owner said, ‘pregnant, just like the lady who lived in that purple house you’ll see when you get to the town up there. Rumour has it, she’s got a child from ten different men. Anyways, that’s a lifetime ago now. Back then, if someone sneezed across the valley there, everyone in town would know about it and the person who sneezed would have died from pneumonia. Not much better now.’
Dee must have given him a strange look, because the station owner added, ‘Oh, er, don’t believe the rumours. Them folk up there are all related, married cousins and what not, but they don’t have two heads.’
‘Didn’t think they had,’ Dee replied, ‘I just want to know how to get to the Thomas farm.’
‘Don’t know why you want to go there; the family left years ago.’
‘Do you know where they went?’
The man shrugged. ‘The missus died, so I heard. Daughter’s become some big shot lawyer in Melbourne. Something not right there, she never fitted, you know what I mean. She wasn’t one of us.’
‘Did she look like Lillie, the blonde?’ Dee showed the man a photo she had scanned to her phone of 17-year-old Lillie.
The man paused, squinted and then nodded. ‘Yeah, there were rumours. But we could never prove it. Janine, Mr. Thomas’s missus, always insisted the baby was hers.’
© Tessa Trudinger 2025
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