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I cut him off. “So how did it end up in the lake?”

“That’s what I can’t work out. If I remember, it was a few months before they dammed the town. We were getting ready to move, packing everything up.”

“But what about the head?”

“Well, that’s what I’m saying. That’s when I gave it to him.” Dad stroked the smooth curve of the skull absently. “I packed it into a box and put it in the trunk of his car myself.”

“And now it’s in the lake,” I said. “At least it was in the lake, and now it’s here.”

Dad brightened. “Yes, it’s quite fitting, isn’t it — like it’s returned to the place of its birth. The circle of life and all that.”

“Yeah, except that this isn’t the place of its birth,” I said. “In fact, it was closer to your old studio when it was up in the lake.”

“Good point. Well, maybe that’s why it was there. Maybe it was trying to get back home again.”

“This isn’t really helping,” I said through clenched teeth.

“No, I suppose not. But it’s interesting, isn’t it?” Dad smiled. “I could ask Finkle if you like, when I see him next. Which reminds me . . .” He gestured toward a low table in the center of the room. There was something perched on it, something vaguely head-shaped, swathed in Bubble Wrap.

“Is that —?”

Dad nodded. “Just in time.”

He was right about that. The centenary was only a few days away. “Shouldn’t it be on, like, a stand or something?” I said.

“
Plinth
is the word you’re after.” Dad sighed. “And yes, it should. But Finkle insists I don’t attach it until just before the ceremony. I think he’s worried about bird poo or something.”

Tires crunched outside, and I looked out to see Elijah’s truck pulling up.

“Perfect timing!” Dad said. “I’ll pack this thing properly and give it to him to take in tomorrow.”

He slid Finkle’s head into the box and closed the flaps over the top, then reached for the tape to seal them down tight.

When Dad told Mom about the head, she frowned.

That was probably because it was her usual response to anything to do with his heads.

Then she dropped her fork onto her plate with a clatter, sending flecks of spaghetti sauce flying.

That was probably because he had suddenly produced the head from under his chair and set it in the middle of the table, like a zombie centerpiece.

“Andrew! Get that thing out of here!”

“Don’t talk about Mrs. Finkle like that,” Dad teased. “She’s a lovely lady. Was, anyway. It’s been a long time. Anything could have happened, I suppose.”

“Twelve years. Has it really been that long?” Mom sighed. “Where did you get this?”

“It . . . washed up, apparently. At the lake.”

Dad told Mom about the day Finkle came over. How he’d put the head in his trunk. How he could see him now, clear as if it was yesterday, waving from his little red car as he sped off in a cloud of dust.

But he didn’t tell Mom about me swimming.

Maybe that was because I’d been keeping his head-related secrets for years, telling Mom he was busy glazing pots when he was really obsessing over how to make someone’s ear look slightly less like a deformed cabbage.

Maybe it was because it was hard for anyone who wasn’t Hannah to say much of anything at dinner and afterward, and on into the rest of the evening, because she was so busy telling us all about the centenary preparations. About how the book was finished and the ceremony was all planned and the band was going to be significantly less lame this time, and she was feeling a bit nervous about everything, but she was sure it would be fine in the end, an
occasion to remember,
and no matter what anyone said she was proud of herself and so was Howard, because she had worked really hard and done an excellent job.

“See?” After the dishes were cleared away, she emptied her work satchel, set her laptop down between us, then laid a sheaf of papers out across the table.
Printing proofs,
she called them. She said she didn’t have a proper copy yet, but nearly everything was here. “I just had to change a few things, fix a couple of typos.” She turned to me. “You should thank me, Cass. They tried to call you Carrie at one point.” She smoothed the pages down with the palms of her hands. “But basically this is it.”

I leaned over as she flicked through the glossy, oversize pages.

It was amazing — almost like a real book. There were headlines and photos and text, all wrapping around one another at odd angles in a way that looked funky and interesting, as if it had been carefully designed by someone who knew what she was doing and was on top of everything, and not someone who at any point in her life would have become paralyzed, sobbing uncontrollably halfway up a tree.

It looked different from the way it had on the screen, on the computer. It looked polished and finished.

But it looked different for other reasons, too.

I turned to Hannah. “What happened to the stuff about the bushfire?” Six years ago a fire had come within a mile of the town. I had seen Hannah working on a page about it. She had laid it out with some photos and an interview with the Clancys, whose farm had been threatened.

Now it was just gone.

Hannah waved a hand. “Oh, I deleted that. I couldn’t get it to fit properly in the end. Nothing really happened, anyway. And we could use the space. Howard wanted to put in more about tourism.”

There were other stories missing, too, when I thought about it. The time the Porters’ sheep got out and stopped traffic on the highway, making the news as far away as Perth. The year Miranda Hopkins made the top one hundred of
Australian Idol.
And the time Sam Farrington got lost in the bush, and half the town went out searching . . . No, that one was still there, but it had been reduced to a tiny square and added to the page about the endangered bilby, in a way that made them seem weirdly connected.

“Can I look on here?” I reached for the laptop.

Hannah nodded. I pulled it over in front of me and snapped it open. It blinked quickly to life, and I clicked onto the “Town Council” folder that was sitting on the desktop. Inside that was another folder called “Centenary,” then another called “Book,” and inside that were row after row of documents.

Draft 1, Draft 2, Update, Revised Version, November 19, November 19.2, New Revision . . . the names scrolled on and on.

Hannah was right. She had done a lot of work. She had done all these drafts, all these versions. All of them telling the story, of the town. All of them telling the same story differently. She had deleted some things and added others. She had narrowed things down, and now she had these shiny pages that would soon be bound tightly together into a book, solid and final.

My fingers hovered above the keyboard.

It was a funny thing about computers. You could just press the delete key and make things disappear. It wasn’t like a hard copy, where if you put Liquid Paper over something, you could scratch it off later and see what you had written, faint and ghostly but not gone; where even if you used pencil and rubbed something out, you could still see the marks, the thin patch on the paper that told you something different had come before it, that what you could see wasn’t all there had ever been.

Computers were different. You could save the changes and pretend they never existed in the first place. They didn’t leave a trail but made a smooth, slick surface that told you it was truth, had always been, would always be.

Is that what would happen? I wondered. Now that we had the centenary book, the official new story of Lower Grange, would that solidify into its own kind of truth? Would anyone ever bother to go back and see what sat quietly in the margins?

As Hannah talked on about the band and the plinth and the quality of locally made sausages, I clicked back out of the “Centenary” folder and back into “Town Council.”

Then I noticed something.

There was a document open, sitting there minimized in the corner of the screen. I clicked in the top right-hand corner to close it, but a window popped up.

Save changes before closing?

I don’t know,
I thought.

They’re not my changes.

It’s not my document.

I clicked cancel, and the document popped up in front of me.

Meeting, January 11.

They were notes from a town council meeting two days earlier, Hannah’s rapidly typed notes, full of errors she would clean up later.

EL: 12 Barker St. resident complains about neighbor dog. Regulations? Get someone out there to check it out. Refer to ranger.

GC: Sidewalks on Kitchener St. need work. can we sned someone to look asap plz.

AM: shd have gourmet sasuages for shindig NO MSG the health of our children is at stake (steak? ha!) and blahblahblah

HF: east side lake fence needs work, higher, stronger, maybe new fence between east side and Point as well, plus new signs and stuff, do something etc. VERY IMPORTANT to keep people out. VERY IMPORTANT, yes Howard we get it, we do!! maybe electrify fence!!! the safety of our children and all that. mild electric shocks no problem if prevent drowning. Refer: enginnering?

There was lots more — tightly packed lines about trash collection and fire roads and overdue rates — but this was where I stopped.

A new fence? Higher, stronger,
electrified
?

Wow. Finkle really meant it when he said he didn’t want people up there.

I clicked behind the document, into the “Town Council” folder. There were more documents labeled “Meetings,” going back years. They weren’t all Hannah’s. Most of them were from way before her time. I guess she just had them as a record, so she could look back and go,
HF said this in June 2005
or
12 Barker resident is only complaining about dog because neighbor wouldn’t pay for new fence two years ago
or whatever.

There were two documents for each date — one full of messy notes, like Hannah’s, and one labeled “Minutes.” These were neat and formal. They’d had the mistakes and the
Yes, Howard!
comments deleted. Now they looked official and serious.

I scrolled back through the directory, through the documents, through the years. All the way back, twelve years ago, to when the town was drowned.

There was stuff about protests and debates and arguments. There was stuff about levers and bands and sausages. There was stuff about swimming pools and lakes and fences.

Lots of stuff about lakes and fences.

Report suggests east side of lake for swimming area. Close to town, easy access for residents.

HF: concern about snags and danger.

RW: same on other side?

HF: west side better outlook, appeal for tourists

BT: residents should take priority over tourists!

HF: safety of our children. East side not an option.

AM: need to consider the recommendation of the report.

HF: need to consider the opinion of the mayor, who is your boss!

The discussion went on for several pages. No, several meetings. RW, BT, AM, and every other set of initials wanted the swimming area on the east, but HF pushed for the west. And kept pushing, until first RW, and then BT, and finally AM and everyone else either agreed or gave in.

And finally, the neat and formal, official and serious version of the minutes read simply:

It was resolved that the new swimming area would be established on the west side of the lake, with ample parking and an access road extending from the highway.

Moved: AM; Seconded: BT; all in favor.

I looked down at the table. Hannah had opened the printing proofs to a double-page spread of the lake. There were people swimming and picnicking and floating around on rubber rings. The walls of the dam rose up in the distance, and there was a smaller photograph inset of the viewing platform, where a family stood, pointing out across the water.

The photo didn’t extend east. The edge of the water blurred as it reached the fancy border Hannah had made to look like bubbles flowing around the side of the page. There was no sign of the possibly future-electrified fence, of the padlock and the warning signs, of the uneven edges of what might have once been a road, of the lengths HF would go to, to keep people out.

But why? There weren’t any snags, not really. The water was lower than it had ever been, and we’d never run into anything, at least not accidentally. To find anything, we’d had to dive down and down, holding our breath longer than I had thought humanly possible.

Even then, what we’d found wasn’t exactly dangerous — a shed, a car, a weird Finkle head.

Come to think of it, it was kind of ironic that it was a Finkle head in the lake, when Finkle was the one who didn’t want anyone swimming there.

“Hey!” Hannah reached across and pulled the laptop toward her. She snapped the screen shut. “I didn’t say you could look at that stuff.”

“There were unsaved changes,” I said. “A window popped up. I was —”

“Oh, dammit,” she said. “I hope I didn’t lose anything. I’ve been so busy, I . . . never mind. I’ll type them up later. I can probably remember everything if it comes to that.” She slid the laptop back into its padded sleeve, then leaned out over the table and began rolling up the proofs. “The point is it’s nearly done. I think it’s going to be great!”