She snorted. ‘Girls who got into trouble could have their babies there, knowing they’d be adopted by a family who deserved them. Then the girls could get on with their lives.’

‘That’s stupid,’ the younger woman said. ‘What if they wanted to keep their baby?’

‘It was better for everyone,’ the older woman said.

‘You do know we’re in the twenty-first century, right?’

Jake wasn’t sure the passage of time meant much around here. But he finally had an answer as to where the children in the home had come from. They weren’t government placements—they were babies deemed by Dunton’s moral code to be undesirable.

‘Out of curiosity,’ he addressed the older woman again, ignoring her now crossed arms and enormous frown, ‘when people call it the bad girls’ home, do they mean the girls who grew up there, or the girls who went there to give birth?

‘Both, of course. Born of sin or vessels of sin, it’s all the same,’ she said with a superior sniff.

‘That’s insane,’ her companion protested.

‘You don’t have to work here.’ She smacked Jake’s lunch on the glass countertop and stormed into the walk-in pantry.

‘Sorry about my mum,’ the younger woman said with a sympathetic smile.

Jake picked up his lunch and headed to the station, mulling over this new information as he walked.

He’d spotted a park a few blocks from here on his first reconnaissance of the area. Clusters of trees huddled along the edges of the lawn in partially shed cloaks of decaying leaves, interspersed with the murky green of misshapen pine trees. The piercing whistles of wrens and finches mixed with the cacophony of a trio of screeching black cockatoos. Their unnerving cries reflected Jake’s thoughts.

So the whole town knew—but denied—that some of their own children and grandchildren were born at the girls’ home to be given away like so much excess produce. Or at least, some of the women knew. There had to be grandmothers in Dunton who knew their granddaughters had lived there. They let them grow up believing their own mothers had died and their fathers didn’t want them—that they were essentially orphans—when they had extended family just a few kilometres down the road.

The park offered painted benches in front of a skate­boarding zone, a well-maintained football-oval-cum-cricket-pitch, and a dirt car park. A bevy of black swans floated on the creek that skirted the edge of the park while what must have been half the local teenage male popu­lation rolled up and down concrete waves.

Jake chose the bench furthest from the skateboarders and began to eat his sandwich. Once again, it was the taste of childhood. Bleached white bread that melted on his tongue, the greasy feel of cheap margarine and wafer-thin tomato, lettuce and beetroot for the salad filling.