The salt air clung to her skin as Eliza Mullen
stepped off the steamship, her satchel heavy
with thread and silence. She had left Ireland
with nothing but a name and a promise to herself
not to become like the women who’d come before—
those who vanished into the outback or drowned
in the surf. The 1913 arrival at Port Kembla was
no different from any other, save for the way
the town’s eyes lingered on her like she might
break under their weight.
She found work stitching sails for the fishermen,
her hands quick and sure. But it was the ledger—
a ledger of debts, births, and disappearances—
that drew her in. It belonged to Detective
Inspector Halley, a man whose reputation had
been shattered by a scandal involving a missing
informant and a bullet that never found its mark.
He had fallen from grace, and now he lurked in
the shadows of the town, nursing his pride and a
bottle of cheap gin.
Halley’s rules were simple: don’t ask questions,
don’t look too closely, and never trust anyone
with a name that sounds like a song. But when
Eliza uncovered a name in the ledger that
matched a woman who had gone missing two years
prior—a woman with a similar accent and the same
wary eyes—he couldn’t ignore it.
The pressure came fast. The town’s mayor, a man
with a silver tongue and a pocket full of bribes,
wanted the ledger erased. His men watched
Eliza’s shop, their presence a quiet threat.
Meanwhile, Halley’s old partner, now a constable,
warned him that digging into the past would get
him killed.
The turn came on a moonless night. Eliza
followed the ledger’s trail to a derelict wharf,
where the tide had dragged away the remains of a
boat. There, she found the body of the missing
woman, wrapped in a sail and weighted with
stones. And beside it, a note written in a hand
that matched Halley’s. A confession, or a setup?
Halley confronted her in the alley behind the
pub, his face lit by the flicker of a kerosene
lamp. “You think you’re the first to chase
ghosts?” he spat. “This town eats them whole.”
But Eliza didn’t flinch. She held up the ledger,
its pages fluttering in the wind like a flag of
war.
The result was swift. The mayor’s men tried to
silence them both, but the town had seen enough.
When the truth spilled into the newspapers, the
ledger became legend. Halley resigned quietly,
while Eliza opened a tailor’s shop that catered
to the forgotten and the defiant.
The tides still rose and fell, but the past no
longer dictated the present.
