Page 27 of Down the Track

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Charlie was slumped in his chair so Hux turned to Phaedracilla. ‘She’ll probably want to leap in her car and drive to Longreach, but maybe you can go with her? Try to persuade her to let you drive—she was pretty wrecked when I spoke to her yesterday. And can you drop Possum over to Maggie’s?’

‘Yes, yes and yes,’ Phaedra said. ‘Want me to call ahead and have an ambulance waiting for you at Longreach Airport?’

‘Yeah, good idea.’ Hux looked at his watch. ‘Tell them our ETA is two twenty.’

CHAPTER

11

Jo spent the afternoon of the second day of her seven-day reconnaissance trip to Yindi Creek in a blue funk. The Cracknells had headed home from the airfield for lunch. They’d tried to persuade Jo to come and have a sandwich with them in their airconned weatherboard cottage a block back from the main street, but Jo had been very much in need of some alone time.

She’d also been very much in need of calling her old mentor Jedda and asking her for an explanation, but the irritating thing about wanting to shout at someone who was lying in a hospital bed was that you couldn’t.

She’d texted:Please call me when you can to discuss 2014 dig on Corley Station.Then left it at that.

The Dirt Girls had promised to keep their ears open for news and ‘drop everything’ the instant the police were done with their southernmost paddock, but Jo had just nodded and agreed with anything they’d said, then hightailed it out of there as soon as she’d seen the pair of them safely into their old station wagon. Reflection time over pie and chips at the pub had not done much to calm her down, however, as her brain just kept circling around and around the one phrase.

Gavin Huxtable! Here! Again!

No ring on his finger, she’d noticed, despite the efforts she’d made to not notice anything. But the absence meant nothing—and why would she even care?

Because you adored him once.

Yeah. She swiped up a dollop of pie gravy with her last chip and chewed on it slowly while she thought about how adoring someone had felt. How being adored had felt.

She had adored Hux to the moon and back, but she’d panicked and run when things got serious because—hello, issues! And then she’d sealed her memories of Hux off in a part of her brain the way a fossil not ready for preparation was sealed up in plaster of Paris and stored on a shelf in a climate-controlled storage facility to be dealt with later. Like, decades later. When the time was right.

Which it wasn’t at all at the moment; the timing was wrong, wrong,wrong! Unsealing all those memories now would be catastrophic, because she didn’t just have her past (failed) relationship with Hux to consider, there was also the matter of her past (failed) marriage. The strained relationship she had with her son. The career that had started off with such promise but was now as dynamic as the cold gravy on her plate.

And, on top of the timing problem, there was the other thing. She didn’t need to be a list-obsessed scientist skilled in graphing and correlation and probability to deduce the common theme running through all her failed relationships, all she needed to do was look past the bottles into the mirror behind the bar of the Yindi Creek Hotel. It wasn’t that she meant to screw everything up, she just did.

Take Hux, for instance. Yeah, they’d had some long-ago love affair one long-ago hot summer—and she’d had some sort of meltdown and put her career first. Then she’d got married and, here was the pattern starting to repeat itself, she’d put her career first again.

Then Luke had arrived. Not totally to plan, but she thought she could handle it, because this was the modern world, right? Two parents who shared everything and mums could do it all now, right?

Wrong. Because as soon as she had a baby, that was the moment when everything—life, work, her headspace, mother guilt—had got totally messy and muddled, and missing out on the fieldwork she loved had hurt. She’d tried not to mind. Missing out on personal stuff was what mothers did, after all … but maybe she’d managed to make Luke feel that she was sad about missing out, and it was his fault.

Her problems with Craig? Well, that was a whole other hot mess that she really,reallydidn’t want to dwell on. But it was hard not to blame herself. If sitting at a desk in the bowels of the Natural History Museum doing research work on other people’s fieldwork had been enough, well, maybe she’d still be married. Maybe her son would still love her. Maybe she’d have enough money in the bank to fix the dodgy window on her hatchback that she had to coax up from its track with the aid of a spray can of lithium grease every time she opened it.

Or maybe you’d hate yourself even more.

‘Shut up, brain,’ she said.

‘Excuse me?’ Maggie, the publican, was dumping glasses from the lunchtime crowd (if one palaeontologist at the bar and a table of four who’d left already could be called a crowd) into an industrial dishwasher behind the bar.

‘Sorry. I was talking to myself. Shall I pay up?’

‘I’ll put it on your room, pet. I take it you’re here with me another night, then?’

‘You heard.’

‘About the police shooing you away from your dig site? Yes. Had a few of them in here this morning. Seems our missing man is attracting quite a bit of attention.’

‘I guess it’s a race against time to find someone when it’s the middle of summer.’

‘It sure is.’

‘And … still no news?’ Because if he’d been found, that would be a win. For the missing guy and for her.