Page 95 of Down the Track

Page List

Font Size:

She breathed in and out and fished a wiggly strand of lettuce from the sink. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘When we were together.’

Saying it—admitting it—felt like she’d just loosened the valve on an air chisel. Theyhadbeen together. Ithadbeen important. Shehadloved him.

But she’d not had the confidence or self-esteem to believe he could love her back, so she’d done a runner when her own feelings had become too much for her to handle.

He nudged her shoulder with his. ‘Was that so hard to say?’

She swallowed. ‘Yes, actually. Let’s talk about something else, can we?’

‘You know we’re going to have to talk about you and me sometime, Jo.’

Why would he say that? What did it matter to him now? He was famous, living his best life, he had it all.

She handed him a breadboard, then dumped a handful of washed cutlery in the rack for him to dry next.Talk about something else, she urged herself. But what?

Oh, yes: ‘Did you have any luck with that bottle top?’

‘As it happens, yes, and you’d never believe who knew. I looked online first, tried a reverse image search from a photo and no luck. Then I thought, why not ask the town expert on drinks? So I brought it here and I was showing it to Maggie, and Bernice came over to see why we were getting behind on putting the plastic chairs out. She recognised it straight away.’

‘Is it beer like we thought?’

‘Yep. SP stands for South Pacific Lager and it’s a brewery in Port Moresby. Bernice used to live there when her husband was still alive.’

‘Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea? That bottle top’s a long way from home,’ Jo said. ‘Unless they export beer.’

‘I checked. They brew an export lager and sell it in white cans, not glass bottles. So, our new question is, how did a PNG beer bottle cap get to the top of a jump-up on Corley Station? It’s not likely the Western Queensland police or the Hughendon SES are nipping up to Moresby to buy their weekend beer,’ he said.

‘Agreed.’

‘There’s something else. I found some weird-looking markings on the jump-up. Little ditches. I have a hunch what they are and that’s going to help everything make a whole lot more sense, but … I don’t suppose you’d take a look at the photos? You being the local ditch-digging expert.’

‘What, now?’

‘They’re on my phone.’ He wiped his hands on the tea towel, then pulled his phone out of his back pocket. He found the photos and started sliding backwards through images. ‘Here,’ he said.

She was looking at the same gritty surface soil that had been present on the slope of the jump-up where they’d found the bottle top, but the section of ground did indeed have a ditch in it. Hux was scrolling through photos and one had his booted foot placed widthways in the mark. ‘Wait,’ she said, leaning closer so she could see. ‘Go back to that boot one and make it bigger, will you?’

He did as she bid, and she inspected it for a long moment.

‘How long is your foot?’

‘I measured my boot already and it’s eleven inches from heel to toe.’

‘So this divot was made by something about, what, eight inches wide? Nine? And it’s hit the ground with a lot of force at this end, but not so much at the other end of the mark, I’m guessing.’

‘That’s right. The divot was a good two inches deep here, but sort of graded out to nothing. There was a matching one to the right.’

‘Huh,’ she said. ‘If only there were three-toed imprints there imbedded in the silica. Might have been a new dinosaur stampede record like the one at Lark Quarry. Or a giant pterosaur! That’d be something.’

‘Pterosaur. The flying one.’

She smiled. ‘Yes, a flying one, and there have been some remains found out here. They were pretty sizeable, too. Four-metre wing-span, so I imagine they left some impressive divots in the ground when they were landing.’

‘Would you believe I had the exact same thought when I tried to draw them to scale? Here—this is a photo I took of the whiteboard. I just paced the distances between, so it’s not very exact, but you get the idea.’

She stared down at it, frowning. ‘It looks to me—as crazy as it seems—like these divots were left by a different type of winged object. A plane, in fact.’

Hux grinned. He put his phone on the counter, grabbed her head between his hands and gave her a smacker of a kiss. ‘I knew it. I knew I was right. I thought the exact same thing. A plane—and a PNG beer bottle—and a duffel bag with drug residue. What does all that say to you?’