‘Did you just—’
‘Kiss you? Yes. Come on, don’t get distracted, connect the dots for me. A plane, a beer bottle from the other side of the Torres Strait, and drugs … what does it mean?’
‘It tells me,’ she said slowly, ‘that Dave is not wandering lost and in danger out in Woop Woop. He’s a drug runner. He was meeting a plane.’
‘You’re a genius. I should probably kiss you again. What do you reckon?’
‘Um …’ She could think of a lot of reasons why not. Like kissing her had got her all ruffled and she wasn’t sure how to smooth herself down. Kissing her was sort of indicative that they might have moved on from two people who’d bumped into each other again to something more but she wasn’t sure what.
Kissing, in short, was dangerous.
Best to change the subject. ‘I reckon … Surely it’s not possible for a plane to land on that itty bitty jump-up.’
‘Sure it is. It’s flat as a highway and almost as hard. If only we could work out what sort of plane. I didn’t see any sort of tyre tread.’
‘Huh,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘It’s just … you might not know this, but in my line of work, we don’t often find a complete animal. We find bits and pieces. Which means we’ve grown pretty good at cobbling together the rest using statistics and modelling programs and data from other bits and pieces that other people have found.’
‘And …’
She smiled. He sounded like Luke, wondering why she didn’t cut to the chase already. ‘What I’m saying is, if we go back and measure the distances between your divots exactly, and that smaller one that you mentioned which is maybe the nose wheel? Does that land at the same time or later? Anyway, if we have those distances, it’s going to narrow down the potential candidates. Maybe there’s some databases out there that list the specs of popular planes.’
He was grinning at her, and she was grinning back, and it felt nice. It felt good. It felt … hopeful.
‘When are you driving back? In the morning? I can fly out and maybe we can head up to the jump-up together. With a measuring tape.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She’d love that. And she could brew some coffee when they got back to camp, and maybe Luke could cook up the pancakes he’d been wanting to try on the little frying pan on the butane stove, and—
Crap. She’d forgotten the passenger currently tucked up on the back seat of her rented four-wheel drive.
‘Luke and I are heading back to Brisbane tomorrow. I’m not sure when we’ll be back.’
His grin faded. ‘So soon. I see.’
‘Um, yeah. We found something today. A fossil, I think. I need to look at it properly at the museum, and …’
‘Sure. Your fossils mean everything to you. I guess I should have figured that out by now.’
He turned back to the dish rack and dried the forks and the knives and the spoons, and the last of the glasses and saucers and platters. The only sounds were the squeak of the tea towel against the hard surfaces of the crockery and the pounding of her heart.
CHAPTER
37
On Friday morning, Hux was lying in the dirt between ancient timber stumps, covered in cobwebs and hoping that the thing under his back making crispy noises was old, dried-out leaf litter and not something hideous like a shed snakeskin. His plumber had left him a message that he’d only just gotten around to reading. She was tired of breastfeeding and children in general but hers in particular, so she was beyond keen to abandon them to daycare and get back to work, but she had stitches in her perineum (Hux had saidlalalalain his head while she said that) and had been told she couldn’t do anything that resembled squatting for the foreseeable future. Climbing under his cottage and fixing his pipe drama was not going to happen.
So here he was. At dawn. Feeling miserable. With a three-legged dog for company and—maybe—a recently reborn snake.
TYSON: This is going to be a long day, isn’t it, mate?
He shone the torch up into the bearers and found the place where he needed to cut. Saying a prayer to the building gods that he wasn’t about to slice his nose off with the angle grinder, he fired it up and started cutting. Replace this section. Replace the broken section in the yard. Wrap everything with a hundred yards of plumbing tape, and then he’d turn the water back on and cross his fingers and hope for the best.
Not that hoping for the best had been a great strategy for anything lately—his love life, for example—but plumbing had to be easier than love, right?
Everything was easier than love.