Page 29 of Down the Track
She had a vehicle and time, didn’t she? Time that would be best spent keeping busy rather than moping about on an old wooden bench, so she took off on a drive to the outskirts of Winton to visit the lab techies at the Age of Dinosaurs Museum.
Unsurprisingly, given how small the palaeontology world was in Queensland, she knew a couple of them. They fed her fruitcake and she admired the fossils they were working on, some of which were very exciting finds (which she was only a tiny bit jealous about) and while she was there she wandered around the exhibits to check out the sort of stuff that only museum people noticed—like how thick the steel supports were that held aloft theAustralovenator wintonensiscranial remains, what temperature were the fossil display rooms regulated to, what barriers were employed to keep tourist fingers away from precious items and yet still allow a clear and unimpeded view. It was while she was inspecting the display information beside the fossil remnants of the museum’s most famous resident, Elliot, a giant herbivorous sauropod, that she read a paragraph about the unusual qualities of soil in the Winton Formation.
Black soil is the name given to the thin upper layer of clay soil that is the broken down remnants of the geographical feature known as the Winton Formation. Ordinarily, when bones are found on the surface, it is understood the surrounding matrix has eroded away; not so in this case. Instead, fossils reside in the siltstonebeneaththe black soil. Due to Winton area’s current climate of intense dry and wet seasons, the black soil above the siltstone forms fissures which open and close with the seasons, a process which can transport fossil remnants—even large ones—to the surface.
Black soil. Totally different to the matrix she was familiar with from her digs in Victoria and overseas. She would have dug in it herself back when she was a student here on the outskirts of Winton, but she’d been a zoologist then. Her palaeontology studies were in their infancy. If Jedda had told her about the properties of black soil, she’d somehow forgotten them.
She switched to her phone and flew through some searches. The Main Roads Department pamphletWQ32: Soils of Western Queenslanddescribed it as ‘a soil, generally clay, which, due to its structure, forms a loose surface mulch-like layer as the soil dries’. A farming co-op website written by someone with a poetic turn of phrase described black soil as ‘a pain in the arse out here. Fenceposts won’t last. Trees won’t stay rooted. Secrets won’t stay buried.’
Secrets. Like maybe the rest of the fossilised remnants of whatever dinosaur the Dirt Girls’ partial femur had belonged to?
Jo had to get Jedda to talk to her about the dig. Had the team in 2014 dug down through the black soil to the uneroded siltstone beneath? Maybe—and she almost didn’t want to think this because she didn’t know if she could handle another blow if she was wrong—but maybe this visit out west wasn’t a waste of time and money and effort. Maybe a new approachwouldunearth something? She took a photo of the exhibit’s information display and sent it to Jedda along with the questionDid you dig down into the siltstone?
On the drive home, she punched the radio volume up and left the window down so the hot western plains breeze filled the inside of her hire car. She even found herself humming at some point. Humming.Her. Like she was a happy, hopeful person. It felt wildly, breathtakingly, great.
The police station was open when she arrived back in Yindi Creek in the late afternoon, so she parked right out front and headed in.
The police officer’s expression was not overly welcoming when Jo approached the front counter and said hello, but Jo was on a roll. There was a little bell that could be dinged, sitting next to a small black placard announcing the officer on duty as Acting Senior Constable Petra Clifford and a bunch of fanned-out flyers with titles likeTurning the Screws on CrimeandRoad Safety Starts With Me.
‘Can I help you?’ said the police officer. Her tone said,Oh for god’s sake, what now?
Jo glanced at the clock ticking with slow precision on the back wall of the tiny office—4.55. ‘Sorry, you must be about ready to clock off. I don’t want to take up much of your time. My name’s Jo, and—’ She rethought how she was framing this. Best go into battle fully dressed, perhaps, with some of this newfound confidence that had blown into her car window along with the hot summer air. She dialled her tone down from friendly to formal. ‘Dr Joanne Tan. I’m a senior palaeontologist with Queensland’s National Museum of History. I need access to a site of international significance on Corley Station, but this morning when we flew out there, we were asked to leave.’
‘Yes. I was there. We were conducting a search for a man reported missing.’
‘Has he—’
‘Been located? No.’
‘I’m wondering why we were turned away.’
The police officer had very mobile eyebrows. One of them lifted so high at the question it disappeared into her hair line. ‘Away from your site of international significance?’ She let the words hang in the air so they both had a lot of time to consider how wanky they sounded. ‘Um, let’s see … because we had trained personnel conducting a grid search? And we didn’t need a bunch of tourists getting in the way and leaving footprints everywhere? And because any missing person search in these temperatures can be a life-and-death matter, whereas I’m assuming whatever you’re searching for is a very, very, dead matter?’
Yeah, okay, now she put it that way, Jo could see her question did seem fairly dim-witted. She tried again. ‘Look, I’m not a tourist. My interest in the site is restricted to the depression you would have seen near the pile of rocks, so I have no reason to be tramping about elsewhere. I have reason to believe fossils may lie buried there.’ A giant exaggeration of a barely legible scrapbook and the hazy memories of the Dirt Girls, but the question of the maybe as-yet-undisturbed siltstone lent her claim some truth. Anyway, this was how confident people spoke, wasn’t it? As though they had but to utter the words and their every desire would come true. ‘If you were okay with me heading out there, I’d be setting up a little campsite right next to the excavation and staying until the end of the week. I’d be an extra set of eyes and ears, and I’m not untrained at observation.’
‘The site’s currently a crime scene.’
Jo frowned. ‘Wait. Since when was going missing a crime?’
‘I can’t discuss an active investigation with you. We’re not done with our search yet, so I need you to stay away for the time being. I’ve said the same to Dot and Ethel Cracknell when I went over to their place this afternoon, since they’re the owners of the property at the centre of all this attention.’
‘The thing is—’ Jo cut her eyes to the little black placard to make sure she was getting the title right ‘—Acting Senior Constable Clifford, I only have a few days before I need to be back in Brisbane. Can you let me know when I can—’
‘Since you’re here, perhaps you can explain to me the exact nature of your interest in that location. Officially.’
Jo blinked. ‘Officially? Haven’t I just told you?’
‘Officially as in an interview. A formal one, not chitchat over this counter.’
‘Is that really necessary? I’ve already told you I’m looking for fossils. I don’t know the first thing about this missing person.’ Or whatever crime the police officer had alluded to.
‘Come through to my office.’ The woman had lifted the hinged flap in the counter and was now waiting with barely concealed impatience for Jo to walk through. ‘Take a seat.’
Jo found herself walking into the office and sitting up straight like she was a schoolgirl and the policewoman an all-powerful principal who held Jo’s future in her hands. But what choice did she have if she wanted to get back out to the dig site?
‘I’ll be recording this conversation,’ said the police officer straight off the bat. She pulled a slim silver device from a drawer, checked something on its screen, then laid it on the old-fashioned blotter on her desk. ‘What’s your association with Yindi Creek Chopper Charters?’
‘Um … I hired them for a charter?’
