Page 38 of Down the Track
Yes, he was tired. Yes, he’d made a fool of himself this morning. Charlie was dealing with a whole lot of crap that had the potential to stir up a whole lot of misery if the police didn’t find Dave quicksmart, Number Four was stressed and pregnant and coping with worry about their helicopter business declining into bankruptcy and being unable to feed her two-nearly-three kids, and the woman who’d once torn his heart out (and not even freaking noticed) had just turned up in his life like one of those bad pennies he used to read about in historical fiction, back when he had time to read.
But not everything was wrong in the world. And one of the things that was totally right was publican Maggie Pike.
Twice his age, half his height and ten times his grit: that was Maggie. When he had first joined Charlie in the chopper business and Hux had moved into town, he’d lived upstairs for six months in a room barely large enough to house a single bed and a duffel bag and he and Maggie had become fast friends.
She was the only person outside his family, Phaedra and his agent and publisher who knew he had an alter ego who wrote fiction. Not that the fact that he was Gavin Gunn was atotalsecret. He had a website with his photo on it, after all (his face shadowed under the old grey fedora that had become associated with his Gavin Gunn persona, unshaven) and he did book signings and school talks and so on. But he didn’t ever allow his publisher to put his photo on the back of his books and the bio on his website was very bland. Any questions that might come his—as in, Gavin Gunn’s—way from podcasters or journalists that wanted to know about where he’d grown up, he managed to evade by giving them a half-answer and changing the subject.
He valued his privacy, that was all. He valued his family’s privacy even more.
Maggie, in fact, had been the one to read his first efforts at fiction. She’d offered him tactful feedback, such as:Is your main character supposed to come across as a total arse, Hux?OrThis chapter’s boring me shitless, can you whack a dead body in it? Or a sex scene? Or how about a dead body is discovered in the middle of a sex scene?And he’d thanked her for these offerings by tending bar or changing sheets in the hotel rooms when she was short-staffed and taste-testing her pies whenever he was asked to load a batch into the pie warmer behind the bar.
Maggie was still frowning at him from her side of the stack of beer. ‘I haven’t seen her this morning. Maybe I should go check her room and see if she’s okay.’
‘She was totally fine when I left her,’ he said. Fine and angry, if that parting shot was any indication.
‘Hmm.’ Maggie didn’t sound convinced. ‘I have high hopes that Dr Tan will be the beginning of a steady stream of guests for the pub, if this project she’s working on with the Cracknells comes off. I don’t need you scaring her off. Although …’ The publican eyed him up and down as though reminding herself what he looked like. ‘Didyou scare her? Or did you do something else entirely?’
He chuckled. ‘There was no “something else”, Maggie.’ Sort of. But he didn’t need to share all the details, did he? ‘And Possum was there as a chaperone so there was no reason for Jo to feel scared off.’
‘Huh. You managed to get to first-name basis, I see, while nothing was happening.’
‘Yeah. About that. We kind of know each other. From a long time ago.’
‘Bloody hell. Forget the stocktake—I need coffee. Come into the kitchen and tell me everything.’
While Maggie banged frying pans around on her commercial stovetop and cracked eggs into a chipped blue bowl, Hux gave her the trimmed-down version he’d practised on Charlie last night.
‘About fourteen years ago, Jo was working on the dig site of one of those big dinosaurs that got the whole Dinosaur Trail tourist thing happening out here in Queensland.’
Maggie snorted. ‘Remember those ridiculous dino rubbish bins Winton put up along their main street?’
‘Jealousy doesn’t look good on you, Maggie. You know you loved those bins.’
She flicked her tea towel at him then returned to the stove, where two rashers of bacon were starting to sizzle in about a cup of butter. ‘So you met on a dig site. This must have been before Gavin Gunn was on the scene, then?’
‘I was writing, but I hadn’t sold anything then. In fact, in a crazy sort of way, it was writing that brought us together.’
‘Really? Does our sad little dino doctor have a secret writing career, too?’
That was the second person to tell him Jo was sad. If Tyson counted as a person.
TYSON: I heard that.
‘Jo isn’t a natural writer. She has trouble with grammar and clarity—at least, she did back then—and apparently writing scholarly articles is the way you get ahead in palaeontology. She was struggling with some article she was writing, and I offered to help.’
‘Uh-huh. And that offer to help turned into something else, I’m guessing.’
That was one way of describing love and heartbreak and a decade and a half of not meeting anyone else since he’d fallen for even half as much.
‘The short story is, Maggie, the last day we were together, I was about to tell her I loved her, but before I could get the words out, she told me she was packing her bags and moving overseas.’
‘Oh, Hux. She’s the one, then.’
He frowned. ‘Shewasthe one. A long time ago. Now she’s just a client of Yindi Creek Chopper Charters I’ll probably never have to see again.’
‘Except for apologising to her.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Except for that.’
