Page 9 of Down the Track
Dot looked nothing like her sister. She was a pudding of a woman with an impressively large and swirling strawberry blonde updo that reminded Jo of the matron inA Country Practice. Jo could smell old-fashioned hair lacquer overlaying the aroma of fried steak and onion wafting from the pub kitchen.
‘Hello, pet,’ Ethel said. ‘Why don’t you get drinks while we get ourselves settled? There’s a bottle of champers tucked up in the back corner of Maggie’s good fridge that we’ve been wanting to try for a good long while, haven’t we, Dot?’
‘Ages. And here you are, Jo, wanting our help and meeting us here in this very hotel. It’s providential.’
Jo smiled. Both confident—lucky them. She’d have liked a touch more confidence herself. ‘Champers from the good fridge it is.’ Maggie must be the publican who’d handed her a room key and bottle of water earlier when she’d checked in, then turned back to the crossword she’d been frowning over. ‘I can’t talk now, love, so show yourself upstairs.’ Apparently, the clue for three down had been ‘behaving like a right bastard’.
When she returned to the table, she discovered Ethel and Dot had a novel approach to getting-to-know-you small talk. Either they’d grown up reading Cold War spy novels or their conversational style was naturally didactic, because the questions peppered out like machine-gun fire once they each had a glass of sparkling wine in their hands.
‘How do you know Jedda?’ asked Dot.
‘She’s a legend in the field of palaeontology, so back when I was a student I volunteered on her digs. Once I’d graduated, she found me a paid internship on a six-month expedition to Argentina where we excavated a very old therapod. Then, when I was accepted as a doctoral candidate, she agreed to be my mentor, for which I will be forever grateful. We spent a lot of time on a cliff excavation down near Apollo Bay in Victoria where we helped a team pulling out fragments of small herbivorous sauropods. I used the experience as the basis for my thesis, while Jedda was busy finding new species.’
‘We met her at the Harper place,’ said Ethel, ‘over the far side of Winton. She was working on a dig there and we read about it in the local paper—there was a proper newspaper in these parts then—and we tracked her down so we could introduce ourselves.’
Jo smiled. ‘That would have been the incomplete titanosaur that now lives at the museum where I work in Brisbane. I spent three months on that dig myself, camped out in a paddock being one of the diggers and sorters.’
‘We took to Jedda right away, didn’t we, Ethel?’ said Dot. ‘Wouldn’t have given her our favourite chunk of rock otherwise.’
Chunk of rock. That was a hell of a way to describe the Dirt Girls’ contribution to Australia’s prehistoric record: a suspected ornithopod bone with a crocodylomorph tooth embedded in it, which had been meticulously cleaned and restored and was now on display at the Museum of Natural History, with a little card announcing it as Australia’s only evidence to date of a prehistoric crocodile feeding on a dinosaur. The unanswered question, of course, waswhenhad the early croc fed on the dinosaur? As a scavenger, tearing flesh off a carcase? Or as a predator?
Jo had read the digital reports years ago, back when she was still working on her doctorate. Jedda had put the fossil through a range of tests and written extensively on it, because she was mad keen on ornithopods. It was a shame the partial femur was all the Dirt Girls had given her to work on, though, because it would have been awesome if the fossil could have beenprovedto be an ornithopod. The tooth, though. That embedded tooth.Thatwas what Jo was mad keen on.
She took a sip of her wine. ‘You’re braver than me, then, Dot. I was scared witless by Jedda when I first met her. She was not only intimidating because she was a legend, but she was so tireless on the dig site. None of us could keep up with her, even though we were desperate to impress her.’
‘So why isn’t she here with you, then, if she’s so tireless? It’s been fourteen years since we gave her our chunk of rock, and near on ten years since she came back with her team to dig up Corley Station looking for the rest of the dinosaur, and we’ve been waiting ever since for her to come back and finish the job. She promised us we were on the cusp of something exciting, but then when the dig turned up nothing, she buggered off.’
Jo choked on a sip of wine. ‘I’m sorry—did you say there’salreadybeen a dig on your land? Ten years ago? And it turned upnothing?’ The ballooning hope she’d had in her stomach turned to a balloon filled with lead, and the garden trowels she had stowed in the boot of the four-wheel drive parked out on Yindi Creek’s wide main street, along with her lists and notes (and dreams) now seemed ridiculous. Pitiable.
Dot and Ethel exchanged a look. ‘This’d be what Jedda meant, I expect, that last phone call,’ said Dot.
Ethel nodded. ‘Told you there was something iffy, didn’t I?’
‘I seem to have missed a step in this conversation,’ Jo said, in the calmest voice she could manage. She’d heard nothing of a failed dig. Correction: Jedda had told her nothing about a failed dig. On purpose, she had to assume. Butwhy?
The museum where she worked certainly hadn’t been involved, so who had sponsored it? One of the universities? A private collector? She was banking her career on this expedition. She’d had to negotiate custody arrangements and water polo camps and her freaking credit card limit for this expedition.
And forwhat?
She wanted to leave. She wanted to get up from the table, run out to the main street, and keep running until she was a long, long way away from this horrible feeling of failure.
‘Have some water, Jo,’ said Dot. ‘You’ve gone a little clammy.’
There’d be time enough to drink water when she was unemployed. Right now, she wanted to know why on earth she’d been set up like this. ‘When was this iffy conversation? Actually, let’s go back further than that. When did you and Jedda start talking about a new dig?’
‘That’d be this last winter,’ said Ethel. ‘Dot and I were going through our old scrapbook, and we called her to remind her she had unfinished business out here.’
Dot nodded. ‘We aren’t getting any younger.’
‘And a promise is a promise.’
Jo mulled over the word ‘unfinished’. Maybe something had happened. Floods. Fire. A biblical plague of locusts. ‘Did the dig get interrupted, maybe? By a cyclone or something?’ That could happen, right? It didn’t excuse Jedda from not mentioning she’d already been to Corley Station, but perhaps the site had barely been touched when some act of nature sent Jedda and her team packing.
‘Oh no, pet,’ said Dot. ‘They dug a hole the size of one of those swimming pools you people in Brisbane have in your backyards. They were very thorough.’
Jo closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing in very slowly through her nose, filling her lungs and letting the oxygen do its thing before she burst a blood vessel. What the hell was Jedda playing at? Getting her hopes up about a big find then sending her out here to nothing but a big pile of picked-over rubble?
‘Jedda was all fired up at first, wasn’t she, Dot, when she heard from us, but after a month or two she went quiet and wasn’t answering our letters or phone messages. Then maybe at the start of October or so, she tells us she’s still very interested in coming back, and would we trust her enough to pop our scrapbook in the post to refresh her memory and whatnot, but that she had a young friend who she’d like to pass the scrapbook to. Someone who needed it more than she did,’ said Dot.
