Jo looked sideways at Ethel, hoping this wasn’t going to be the start of the Dirt Girls workshopping her life. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘Nothing’s so complicated we can’t figure it out, Jo.’ Ethel was speaking to her just a little too nicely, as though she thought Jo could start weeping again at any moment. Even a non-people person with no clue about psychology could tell that.
Hux, though. He was—or had been—the total opposite of a non-people person. Chatty. Huggy. Charming. So charming, in fact, that Jo had, in her heart of hearts, never quite believed that all the charm that was being directed her way was real. She’d thought it likely she’d misread his interest or her feelings. She’d been on that dig site for weeks, just rocks and sheep and scrub grass on her horizon. She’d been single, too, so of course a hot guy rocking up in aviator sunglasses had cracked open her dormant hormones like a chisel through sandstone. He’d worn a beat-up old hat, a grey felt number that had made him look more like a saxophone player in some funky inner-city jazz club than an outback pilot.
She snuck a quick look at him.
The charm factor hadn’t dimmed either. Dot was gossiping and giggling like a schoolgirl as Hux helped her navigate the rough ground.
When they reached the tumbledown snarl of bleached timber, they found it was home to an ant colony and a large snakeskin, but it was deemed by the Dirt Girls, after a thorough tramp about the area and a confab viewing the touched-up images on Jo’s iPad screen under the brim of their stockmen hats, as not quite right.
The tree, when they reached it ten sweaty minutes and a near tumble by Ethel later, had them looking more hopeful, so Jo sank a new pin onto her mapping app. It was a gidgee tree, also called a stinking wattle by those who’d gotten a good whiff of its damp bark and leaf litter after a downpour. It had gnarly, tough bark, with short, stubby branches that flowered puffballs of yellow in the winter months and provided shelter, stingy though it was, to passing wildlife. Goannas were known to climb into their upper branches in search of bird eggs. It was the best wood out here for a campfire. As long as the wood was dry.
No storm birds were roosting, however, despite summer being the season for them. Perhaps the helicopter noise had sent them swooping off back to their migratory path to Indonesia, or perhaps relying on the same birds to be hanging around in the same spot all these years later was madness. Scientific expeditions should never be planned around madness, despite Ethel’s insistence that ‘she had a gut feel’.
Jo left the Dirt Girls by the gidgee tree flirting shamelessly with Hux and walked a square out from them, and then a larger square, and then a larger square again. Where was the remains of the dig? Where was the rubble pile?
This wasn’t the spot. Ethel’s gut feel was misplaced.
Jo returned to the tree and accepted a bottle of water from Dot. ‘Thanks,’ she said. The water had lost its chill, but twenty minutes in the full sun had made her so thirsty it still tasted like heaven. ‘I vote we get back in the sky and fly down along the southern length of the jump-up, keeping the fence line in sight. See what other tree landmarks we can find. There are no dig spoils here. It can’t be the place.’
‘Maybe the dig team backfilled their hole last time when they came up stumps,’ said Hux.
Jo raised her eyebrows. ‘How do you know about the last dig?’
‘We’ve been having a catch-up,’ said Dot.
Right. Well, his question wasn’t a silly one, so she guessed she could answer. ‘At a site this remote, and with no real track for a flat-bed truck to gain access, it’s unlikely the team had a backhoe with them. They wouldn’t put the rubble back in the hole by hand.’
Ethel seemed to have forgotten her insistence that this was the spot now that she had other information on which to dwell. ‘Hux tells me you two know each otherrealwell.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Jo said, hoping her tone saidend of discussion. ‘We haven’t seen each other in years.’
Hux didn’t say anything, but he was looking at her, and then no-one was saying anything and the silence got really awkward, really fast.
‘Right, Hux?’ The longer the silence, the more she could sense Dot’s and Ethel’s interest blooming into something as big as the jump-up they’d landed beside.
‘Fourteen years,’ he said at last. ‘And nine months. Give or take a day.’
She could feel her mouth drop open. He remembered exactly?
Okay, sure, they had—ended things—just after the Yakka, and maybe the date of that was seared into the locals’ brains the way Anzac Day was seared into the nation’s … But to say it like that. Out loud. Like it mattered.
‘This sounds like a story,’ said Dot, clearly indicating it was a story she wanted to hear, preferably over a cheeseboard with plenty of Maggie’s fancy champers to hand and an abundance of time in which to dive into the juicy details.
Damn it,Hux, Jo wanted to say.
Instead, she busied herself rifling through her bag, where she’d stuffed the dirt diary, her notebook, her iPad and pens and sunblock and water and wallet, but not, unfortunately, anything at all helpful to get her through this awful moment.
Her notebook would have to do. Pulling it out, she inspected the blank page she’d turned to as though it held a handy list for her to follow.A Three-Step Strategy for Responding Calmly When Your Ex-Lover Chucks a Social Grenade into Conversationwould have been useful. She used the pen tucked behind her ear to give the blank page a confident tick as though she’d addressed some vitally important palaeontological exploration issue and then closed the notebook with a snap.
‘Let’s get back to the search, shall we? How are we for time, Gavin?’
That felt better. She should have stuck with his proper name from the get-go. His nickname was too familiar, too … intimate.
A muscle ticked in his cheek. She’d have liked to think it was from a suppressed smile—two old pals ribbing each other after all these years, ha-di-ha-ha.
‘We can fly along the jump-up to the far end. It might add to the museum’s charter time, though, so there’ll be some adjustment to the bill when we get back to the office that you’ll have to sort out with Phaedra. If you want more airtime than that, it’ll have to be a second trip, as we have to keep within our fuel range.’
