She’d come this far—another few hundred dollars debt on her credit card now wasn’t going to deter her. Neither was the fact that none of these trees might be the stormbird tree. The tree they really needed to find might have been struck by lightning, felled by the Cracknell nephew who worked this land or been washed away by floodwater the last time the Diamantina River broke its banks.
‘No problem,’ she said firmly. Confidence counted in palaeontology; women learned that the hard way early in their studies, usually the first time they butted heads with some crusty old professor who clung to misogyny as fiercely as their dandruff clung to their academic gown. And while her confidence wasn’t genuine, she firmly believed in appearing to be confident. ‘I’d like to check these sites out as thoroughly as we can in the time we have available.’
As it turned out, their flyover of the western ridge of the jump-up revealed a number of likely looking trees, a clearing that might have been an old excavation (only it was too hard to be sure from above) and a pile of rock spoil that had her heart thumping in excitement … This was it. Thishadto be it.
Unfortunately, their flyover also revealed a problem. A major kick-in-the-pants type of problem.
Hux—damn it,Gavin—brought them in to land beside the dusty, blue-and-white helicopter that had already laid claim to the site, and by the time he’d stilled the blades so they could all take their headphones off, a row of sweaty, serious-faced individuals gathered in a line to face them: police and, if those high-vis orange uniforms were any clue, State Emergency Services volunteers.
A bloke with a barrel chest busting through the buttons of his shirt stepped forwards.
‘You lot want to explain what in hell you’re doing here?’
CHAPTER
9
Fourteen and a bit years ago
In a helicopter on a mail run above Jack Harper’s sheep station outside of Winton, stressing
Maybe Hux’s stumbling-over-a-dead-body problem could be fixed if it turned out to be the dodgy security guard? The one with the nails and the bling and the conveniently unreliable memory?
He checked his bird’s-eye view of paddock, dry creek bed and fence line through the pilot’s side of the R22 and compared it with the rough, hand-drawn map he had clipped to the dash. Thirty minutes he’d been in the air, and he was still short a couple hundred head of sheep. Wherever Jack Harper’s flock were grazing, it wasn’t where old mate had thought they’d be.
He’d give it ten more minutes, then head down to the dig site with the box of apples Jack had asked him to drop in to the science team currently digging up a section of Harper paddock. Which meant he had ten more minutes to work on finding an ending for his book. He pressed record on his phone to leave himself a voice memo. ‘Perhaps the dead body could be a red herring and nothing to do with the case at all? Perhaps it just looks like murder, but forensics will point to natural causes?’
In a quarry? With one boot off and a bloody great chunk of skull smashed in under all that peroxide blond hair? Not bloody likely. Perhaps what was actually going on was that his whole manuscript was a great steaming pile of cow dung and he was kidding himself that he knew the first thing about writing a novel.
A column of dust spun along the rough plain below him and his eyes narrowed. Even flying low like he was, sheep could be easy to miss. Unlike the storybook sheep that frolicked like snowy white clouds across the green pages of kids’ books, the merino sheep out here were dull, their fleece thick with dust from the paddocks. They didn’t frolic, either, unless they were trying to get away from a kelpie nipping at their heels. Most of the time they were hoping for shade from rocky outcrops, or from the needle-leaved stands of prickly acacia.
The dust thinned into nothing. False alarm … just a willy-willy.
Hux swung the chopper five degrees southwest and returned to the major headache he was having with his book’s ending. Finally, a literary agent in Brisbane had agreed to meet with him next time he could get to the city to talk about the crime novel he’d spent the last twelve months writing, but at this rate, he’d be turning up to the meeting with no ending, looking like a total tool. He pictured his main character, Tyson Jones, running into the abandoned quarry, seeing the boot discarded by the old water tank, feeling a burst of adrenaline at the clatter of rockfall somewhere in the shadows near him, but then …
Then …
Shit. He needed an epic plot-twisty thing to happen. Something that was meaningful and profound. Something that was going to be a tough moment for the hero, but also had to be kinda cool and ironic, because Tyson ‘Clueless’ Jones wasn’t just any old crime-solving hack. He was iconic. Funny and irreverent and destined to become a bestseller.
Or he would be. Hopefully.
‘And the thing that Tyson is about to see in the quarry that’ll make him do a double take … make him say holy crap and rethink everything he’s learned about the case so far, about life, even, is …’
Nope. His mind was as devoid of ideas as the paddock below him was devoid of sheep. The fuel gauge light blipped on, letting him know it was decision time. Apple delivery time. His cliffhanger would have to wait.
The dinosaur scientists had been digging out here for a couple of years, but Hux had only just moved back to Yindi Creek and invested all his savings into Cocker and Huxtable, so Charlie—lifelong friend and, now, business partner—had been doing the work out here on his own until now. Today was Hux’s first visit to see what all the fuss and bother was about. The local paper had written up a storm about the fossils being found and consequently he had been expecting, he wasn’t sure exactly, but …more. Definitely more. Like, a giant bony skull with ferocious teeth, maybe, perched on the back of a ute while the dig team high-fived each other and took selfies with it. As he circled to pick a safe landing spot, all it looked like the scientists had achieved was digging a big sandpit.
Some machinery was set up by the pit, a mini Kanga by the looks, and some sort of hoist and chain on a tripod, and the excavation didn’t look deep so much as wide. Pegs marked out an area as big as a tennis court, and tents and swags were clustered to the east of it. A few off-road caravans and four-wheel drives cluttered up the southern side.
He did another circuit as he worked out where to put the bird down safely. Helicopter rule number one: Select an appropriate landing area, ideally on level ground, free from obstacles fifty feet in every direction. Helicopter rule number two: Don’t land so far away you break your back lugging the cargo to its final destination.
Once on the ground, he waited for the whine to thin as the rotors came to a halt. A scrap of yellow string fluttered past in the breeze, its harsh colour reminiscent of crime tape. It made a stark contrast against the red soil, which gave him book cover idea number 207—all of them totally pointless until he’d finished writing his damn book.
Sighing, he pulled off his headset, put on his current favourite hat (grey, from an op shop, a little bit retro and a whole lot detective noir) and climbed out of the cockpit. He had apples to deliver. A fact he promptly forgot about two minutes later, when, his view impeded by the massive carton in his arms, he nearly fell into the excavation pit.
A woman—his age, or younger, so maybe one of the uni student volunteers he’d read about—knelt in the dirt at the base of the trench in front of him, a rope of dark hair swinging from beneath her scruffy hat, her khaki shorts and singlet covered in soil dust.
‘Hi,’ he said, his boots scuffling at the edge as he found his footing. Shit, had he even seen her when he was deciding where to land? ‘Sorry. I almost flattened you.’
