‘Not at this time.’
Great. Just freaking great.
CHAPTER
12
The water cooler at the end of the small back corridor of Longreach Hospital was a crowded space in which to hold a family meeting, and it wasn’t exactly private, either, but maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. It kept the shouting to a minimum.
Sally’s youngest, Lucy, was asleep on her grandpa’s shoulder, her face smooshed into the plaid of one of Ronnie Huxtable’s good shirts so that only the fuzz of reddish-brown hair was showing above the frog-green outfit she had been dressed in. Of Hux’s parents, Ronnie was very much the huggier of the two; an attribute Hux’s nieces and nephew intuited from birth. Malvina Huxtable showed her love in other ways, like badgering the hospital staff until Charlie had been given a bed closer to the window and a meal on a tray that hadn’t come out of one of the vending machines, despite Charlie having missed the official lunch service. Sal and Charlie’s older kid, Harry, was keeping himself occupied down at everyone’s knee height, sitting on the floor pulling paper cups out of the dispenser. A waste of resources, absolutely, and no doubt the cups weren’t even biodegradable, and Hux would have felt bad about it if he hadn’t spent the last hour keeping the little menace from digging soil out of the hospital pot plants with the kitchen whisk he’d insisted on bringing with him to keep him company on the long drive from Yindi Creek.
‘His ECG was normal. That’s a good thing,’ said Sal, but since she said it more like a question than a statement, no-one was fooled into thinking that she had found any solace at all in the diagnosis from the registrar run off her feet in the emergency department.
‘We didn’t have panic attacks in my day,’ said Malvina, as though panic was a frivolous modern invention like acrylic knitting yarn or two-factor authentication and could, therefore, be dismissed from further consideration.
Hux didn’t bother pointing out the fallacy. For one, his mother wasn’t interested in updating her views, and for two, he was too relieved at how well—howcalmly—his mum and dad had taken the whole Charlie and the Missing Person story. His parents had arrived at Longreach Hospital half an hour before Sal and Regina and the kids, so he’d used the time to fill them in.
‘What I don’t understand,’ Malvina said, ‘is why the Champions would be giving their muster work over to the other helicopter company in Cloncurry.’
Phaedra, who had been included in the family meeting for the simple fact that she was, unofficially, considered part of the family, mouthed ‘sorry’ at Hux. God only knew why she had blabbed this fact to his mother, but Malvina was unlikely to let it go. Despite Gunn Station being sixty kilometres out of town, his mum liked to think she was the beating heart of Yindi Creek and its outlying stations. She would construe an attack on Hux and Charlie’s business as a personal declaration of war. Nothing daunted Malvina. Nothing brought her low, except for when the old stories resurfaced, as they did from time to time, but not recently. Not in years.
‘I’ve a good mind to drive over to the Champion place and remind Bernard whose ram won the blue ribbon at last year’s Yakka,’ she said.
‘You do that, Mum,’ said Hux. He thought back to the last few times the Huxtable name had been dragged into the news. The rise in true crime podcasts had seen a resurgence of people coming to Yindi Creek and wanting to talk about the region’s most famous unsolved mystery. Cold case cops would call occasionally to say bones had been found down a bore shaft … Now and then an inmate in prison would want to confess to abduction and offer to lead police to a location … But Merv had shielded them from the worst of it because, when those times happened, Malvina buckled.
But where was Merv now? Behind the wheel on the Gobi Desert Road or somewhere, out of range of not only news broadcasts, but also the much more effective means of communication in the outback: the bush telegraph.
Oh shit. He’d just had a thought and it wasn’t a good one.
TYSON: Oh shit is right.
Hux caught Phaedra’s eye and jerked his head, and thankfully she followed him to the other end of the corridor without him having to make a big deal of wanting to speak to her alone.
‘Thanks for getting Sal here. She okay on the drive in?’
‘Yeah. We propped her up with a pillow because her back’s bothering her and I wrangled the kids into their car seats.’
‘Speaking of kids—it’s getting late. Where are your two hellraisers? Someone looking after them?’
‘It’s their dad’s week.’
‘Right. Hey, you know you said police were door-knocking down main street earlier.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You didn’t hear anything about journalists turning up, did you? Real ones, I mean, not schoolkids in theEcho?’
Phaedra blew out a breath. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But thereisa guy possibly missing for days now out in inhospitable country, Hux. The police will have put the word out and the TV news broadcasts might be reporting on it.’ She had her phone in her hands and was rapid-fire typing with two thumbs across her screen. ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘The ABC has a news item up online. So does Channel Nine.’
She twisted her phone so he could see her search results. The first article was simple and to the point:
MAN MISSING?
Police and emergency services are conducting aerial and ground searches of an area east of McKinlay, Western Queensland, in search of a man who failed to arrive for an agreed pick-up with Yindi Creek Chopper Charters. Police are concerned the man may be without food or water and temperatures this week are expected to soar above 40 degrees. Anyone with information as to the man’s whereabouts are asked to call Police Watch.
‘Doesn’t look too ominous,’ said Phaedra.
‘Yet,’ Hux said. ‘All it’s going to take is someone doing a google search and discovering one of the owners of Yindi Creek Chopper Charters is Charlie Cocker, the same Charlie Cocker who was interviewed by police in a famous case from the past and accused of not being totally honest from the get-go. You know what journalists are like. Everything will get dragged up again.’
