Jo sat up straighter on the stool and told her cheeks to not even think about blushing. ‘A woman wears her best lipstick for herself, Maggie.’
‘Well, good for you, pet.’
Jo relented. ‘Not often, I’ll admit. But the police letting me know they’ve left Corley Station has put me in the mood for celebration. I’m pretty much a hundred per cent boring scientist most of the time.’
‘And how’s that working for you?’
Hopefully that was a rhetorical question, because obviously the answer was ‘not well’, so she backtracked to where the conversation was before it took a swerve into the personal. ‘Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know my days sitting here in your pub doing diddly squat are over. I’m going to get myself sorted this afternoon, then head off at dawn out to the dig site tomorrow.’
‘Better check if the roads are open. I know we don’t have a cloud in the sky, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t had more rain up in the Gulf Country.’
‘Will do. I’ve got to be back in Brissie on Sunday, so hopefully any imminent rain stays away until then. And if the site is looking promising, I’ll be back as soon as I can. Do you know if there’s a storage facility around town if I have to leave some gear here?’
Maggie snorted. ‘A storage facility? In Yindi Creek? Pet, that’s why us country folks love sheds. You can leave your stuff out back in my shearing shed, if you like. There’s no tourists at this time of year so it won’t be in the way. You’ll just need to have it clear before the Yakka.’
‘That’s not until the start of March, is it? I’ll be long gone by then, I promise.’
‘You told the Dirt Girls yet?’
‘No. I’m going to walk over and let them know. They’re as invested in this as I am. More, possibly.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe you could have a looksee at their hole in the ground on your own in case all you’re going to be finding is disappointment. Don’t wear them out with your gallivanting.’
‘Those two could outlast a bull rider,’ Jo said.
‘They’d like you to think that, but they’re both closer to eighty than seventy, and Dot’s lost a lot of her puff since that shingles virus she had last year, so don’t let them fool you.’
Jo frowned. ‘Why does it sound like you disapprove?’
Maggie plucked an empty coffee cup and a crumb-spattered plate from further along the counter, gave an ancient metal serviette box a swish with her rag, then settled her gaze back on Jo. ‘That’s not disapproval you’re hearing. Dot and Ethel are legends out here. They ran that sheep station after their father died and they had their passion for fossils, and your interest in their fossils is reminding them of how well they’ve lived their lives. Trailblazers, the two of them, for women who didn’t want to spend their lives having four kids each and cooking meat and three veg for their menfolk. You coming here is a real treat for them. I just don’t want to see them too knackered to enjoy it.’
A treat. No pressure on her, then, if it all came to nothing.
‘Okay. I’ll drop in, but I’ll suggest I go solo to make a formal assessment of the site the police turned us away from.’ Which, please god, would be the right place. She looked at her notebook. The pages had cracked open to the sketch she’d done of a crocodylomorph skeleton. She ran her finger over the long bony structure. Imagine finding one. Imagine finding a complete skeleton.
‘Don’t push Dot and Ethel too hard, that’s all I’m saying,’ said Maggie. ‘Slow the pace a little.’
‘I don’t have a lot of time,’ said Jo. Understatement of the century. She had a life to rebuild, a career to reboot, an honest talk about feelings to learn how to do and a son to reclaim … She was up to her eyebrows with stuff she needed to do.
Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘Then make some.’
CHAPTER
17
‘Hey, Phaeds, where’s the big map that used to hang above the photocopier?’
Hux was in the office, spending his afternoon staring at the murder board he was compiling on a whiteboard he’d dragged out of the airfield shed and set up in the airconned donger. If he had a map showing the topography between Yindi Creek and Corley Station and surrounds, he’d be able to trace out the route Charlie had flown, and—just out of curiosity, really—the route he’d flown on Tuesday morning with Jo and the Cracknell sisters. He was calling it a murder board even if this investigation he’d tasked himself with wasn’t a murder—this was just how he plotted out the crimes Tyson Jones had to solve in each novel he wrote. He liked the process of filling in events around a timeline and having it all writ large on a wall so the anomalies—or clues, as they’d be in a manuscript—were easier to spot. In this case, he was hoping his murder board would help him work out the identity of and, more to the point, the whereabouts of mystery man Dave.
He had Friday morning as the starting point, with a copy of Dave’s handwritten passenger information sheet stuck beneath. Sunday 9.50 am was the next marker on the timeline, when Charlie had told him he’d arrived at the cairn of rocks. Hux narrowed his eyes at the timeline and asked himself what else he knew. Charlie had said the guy had been carrying a duffel bag that had an IGA shopping bag stuffed into it and a fold-up shovel and jerrycans, and hot pies, and he’d paid cash. Cash wasn’t so uncommon out here in Western Queensland, not like it was at the coast. The banks had cleared off years ago but they’d left ATMs in their wake. Maybe the guy had taken cash out at the ATM in the supermarket? And was there one at the servo? He might have bought the fuel for the genset there … but that raised the question of how the guy had lugged two jerrycans of fuel to the airfield. There was no strange car parked outside the donger.
Had Dave been dropped off by someone who hadn’t heard he was missing?
Hux extended his starting arrow backwards and wrote on the board:Ask bakery to check receipts;ask IGA if they have a camera pointed at the ATM.
TYSON: Ask at the servo if anyone remembers someone filling up two jerrycans.
He wrote that up, too.
