‘Let’s go for a drive.’
Hux didn’t ask where they were going. He knew; of course he knew. And he waited for Charlie to start talking when they got there, because it had been a long time since they’d talked—really talked—about Jessica Huxtable. His older sister. Charlie’s one-time best friend. It might even be the first time they’d talked about her since they’d both been adults.
Hux had been twelve when Jess went missing and Charlie seventeen. A wide gulf back then. Nothing at all now.
There’d been talk of constructing a memorial in the scrub to the side of the Gunn Station property boundary at one point; a plaque with a few words, a sculpture, a tree. But in the end, the family had chosen to keep their memories of Jess untethered from the spot where the unthinkable had happened.
‘What do you remember?’ Charlie said.
‘Nail polish,’ Hux said. ‘The stink of it. I’ve hated it ever since. Jess was painting her nails when you rang, and she’d been threatening to paint mine, too, which I’d been pretending was the grossest thing ever just to wind her up, you know? Then after the phone call she was so giddy and happy.’
‘I knew she was babysitting while your parents and the other girls were away in Longreach for the night. I should never even have told her about that party. I only rang, because—’
‘She was your friend.’
‘Yes. Best friend. Only, it had been a little weird between us.’
This was new. ‘Weird how?’
‘Jess had been mad at me because I’d been seeing this girl, and I was like, why do you even care? But I think she was hoping … I don’t know.’
‘That you’d maybe be more than friends?’
Charlie cleared his throat. ‘I guess. Makes me sound full of myself, doesn’t it? Anyway, I thought if I told her this party was on she’d stop being mad at me and everything would go back to the way it used to be. Dumb, hey?’
‘You were seventeen, Charlie. You’re allowed to be dumb when you’re seventeen. Anyway, it wasn’t all on you. I was the one who told her I didn’t need to be babysat.’ He’d been thrilled that Jess was going to clear off for a few hours, because then he could watch whatever video he wanted to watch, not some dumb girl movie.
‘We agreed to meet at seven at the cattle grid. I was there a couple minutes after and I waited for, like, twenty minutes, feeling really shitty with her for making me wait, you know? Like, stop messing with your hair, or just choose an outfit already. I’d flogged a sixpack of beer from Dad’s fridge and they were getting warm. That’s what I was worried about, Hux. Warm beer.’
‘And then you drove up to the house.’
‘Yeah. And you told me she’d left ages ago in the farm ute.’
That farm ute hadn’t been roadworthy, hadn’t even been registered. Which hadn’t mattered a scrap on the property, because they just used it for driving feed out to the stock. All the kids had driven it. Well, probably not Fiona. She’d have only been six. But Hux could remember cruising round the paddocks in it with the bench seat pulled in so close to the wheel his siblings had had to sit cross-legged next to him.
They couldn’t call her, of course. None of them had mobile phones back then. But she couldn’t have gone far—Jess didn’t have her licence. She’d never have driven off the property onto a public road.
Hux remembered the debate he and Charlie had had on the front step. Try to call the oldies in Longreach? But then Jess would get in trouble for leaving Hux home alone to go to a party. They were in total agreement there: geez, never mention the party. Drive back to the gate and look for her? But Charlie had just driven to the homestead from the gate and he hadn’t seen the ute.
In the end, they loaded up a couple of dogs and some torches into Charlie’s ute and drove back to the cattle grid. The dogs found the ute. A hundred metres off the road, one of its headlights smashed in—from a roo? Another vehicle?—and a spider crack across the windshield.
‘But whathappened, Hux?’
‘I don’t know, mate. We’re never going to know.’
CHAPTER
24
Jo set off early to collect Luke from his father’s house on Friday morning, full of good intentions to make amends for not collecting him from camp.
She hadn’t done many pick-ups from the old family home and walking up the front path had not become any easier. If she looked to the left she’d see the geraniums she’d planted from cuttings a neighbour gave her when Luke had been a toddler and she’d been a full-time mum. To the right would be the lavender patch where Luke had been stung on the face by a bee when he was five. She wasn’t sure which had been worse: the howls of pain or the mad car trip to the emergency department at the hospital in the next suburb, with his face swollen up like a water balloon, and her wondering if he’d still be breathing when they got there.
But straight ahead: the door.
Would she go for the brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head with a ring through its mouth that she’d bought at a secondhand store, or the doorbell that had a whimsical habit of ringing on its own every now and then, filling the inner corridor of the house with an eerie rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’?
She still had a key, of course. No-one had asked for it back, and having it dangling on her key ring was a torment every time she looked at it, but that scratched, worn key was, for some reason (that no doubt she ought to see a counsellor about), a talisman of the life she’d thought she’d be living.
