The boy who’d rung to invite her to the party, family friend Charlie Cocker, said she never arrived at the station gates where they’d agreed to meet so he could drive her to the party. Despite police and volunteer searches, rewards, special investigations and coronial enquiries, no-one has ever been able to answer the question of where Jessica went.
Or where she was taken.
The only clues were the old farm ute, found less than a hundred metres away from where her friend Charlie was waiting for her. The ute had a broken headlight and a crack across the windscreen.
The answer to why Gavin Gunn would choose now to reveal to the world the identity he has managed to keep under wraps for more than a decade is hidden in the story above: Charlie Cocker, the kid who invited Jessica Huxtable to the party.
Type the words ‘Charlie Cocker’ and ‘Yindi Creek’ into any search engine and you’ll find a recent story. A recent missing persons story.
A little more than a week ago, Cocker, who now co-owns and operates the Yindi Creek Chopper Charters business with his family friend Gavin Huxtable accepted a charter to transport a man, known only as Dave, to a remote spot in the outback west of Yindi Creek and collect him two days later.
The drop-off occurred as planned. However, when the pilot returned to collect him, the man was a no-show.
His whereabouts remain unknown.
Acting Senior Constable Petra Clifford, the officer in charge of the tiny, one-officer police station in Yindi Creek, said: ‘Police are pursuing every lead and we ask that anyone in the district who may have information on the man’s whereabouts or identity to come forward.’ She refused to answer questions on rumours that a drug cache was found aboard a Yindi Creek Chopper Charters helicopter.
His parents must have read countless news reports when Jess went missing, looking for the new detail, the glimmer of hope. They must have walked the land in much the same way as he was now walking over the red soil of Corley Station, only their steps would have been fuelled by desperation; his parents, Regina, Laura, Sal, probably Charlie, definitely Charlie’s parents, who’d managed the property that neighboured Gunn Station back in the nineties. Hux and Fiona kept close. The farm ute Jess had been driving had been the epicentre of the search and teams had walked out in wider and wider circles until the police had called off the search and only family remained. If Hux had helped with the search, the memory had faded, buried under all the other memories of that time.
Three days a person could last without water. But not out here. Not in a hot summer. Out here, it was more likely to be one day.
He stood at the cairn of rocks and wondered what a person would do if they were stood exactly where he was now and had no water. No clue where they were. No phone, no radio, no handy helicopter half full of fuel waiting to whisk them back to town for a cold beer and a hot pie.
Water and shade, they were the key to survival. Food didn’t matter. And what was the rule Ronnie had drummed into him and the Numbers after Jess went missing?If you’re on foot and don’t have a vehicle to stay with, find a fence line. Sooner or later, and hopefully it’s sooner, every farmer checks along the fence line.
If Dave had been confused about time and place and just missed his pick-up, then he’d have needed water. And where, from here, would you find it?
Or—because the presence of illegal drugs added a whole new swag of questions to be answered—if Dave hadn’t been confused about time and place, what had brought him out here in the first place?
Hux looked into the shallow pit beside the rock cairn; the old excavation pit, he assumed, from the last time dinosaur bones were being looked for on this land. The bottom was dry, silt dry, which was enough to tell him that there’d be no groundwater lying around waiting to be drunk. Boot prints—the police, he assumed, but possibly Dave’s. And there was a sheep skull in there, too, which might give a bloke not used to country life the heebie-jeebies, but a sheep wasn’t a feral animal. A sheep was livestock, which meant irrigation troughs. A property owner. Help.
Hux decided the thing Dave would do next—if he was genuinely lost—would be to climb up to higher ground, which meant the jump-up, and look for signs of a farmhouse, or an irrigation system or stock. Worst-case scenario, a track that stock had carved into ground. Stock would lead Dave to water.
Checking out the view from higher ground might answer that question too. Hux had seen what there was around from the cockpit of the helicopter, but seeing something through a windscreen when your mind was on a million things like lift and centrifugal forces and altitude was one thing. Seeing it from the ground, when you were still and the whole of the outback was still and silent around you, that was different.
He turned to grab another bottle of water from the chopper, but was distracted by a yip from his dog, who had abandoned peeing on spinifex to roar off towards the fence line to bark at— Was that a kid?
It was indeed a kid. A boy, in fact. And behind, him, looking as hot and flustered as though she’d walked out here from Yindi Creek, was Jo.
Why his heart had to go thumpity-thump in that damn fool way at the sight of her running towards him to defend her son from the pint-sized Possum, though, was just plain irritating. He was nothing to her.
TYSON: For the love of god, Hux, enough with the pity party.
Yeah, okay, whatever. Tyson had a point. Besides, he had enough on his plate with the publicity tsunami he’d just unleashed and the scripts he was still wrestling with and the emotional fallout the Huxtable family had headed their way. He could give his heart a good talking-to later.
He inspected the red, overheated faces in front of him. Just somebody he used to know—and her son.
The kid was as thin as a garden rake and had his mother’s black hair. He was at that awkward half-grown stage in a boy’s life where his arms and legs looked too long. He wore a striped t-shirt that was a couple inches too short and faded red boardshorts. He looked like he was headed to the beach for a boogie board with mates, not to the outback.
He was also staring at Hux with his mouth agape and his eyes boggling and Hux had no trouble at all interpreting these signs because he had, over the years, done quite a few school talks and conventions. Since the graphic novels came out, his fanbase had opened up to a whole heap of new, voracious readers: teenagers.
Joanne Tan’s kid was aClueless Jonesfan.
‘Hey,’ he said, because Jo didn’t seem to have worked out that introductions were necessary. ‘I’m Gavin. You must be Jo’s son.’ He held out his hand and the boy dropped the cooler bag he was holding and leapt forwards to shake it.
‘Luke. Luke Alessandro. Wait … do you know mymum?’
Jo seemed to have found her voice. ‘Hi, Hux. Um, yeah, actually, I do know Hux. From a long time ago.’
