Sighing, he picked it up. ‘No, thank you,’ he said when the person at the other end announced themselves as a feature writer for theAustralian Women’s Weekly. He’d said no to an interview withBetter Reading, maybe-it-depends toAustralian Story, and he’d said yes to an indie podcaster who had a keen interest in graphic novels and who had sounded about seventeen. The fact people were bypassing his publicist and calling Yindi Creek Chopper Charters direct was a total pain.
Slamming the phone down, he leant forwards and picked up the little plastic bag with the SP bottle cap in it. He’d tried photographing it and doing a reverse image search. He’d searched ‘SP’ and now he knew more about sparkling water and beverage suction-and-pressure hoses than the average guy needed to know, but he was no wiser about the cap in the little plastic bag. Perhaps it was time to admit defeat and hand it over to Acting Senior Constable Clifford. Which he probably should have done before now, anyway.
He looked at Possum, who was now flat on his back, fast asleep, his tummy showing hairless and pink, legs bent like furry little boomerangs. ‘What do you reckon, mate?’
TYSON: You’re expecting that bundle of annoyance to help? Mate, when you’re at a standstill, you find an expert, not a hairball.
An expert. On beer bottle tops.
Of course. He knew just the person to ask. He could hand the cap over to Maggie when he saw her later. Tonight was his library talk.
‘Phaeds,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Have you seen Charlie today?’
‘Nope.’
‘I volunteered him to help me lug some chairs and tables around between the pub and the library. I hope he remembers today is the day.’
‘He knows. At least, Sal knows, so I’m assuming that means Charlie knows. She was telling me she’s getting her hair done for the occasion.’
Promising. He’d already heard from the Huxtables currently filling every bedroom at Gunn Station that they’d be there, expecting front row seats. And if Hux didn’t have to spend time this arvo coaxing a recalcitrant Charlie into a clean shirt and onto a stool in front of a crowd at the Yindi Creek Library, then that was a win.
Frowning back at his murder board, he decided it was so full he could no longer make sense of it. He pulled it away from the wall a little so he could spin it without destroying Charlie’s new paintwork. Excellent. The B side: fresh space on which to write. Now, where were those rough measurements he’d taken between those odd markings on the jump-up? If he reduced them by a factor of, what, a hundred to one, or maybe fifty to one, then he could draw the jump-up on the board. Now for the divots. Two side by side, bigger and deeper, and one smaller, ahead of them, centred.
Hmm. If he were a palaeontologist, he might be thinking some huge pterodactyl foot had plunged its claws into the ground as it came into land, or—
He sucked in a breath.
TYSON: Holy hellfire, Huxtable. Is that what I think it is?
Hux couldn’t stop the grin. Oh, yes. It could be. But how to prove it?
CHAPTER
35
By two pm Thursday the temperature out at the dig site had soared to thirty-six degrees and Jo was beginning to feel as brittle and baked as one of the many sheep dung clumps that littered the plain. She was in quadrant thirteen, having brought quadrants fourteen through sixteen down to a depth of sixteen hundred millimetres each—an increase of 600 millimetres on the old dig—and so far, despite all the shifting of soil, she’d only found two items of interest. Both fossilised bone (or tooth or claw), so yay. Both minute fragments, so impossible to determine what they were from.
She’d found them in quadrant fourteen, so she was hoping (really hoping) that thirteen might yield a little more structure. If it did, she’d throw a stake in and abandon her quadrant search and start moving outwards in a circle.
She had blisters on her forefingers from where the trowel was rubbing her skin despite the heavy gloves she wore, and she had spent more than a little time cursing the deskwork she’d been doing for the last three years during which her hard-won calluses had softened.
Her trowel slid through the loose soil once more but she cocked her head at the sound it made. Not the rough bite of metal through grit, like she’d grown accustomed to. No, this had sounded like more of a slide. As though something smooth were beneath the soil. Something against which the tip of the trowel had slid.
She squatted in the base of the hole and pushed at the dirt with her gloved hands, digging her fingers in to try to find a structure. Her fingers scraped on something.
Her heart rate instantly kicked into overdrive even as she was telling herself not to get excited. It would be a sheep skull. It would be an old star picket. It would be—
She grabbed some of the precious water that she had allocated for fossil work and not drinking and sluiced it into the hole to wet the surrounding area. Wet dirt was easier to scoop than dry. She hauled out a few handfuls, managing to dig in below and to the sides of whatever was hiding here.
‘Luke?’ she called.
‘Yeah, Mum?’
He was packing the rubbish into their car and he’d taken the duty on pretty cheerfully, for the simple reason that he knew they were due to head into Yindi Creek in an hour or so for the library event he’d not forgotten about. They were booked in for the night at the hotel, too, so while Luke was dead keen on getting to be a Gavin Gunn fan for the night, Jo was dead keen on having a shower and a glass of wine. Maybe a couple of each.
‘I’ve found a chunk of something. You want to give me a hand levering it out of here?’
‘Something good?’
