put a fist over his mouth and geared up for a cough, but nothing came. His breath wheezed in and out.
‘Nothing else bothering you today, Mr Connolly?’
Something you’re not talking about, the way I’m not talking about Janey, or the kid…
The man shook his head. ‘It was me daughter-in-law brought me in, said I had to do something about the bites. I told her it was nothin’ but she wouldn’t listen.’
‘She did the right thing.’
Marcia was mouthing something at Luke from the door with a frown on her face, and he had another one of those chills down his spine as an odd intuition kicked into high gear. He ushered the old man out, patting him on the back in an attempt to coax him to move faster. What did Marcia have to report?
‘Someone’s been asking for you,’ she said, as soon as they were alone. ‘That woman from the bus crash.’
‘Janey Stafford,’ he supplied automatically.
She raised her eyebrows. ‘So you do know her.’
‘I said I did, the other night.’
‘You said you knew her sister.’
He wasn’t going to respond to that. ‘So she’s conscious?’ His head felt suddenly light, and his ears were ringing.
‘Doing a lot better. They’re talking about discharge tomorrow. She wants to see you, and—’ She stopped suddenly.
‘Yeah? What?’ he growled, ill at ease.
‘Nothing. One more patient. Roads are still crawling, apparently, people are just pouring out of the area and heading south, which is good because it means less stress on services. Did you take Mr Connolly’s temperature?’
Luke went still. ‘You asked me to, didn’t you?’ Damn, he’d totally forgotten, even when he’d touched the man’s warm skin.
‘I thought he was brewing a low-grade fever.’
‘Has he left? Could you try and catch him? I completely forgot.’
Oh, hell, he didn’t usually do this! He could have blamed the lack of sleep since Saturday, the stress, the makeshift conditions of the clinic, but he knew the problem was in his own head, and the distractions were far more personal, deeply rooted in his past. If Janey Stafford had come to Crocodile Creek because of him…If she had news about his son…If that unidentified kid whom Georgie and Alistair had found…
‘So you think—?’ Marcia began.
‘I don’t know what I think. What did you think?’
‘I wondered about pneumonia. He’s a smoker. I should have been more specific, Luke. I’m sorry, it’s my fault as much as yours.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ he retorted grimly. ‘Just see if you can catch him. I should have given him a more thorough check.’
But Mr Connolly and his daughter-in-law had already gone, and although Marcia tried to reach them by phone, there were so many equipment problems at the moment—lines down, towers damaged—she had no success. Luke made a mental note to himself to keep trying once they got back to Crocodile Creek.
‘I cannot believe this,’ Marcia said for about the fifth time, as they drove back. ‘I just cannot believe this is the same landscape I drove through four weeks ago.’
She’d had a couple of days off back then, apparently, and had gone north for a bit of a wild beach weekend with a couple of female friends. Luke hadn’t been up this way as recently, and didn’t feel the need to express his reaction out loud—he’d learned to keep his emotions to himself in recent years—but he was just as shocked as Marcia, and no less so because they’d passed the same sights only that morning, on their way up. Seeing them in the other direction brought a fresh wave of disbelief.
There was such a dramatic grandeur about the huge mountains that backed this part of the coast, and with the region’s bountiful rainfall they were always incredibly lush and green. Not any more. The rainforest’s entire canopy had been shredded, leaving only straggly sticks. The twisted trunks and branches had even been scoured of their bark, as if sandblasted. It would take the landscape years to recover.
There were massive, beautiful trees, once lush with enormous canopies and huge branches hung thickly with epiphytes, but now reduced to trunks with a couple of stick-like branches poking up, their greenery lying in a shredded mulch on the ground and already beginning to rot.
Close by the highway, huge weeping figs lay one after another on the ground, their root systems exposed, as if a giant hand had been pulling roadside weeds. Telephone poles leaned drunkenly, with their wires trailing in muddy pools.
They passed a house set back about fifty metres from the road—a typical old-fashioned Queenslander up on wooden pylons ten feet from the ground. Its front veranda and wall had been torn off and lay in a crumpled heap nearby, while its neat interior was open to display like a doll’s house.
And the crops. Totally flattened. Sugar cane, bananas, pawpaws, with the farmers’ ruined houses set in the middle of the destruction.
‘What about the animals?’ Marcia whispered again. ‘The birds…’
‘I know,’ muttered Luke. Cassowaries, sugar gliders, tree frogs, possums, parrots, tree kangaroos, paddymelons, pythons, butterflies…The list went on, endangered species and common ones, predators and prey. Where would they find food and shelter now? ‘But it’s the people we have to think about.’
He slowed to a crawl behind an evacuating family in a loaded down minivan towing a trailer piled high with their belongings and covered with a badly tethered blue plastic tarpaulin. They probably had relatives somewhere down south, who’d promised to put them up until they could get back on their feet, make some decisions, sort out their finances.
‘People help each other,’ Marcia pointed out. ‘Animals can’t.’
‘Nature is cruel,’ Luke answered, sounding cruel himself, although he didn’t mean to be. ‘Marce, we’re all pretty much in shock. Close your eyes and get some rest while we drive. Don’t let it get to you so much, when we’re so strapped as it is.’
‘Oh, put up a few nice defensive walls?’ She smiled to soften the statement.
‘What’s wrong with walls?’ he said.
He knew what she must be thinking—that he must know all about walls. He hadn’t asked any of the right questions about Janey Stafford. But he couldn’t risk giving anything away. He couldn’t bear to. His absurdly leaping hopes, all the anger and distrust, those irritating memories he still had of the time eight years ago when he and Janey had been colleagues.
She’d disapproved of him, and she’d let it show, even before he and her sister had fallen so wildly in love. She’d thought he was a lightweight, and that he relied on charm and networking to get what he wanted. In hindsight, there could have been some truth in all of that. He’d led a pretty charmed life until he’d married Alice Stafford.
Now Janey was asking for him. Which surely meant she must have
