quite free from the past.
Mick was the first to rouse. “Let me shout you another beer, son,” he said, turning. “I won’t have another scotch, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
Banfield answered quietly but with genuine feeling. “Nothing would make me happier than to have you back, Mick. And yes, I will have that beer. I’m not planning to drive home tonight. I thought I’d stay over at the pub.”
“Bonza!” Mick clapped a big friendly hand on Banfield’s arm, signaling a very unsure-looking waiter. “You can have dinner with me.”
“I didn’t know you ate anymore,” Banfield said dryly.
“I will tonight. And no more booze. Count on it.” Mick spoke earnestly. “That’s if you’ll honor your dad’s old mate.”
“Suits me fine,” Banfield said with more kindness than truth. He’d heard Mick’s promises before.
“Then we might get to meet this doctor guy.” Mick perked up. “Take a closer gander at the girlfriend. Never seen a woman as striking in me life, unless it was your mum. You’ve got your father’s rangy height and his strong cast of features, but you have your mother’s eyes. Tiger eyes, Bridget used to call them. Never saw a tiger in her life. Pure gold.” He shook his head. “The things we hand down to our children. You were the son of privilege, Chase. Heir to a great station. And wealth. But I reckon you’d give it all up to have your mum and dad back.”
Banfield leaned back in his chair, memories piercing his heart. “You’re right about that, Mick.”
“It’s the same with me.” Mick suddenly stood up and pitched the rest of his whiskey into the lush tropical garden. “Are you sure you can’t listen to what this professor has to say?” he asked. “I’ve got the funniest feeling it’s something to do with that cache old Porter dug up years ago. The coins and the pottery.”
“You and your treasure, Mick,” Banfield scoffed. “There is no treasure. There was no village. The ancient Egyptians were never on Three Moons.”
Mick plonked down again and summoned the hovering waiter. “How do you know?” he countered gleefully. “You weren’t there.”
MICK STUCK to his promise for the hour they stayed on at the club, drinking soda water with a dash of bitters, wincing with every mouthful as though it was poison. As the place filled up and the other members became aware that Mick was as close to sober as he’d been in years, a lot of the old camaraderie returned.
Banfield was a generation younger than most of the others, but as his father’s son he’d had been granted full membership as a matter of course. Being heir to a vast station was one thing. Running it when Porter Banfield had almost brought it to the brink was another. It didn’t take Chase Banfield long, three years at most, to establish that he could take his place with the best of them. From the day he returned home from university with an honors degree in economics and business administration, he had taken to calling in at the club. Not to drink, although he always had time for a quick beer, but to talk to his fellow cattlemen. Or, as he admitted openly to much friendly banter, to “pick their brains.” These were top cattlemen like his father. He had much to learn. A month later he turned twenty-one, and his uncle Porter’s guardianship was over. John Chase Banfield was in full control of his inheritance—his trust fund, his father’s business portfolio and historic Three Moons station. It was also the day he evicted his uncle. At last he was free to take over the reins and restore Three Moons to its former position as one of the great cattle stations of the world’s leading beef-producing country. He was afire to succeed. He had the brains, the strength, the determination, and he was a very fast learner.
IT WAS ONLY a short four-mile trip from the club into the town of Isis, the drive winding through towering banks of bougainvillea gone wild. A veritable jungle of the ubiquitous cerise and deep-purple flowers, with their dangerous hooked thorns. A drawback certainly but they looked magnificent, brilliant foils for the soaring palms and vivid orange-scarlet of the flame-of-the-forest that lit up the bush. In this part of the world, an enormous range of bougainvillea cultivars, the Thai golds, the pinks, the bronzes, the burnt oranges and scarlets adorned home gardens, showy and relatively easy to handle, but they never assumed the incredible height and splendor of the original bougainvillea gone wild. His mother had planted bridal white when she first came to Three Moons, training it over walls and pergolas and the balustrades of the veranda. Now great billowing veils of it made an unforgettable sight.
His mother! Would he ever in his lifetime be released from the grief? The might-have-beens? But grief had to be lived with. He was a Banfield and it was up to him to carry on a proud tradition, which Porter had almost wrecked. He’d never seen his uncle grieve, but perhaps he had in private. Porter was a strange one, with his own inner life, layers and layers of secrets. He was incapable of showing affection, if indeed he actually felt emotion outside his love of precious objects, especially antiquities. Inanimate possessions were the thing, not human relationships. Chase couldn’t begin to understand his uncle. He had long since stopped trying.
The sun had lost the worst of its heat, the cloudless cobalt sky giving way to another glorious tropical sunset. There were Mick’s Spanish galleons sailing majestically above, sweeping down the sky, their sails billowing crimson and gold. Poor old Mick! He held out no real hope that Mick would show up for dinner. Probably someone would let him sleep it off at the club.
After he’d gone a mile, he turned off the side road and onto the highway, saluting as always his grandfather, the town’s founding father who’d had the foresight to line the route with royal palms. They soared a uniform eighty feet, forming a superb entry into the little rain-forest town. Then the poincianas suddenly replaced them, forming an interlocking canopy over the main street, turning the air rosy when they were in bloom. North of Capricorn was a fantasy world, a paradise, a celebration of nature. He had visited other parts of the world, sailed around the glorious South Pacific with two of his university friends, but there was nowhere on earth he’d rather be than the place he was born. Three Moons. His great-great-grandfather, Patrick Banfield, an Englishman in search of adventure, had named it after the three almost perfect moon-shaped lagoons on the vast selection he’d taken on from the colonial Queensland government. Their characteristic feature was magnificent water lilies, and Patrick Banfield had realized they would be easily seen from the Malaysian-style homestead he planned to build.
All kinds of water birds still thronged to the lagoons—ibis, egrets, pelicans, ducks, magpie geese, pygmy geese, the brolgas, the blue cranes that mated for life. There were no beautiful water lilies farther back, in the swamp country. There the surface was completely overgrown with aquatic plants, the thick vegetation hiding the waterfowl and the crocodiles. The common crocodile mostly, freshwater, harmless, living mainly on fish. But the big stream the Aborigines called Gongora, the place of the sacred crocodile on Three Moons coastal border, was home to a few estuarine crocs that weren’t particular about what they ate. Anything and everything that might come to drink at the water’s edge. Birds, reptiles, mammals, tortoises, cattle, men.
The station had suffered three crocodile-related disasters over the years, which was close to a miracle, considering no one seemed to heed the warnings. Victim one at the turn of the century—an unwary stockman. Another in the 1930s when a visiting English cousin deliberately went after the legendary Munwari, the gigantic sacred crocodile said to be thousands of years old. Ah, the thrill of the kill! Everyone had warned him not to interfere with the crocodiles, a species that had survived unchanged for more than 150 million years, but according to the cousin, this was even better than hunting rhino in Africa. He’d made it to the upper reaches of Gongora, deep into country few white men had ever traveled; he’d never returned. A large search had been mounted, but it was as though he’d vanished from
