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Joe Miles, B.Ec, MBA
What on earth? She picked up the book and rifled through pages, where charts and tables were interspersed with headings likeDon’t Guess It, Calculate It, andBetter Safe than Sorry: Sticking to Your Limits.
Share trading. Stockbroking. These were phrases she’d heard, of course … she read newspapers, she watched the news. That was as far as her understanding went, though; stock to her meant Hereford cattle and merino sheep, and she’d never considered owning shares. If she had spare cash she’d have fixed the aircon in her ute or plugged it into her mortgage.
She swallowed. If she had spare cash, she could have saved herself all this anguish and offered to buy the Wirraway herself, then donate it to the museum. As it was the transport costs were going to leave her savings bone dry.
Wasthishow Joe had lost his house? Had the ex just thrown the ‘bad bet’ phrase around to be hurtful?
She peeked inside the cover and there was a headshot of her farmer, looking serious and unrecognisable in a suit and tie. Someone had used a blue pen to draw horns on his forehead and given him snake fangs.Rewrite with lessons learned? Or tear into shreds andburn into ashes and bury under Dobbin poop?was scribbled beneath in the same blue pen. She looked up at the whiteboard. The same messy scrawl covered it from top to bottom, the way it had the whole time she’d been renovating the cottages.
‘Holy crap,’ she breathed.
Tucking the book under her arm, she hustled out of the stable. ‘Mum?’ she called. ‘Big news! I’ll tell you on the way to the plane.’
The shed was closed up and silent when they pulled into the patch of gravel beside it. Puddles dotted the flat ground and the sun that had warmed them up at the homestead was now hiding behind cloud.
The door creaked as Kirsty braced her shoulder against it and heaved.
It creaked open about six inches, then stuck.
‘What the heck?’ A padlock and chain, shiny, huge, strong looking, was linked about the door’s ancient handles. She’d been lockedout?
By crikey, that plane better not be gone, or she— Her breath seized as she pressed her face to the chink in the doorway.
The Wirraway wasn’t gone. She closed her eyes briefly, then stood aside so her mother could peer in with her. ‘I don’t know why it’s locked,’ she said grimly. ‘But here … come and meetDoreen Anne.’
The plane, at least the narrow slice of it they could see, looked even better than she remembered it, and she’d only been gone a week. Terri’s mouth was hanging open like a flycatcher. She grinned at her mum. ‘Pretty amazing, hey?’
‘Amazing.’
To hell with this. She’d broken in once before, and she was breaking in again. She turned for her ute and hauled up the lid on her battered tool box. Surely she had boltcutters in here?
Aha. She hauled on the frayed rubber handle, then turned back to the shed.
‘Should you be doing that, pet?’
‘Says the woman who broke my laundry window. Stand back, Mum, in case a bit of metal flies off.’
The padlock’s bolt cleaved in half with a satisfactory ping, and she hauled the door open on its tracks so her mother could see theDoreen Annein all her glory. ‘I haven’t touched the engine, but everything else has been tidied up. I need a little epoxy to fix a ding in a propellor blade, but other than that, she’s about ready.’
‘I understand now why it’s so important for this to go to a museum,’ her mother said. ‘Who’s the painted lady?’
‘Doreen Anne herself. My great-grandmother.’ She cleared her throat, anxious about how her mother was going to take the next bit. ‘The story we’re running in the paper this coming weekend includes a section on my involvement with the plane.’ A story that had become vitally important now battle lines had been drawn.
‘Uhuh.’
Her mother had taken that better than she’d expected; after all, the chain of events connecting her to Bill did involve her mother skipping out on the inquest of an accident which killed the Bluett heir. Kirsty looked across as her mother made an off noise.
Terri had wandered to sunbleached timbers that had once been a cattle chute. She was looking down the slope of hill to where the farm ended and Shannon Gully Road carved through the valley below. ‘That’s where it happened,’ she said.
Kirsty moved to stand beside her. ‘The accident?’
‘You see those crops, how the rows come to an end in that rocky bit of scree?’
She followed her mother’s hand. The slope down through the avocado seedlings wasn’t steep, but the loose rocks would have made the descent dangerous. Deadly, in fact.
‘Bad shit happens to Foxes,’ she murmured, the old refrain they’d shared so often.
‘Only … it wasn’t me who died, was it, Kirsty? It was your father. And I ran away and blamed fate instead of facing up to my part in the accident.’
‘You’re here now, Mum.’
And so was she, Kirsty Fox. And she was here to stay. Hopefully. Bad s–h–i–t or not.
