‘But, wait. Now? Is it even open? Aren’t you working? It’s … how far away is Wacol, anyway? We can’t just …’ up stumps and run. Kirsty pressed her fingers to her mouth, startled at how close she’d come to saying the words out loud.
To Carol.
Who had no idea the person she’d been helping these few weeks was a coward first and a long-lost relative of Bill Bluett second.
Carol narrowed her eyes at her. ‘I’ve called ahead. The curator is meeting us. What seems to be the problem, my lamb?’
A lifetime habit of avoidance? Kirsty took a breath. ‘There’s no problem. I’m game if you are.’
‘That’s the spirit. Now, be a lamb and drive your vehicle as close to the museum as possible. These hips may look like they were made for dancing, but they’re giving me the pip today in a big freaking way. I may need a leg up, just saying.’
One hundred and seventy-five kilometres of road filled the map from Clarence to Wacol—mostly highway, a few turns when they reached the outskirts of Brisbane—but no dead ends. Plenty of places to whip a U-turn and skip off elsewhere if the need arose.
Yep, this was a decent drive, through countryside as glorious as any she’d seen. Her hands on the wheel, the hum of tyres on rains-lick bitumen, an old-school rock song on the radio making her left foot tap along to the beat … Kirsty felt herself relaxing into her road-trip vibe. Maybe she should turn the volume up. She and Carol could have a singalong, the way she and Terri used to do when they were racing cross country together in the old days.
These boots are made for walkin’… Oh yes, that one had been a favourite. Not that she’d owned boots when she was a kid.These thongs are made for walkin’she hummed to herself. Didn’t have quite the same oomph. She owned boots now, though, and she could walk away any time she wanted.
It felt good to be on the road again. The edgy feeling she’d had since Joe had cosied up to her on her swag was weaker now she’d put some road miles between her and Clarence. She didn’t have to keep blocking out the memory of him telling her he didn’t want her to go.
And when she did leave Clarence … when her annual leave was up, and Helen Best had cleared her, and her carbon monoxide poisoning or low blood sugar or whatever it was had stopped recurring every time she was flustered … her memories of Joe would fade too.
Probably.
‘Something wrong, pet?’
Oh no. Eyes leaking again. And why were her hands gripping the steering wheel like they needed its bulk to stop them from trembling? ‘Grit in the aircon, Carol. I’m totally fine.’
‘Uhuh. Since we’ve got a couple of hours to kill and you’re trapped with me inside this ramshackle utility of yours with no prospect of escape, why don’t we try the truth this time?’
Kirsty’s road-trip vibe fizzed out. Somehow she didn’t think turning up the radio and finding a song to sing along to was going to work. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Carol reached over and gave her knee a pat. ‘I’m starting to know you pretty well, Kirsty my love, and there’s something going on with you. Something more than a fun little holiday in Northern New South Wales researching Old Bill. I wish you’d tell me.’
The irony of being in a vehicle and roaring up a highway at this exact moment wasn’t lost on her. The difference was Carol wasn’t Terri.
Carol wasn’t going to think running away was fun, or necessary, or inevitable. And now, faced with saying the words out loud to a woman as lovely, as selfless, as kind as Carol Wallace, custodian of the past and volunteer extraordinaire, Kirsty could see how utterly ridiculous her and her mother’s hang-ups truly were. How utterly cowardly.
She cleared her throat. ‘I think it’s time I told you about the Fox family curse.’
By the time they found the cluster of old military dongers at the back of an industrial estate in Wacol, Carol knew it all. The itinerant childhood. The bad luck that Terri had convinced herself followed them everywhere. The plane crash that maybe wouldn’t have happened if Kirsty hadn’t settled down.
‘You know that’s rubbish, don’t you, pet?’ said Carol. ‘Maybe it was equipment failure. Maybe you really do have low blood sugar and ought to be going to a GP to get it checked out instead of relying on random internet searches to diagnose yourself.’
Kirsty brought the ute to a standstill beside a weeping hibiscus and rested her eyes on the curved metal roofline of the museum. ‘The Air Traffic Safety investigators said a rabbit infestation was involved, but … I don’t know, Carol. Plus, I am supposed to be calling someone. Not a GP but a psychologist. It’s mandatory after a plane incident but I’ve been …’
‘Avoiding it?’
She unbuckled her seatbelt and shot Carol a look. ‘I guess you do know me pretty well.’
She walked around to the other side of the ute and helped Carol down. They appeared to be alone. Grass grew sparsely on the gravelly soil where they’d parked, and a bird call was the only sound above the distant growl from Ipswich Road. ‘Should we have checked this place was open before we drove for two hours?’
‘I told you, the curator knows we’re coming. His name’s John, and he lives nearby.’ Carol handed over her phone. ‘Here, you text him for me and let him know we’re here. My fingers are no good on these little screens.’
Kirsty did as she was bid, and they found a timber bench beside the donger. ‘This museum is not what I was expecting.’
‘It’s adorable,’ said Carol. ‘What were you wanting, chrome and glass?’
‘I guess I hadn’t thought about it.’