A childhood living on various outback stations and five years jil-larooing in the remoteness of the Northern Territory told her this was no hangar but an old cowshed. Almost hidden by the fluff of dandelion heads lay the collapsed timbers of an old cattle chute.
Just have a gander,the voice in her head urged. Ridiculous. As though there’d be anything in there from 1974.Maybe there’s a broken propellor blade!The voice in her head wasn’t keen to be silenced.Wouldn’t that be amazing? A family heirloom!
Foxes didn’t have family heirlooms, she reminded herself, but she noticed she wasn’t putting her ute into gear and driving off. Instead, she was squeezing the bejeezus out of her steering wheel. How bad would it be, really, if she took a look?
‘Okay, one peek.’
She pushed her door open, climbed out, and took a lungful of clean country air. A herd of cattle dotted the nearby paddock, young ones, by the looks, too interested in the grass to do more than glance in her direction. The sun had found its way through the cloud cover, so the paddock glinted silver. She walked up to the old walls, looking for a crack to peer through, but whatever windows there may once have been had been boarded over with plywood or—horrid thought—asbestos sheets. They’d bowed and splintered, but not enough for her to see through.
‘Bummer.’ She made her way back to the front of the shed where a massive sliding door barred her entrance and hauled on the handle.
It didn’t budge.
‘Comeon.’
She huffed a little. It was ludicrous—ludicrous—to think anything from an old photograph would still be hanging around in some shed in country New South Wales. Even more ludicrous to have driven two-thousand-odd kilometres to find out.
But still …
She switched her angle, dug the worn tread of her boots into the rocky soil, and pushed, forcing the huge slider to groan. Like loosening a wheel nut, she thought. A fight at first, but if she could budge this old door an inch, then she’d have cracked the grime seizing it shut.
The problem had to be in the rollers. Rust for sure, or maybe they had disintegrated. Tools, a liberal squirt of WD-40: she had both in her ute. She eyed the handle, tempted to whack a tow strap around it and see if her ute could haul it open. But that would surely be a little too wild. A vision of her mother hiking up her skirt and breaking the lock on her laundry window floated through her mind. A sneaky peek she was up for … break and enter she was not.
Nope. Definitely not.
If she could crack the door an inch, she could at least get a glimpse of anything at all interesting, and then she’d track down the owner and ask him or her for permission to explore further.
If there was nothing there?
Well, she could slink away and go and stare at the other contents in the suitcase.
The rollers were just visible when she hunkered down onto the weedy, stony ground. She used a stick to poke at the rubble that had gathered beneath the door, then gave each of the rollers a squirt from her can. Bracing herself against the handle once more, she rocked at the door, listening to it groan in protest. At last, the old timber structure gave a shudder, then slid open an inch … then six inches. She rearranged her feet and gave it one last almighty shove, and the door flung itself along its tracks so she was standing in a wide opening with thin, wintry sunlight flowing in around her.
Grit and haymotes and old paint rained down from the bearer above her. Shielding her eyes, she took a step forward.
Chains hung from rafters. Junk spilled from corners: rolls of rust that had once been wire, a three-legged chair, a rack of old branding irons and the paper-thin husk of a bush python and …
‘Holy cow,’ she breathed. A small, dull silver aircraft was parked on chocks on the cracked concrete floor.
She wiped her eyes, unsure why they’d decided to leak. This wasepicnot sad! This wasmarvellous. Now she couldn’t possibly head back to Port Augusta, not without uncovering the mystery of why an historic plane had been left to rust away in a shed!
Now was the time to go find the owner and plead her case, and she was totally going to do that any second now. Only … the plane was soright there.
Its metal fuselage wasn’t smooth but ridged. Wings rode low from its belly, sturdy and raked, stretching—she narrowed her eyes—forty feet or so from wingtip to wingtip. How could it justbehere? Alone and unvisited?
She reached up and rested a hand on the propellor: forged aluminium blades. A few nicks but still smooth. Still efficient. Still powerful. But not—her breath caught on a shudder—not as powerful as the armament.
Freaking hell. This thing had machine-gun housings, two forward and one aft. This thing had flown towar.
Markings peered out from under thick, greasy dust, blue and white, like a giant eye: the rondel of the Royal Australian Air Force. There was something stencilled on the nosecone, too, but the dirt and the angle of the plane canted up on its chocks made it hard to see.
She scanned the place for something that wouldn’t crumble under human weight and found an old steel bucket in a corner. She stood on it, then reached up and wiped at the grime covering the stencil. Huh. This stuffstuck. She pulled off the shirt she wore over her singlet, balled it in her fist, and used it to scrub at the metal plates until the colour beneath showed its pattern.
‘Oh!’ She’d seen a glimmer of this in the photograph from the newspaper article! The peeling memory of a woman styled and saucy like a movie siren, all pink frills and blonde curls. And beneath her, stencilled in white paint, the words the photo hadn’t shown:Doreen Anne.
Not a person, but a plane … and left to her by her grandmother! Air whooshed from her lungs and she rested her hand beside the woman’s face. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. You’re not alone, not any longer.’
She gave the rough texture of the paint one last pat, then wrapped a hand around a metal strut and looked for somewhere to wedge her foot so she could climb into the cockpit. Just a quick look, because she was here, wasn’t she? Then she wasreallygoing to find the new owner of the farm she was trespassing on and tell them she was here to collect her inheritance.
This wasgoodluck. This waswonderfulfate.
Maybe she really had broken the curse.