Her Knight in the Outback

‘I did. But a road train had jack-knifed across the highway just out of Kal and the spill clean-up was going to take twenty-four hours so I adjusted my route. I’ll do the south-west anti-clockwise. Like you.’

Was there just the slightest pause before ‘like you’? And did that mean anything? Apparently, she took too long wondering because he started up again.

‘I assumed I’d have missed you, actually.’

Or hoped? Impossible to know with his eyes hidden behind seriously dark sunglasses. Still, if he’d truly wanted to avoid her he could have just kept walking just now. She was so busy promoting The Missing to locals she never would have noticed him.

Eve pushed her shoulders back to improve her posture, which had slumped as the morning wore on. Convenient coincidence that it also made the best of her limited assets.

‘I had to do Salmon Gums and Gibson on the way,’ she said. ‘I only arrived last night.’

He took in the two-dozen posters affixed to the tilted up doors of the bus’s luggage compartment. It made a great roadside noticeboard to set her fold-out table up in front of.

He strolled up and back, studying every face closely.

‘Who are all these people?’

‘They’re all long-termers.’ The ten per cent.

‘Do you know them all?’

‘No,’ she murmured. ‘But I know most of their families. Online, at least.’

‘All missing.’ He frowned. ‘Doesn’t it pull focus from your brother? To do this?’

Yeah. It definitely did.

‘I wouldn’t be much of a human being if I travelled the entire country only looking after myself. Besides, we kind of have a reciprocal arrangement going. If someone’s doing something special—like media or some kind of promotion—they try to include as many others as they can. This is something I can do in the big centres while taking a break from the road.’

Though Esperance was hardly a metropolis and talking to strangers all day wasn’t much of a break.

He stopped just in front of her, picked up one of Travis’s posters. ‘Who’s “we”?’

‘The network.’

The sunglasses tipped more towards her.

‘The missing-persons network,’ she explained. ‘The families. There are a lot of us.’

‘You have a formal network?’

‘We have an informal one. We share information. Tips. Successes.’

Failures. Quite a lot of failures.

‘Good to have the support, I guess.’

He had no idea. Some days her commitment to a bunch of people she’d never met face to face was the only thing that got her out of bed.

‘When I first started up, I kept my focus on Trav. But these people—’ she tipped her head back towards all the faces on her poster display ‘—are like extended family to me because they’re the family of people I’m now close to. How could I not include them amongst The Missing?’

A woman stopped to pick up one of her fliers and Eve quickly delivered her spiel, smiling and making a lot of eye contact. Pumping it with energy. Whatever it took...

Marshall waited until the woman had finished perusing the whole display. ‘The Missing?’

She looked behind her. ‘Them.’

And her brother had the biggest and most central poster on it.

He nodded to a gap on the top right of the display. ‘Looks like one’s fallen off.’

‘I just took someone down.’

His eyebrows lifted. ‘They were found? That’s great.’

No, not great. But at least found. That was how it was for the families of long-timers. The Simmons family had the rest of their lives to deal with the mental torture that came with feeling relief when their son’s remains were found in a gully at the bottom of a popular hiking mountain. Closure. That became the goal somewhere around the ten-month mark.

Emotional euthanasia.

Maybe one day that would be her—loathing herself for being grateful that the question mark that stalked her twenty-four-seven was now gone because her brother was. But there was no way she could explain any of that to someone outside the network. Regular people just didn’t get it. It was just so much easier to smile and nod.

‘Yes. Great.’

Silence clunked somewhat awkwardly on the table between them.

‘Did you get out to Israelite Bay yet?’ he finally asked.

‘I’ll probably do that tomorrow or Wednesday.’

His clear eyes narrowed. ‘Listen. I have an idea. You need to travel out to the bay and I need to head out to Cape Arid and Middle Island to survey them for a possible new weather station. Why don’t we team up, head out together? Two birds, one stone.’

More together time in which to struggle with conversation and obsess about his tattoos. Was that wise?

‘I’ll only slow you down. I need to do poster drops at all roadhouses, caravan parks and campsites between here and there.’

‘That’s okay. As far as the office is concerned, I have a couple of days while the truck mess is cleared up. We can take our time.’

Why did he seem so very reluctant? Almost as if he was speaking against his will. She scrunched her nose as a prelude to an I don’t think so.

But he beat her to it. ‘Middle Island is off-limits to the public. You can’t go there without a permit.’

‘And you have a permit?’

‘I do.’

‘Have you forgotten that this isn’t a tourist trip for me?’

‘You’ll get your work done on the way, and then you’ll just keep me company for mine.’