CROCODILE CREEK

A cutting-edge medical centre. Fully equipped for saving lives and loves!

Crocodile Creek’s state-of-the-art Medical Centre and Rescue Response Unit is home to a team of expertly trained medical professionals. These dedicated men and women face the challenges of life, love and medicine every day!

Two weddings!

Crocodile Creek is playing host to two weddings this year, and love is definitely in the air! But…

A cyclone is brewing!

As a severe weather front moves in, the rescue team are poised for action—this time with some new recruits.

Two missing children!

As the cyclone wreaks its devastation, it soon becomes clear that there are two little ones missing. Now the team has to pull together like never before to find them…before it’s too late!

Dear Reader

Our starting point for this second Crocodile Creek mini-series was ‘a cyclone and weddings’, and the whole thing dropped into place with amazing speed when we talked about it together. Something to do with our friendship as writers. The ideas sparked between us and we had no disagreements about how these books should develop.

Something to do with that whole idea of human celebration in the face of nature’s devastation, too. People just seem to have an innate need to seek renewal and emotional connection even while the storm is still raging, and that balance of loss and renewal seemed so right in these books.

Some of you may not know this, but cyclones and hurricanes are really the same thing—they just spin in opposite directions—so if you’re wondering just how intense our Cyclone Willie was, think of some of the most infamous hurricanes, only in a region of scattered population, tropical farms and rugged rainforest. Some of the devastation we describe comes from eye-witness accounts of Cyclone Larry, a powerfully destructive storm which hit the coast of far north Queensland in March 2006.

But of course it’s the positive things we like to focus on as romance writers. There’s more than one happy ending in this book…

All the best

Lilian Darcy

Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family

Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LILIAN DARCY is Australian, but has strong ties to the USA through her American husband. They have four growing children, and currently live in Canberra, Australia. Lilian has written over seventy romance novels, and still has more story ideas crowding into her head than she knows what to do with. Her work has appeared on romance bestseller lists, and two of her plays have been nominated for major Australian writing awards. ‘I’ll keep writing as long as people keep reading my books,’ she says. ‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, and I love it.’ Find out more about Lilian and her books at her website, www.liliandarcy.com, or write to her at PO Box 532, Jamison PO, Macquarie, ACT 2614, Australia.

CONTENTS

COVER

LETTER TO READER

TITLE PAGE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

COPYRIGHT

PROLOGUE

FELIXX had fallen asleep now, thank goodness. He looked uncomfortable, with his cheek pressed against the sill below the darkened, rain-splashed window of the bus. Janey’s heart hurt when she looked at him. He was only five years old, and he hadn’t spoken a word to her. Not in the two hours they’d been on the bus, or over the past three days since she’d arrived at Mundarri. He hadn’t spoken a word to anyone, and no one could tell her why.

Was she doing the right thing?

As soon as news had reached her about Alice’s death, she’d taken indefinite leave from her group general practice in Darwin. Had managed to reach Mundarri via a roundabout route of hops by air in frighteningly small planes, and finally a lift from one of Mundarri’s other residents, a woman named Maharia.

Everyone at Mundarri seemed to have chosen odd names for themselves. Janey gathered this was part of the philosophy of the place—that you gave yourself a fresh start with a new and more spiritual name. Alice had become Alanya, although Janey could never think of her by that name. Little Felixx had originally been named Francis James, which his dad had soon shortened to Frankie Jay, she remembered.

Anyway…The Mundarri people had all seemed nice enough. Caring. Very gentle and warm with Felixx, as Janey was learning to call him.

And yet they let my sister die.

Yes, OK, so she was a doctor, trained within what the Mundarri people regarded as the uncompromising scientific straitjacket of Western medicine, but the fact was Alice’s liver had packed up and a ‘cleansing diet’ of carrot juice was just never going to cut it in the healing department.

Alice had needed urgent hospital treatment, and probably a transplant down the track, and the people at Mundarri, out of arrogance or naivety or goodness knows what, hadn’t called an ambulance for her until it had been far too late.

Thinking about it, Janey found she was crying. Anger and grief and doubt all mixed up together.

Had she done the right thing?

Felixx could have stayed at Mundarri. It would have taken some lengthy wrangling with the authorities, but one of the women—Maharia, or who was that other one Felixx had seemed close to? Raina?—could have been named his legal guardian and he would have continued to live in a place that was at least familiar.

A place whose irresponsible, ill-informed healing philosophies had killed his mother.

No, she had done the right thing, taking him away.

But she didn’t know what she was going to do next, because it turned out Felixx had a father living just a few hours from here, and Janey had had no idea. It had been a huge shock to discover Luke Bresciano’s contact details among Alice’s things, and to discover that Crocodile Creek was, by Australian standards, so close.

Beyond the confines of the bus, night had fallen completely now. The sodden blanket of cloud overhead let no moonlight through, and the rain was relentless, noisy and thick and buffeted by wind. There was a cyclone hovering out to sea, apparently, and people were saying it was getting closer and stronger, and might hit the coast. In these conditions, you could easily believe it.

The bus rounded a bend and Felixx slid toward Janey, still fast asleep. She pillowed his head on her shoulder and wondered yet again why he wouldn’t speak.

It wasn’t a defiant silence, she thought. It came from…fear?

Or grief. He’d just lost his mother.

Oh, lord, could she herself possibly give him what he needed? At thirty-four, she’d never had a child. She loved him, but she didn’t know him, because she and Alice had lived so far from each other since he was born, and Alice had made so little effort to keep in touch. ‘I can’t deal with cities any more,’ she’d said. ‘I need the wilderness.’

Luke Bresciano was Felixx’s father. Janey needed to at least consider the possibility that he might want his son, despite everything Alice had said to the contrary. And she had to consider that Luke might be the best person to have him.

Was she doing the right thing?

Felixx felt warm against her side, and it was getting rather steamy in the damp bus. They rounded another bend and the bus skidded suddenly, bringing forth a chorus of alarmed gasps and cries.

‘Sorry, folks,’ the driver called. ‘It’s evil out there.’

How much longer till they reached the coast? They were late, surely. Should have been there by now. Janey had counted on arriving in time to organise motel accommodation for tonight—this whole trip hadn’t even been on her agenda this time yesterday. She couldn’t just show up on Luke Bresciano’s doorstep without warning.

Stay asleep, little man, so at least you’re fresh when we get there…

She put her arm around his little shoulder, thinking that he seemed so small for his age, loved but possibly not as well nourished as he should have been. They were strict vegans at Mundarri, there wasn’t a lot of money on hand for fancy nutritional supplements, and it took a great deal of commitment to provide adequate nutrition for a child’s growing body on that kind of diet.

His clothing, too…There was a hole in his sneaker that someone—Alice?—had tried to disguise with a cheerful picture of an orange clownfish. And there were mosquito bites, fresh ones and old ones, all over his skin. Alice’s rainforest paradise had had its downside.

Where was the best place for this little boy? Should Janey have taken him back to Darwin with her and contacted Luke later on? But she didn’t want Felixx’s future hanging in limbo for months on end.

Her heart hurt again. What was the best thing for this precious waif of a child?

And then, right in the middle of the wash of churning emotion, the bus gave a tremendous, unexpected lurch. There was no more room for thought. A wild lashing of rain and wind slammed into the vehicle’s side and it began to lean and slide. Outside, there came a violent, unearthly roaring sound. The bus driver yelled and swore. Couldn’t he get the steering back under control? Come on…Come on…

Janey tried to keep hold of Felixx with one hand while fending them both off the seat-back in front with the other. The bus slid and heaved. She screamed. Chaos erupted, and then blackness.

CHAPTER ONE

‘WHO do we still have left?’ Luke asked wearily, craning his head for a quick look through the half-open door of the back room at the Bellambour Post Office and General Store.

‘Only three,’ Nurse Marcia Flynn promised. ‘Want to see the kid next? He’s ten, he’s doing pretty well, but I think that arm is broken.’

‘Displaced?’

‘Not that I could see. I’m just going on how much it’s hurting him.’

‘Normally, I’d tell the parents to take him into Crocodile Creek and get it X-rayed,’ Luke said. He was an orthopaedic surgeon, he didn’t believe in letting bones heal crooked.

But conditions were far from normal in the wake of Cyclone Willie, as they all knew. Even supposing the ten-year-old’s parents still had an operational vehicle, which some people didn’t, the roads were a mess, and southbound traffic ran in a slow, continuous stream as people evacuated the cyclone-ravaged coast of Far North Queensland. The hospital was running around the clock, as Luke himself had been doing for three days, living on snatched sleep and even sketchier meals.

He’d only made it back to the doctors’ house for the occasional change of underwear. He’d even showered and slept at the hospital, and had attempted to tune out the mess of stories and rumours that swirled in the cyclone’s wake. Out of stubbornness, or something else?

Grace O’Riordan was in the ICU while Harry Blake looked like death warmed up, Georgie Turner had been swept off her feet by that visiting American neurosurgeon, Alistair, while the two of them had been rescuing Georgie’s seven-year-old stepbrother, a dog and another kid from the very jaws of the storm.

The kid.

Luke was a self-destructive idiot for even thinking about the kid…

Now, here he was in the post office of this little town an hour north of Crocodile Creek at what the local State Emergency Service had turned into a makeshift medical clinic. So that the citizens of Bellambour who weren’t planning to leave the town could see a doctor if they needed to.

Charles Wetherby had virtually ordered Luke to take some time off that morning. ‘You made it to Mike and Emily’s wedding celebration for, what, twenty minutes, the other night?’ Crocodile Creek Hospital’s medical director had accused. ‘Just long enough to get Alistair Carmichael’s blood up when you danced with Georgie. And you’ve been working nonstop since. You need to get out of this place and breathe some air.’

‘I’m fine, Charles.’ Gritted teeth.

‘You’re not, but I can tell you don’t want to talk about it.’

‘I don’t want any time off.’ Not until Janey Stafford had regained consciousness and he would hopefully be able to see her. Until then, he’d take any distractions he could.

And he wouldn’t think about the kid.

‘Would it help if I sent you on a busman’s holiday?’ Charles had asked.

‘If you’ll tell me what that is.’

‘Hmm, I keep forgetting that anyone under thirty-five only learns American slang. I’ll send you out on a clinic run, so you can at least have a change of scene while you work yourself into the ground. That’s what I’m trying to say.’

‘That’d be great…’ he’d said, meaning it.

‘Check the broken arm out the old-fashioned way, by feel,’ Marcia said now.

‘And then a backslab and a bandage,’ Luke agreed, dragging his focus back. ‘Shouldn’t be a tough case. If it is displaced, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’

‘If it’s not washed away, like half the other bridges around here.’

He gave a dutiful laugh. It came out rusty, so different from the charm-laden sound he’d once used to such good effect. He sighed. ‘OK, I’ll see him next.’

‘And then the old man, and last of all you can get to the guy who’s doing all the complaining!’

‘You’re punishing him for complaining the most?’

‘I think if there was really something wrong with him, he wouldn’t have the energy left for it.’

‘The Flynn triage system.’ He appreciated Marcia. She was quick-witted and cheerful, the type who used nursing as a ticket to see the world, and good for her, having that spirit of adventure. He liked a woman with energy and spark. She probably wouldn’t stay in Crocodile Creek much longer. ‘Treat the quiet ones first. I like it, Marcia.’

But his heart wasn’t really committed to the conversation, Luke knew. He’d been like this for three days, running on autopilot, locking back into focus when he saw a serious case but at other times not really there. When he looked back on the incredible days of the cyclone and its aftermath in the weeks and months to come, he knew he would probably remember it differently to how everyone else did.

Because of Janey Stafford.

Three days ago in the middle of the night, just hours before the cyclone had hit, hearing Janey’s name in the A and E department when Marcia had turned up some ID, he’d felt an electric prickle of shock all the way up his spine. He’d had to check the woman’s identity for himself, with his own eyes—reach out and take a look beneath her oxygen mask to make sure it was really and seriously the same Janey Stafford, Alice’s sister, not someone else.

He’d recognised her at once. The glossy mid-brown hair, the brown eyes, the freckles, the features that weren’t quite regular enough to make her beautiful, except when she smiled, which of course she hadn’t been doing then, in her unconscious state.

And although he’d played down their past relationship to his colleagues, he’d been thinking about her ever since. Wondering why she was there. Wondering if he was kidding himself that it had anything to do with him. Remembering how steady and sensible she’d always been, unlikely to come to Crocodile Creek on a whim. Thinking of his lost son and—

Stop it, Luke.

You can’t afford this.

The ten-year-old with the iffy arm appeared in the makeshift clinic along with his mum, and Luke snapped back into the pretence of focus—into the cheerful humour that his fellow doctors might think was designed to lighten the atmosphere of disaster and loss all around them, but they were wrong. The humour was really just a way of anchoring himself to the work he had to do.

‘So?’ he said to the scruffy ten-year-old. ‘Circus tricks? Rodeo riding? Jumping off a fence wearing paper wings and trying to fly?’

The kid gave a reluctant grin. ‘Nah. We were cleaning up the mud in the living room and I slipped on it.’ Not a story you were tempted to doubt when he still had a crust of dried mud all down his side, and when dozens of homes around here had fine, flood-washed silt inches thick on their floors. The mother nodded, too.

‘You didn’t consider a bath before you came in?’

‘We’re saving water.’

Ironic, when they’d just had about twenty inches of the stuff coming down from the sky, but Luke understood the situation. The family could have lost their rainwater tank in the storm, creeks were contaminated with debris and dead animals, town mains supplies were cut off or compromised in some other way. The damage and danger hadn’t ended on Sunday with the passage of the storm.

‘How’s your arm now? Does it hurt?’ He went through some standard questions and checks, decided the forearm was fractured but not displaced and so the backslab and bandage would be fine. He’d do it himself because Marcia was still treating some dodgy-looking cuts on their previous patient.

And while he wrapped the bandage, he wondered about Janey.

If she’d been brought out of her medically induced coma.

If she was talking yet.

If she was in contact with her sister.

If he could possibly go and sit beside her hospital bed and wangle anything out of her about Frankie Jay. If she acted cagey, told out-and-out lies, or if she really knew nothing, the way she’d claimed the last time he’d spoken to her by phone from England several years ago.

‘Just a couple of mosquito bites.’

He blinked. The kid with the arm had gone, and here was the old man, playing down the infected bites covering a pair of ancient, skinny, reddish-purple legs which didn’t look as if they boasted very good circulation.

And, of course, Luke was aware that he’d finished with the kid and called the old man in.

Of course he was.

He’d said the right words. Bring him in to the hospital outpatient department in two weeks, Mum, so we can check that arm. Good luck with the mud. Tell me what I can do for you today, Mr Connolly. But once again he’d been operating on autopilot the whole time.

‘Bit nasty, though, aren’t they?’ he said about the bites. ‘Have you been wading around in some of this water?’

The old man shrugged. ‘Helping my son on the farm. Crop’s destroyed. Take us years to get on our feet again. Never seen anything like that rain.’

‘Wish we could send some of it to the drought areas down south, hey?’ Luke took a closer look at the bites and decided that a topical cream wouldn’t be enough to combat the multiple sites of infection, some of which were crusted with yellow-white pus. The man needed a course of oral antibiotic, but would he remember to take it? He’d probably rely on his daughter-in-law or his son to remind him. The man’s skin felt warm to the touch. ‘Pretty sticky out there, is it?’

Another shrug. ‘Not too bad.’

Luke wrote out the script, gave some instructions and saw the old man’s eyes glaze over. ‘Show the tablets to your daughter-in-law,’ he said firmly. ‘She’ll make sure you take them at the right times of day.’

‘She’s good,’ Mr Connolly agreed. He hunched his shoulders, put a fist over his mouth and geared up for a cough, but nothing came. His breath wheezed in and out.

‘Nothing else bothering you today, Mr Connolly?’

Something you’re not talking about, the way I’m not talking about Janey, or the kid…

The man shook his head. ‘It was me daughter-in-law brought me in, said I had to do something about the bites. I told her it was nothin’ but she wouldn’t listen.’

‘She did the right thing.’

Marcia was mouthing something at Luke from the door with a frown on her face, and he had another one of those chills down his spine as an odd intuition kicked into high gear. He ushered the old man out, patting him on the back in an attempt to coax him to move faster. What did Marcia have to report?

‘Someone’s been asking for you,’ she said, as soon as they were alone. ‘That woman from the bus crash.’

‘Janey Stafford,’ he supplied automatically.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘So you do know her.’

‘I said I did, the other night.’

‘You said you knew her sister.’

He wasn’t going to respond to that. ‘So she’s conscious?’ His head felt suddenly light, and his ears were ringing.

‘Doing a lot better. They’re talking about discharge tomorrow. She wants to see you, and—’ She stopped suddenly.

‘Yeah? What?’ he growled, ill at ease.

‘Nothing. One more patient. Roads are still crawling, apparently, people are just pouring out of the area and heading south, which is good because it means less stress on services. Did you take Mr Connolly’s temperature?’

Luke went still. ‘You asked me to, didn’t you?’ Damn, he’d totally forgotten, even when he’d touched the man’s warm skin.

‘I thought he was brewing a low-grade fever.’

‘Has he left? Could you try and catch him? I completely forgot.’

Oh, hell, he didn’t usually do this! He could have blamed the lack of sleep since Saturday, the stress, the makeshift conditions of the clinic, but he knew the problem was in his own head, and the distractions were far more personal, deeply rooted in his past. If Janey Stafford had come to Crocodile Creek because of him…If she had news about his son…If that unidentified kid whom Georgie and Alistair had found…

‘So you think—?’ Marcia began.

‘I don’t know what I think. What did you think?’

‘I wondered about pneumonia. He’s a smoker. I should have been more specific, Luke. I’m sorry, it’s my fault as much as yours.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ he retorted grimly. ‘Just see if you can catch him. I should have given him a more thorough check.’

But Mr Connolly and his daughter-in-law had already gone, and although Marcia tried to reach them by phone, there were so many equipment problems at the moment—lines down, towers damaged—she had no success. Luke made a mental note to himself to keep trying once they got back to Crocodile Creek.

‘I cannot believe this,’ Marcia said for about the fifth time, as they drove back. ‘I just cannot believe this is the same landscape I drove through four weeks ago.’

She’d had a couple of days off back then, apparently, and had gone north for a bit of a wild beach weekend with a couple of female friends. Luke hadn’t been up this way as recently, and didn’t feel the need to express his reaction out loud—he’d learned to keep his emotions to himself in recent years—but he was just as shocked as Marcia, and no less so because they’d passed the same sights only that morning, on their way up. Seeing them in the other direction brought a fresh wave of disbelief.

There was such a dramatic grandeur about the huge mountains that backed this part of the coast, and with the region’s bountiful rainfall they were always incredibly lush and green. Not any more. The rainforest’s entire canopy had been shredded, leaving only straggly sticks. The twisted trunks and branches had even been scoured of their bark, as if sandblasted. It would take the landscape years to recover.

There were massive, beautiful trees, once lush with enormous canopies and huge branches hung thickly with epiphytes, but now reduced to trunks with a couple of stick-like branches poking up, their greenery lying in a shredded mulch on the ground and already beginning to rot.

Close by the highway, huge weeping figs lay one after another on the ground, their root systems exposed, as if a giant hand had been pulling roadside weeds. Telephone poles leaned drunkenly, with their wires trailing in muddy pools.

They passed a house set back about fifty metres from the road—a typical old-fashioned Queenslander up on wooden pylons ten feet from the ground. Its front veranda and wall had been torn off and lay in a crumpled heap nearby, while its neat interior was open to display like a doll’s house.

And the crops. Totally flattened. Sugar cane, bananas, pawpaws, with the farmers’ ruined houses set in the middle of the destruction.

‘What about the animals?’ Marcia whispered again. ‘The birds…’

‘I know,’ muttered Luke. Cassowaries, sugar gliders, tree frogs, possums, parrots, tree kangaroos, paddymelons, pythons, butterflies…The list went on, endangered species and common ones, predators and prey. Where would they find food and shelter now? ‘But it’s the people we have to think about.’

He slowed to a crawl behind an evacuating family in a loaded down minivan towing a trailer piled high with their belongings and covered with a badly tethered blue plastic tarpaulin. They probably had relatives somewhere down south, who’d promised to put them up until they could get back on their feet, make some decisions, sort out their finances.

‘People help each other,’ Marcia pointed out. ‘Animals can’t.’

‘Nature is cruel,’ Luke answered, sounding cruel himself, although he didn’t mean to be. ‘Marce, we’re all pretty much in shock. Close your eyes and get some rest while we drive. Don’t let it get to you so much, when we’re so strapped as it is.’

‘Oh, put up a few nice defensive walls?’ She smiled to soften the statement.

‘What’s wrong with walls?’ he said.

He knew what she must be thinking—that he must know all about walls. He hadn’t asked any of the right questions about Janey Stafford. But he couldn’t risk giving anything away. He couldn’t bear to. His absurdly leaping hopes, all the anger and distrust, those irritating memories he still had of the time eight years ago when he and Janey had been colleagues.

She’d disapproved of him, and she’d let it show, even before he and her sister had fallen so wildly in love. She’d thought he was a lightweight, and that he relied on charm and networking to get what he wanted. In hindsight, there could have been some truth in all of that. He’d led a pretty charmed life until he’d married Alice Stafford.

Now Janey was asking for him. Which surely meant she must have come to Crocodile Creek to see him. And why would she have done that, unless…?

The shoe tortured him.

The stupid little shoe that Susie Jackson’s sister Hannah had taken on as a personal quest, since arriving from New Zealand for Mike and Emily’s wedding and getting caught up in the drama of the cyclone.

Who did the shoe belong to? What age of child would it fit? There had been two children missing following the bus crash up in the rainforest, they now knew—Georgie’s little half-brother Max, aged seven, whom she hoped would be living with her permanently from now on, and the other boy that Georgie and Alistair had rescued from their hiding place in an old gold-mining shaft, whom Luke hadn’t yet seen. The one who didn’t speak, so they didn’t even know his age or his name.

He knew Susie pretty well after his five months in Crocodile Creek, as a hospital physiotherapist and an orthopaedic surgeon tended to have a fair bit to do with each other professionally. She and Hannah were twins. Identical.

And there had been something quite disturbing about all this concern for a child’s forlorn shoe coming from someone who wasn’t Susie Jackson but who looked exactly like her. He’d had to hold himself back, pretend to a lack of concern and questions that had probably made him look cold in the face of everyone else’s concern.

In the face of the shoe itself.

Because it did have a face, this shoe—a little orange clownfish face, cleverly painted on the worn sneaker to disguise the hole in the toe. Orange felt-tip pen, black markings made with something finer, maybe a laundry marker, and white edgings of correction fluid. Alice had always had a talent for drawing, and for improvisation…

‘It was her sister I knew,’ he’d said about Janey, in the A and E department, the night she’d been brought in. He hadn’t said, This patient’s my sister-in-law.

And it wasn’t Frankie Jay’s shoe, he told himself yet again.

It couldn’t be.

The mysterious silent kid could not be Frankie Jay.

Yet Frankie Jay’s aunt had been on the bus. She was lying in Crocodile Creek Hospital right now, asking about Luke—asking about a little boy, too?—but the shoe couldn’t belong to her nephew—my son—because the consensus around the hospital, from people who knew about such things, was that the shoe must belong to a four-year-old or thereabouts, and Frankie Jay would be turning six in just a few weeks.

Luke wouldn’t even recognise him, he knew.

He hadn’t seen him since he was three months old.

‘He’s coming in to see you now,’ Dr Wetherby reported to Janey.

Charles, she remembered. He’d asked her to call him that, and he knew she was a doctor herself. Charles Wetherby. In a wheelchair. Somewhat of a local legend, she gathered. He was the hospital’s medical director.

Her brain still felt fuzzy and disoriented, slow to process what was happening around her and the things people said, struggling to make sense of everything. But she kept trying, deeply anxious to return to full health, to get out of here, although she didn’t know where she and Felixx would go.

Felixx, who was coming in to see her now.

‘Georgie Turner’s bringing him,’ Charles continued. ‘Our obstetrician. She’s terrific.’

‘He’s been staying with her since the crash.’ She still had blanks in her memory, and forgot things she’d been told.

‘That’s right.’ Dr Wetherby was very patient. ‘She and Dr Carmichael risked their lives to find him and Max, right in the teeth of the cyclone. We’re all devoutly thankful that the four of them survived.’

‘How long have I been in here now?’

‘Since Saturday night. And now it’s Tuesday. You missed all the drama.’

‘Not all of it.’

Except that she couldn’t remember. She and Felixx had been on the bus that had slid off the road. There had been a landslide, triggered by the massive dump of rain that had heralded the cyclone, apparently. She remembered when they’d left Mundarri a few hours earlier, trying to get her waif-like, silent nephew to say goodbye to Raina and Maharia, but as usual he hadn’t said a word, just waved, taken Janey’s hand, stretched his small legs to climb the bus’s high steps.

And that was all.

After this, everything remained blank, and when she’d regained consciousness, she’d had to ask, ‘Where am I?’ like an accident victim in a bad movie, before she’d remembered finding Luke Bresciano’s contact details at Mundarri among Alice’s things. The second thing she’d asked had been, ‘Where’s Felixx? My—my little boy.’ Because, for the moment at least, he was hers.

‘Is he OK?’ she asked now, having been told at first that he was but not quite daring to believe it.

‘Well, we have a couple of concerns…’ Charles Wetherby said.

‘Is he speaking?’

‘No, he’s not, and we were wondering if there’s anything you can tell us about that. He doesn’t seem to have a hearing problem.’

‘He hasn’t spoken to me either.’

‘Since when, Janey?’

She frowned and tried to will the fuzz out of her brain. Since when? Since ever! But had she managed to explain…? No, that’s right. They would have assumed the obvious relationship, and she’d been too fuzzy to correct them. ‘He’s not my son,’ she said.

‘But I thought—’

‘He’s my nephew. My sister’s child. I don’t know him very well. She—They believe in alternative healing at Mundarri. I don’t know if you’ve heard of—’

‘Mundarri? Some kind of spiritual retreat, up in the rainforest?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, I do think there’s a place in our system for alternative medicine…’

‘I do, too, sometimes.’

‘But I’ve heard they have some odd ideas.’

‘Odd ideas that killed my sister.’ She sketched out the story as briefly as she could, sidetracked into an ambush of emotion before she could swallow it back, and even just that amount of effort tired her out. ‘I’m sorry, I’m a doctor myself. Right, yes, I did tell you that.’ Her head hurt. ‘As you say, I think alternative healing has its place, but—’

‘We’re both doctors, you don’t have to explain.’

‘Will I be discharged today?’ she asked, knowing the answer even before she heard it.

‘Not before tomorrow, I shouldn’t think,’ Charles said gently. ‘Should we postpone your nephew coming in?’

‘Oh, no, please. I want to see him! Let me just close my eyes for a minute…’

And the next time she opened them, not long afterwards, there he was, being ushered into the room by an attractive and very energetic-looking woman with bright red dangly earrings. She had a pretty impressive bruise on the side of her face, which Janey put down to the cyclone.

‘Felixx…’ Janey struggled to sit up, struggled yet again not to cry. She didn’t want to scare him any more than he’d been scared already by all that had happened, all the uncertainty, all that he’d lost. ‘Oh, sweetheart…Oh, darling…’

She held out her arms, but Georgie Turner had to nudge him forward. ‘Come and hug your Auntie Janey.’ Charles Wetherby must have explained their relationship to her.

At last he came, and she felt his warm little body. Had a momentary flashback to the bus. That’s right, he’d fallen asleep on her shoulder, so warm and trusting and relaxed. Now she wanted to hold him for ever, just for the reassurance that they were both alive, that she hadn’t let him down, that they were together, so everything would be all right.

But he pulled back.

Didn’t speak, of course.

Why didn’t he speak?

He looked scared. She could see him taking in the equipment—the drip stand and bag of fluid and cannula taped to her hand, the monitor reporting on her oxygen and heart, and the imposing side rails and wheels and crank handle of the hospital bed.

Alice, she remembered. He was scared because his mother had died, and now his Auntie Janey was ill, too.

‘I’m feeling so much better, Felixx,’ she said quickly. ‘Dr Wetherby says I can probably get out of here tomorrow. I’m sitting here going woo-hoo!’

On Felixx’s face the sun came out from behind a cloud. It was the only way Janey could describe it to herself. His smile spread wide, his eyes went happy, his tense little shoulders dropped and relaxed. He looked as if there was something else he wanted to say or ask, but didn’t know how. Or didn’t dare.

‘Were you scared I was really sick?’

He nodded, cautious about it.

Oh, hell, of course he had been scared!

‘Nah,’ she said, deliberately casual and dismissive. ‘Takes more than a few bumps on the head to knock me around. We’ll be able to check into a nice motel, and—’ She stopped.

Georgie was shaking her head. ‘No motels,’ she mouthed.

The cyclone, Janey remembered. As she hadn’t seen it or heard it or even seen the damage yet, she had to take it on trust and her foggy brain kept forgetting. None of the motels in town were currently open for business apparently.

She put on a bright voice. ‘Well, we’ll have to camp or something.’

‘If you’re not feeling well enough to travel yet, Janey, we can arrange something. There’s a big house—it’s the original hospital building—where several of the doctors live, and we can usually find extra room.’ Georgie’s bright earrings bobbed as she talked. She looked like the kind of woman who could arrange emergency accommodation on an uninhabited planet if she had to. ‘We can lend you some clothes. Rowdy, here, was pretty happy to be reunited with his missing clownfish shoe, but his toes are getting squashed in those sneakers, so we’ve found him some new ones.’

‘You haven’t thrown the clownfish shoe away?’

‘Ooh, no, weren’t allowed to do that!’ Her face telegraphed the story. Rowdy must have clung to the shoe. Alice had painted the fish on it to hide the hole in the toe, Janey knew, and of course he wanted all the reminders of his mum that he could find.

‘Thanks,’ she said, her voice husky with tears.

‘To be honest, though,’ Georgie said gently, ‘getting back to the issue of where you’re staying, we’re encouraging people to evacuate if they can. Resources are pretty stretched. I think the Golden Palm will be up and running in a couple of days. It’s not exactly five-star, but they only had minor damage and they’re working on getting one block of rooms back into a fit state for guests. There’s the Athina, too, but that’ll be full. They’ve just had a big wedding. You’re from Darwin?’

‘I don’t know where I’m from right now.’ Janey closed her eyes. ‘The moon?’

The thought of finding a place to stay, tracking down Luke, presenting him with his son and saying something like, Do you want him? Alice said you didn’t, but she’s gone now, and I’m wondering if that might make you change your mind. After all, you are the only father he’s got…

Exhausting.

Too hard.

She’d asked someone about Luke, but maybe no one had passed the message on. Or, no, with services in the whole region so strapped, he’d be working around the clock, playing the hero.

He had a nice line in heroic behaviour. People loved the casual humour, the god-like reassurances and the warm fire in his amber-brown eyes, and immediately believed in him. She knew what he was like…or had known once…He wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to show off in all this chaos. Which was good, because she didn’t have the energy for their confrontation just yet.

‘Honey, we might take you back to play with Max, OK?’ she heard Georgie say. ‘Auntie Janey needs to rest for a while now.’

He stood there looking at her for a moment, frowning, giving off that same sense that he was about to speak, that the words were just crammed in his mouth bursting to come out, but as usual he stayed silent.

‘Bye, sweetheart,’ she managed, then the sleepy fog stole over her brain again, and hours passed.

The next time she woke up, her head had cleared, her stomach wanted food, her limbs were ready for a good stretch and altogether she felt about a hundred years better.

Until she became aware of the quiet masculine presence in the chair beside her bed—dark hair, strong shoulders, genuine, implacable fatigue written all over him—and realised it was Luke.

CHAPTER TWO

LUKE looked exhausted and stressed.

He had bloodshot eyes, hair yelling for a brush, even a streak of dried mud along his jaw. He looked older. There were some lines around his eyes and mouth. Janey hadn’t seen him in, what, seven years? No, just under six, if you counted photographs.

Alice had sent one from London shortly after Felixx’s birth—a casual shot of both parents and the tiny bundle of baby snuggled between them. Alice had looked tired, but Luke had glowed—the archetypical proud father. Just three months later, their marriage had shattered. Janey still didn’t know the full story, and what she did know had come only from Alice.

So how did you even start in a situation like this?

With ‘hello’ apparently.

Luke said it first, his voice low and tired and husky. Despite the changes in his appearance, he was still the man she remembered, dark and ferociously good-looking, with those trust-me-I’m-a-hero amber-brown eyes and a confident mouth that had rarely bothered to bestow its charming smile on Janey. She’d seen it quirked in annoyance or outright anger far more often.

‘Hello, Luke,’ she answered him. ‘It’s good to see you.’

His smile was strained. Good to see each other? Maybe. And they both looked wrecked. He carried his fatigue well, but she had no illusions about the appearance she must present after two days of unconsciousness in a hospital bed—and she’d never been the pretty one of the two Stafford girls.

‘It’s been a while,’ Luke said.

‘Too long.’

His face changed. The strong jaw suddenly looked harder. No charm in evidence at all. ‘Don’t put that down to me, Janey. Just don’t. I contacted you and your parents over and over, asking you to put me in touch with Alice, and you insisted you didn’t know where she was.’

‘We didn’t, then. She didn’t contact us for a couple of years.’

‘But you do now?’

‘It’s complicated…’

‘Explain, Janey. Pretend I’m completely in the dark, no idea what’s been going on for the past five and a half years with my wife or my son. Just pretend, OK?’ His voice dripped with harsh sarcasm on those last three words.

Oh, lord, their dealings were getting badly strained already, and she had some shattering news to impart!

I won’t do this, she vowed. I won’t make it into a battle or a litany of accusations, no matter how I feel about Luke, or how much truth there might have been in what Alice said! Felixx has endured enough, he doesn’t need his two closest living relatives to be at war with each other.

It wouldn’t have been Alice’s approach, she knew. Alice had loved the high drama of family arguments and taking sides and emotional manipulation. You became drawn into it, inevitably, because—like Luke—she had so much charisma, so much life, so much self-belief. The world always seemed a more interesting and dramatic place when she was around.

Had loved.

Had had.

Had seemed.

Luke must have seen something in her face. ‘I’m sorry. Shall we start again?’ he said.

‘Let’s.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I can’t do the small talk. Not in a situation like this. There’s only one thing I want to know right now. The child. The boy. He’s around four years old, people are saying. They’ve been calling him Rowdy, but you’ve said his name is Felix. So he’s your son. I had this stupid hope for a while that—’ He broke off.

The look on his face was that of a man still under torture. It shocked her, because she’d never seen him like this before, wouldn’t have said he had the capacity to feel life’s darker emotions so deeply.

He was the sunshine type.

‘Luke…Dear God, I thought you knew,’ Janey blurted out. ‘He is Frankie Jay. He is yours. Of course he is.’

She watched him try to stand then sit back down as if his legs had given out from under him. He looked totally bewildered. ‘But—Felix?’

‘Alice changed his name, and I’ve grown used to it. She changed hers, too, and both their last names. Alanya and Felixx Star. Felixx’s has a double X, which is—’

Ridiculous.

She stopped. Why give this detail now? The double X. Her opinion of it. Her brain still wasn’t working quite right. ‘He’s small for his age,’ she went on. ‘He does look like he could be four.’

Luke put his head in his hands for a long moment, hiding his expression. She wanted to reach out and comfort him with her touch, but didn’t think she had the right or that he’d want her to. The nakedness of his reactions kept surprising her, although she couldn’t have put into words what she’d expected instead.

More of a performance?

‘When they found your ID in A and E on Saturday night, I didn’t know why you’d been on that bus,’ he said eventually. ‘If it was anything to do with me, if it was just one of those bizarre coincidences, or if Alice had put you up to it for some reason…Hell, I can’t call her Alanya! Where is she? Was this her idea? Why bring him here now, after all this time, when she did so much—must have moved heaven and earth—to make sure I could never find either of them?’

‘Never find them? She said you didn’t want him! Or her. That you couldn’t handle father-hood and wanted your bachelor days back. That you were the one who left.’

‘Which you instantly believed, of course.’ Suddenly, they were both gabbling, fast and furious.

‘Yes, because—’ She fought the swimming feeling in her head.

‘When was this?’ he demanded. ‘After my phone calls from London, or before?’

‘You’d said when we were working together—and you said it more than once—that you never wanted kids. And you certainly used to enjoy your freedom. Some men find they can’t deal with—’

‘No!’

‘Yes! When we were interns, those three months in the paediatric unit. We saw some heart-rending things.’

‘All right, I remember. I was twenty-six years old. That’s a young man’s response, Janey, pretty unthinking in some areas, far too black and white. I’ll never have to see a child of mine go through this, because I’m damned sure now that I’m never having kids. As for enjoying my freedom, that’s just how you would phrase it, isn’t it? The negative connotation. We all needed a bit of a release in those days. I changed. I loved Frankie Jay like—When was this? When did she say this? After my phone calls?’

‘After, when she came back to Australia.’

‘When you already knew how desperate I was to get in touch with her and see my son.’

‘It’s easy to say. Especially on the phone from half a world away. That you’re desperate to get in touch. It’s the expected reaction. Casts you in a heroic—’

He swore. ‘You thought it was just a performance? Hell, I knew you never thought all that highly of me marrying your sister, but…’ His lips had gone white. ‘We worked together. I saved your backside a couple of times, and you even returned the favour. There was a degree of respect between us. Professional respect, at least. I thought. But that’s what you think I’m capable of.’

‘I wasn’t accustomed to think my own sister was telling lies. I didn’t know what to think or believe or feel. You know what she was like, Luke. She drew us all in.’

‘Captivating,’ he said bitterly. ‘She weaves these beautiful, magical webs around her life. You want to be in her world because it looks so sparkling and wonderful. You believe every word she tells you. She casts spells. Wait a minute…’ His face changed, and Janey knew he’d belatedly registered her use of that tell-tale word ‘was’—the past tense.

‘She died,’ she told him simply. She swallowed. Luke didn’t need to see her in tears. She’d shed enough of those when she’d first heard the news. ‘A week ago. No, ten days. Oh, hell, nearly two weeks, I’m still in such a fog.’

She sketched in the medical facts for him, then continued, ‘She was living at Mundarri, it’s a retreat. A commune, some people would call it. And they didn’t realise how ill she was until it was too late. Charles Wetherby knew of the place when I told him. Up in the rainforest. I don’t know if—’

‘Yes, spiritual healing, or something. I guess that fits. She’d begun to get heavily involved in that sort of thing in England before she disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Just went off the grid, Janey. Do you think I didn’t try every avenue I could think of to track her down when she took Frankie Jay?’ His whole face blazed, and she could see the way his tightly held fists made his forearms knot with muscle. ‘She did it deliberately, no matter what she might have told you. That would have been when she changed their names, not when she got to the rainforest place, Mundarri. And I wouldn’t be surprised if she changed them more than once. Poor kid, probably doesn’t know what he wants to be called. It wasn’t me. I wanted our marriage. To try and save it, for his sake. I wanted to be a good father. She sabotaged everything.’

‘Luke—’

‘I don’t use that word lightly, and the only reason I never spoke of it in those terms when I called you from London was that I thought if I sounded too harsh about her you wouldn’t tell me where she was.’

‘Why didn’t you try again when you came back to Australia? I didn’t even know you were back in the country until I found your contact details amongst Alice’s things. She must have kept track of you.’

‘While making damned sure I couldn’t trace her. I gave up, that was why I didn’t make contact with you or your parents when I got back. Maybe I shouldn’t have given up. But it was killing me. I didn’t get a senior fellowship in the US that I wanted, because of it. I was too distracted, trying to find my wife and child. The fellowship went to someone else, and deservedly so, because I hadn’t been giving a hundred per cent and I couldn’t fake it any more.’

Luke Bresciano? Unable to fake it?

Again, she let too much show on her face.

‘Yes, you’re right, OK? I did used to fake it sometimes, when we were interns.’

‘Sometimes?’

‘OK, a lot. Never the actual medicine, but the bedside manner, the confidence, sure! It was a survival strategy. We all had them. Apparently you weren’t impressed with mine.’

‘Finish the story, Luke.’

‘I came home to Australia instead. I knew my son was at least safe, that Alice loved him. I decided that would have to be enough, the abstract knowing. I’m not the first parent to have lived through losing a child completely when a marriage breaks down—to have a son or daughter or a whole family just vanish out of your life, and your ex to go to incredibly extreme measures to deprive you of any contact. I joined a support group for a while, but some of the bitterness and desperation I saw in those other parents…No. For sheer survival I had to turn my back and start again.’

‘Oh, Luke…’ She slumped against the raised upper half of the hospital bed, her energy completely drained. Her hands were actually shaking, cold despite the tropical heat.

He reached out and covered her clammy fingers with his warm palm. Instinctively, she closed her eyes. The contact felt good, far better than she would have expected. It oriented something in her universe, and she didn’t stop to think if that might be in any way dangerous.

Couldn’t stop to think.

Didn’t have any thought power left.

‘This is too exhausting for you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be talking about it now.’

‘We had to. How could we have put it off? What would we have said instead?’

‘Where is he? Will you let me see him?’

‘Let you see him?’ Her eyes flew open, she tried to sit up and saw stars.

His voice seemed to come from a distance. ‘Your sister didn’t let me, for over five years. Who has legal custody of him now?’

‘I do, but it’s temporary.’

‘Your parents…?’

‘Mum’s not well. Dad’s struggling, taking care of her. Alice’s death has hit them hard. They couldn’t manage a child now. They want me to have him, but—’

‘You don’t?’

‘Oh, I do, with all my heart, but I thought you should have a say in it, Luke.’ He was still holding her hand. Instinctively, she squeezed it. ‘That you should have him, if you want him. I—I do trust that your heart’s in the right place.’

He’d never been bad, after all. Just because she hadn’t liked him, just because he’d made her spit chips every time they met, and she had thought him so arrogant and immature…She wouldn’t let personal feelings win out over the objective realities of right and wrong. He’d be a good father, if he wanted to be.

‘All the stuff that happened with you and Alice…’ she said, ‘a bad marriage can bring out the worst in people.’

‘We were never right for each other. We dazzled each other at first, but I wouldn’t want those stars in my eyes again.’

‘Luke, if you want Felixx…Frankie Jay…then he’s yours. He has to be. It’s the right thing. That’s why I came to Crocodile Creek.’

Approaching the doctors’ house where he’d lived for almost five months, Luke saw the place as if he’d never seen it before.

Because now, since Sunday night, his child had been here.

He’d left Janey to rest, knowing there were still a million things to say but that she was too exhausted for either of them to do any more talking at this point. In any case, the urgency to see his son was suddenly shattering.

It pulled him like a magnet, made him feel ill and dizzy. He couldn’t live a minute longer if he didn’t see his boy. A part of him still believed it would all turn out to be some nightmare mistake and the child wouldn’t be his at all.

‘He’s sleeping on a camp stretcher on the floor in Emily’s room,’ Charles had told him a few minutes ago. ‘Has been for the past two nights. I guess you really have been bedding down in the A and E department.’

‘Yes. When I’ve slept at all.’

The whole town was in chaos. With the bus crash and cyclone barging in on their wedding reception three nights ago, Emily and Mike Poulos should have been miles away on their honeymoon by this time but instead they’d stayed to help. They’d had no choice in the matter, and it might be days longer before they could easily be spared and before regular commercial flights resumed.

The short snatches of time that Emily and her new husband did manage to spend together, they spent over at the Athina Hotel, in a room that was too rain-damaged for real hotel guests, with its sodden carpet ripped up, but quite acceptable to a couple of battle-weary doctors who happened to be newly married and madly in love.

Which meant that Emily’s room had been available for Max and Frankie Jay.

I am not calling him by the name Alice used when she stole him away.

‘Although I’m not sure what he’d be doing right now,’ Charles had continued. ‘Eating, probably. He’s developed quite an appetite since we got hold of him.’

And when Luke tiptoed up the steps and into the big communal kitchen with his heart thudding right up in his throat, there he was. His son. Eating an enormous hamburger with everything, half of which—fried egg, beetroot slice, grated carrot, pineapple ring and cheese—was sliding out the sides and back onto the plate.

Frankie Jay had beetroot juice and burger bun crumbs smeared all over his face, and was tackling with serious attention the issue of how to get the fallen bits of hamburger filling back into his mouth. Via reinserting them into the bun? Or should he take a more direct route?

Luke simply stood and watched, totally overwhelmed, seeing bits of himself, bits of Alice and Janey and four grandparents and finally just the new, unique being that wasn’t bits of anybody else but was just Frankie Jay. Dark hair, brown eyes, scratches and mosquito bites on his skin, freckles across his nose, wiry little limbs.

Georgie saw him in the doorway first, and she must already have been briefed by Charles as she raised her eyebrows in a question that said, Shall I let him know you’re here?

Luke shook his head, wondering if the whole medical community—in fact, the whole town—knew by now that this was his long-lost son, and the owner of that forlorn little shoe. He’d kept to himself a fair bit since coming here. His shattered past would provide fascinating fodder for gossip. The thought stripped him raw, when he didn’t know how any of it was going to work out.

Georgie nodded and stayed silent, and they both watched Frankie Jay eating. Only when his plate was cleaned of every last bun crumb and tomato sauce smear and lettuce shred did he look up. As if wondering about dessert. Hadn’t Alice fed him up in the rainforest? No wonder they’d all thought he was only four years old, he was tiny! And, though wiry, he was thin.

‘Had enough, Rowdy?’ Georgie said cheerfully.

Rowdy?

That’s right. He hadn’t been speaking.

Why hadn’t he been speaking?

So they hadn’t known his name, the medical personnel who’d rescued him and checked him and brought him in, and the nickname they’d given him had apparently stuck. Luke found he quite liked it. It took care of the adversarial relationship in his own mind between Felixx and Frankie Jay, and provided a compromise that everyone could live with, at least for the time being.

Rowdy looked towards the doorway and saw him at last, then nodded slowly in answer to Georgie’s question. He’d had enough to eat was the impression. Well, maybe. Because if the word supper happened to be mentioned a little later on, he wouldn’t say no…

‘Hi, Rowdy,’ Luke said to him. He couldn’t believe it was such a quiet moment when there should be trumpets sounding or a huge orchestra reaching a crescendo. In the back of his mind he realised it was no accident that so few people were around. Charles and Georgie had engineered this whole scene by sending everyone else away.

To protect my child? Or to protect me?

Both, he decided, and was grateful. It was good of them. Not something he had the right to expect when he’d kept so much to himself since he’d come to Crocodile Creek. Janey wouldn’t believe that the charmer with the major ego from Royal Victoria Hospital could have morphed into such a workaholic loner.

‘This is Luke, Rowdy,’ Georgie said. ‘He’s…’ She threw him a panicky look. What did Rowdy know?

‘I’m a friend of your Auntie Janey,’ Luke supplied.

Rowdy smiled. Apparently he liked his Auntie Janey.

‘I’ve just been to see her.’ An image flashed into his mind of the way she’d looked against the hospital white of her pillow. Vulnerable yet calm. Lips a little dry. Eyes huge and shadowed. Never anywhere near as beautiful as Alice, but a lot more grounded and with an intelligence she could never hide. ‘She’s still pretty tired, but she’s doing a lot better.’

Rowdy pressed his lips together and nodded, and you’d have thought from his expression that Janey’s recovery was all down to him, that possibly the entire universe would end if this one kid didn’t breathe in the right way, or wipe his plate clean with the correct licked finger, or something. He had an air of crushing responsibility about him, and the pleasure of the hamburger was apparently already too far in the past to be of any help.

‘Hey…’ How did you reach out to a kid who didn’t speak. Why didn’t he speak? How did you create a bond, and trust, and a relationship?

Luke felt completely at sea. He’d been holding himself back for so long, he just wanted to unleash his emotions right now, on the spot. Crush his child in his arms. Say all these fervent, dramatic words.

I love you. I would die for you. I have missed you every single day. I taught you to laugh, do you know that? I used to blow raspberries on your tummy when you were three months old, and you used to gurgle and gurgle and laugh and laugh…

But he knew he couldn’t.

What the hell should he do instead?

He turned back to Georgie, helpless and close to tears. ‘I…uh…’

‘Hey, shall we head outside for a bit before it gets dark?’ she said cheerfully to Rowdy, who stood up at once. The weight on him seemed a little lighter again, but his silence was just as complete. She told Luke, ‘We had a team clearing up around the pool area yesterday, so the kids would have somewhere to play. The whole town is doing it—creating tiny pieces of order in the chaos. The beach is still a mess, the sand half cut away and covered in debris, and the surf is brown.’

He grabbed her arm just as she was about to follow Rowdy outside. ‘I don’t know what to do, Georgie.’

She stopped in her tracks. ‘You mean about the momentous reunion?’

‘Yes.’

‘Momentous isn’t what he needs, I don’t think.’

‘I know it isn’t, but what is there instead? It’s momentous for me, and I’m having a hard time getting past that to what else I could—’

‘Just…child care. Fun stuff. Minute by minute. Throw him a ball. Read him a story tonight. We have kids’ books here. Take it slow. We can’t swim yet, unfortunately, because the pool’s still full of debris and muck and chairs.’

‘I’ll clean it out tomorrow,’ Luke said. It was a resolution and a promise. He knew he hadn’t made himself a full part of the Croc Creek medical community in the months he’d been there. This felt like something he could grab hold of, something concrete that he could do. For Rowdy. For his fellow doctors. For himself.

‘Big job.’ Georgie sounded sceptical. ‘It’s pretty gungy.’

‘I want to.’

‘I’d better dust off a bikini, then.’ She grinned, then disappeared onto the veranda for a moment and brought out a big red ball. ‘Here. Catch.’

With Georgie effortlessly starting the game, Rowdy was soon involved, throwing back and forth to Luke. He smiled, ran to retrieve dropped catches, followed instructions, once even laughed. But he said not a word, and that was hard. The game fizzled out after about ten minutes, and Georgie’s pager went off.

‘Rats! If this is that bloody Henderson baby, deciding to be born…’

Yep, apparently it was.

‘I’ll have to go, guys…’

‘Where is everybody anyway?’ Luke asked. It was getting dark now.

‘At Christina and Joe’s, having been told to eat their hamburgers somewhat faster than Rowdy did, and then we hustled them off. We thought—’

‘I know what you thought. And thanks.’ He dropped his voice. ‘But it leaves us in a bit of a hole at this point, because…Would he stay with me, on our own?’

‘You’re a friend of Auntie Janey’s. Does he trust…?’

‘He doesn’t know her that well either, but you saw his face when I said I was her friend. She counts for something, in his mind.’

‘I’ll get Alistair and Max to come back. You won’t be on your own for long. He can get into his pyjamas and brush his teeth and there’s a bookshelf in my room with those kids’ books. I’m getting the impression he likes anything about trains.’

Rowdy had disappeared while they’d been talking.

They found him inside a few minutes later, in Emily’s room, crouched by his camp stretcher and wolfing chocolate.

‘Oh, sweetheart! You could have told us if you were still hungry!’ Georgie said, stricken by the sight. He ate like a stray animal, as if he didn’t know where his next meal was coming from. ‘There’s plenty more to eat in the kitchen.’

Rowdy looked scared and frozen, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car.

‘Told us?’ Luke said quietly.

‘I treat him as if he talks, in the hope that soon he actually will,’ she answered, even more quietly. ‘We’ve taken a good look at him. There’s nothing physiologically wrong. And he communicates. Doesn’t usually initiate much, but nods or shakes his head, points.’

‘He’s so thin.’

‘They have a vegan diet at Mundarri.’

Luke swore. ‘It’s hard enough for an adult to get a balanced intake that way, let alone a child. From the look of him, I’d say they didn’t do enough.’

‘Here, we’re letting him eat what he wants so far. Don’t want to turn him into a junk-food addict, but his protein and calcium and iron intake could certainly use a boost, and a bit of fat. For this week, chocolate is a health food.’ She took a closer look. ‘At least…Hmm, not sure about this chocolate.’ She said to Rowdy, ‘Where did you get it, sweetheart?’

Luke followed her deeper into the room, and they both bent down to Rowdy, who instinctively hid the chocolate in his hands.

‘Show me?’ Luke said gently.

He opened his son’s fingers, to find the last couple of battered-looking, dirt-encrusted squares, then picked up the piece of torn wrapper he saw on the floor. It was soaking wet, as was the plastic bag it had apparently been stored in. He also found grit and clay and chocolate crumbs.

‘Oh, shoot!’ Georgie said. ‘This is from Saturday night. The supplies Charles packed for us. We left it with Rowdy and Max, Alistair and me, when we had to wait out the worst of the storm. It’s been through a cyclone, down a mineshaft and up in a chopper. Where have you been keeping this, Rowdy? Hidden here under the bed? You didn’t have to do that! This is all dirty and gritty from the mineshaft, we should have thrown it away. You can tell us when you’re hungry, OK, lovey. I know, you don’t like talking, but you can rub your tummy or point to the fridge. Eating isn’t something we need to do in secret, my sweetheart! Never, never!’

She took the last few squares of chocolate out of a sticky but quiescent little hand, gave him a quick, reassuring squeeze and stood up.

‘I really need to go,’ she said to Luke. ‘I’ll phone Alistair on my way across and he’ll be home with Max in a few minutes. Find a story to read, and don’t give him a hard time about the chocolate.’

‘You think I would?’

‘Sorry. Bossiness gets to be a habit.’

‘Thanks for it, Georgie. You’ve…helped tonight.’

So she left, and Rowdy didn’t seem to mind, and Luke found a Thomas the Tank book, suggested pyjamas, teeth-brushing and toilet, then sat on the uncomfortable edge of the camp stretcher while Rowdy tucked himself under the thin summer sheet and they read about naughty trains.

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