Long-Lost Son Read online

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 ha
ndle 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.