Authors: Caroline Carver
“Um . . . about that night,” she said hesitantly.
“I haven’t told anyone, if you’re worried.” He was returning to his desk.
“No, it’s not that. It’s just I have a rather odd request . . . I, er, wondered if you could teach me how to shoot.”
Yumuru slowly turned around. There was a long silence while he studied her, but she couldn’t read his expression thanks to
a sprinkle of sunlight trembling on his little gold-rimmed glasses. Eventually he said quietly, “You’re serious.”
She nodded.
“Why?”
Georgia ran over various replies and ended up saying simply, “Instinct.”
“You think whoever did that to your hand is going to come after you?”
She nodded again.
Another long silence. “I thought I’d never have to go near a gun again . . . But if you’re in fear of your life, which you
obviously are . . . I know a gun club the locals use. Outside Helenvale. It’s well signposted. How about if you meet me there
first thing tomorrow? Say, eight o’clock?”
“Oh, Yumuru, thank you so—”
“Save your thanks.” His voice was curt. “You might come to regret it. I know I did.”
Wanting to speak with Joanie about Suzie, Georgia hastened to the west wing. She took a deep breath before she entered Tilly’s
room, already dreading the filthy stench that would greet her. She tapped on the door, more out of politeness than in expectation
of Tilly responding.
She started when a voice called, “Come in.”
Georgia pushed open the door and walked inside. There was nobody in the room aside from a woman in her early twenties lying
in bed, watching morning television.
“Tilly?” she said uncertainly, wondering if she hadn’t got the wrong room.
“Yeah.” Using the remote, the woman turned off the TV and rolled her head around to study Georgia. “Sorry, do I know you?”
Her voice was faint, and although her pale skin hung loosely across the bones in her face from weight loss, her eyes were
bright.
“But . . . you were . . .”
Tilly gave a tiny smile. “Yeah, I know. I turned the corner last night, apparently.”
Georgia crossed the room. She was shaking her head in amazement. “Well done, you.”
“Well done, ’Muru, you mean. After all those doctors . . . Tried every known antibiotic, but none of them worked. If the croc
had taken my leg, they would’ve amputated, you know, and I’d never have come here and remained in one piece.”
Remembering that Suzie had mentioned exploitation at the healing center to India, she said, “Why did you choose to come here?
Why didn’t you stay in hospital?”
Tilly looked away. “What with Joanie looking after the kids, a nice environment, and all . . .” Her voice was quiet as she
admitted, “I came here to die.”
“But you didn’t.”
“’Muru wouldn’t let me. Gave me healing twice a day, sometimes hours on end.”
Georgia approached the bed, recalling the locked door in the pharmacy and Yumuru’s injections the last time she was in this
room. “And vitamins.”
Tilly looked away. “Yeah. Vitamins. I couldn’t eat. Didn’t want to eat. I guess I needed them.”
“Isn’t it unusual they’re administered by injection?”
“No idea.” Tilly plucked at the blanket. “All I know is ’Muru says I’ll need a jab every day. Until I’m really strong.”
For a brief moment, Georgia wondered whether Yumuru really was the quintessential healer, or if the vitamins had something
to do with Tilly’s spectacular recovery. And what, her mind zigzagged, did Suzie Wilson, head of pharmacy here, have to do
with the Chens?
“How are the kids?”
Tilly’s face lit up, and they talked a little more until Tilly told her Joanie had gone into town. Georgia then excused herself
and headed for Evie’s Suzuki. As she headed down the drive, the buzz of insects was so loud that it made her think of strips
of Velcro being ripped apart inside a metal bin.
It took her three hours before she came to a junction she reckoned fitted her scrawled notes. For the last twelve miles she
had worried that she’d misunderstood Suzie’s friend’s instructions, but here it was, with a big notice: “Cape Archer National
Park.”
Turning right as instructed, she wondered if he lived in the park or worked there. She couldn’t think he had anything to do
with the healing center or even Suzie’s research, not all the way out here.
She spent the next half hour bouncing about on a dirt track with potholes big as washing machines that had Evie’s little Suzuki
scooting from one side of the road to the other, and when she arrived she was disheveled. She had great patches of damp between
her shoulder blades and beneath her arms, and her hair was flat against her skull, swimming in sweat.
She crawled out of the car. Her neck popped as she stood up straight, and she heard a soft click somewhere in her lumbar region.
The house ahead was low-slung and roofed with tin. There were two outsheds, and an aluminum boat slumped in the shallows of
a broad, slow-moving river the color of dull copper. The air was filled with the unceasing chatter and trilling of insects.
What on earth did Suzie’s answerphone friend do out here?
She’d barely reached the house when she felt a sting on her calf. Georgia slapped it. Her hand came away bloody. Another sting
on her ankle, then one on her forearm. Dammit. She’d forgotten the man’s advice.
She was practically dancing on the doorstep when the fly screen banged open.
“I warned you.”
A bare-chested man in shorts pulled her inside.
“Deet,” he said. “It’s the only stuff that works against the buggers.”
He marched down a dark hall. Georgia stood there, trying to adjust to the sudden gloom.
“Come on in then, don’t stand there like a spare part!”
Georgia hurried after him and into what appeared to be a laundry. He thrust a plastic liter bottle at her. “Douse yourself,
or get eaten alive.”
Then he took in her bandage. “Hold your hand out. I’ll pour.”
Breathing shallowly, she applied the repellent. Feet, ankles, legs, arms, face. It reeked of bitter chemicals and felt as
though it was burning her lips. Georgia reached for the tap, to rinse her hand.
“Leave it,” he said. “They love that thin skin over your knuckles. They love any skin that isn’t doused, period.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“No worries.” He pushed out a paw. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Huub Zwartendijk. Park ranger. My mates call me Dutch.
Can’t get their tongues around my real name.”
Oh, Dutch. Please. I’m so cold.
At last it was beginning to make sense. Dutch was, she realized, the guy with the battered boots in Suzie’s photographs. And
Nail-tooth had to be one of the crocodiles.
“Georgia Parish.”
“Yeah, so you said.” He looked at his big bare feet, then away. “Come on outside. Let’s visit old Nail-tooth. We can talk
on the way.”
She scurried after him and into the kitchen, where he picked up a large blue cooler, a shotgun, and a box of shells before
striding into the wet blanket of humidity and whining, whirring insects. Dutch marched to the aluminum boat on the muddy bank
of the river and dumped the cooler and shotgun beside a huge gaff and a box bulging with fishing gear.
“Hop in,” he said.
“You don’t have to push me. I don’t mind getting wet,” she said.
“Just get in, will you?”
Georgia jumped inside and made to sit on the central strut.
“Hold it there!”
She hovered uncertainly while she watched Dutch gallop back into the house. He returned with a towel and an umbrella. The
towel was to protect her behind from the scalding aluminum, he told her as he unfolded it across the bow strut.
“Sit,” he said.
She sat and watched him lay the umbrella next to the shotgun in the belly of the boat. She didn’t dare ask what it was for
and make herself look even more stupid than he already thought she was.
Pushing the boat into the river, Dutch jumped aboard and fired up the twin-stroke. Sitting in the stern, he held the tiller
in his right hand, engine buzzing, while Georgia sat up front, warm sultry air whipping against her face.
The river had low, wide banks owing to the floods bringing down so much soil. In the dense growth on either side were thousands
of mangroves with tangles of roots, boughs, and branches. Creepers hung from trees and white egrets stalked through the low
rushes in shallow water, long necks undulating. The sky was a dusty blue, the sun an ashen blur overhead.
Briefly she glanced at the creamy wake behind them, then turned her face forward. She had no idea where they were going, or
what Dutch had planned, and she didn’t care. She was on the water again. She spent all her spare time in Sydney crewing or
swiping a free ride on someone’s motorboat, and although it had only been a fortnight since she’d been on the water, it felt
like months. For the first time since the Piper’s crash, she was smiling.
They hadn’t gone far when Dutch cut the revs and the twin-stroke eased into a low chuckle. Their sudden drop in speed, to
around four knots, she reckoned, made it feel as though the temperature had increased a thousandfold. Georgia looked at the
water gliding beneath the hull and longed to dive in and rinse the Deet and sweat from her skin.
“You’re a water baby,” he said.
Georgia turned and looked at him. “I like the water, yes.”
“Not like Suzie, then.”
“She didn’t like water?”
He grunted at the same time as he blew air from his nose. He sounded like a horse snorting. “Couldn’t swim. Shit scared, she
was, but she came out here, time after time. Admired the pants off her for that.”
They cruised slowly around a long bend in the river, and after a minute or so he slowed the boat further and said, “See that
slide? That’s Nail-tooth’s front driveway. To the left of the elephant grass.”
The slide, as Dutch called it, was a broad, churned-up section of mud that looked as though somebody had dragged several oversized
sacks of cement into the river.
Georgia indicated the embankment. “How on earth does he get back up again?” she asked. “It’s quite steep.”
Dutch grinned. “He doesn’t. He waits for the tide to come in. Then he walks it.”
Clever croc, she thought, impressed.
“Let’s potter around a bit and see if he’s about.” Pointing the bow upriver again, he reached down and snapped the cooler
lid open. He passed her a beer dripping with condensation. “Might take a while. May as well enjoy ourselves.”
Georgia popped the tab and tipped the lager down her throat. She felt the chill flow into her stomach. Wiping her mouth with
the back of her hand, she couldn’t help the small belch that followed.
“Why the interest in Nail-tooth?”
“He’s a big bugger, is all. Around twenty-three feet, maybe a bit more. Suzie had a kind of affection for him. Be nice of
you two to meet, seeing how you were with Suze at the end.”
Twenty-three feet?
The croc had to weigh over a ton. Georgia hastily took another swig of her beer. Jesus. She wasn’t certain she wanted to
meet a croc the size of one of Yumuru’s Land Cruisers.
“How did he get his name?”
Dutch gave her a look like Mrs. Scutchings used to whenever she’d given a wrong answer to an obvious question at school.
“Because of his nail tooth, right? Got knocked about during a fight or some such and one of his incisors split in half. Crocs
regrow their teeth, so you can’t see it anymore, but his nickname stuck.” Dutch shook his head. “Never seen a croc do that
before. Poor bugger. Must’ve hurt like hell.”
They’d coasted for about five minutes when Dutch said, “See that log?” He was pointing at what looked like a felled tree trunk
lying on a sandbank.
Georgia nodded.
“Croc.”
As soon as he said the word “croc” it was no longer a piece of wood but a prehistoric creature with a ridge of scales reaching
along its spine to the tip of its powerful tail. Its snout faced the river. She looked ahead and saw another unmoving shape
on the riverbank that wasn’t a log. Then what appeared to be a broken branch, flattening tufts of dried grasses, poking out
of the rainforest.
“Heavens,” she said.
“Croc city. That’s where we are.”
Dutch pointed out three more crocodiles lurking in the mangroves. If he hadn’t drawn them to her attention, she’d never have
spotted them. They were well camouflaged, their skin mottling into the darkness of the rainforest.
“Why was Suzie so interested in crocodiles?”
“Not just any crocs,” he corrected her. “Wild crocs. The farmed ones are too fat. You know they farm crocs for leather? Crocodile
handbags and shit? Some bloke’s even using croc leather for sex toys. Can you believe it?”
Georgia swallowed some beer the wrong way and had to cough to clear her throat.
“Anyhow, farmed crocs were useless for the work she was doing. She needed blood samples from the wild blokes out here, all
skinny and lean and pure from living the way they do. Not fed with the shit farmed crocs are.”
“What work was she doing?”
He fiddled with the outboard for a moment, adjusting the mixture of fuel and two-stroke oil. “She wanted it kept quiet. I
respected that.”
Georgia took a breath of air. After the iced beer, it was like inhaling a quart of warm grease.
“She’s dead, Dutch,” she reminded him.
The engine note was running sweetly, but he was still fiddling with the fuel mixture.
“She was in my arms when she died. The last thing she said was your name. Dutch. And then she was gone.”
He stopped fiddling with the fuel and studied his broad brown feet. When he spoke, it was a choking growl. “Silly cow.”
She gave him a minute or so, then said, “What she was working on could have a bearing on the plane crash.”
Small pause. “Yeah. So you said.”
“Could you tell me? Please?”
He gave his horse’s snort and shifted his hips, resettling at the stern. The boat continued to trickle, inch by inch, upriver.
Eventually he gave another snort, and said, “She was ashamed of something her dad had done a couple of years back. One time
she told me about it, and I’m talking something really bad. She was bloody crucified. Turned into a bony-assed, uptight, and
freaked-out creature overnight. Say boo and she’d nearly die of fright.”