Now that the drug grubs had been dealt with, Baxter decided to take a trip up to Rockhampton to visit Liz and their son.
He mentioned his travel plans to his mother, but as he still hadn’t told her about her grandchild, he gave her the half-truth that he was going to visit an old friend who’d moved to Queensland from Moondilla.
Frances’s reaction surprised him. ‘Would you like me to come with you?’ she asked. ‘I could share the driving and keep you company.’
‘Could the restaurant get along okay for a week without you?’ he asked.
‘Quite. My assistant Henry could look after it very well and he enjoys being the boss cocky. Good experience for him.’
Good old Mum, Baxter thought. She was always there when needed. Well, she’d get her reward when they got to Liz Drew’s property. He had been trying to work out how he could surprise her with the baby, and his mother had supplied the answer.
Baxter decided to bring Chief, who could sleep in the car and have his food packed in an Esky. Julie said she’d keep an eye on Riverview and water the vegetables and herbs, and the Lewis family volunteered to help out too, so that eased his mind.
He said to Julie that he’d keep in touch, but she told him to take a complete break from everything in Moondilla—he needed it. ‘Try to forget about Campanelli and his sidekicks,’ she said. ‘Doctor’s orders.’
•
Baxter drove north to Sydney, picked up his mother and set out for Rockhampton.
‘If I was a magician, I’d turn you into my girlfriend and life would be just wonderful,’ he said, as they zoomed up the highway. ‘It would solve a lot of problems.’
His mother burst out laughing. ‘For you, but maybe not for me! I like you as a son—I might not like you as my boyfriend.’ She patted his hand. ‘I wouldn’t give up on Julie. Something tells me that she’s about to make a big decision.’
‘Really? What gives you that idea?’ he asked.
‘I rang her and she told me that she’ll miss you, and that it would be the first week since you ran into her in Moondilla in which she won’t be able to visit you. I call that distinctly promising.’
To Baxter this didn’t sound all that significant, but he still felt warm at the thought of Julie missing him.
‘About time too,’ Frances added. ‘She hasn’t got all that many years left to have babies.’
He grimaced. ‘Mum—’
‘So, tell me more about this mysterious friend of yours in Rockhampton. A man or a woman?’
Baxter thought that the less said, the better. ‘A woman. Liz Drew. She left Moondilla after her husband died. She owns a cattle property and has a baby. You never met her. She used to be with a country and western group. Very attractive woman.’
‘Hmm,’ said Frances. ‘Another fish that got out of your net.’
•
Liz’s property was well out in the bush, more than an hour’s drive from Rockhampton. Her cattle were predominately Brahman or Brahman cross, and a point of interest for Baxter: after living in New South Wales it was a new experience to see so many cattle with pronounced humps. He’d been told that Brahmans had a high tolerance for ticks and weren’t so much affected by heat as the British and European breeds—they would continue grazing when the other breeds looked for shade.
The homestead was massive, its verandahs so long that they seemed to merge into the horizon. There were at least a dozen outbuildings and the whole complex bore the appearance of a small village rather than a family home.
The heat hit mother and son as they stepped from the air-conditioned car. A cavernous shed with a yawning entrance promised some relief, so they got back in the car and drove into it. Frances was fanning her face with a magazine.
Baxter poured water from a canvas bag into a bowl and put it beside the car. ‘Stay here, Chief,’ he ordered the German Shepherd.
As he and his mother walked out into the blinding sunlight and heat, they almost collided with a young woman who had materialised from somewhere in the maze of buildings. She was a tall, slim woman in riding gear, and she carried a coiled red hide stockwhip in her right hand. Baxter reckoned that at a distance she’d almost pass for a young man—as Julie often did—with her slim figure and dark hair jammed under a white, very broad-brimmed Akubra.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked with a certain wariness in her voice. It was a softer voice than her appearance suggested it might be.
‘I’m looking for Mrs Drew,’ Baxter said.
‘Liz is in town. She took the baby in for him to have another needle. She said if anyone turned up, she’d be as quick as she could manage it.’
‘How is he?’ Baxter asked.
‘He’s a bonzer baby.’ The woman gave him a once-over. ‘I know who you are: you’re Greg Baxter, aren’t you?’
‘Am I?’
She smiled and shook his hand. ‘I reckon there’s probably not two men in the country who look like you. Liz told me all about you.’
‘She did, eh.’ He worried the woman might make a comment about the baby, but instead she turned to smile at Frances. ‘This is my mother . . . Mrs Baxter.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Baxter,’ she said, and the women shook hands. ‘I’m Pat. Pat Collins. I’m Liz’s cousin. I managed the place while she was down south.’
Pat was probably in her late thirties. Her eyes were grey and there were tiny lines beneath them. Her figure was lean, like a length of whipcord. She had small high breasts that betrayed her otherwise boyish figure.
‘Good to meet you, Pat,’ said Baxter. ‘You know, you’re the first female ringer I’ve met. Although as a matter of fact, you’re the first ringer I’ve met!’ They all laughed and that made the atmosphere more amenable.
‘There’s more of us than there used to be,’ Pat said. ‘Women ringers, I mean. Mind you, a lot of the old diehard cattlemen wouldn’t employ a woman to save their lives. Not them. But things are changing.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ said Frances.
Pat gave her a smile. ‘Well, Liz should be back for lunch as she left early. In the meantime, would you like a cuppa? I’ve got my own cottage.’
‘A cup of tea would be great,’ Baxter said, and his mother—who was almost wilting—agreed. ‘But I’ve got my dog with me. All right if we get him?’
‘That would be Chief, right? I’ve heard all about him too. Liz says he’s some dog. Of course you can bring him. All our dogs are tied up right now.’
Pat walked back with them into the big shed and showed a lot of interest in the German Shepherd. Then Baxter, Chief and Frances followed the ringer across the square and around the corner of another big shed, which was partly filled with bales of hay.
Just beyond this shed was a neat cottage. The Baxters stood aside to allow Pat to mount the front steps, then followed her in. It was a three-bedroom place and larger than Baxter had imagined from the front view. A large horse yard lay perhaps fifty metres from the cottage. It was attached to a stable that, from what he could see, was divided in two. A nice bay horse was feeding from a trough in the yard.
‘Been out looking things over,’ the ringer said. ‘Got away early.’
Baxter nodded. ‘I take it you know a lot about cattle, Pat?’
‘I reckon I know a fair bit. I was just about born on a cattle camp. Won my share of campdrafts too.’
‘This would be a good place for a boy to grow up,’ Baxter suggested, thinking of his son. ‘He’d have his own pony and plenty of riding.’
‘He’ll have all that, but there’s not much money in cattle right now. You need to have a connection with a food outlet or maybe have a small feedlot where you can finish cattle, except that these cattle don’t lend themselves to that sort of thing. You need a fair splash of British breed in them if you’re going to feed cattle. Liz is looking into it.’
Baxter nodded; he remembered Liz telling him about this enthusiastically before she left Moondilla. He hoped the reality of station ownership hadn’t hit her too hard.
‘Would you like a wash?’ Pat asked.
‘That would be great,’ said Baxter. ‘This heat is a bit tough on Mum.’
‘Yes, I’m used to being in air-conditioned surroundings!’ said Frances, fanning her flushed and sweat-beaded face.
After their wash, Pat handed them mugs of tea that were about three times the size of a normal cup and slabs of fruitcake large enough for at least two people. Frances did her best to eat and drink, then asked Pat if she could please have a lie down. The ringer set her up in one of the bedrooms.
‘Liz has started talking about selling this place, on and off,’ Pat told Baxter, sitting back down. ‘But her old man loved it and would never have thought of selling up. He reckoned if he ever had grandkids, it would be just the shot for them. So I think it’s partly sentiment that keeps Liz here. That and the hope that beef prices will improve. Then there’s the young fella—if he takes after Liz’s father, he’ll be a fair dinkum bushie and want his own property.’
‘Then perhaps keeping the property is the best plan for the future?’ said Baxter. It sounded like a terrific life for his son.
‘Well, Liz says if she sells up and invests the money, she’d be better off than she is now with all the worry of the place. But then she loves it here.’
‘Does she ride much?’
‘Oh, yes. Liz is no mug on a horse. She rode from when she could walk. She doesn’t ride in drafts like me, but she’s pretty keen on horses. So they’re one reason she always decides against selling up.’
Baxter had other questions he wanted to ask, but reckoned it would be bad taste to pry and would also place the ringer in an invidious position. Liz would probably tell him all he wanted to know.
‘It’s a bit different here to Kings Cross,’ he said with the memory of that place still clear in his mind after all the writing he’d been doing.
‘I suppose so,’ Pat said. ‘I’ve never been there but I’ve read about it. You know the place well?’
‘Well enough. I did some research there for a book.’
‘Ah. It’s a bad place for drugs, isn’t it?’
‘Bad enough,’ he said—but then Moondilla had been too, until recently. He wondered what Pat the Ringer would make of Alan the Pimp or Campanelli the King Pin. She’d probably use her stockwhip on them.
‘Bad women too?’ she suggested.
Rosa’s memory still haunted him. ‘Not bad, Pat, just unfortunate.’ He decided to change the subject. ‘Is Liz well?’
‘Fit as a fiddle. Looks well too. She fed the baby and all.’ Pat grinned and her grey eyes softened. ‘Liz thinks he’s Christmas. Probably spoil him something terrible.’
‘I hope not,’ Baxter said quickly. He was still wondering if Pat knew he was the father, but he didn’t want to ask—especially because Frances might overhear. ‘Are you keen on country and western music?’ he asked instead.
‘I can take it or leave it,’ Pat said with a laugh. ‘Liz likes it a lot. She used to be in a country and western troupe.’
‘So she told me. That’s how she came to be in Moondilla.’
‘What did you think of her husband?’ Pat asked. ‘I never met Jack.’
‘Not much. He was an ex-pug and a boozer.’ He wondered how much Pat knew about the marriage. ‘It beats me why a woman who stood to inherit all this would marry a fellow like Jack Drew. Liz told me it was because she’d got sick of travelling all over the country, but it seems she didn’t have to do that. She could have come home here.’
Shaking her head, Pat sighed. ‘Liz was too proud to do that. She had a big row with her mother and left. She wouldn’t come back while her mum was here. And then she lost her parents, one after the other.’
‘Poor Liz.’ Whenever he heard stories like this, Baxter felt immensely grateful for his own mother. ‘So they never mended their fences?’
Pat’s eyes were sad. ‘No, unfortunately.’ She got up and cleared away the dishes. ‘You want to have a look around the property? I’ll leave the homestead tour to Liz.’
‘I’ll let Mum rest a bit longer, and I don’t want her out in the heat. We might wait until the sun goes down. How many acres is this place, anyway?’
‘About a hundred and twenty thousand. Of course, that doesn’t mean a lot in terms of what it can carry. You need a lot more acres to run a beast than down south.’
‘It must take a bit of getting around,’ Baxter said.
‘That and all,’ she said.
This seemed a strange expression, but then he remembered that many northerners often added the ‘all’ to their sentences. It set them apart.
‘We’ve got bikes and a couple of four-wheelers,’ Pat said, ‘but you can’t work cattle on them. They’re okay if you just want to keep to the tracks and check out the watering points, but you can’t use them for mustering in some of our country. You need horses there. You ride at all?’
‘Afraid not. I was always too busy doing other things,’ he said. He told Pat a little about himself—the writing, martial arts and cooking.
‘Liz is busting to see you,’ Pat said. ‘She thinks you’re the ant’s pants.’ Pat was looking out the window. ‘She won’t be long now. See that dust?’
The ringer pointed to where a long caterpillar of pinky-white dust was snaking its way through the olive-green scrub.