It was another two-hour walk before they reached a narrow pathway that led to a medium-sized wooden house on stilts. Sam found it hard to hide his surprise and admiration. “Is this your house? It’s incredible! I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Alex, on the other hand, tried her best not to drop her guard and show her wonderment. “It’s quite something all right.”
The two men stopped and put the dead animal down in a small clearing next to the house. Sam, still in a state of astonishment, walked back to the front of the house to join Alex. Ollie didn’t answer. Instead, he searched the perimeter of the house and walked up the stairs onto the wraparound porch.
“Sam, look there,” Alex whispered beckoning toward the several surveillance cameras hidden in the trees around the house.
“All right, you two, the coast is clear.”
Clear from what? Alex thought but followed Sam up the stairs onto the deck and into the house where Ollie shoved a beer into each of their hands.
“Cheers Mate,” he said, as he whacked his beer against theirs and downed half the bottle.
“Ah, nothing like an ice-cold stubby to quench the thirst, hey?” downing the other half before reaching inside his refrigerator for another one.
The ice-cold beer in Alex’s hand was too tempting. So much so that even her stubborn pride couldn’t prevent her from taking several mouthfuls, ignoring Ollie’s sheepish grin in response.
“So what brings you two Brits out here in the middle of nowhere? The jungle isn’t a place to go walkabout, you know? You can count your lucky stars I bumped into you. That bamboo tent of yours wouldn’t have kept the fastest rat safe from the tigers and snakes.”
A very enthusiastic Sam took another gulp of his beer before replying, “We really appreciate it, Ollie, thanks. Not sure what we would have done if you hadn’t shown up. We were out at the waterfall and our Cruiser seemed to have vanished into thin air.”
Ollie cracked open his second beer and handed another to Sam.
“Now that’s a bugger, Mate. You sure you went back to where you left it?”
“Oh, I don’t make mistakes with coordinates,” Alex snapped.
“Just saying, Sheila. For it to disappear like that it would have had to be stolen. Not unlikely, given the fact that this part of the jungle harbors many insurgent groups.”
Ollie put his beer down and opened his laptop. Two clicks later he slammed the lid shut and walked back over to Sam.
“So Mate, what do you say we go cut up that dinner of ours before the cats come for it? I’m starving. The missus can freshen up so long.”
Alex just about choked on a mouthful of beer. “Missus! Oh no, we’re not married or anything. Sam is my assistant.”
Ollie paused, scanning his eyes over Sam. “Is that right, hey? Assistant, like a secretary or something?”
Instantly regretting her bad choice of words, Alex set off to redeem Sam’s honor, “No-no, not like that. We’re archaeologists, and I simply head up the team. Sam is my very esteemed colleague, helping me in the field and such.”
“Well, what do you know? Where I come from, the Sheilas assist the blokes, not the other way around. But, hey, each kangaroo to its own.”
Sam didn’t seem to be too bothered by their host’s prejudice remark, but Alex could feel her blood curdle beneath her clammy skin, partly by virtue of her own stupidity.
Ollie downed the last of his beer before adding, “Well, then you’ll be flipping a coin for the bed tonight. The loser will have to take the couch.” He turned his eyes to Alex. “The dunny is outside, and there’s a shower cubicle next to it. Spare towels are in the cupboard over there. There shouldn’t be any wild animals pestering you. They can’t come close without tripping the snares, but you best be taking that lamp with you just to be safe. We’ll keep an eye out for you.“
Wild animals, snares, outside shower! Are you kidding me? Alex thought, clearly agonized by the mere notion of showering in the pitch black darkness out in the middle of a jungle. But she was sticky from the hike and desperate for a shower, so she turned and headed toward the cupboard for a towel nonetheless, grateful to have a reason to leave their brash host. She watched them turn and head off to the bottom of the stairs.
“Wait! What’s a dunny?” she shouted at Ollie.
Ollie belted a laugh loud enough that it echoed through the trees and continued walking down the stairs ignoring her. When Sam turned to go back up the stairs to explain, Ollie grabbed his arm, “No worries, Mate. She’ll figure it out,” sporting another wave of laughter.
Alex soon found the ‘dunny’ to mean a toilet, which was nothing, but a deep hole in the ground with a neatly cut out hole in a camp chair positioned over it. It very nearly turned her stomach upside down and forced her to cover her nose with her t-shirt in a futile attempt to escape a stench so foul it alone was enough to keep any jungle creature away. But even that thought wasn’t enough to convince her of being safe from any prowling animals. The front of the jungle bathroom was completely open and exposed, and the only privacy it provided was a cordoned off bamboo fence covering it on each of its three sides.
A toilet roll hung from a wire protruding from the bamboo fence, and a curled up car magazine sat wedged between two poles in front of it. To the right was a bucket of sand and a spade. Never in all the years of traveling with her parents had she ever seen anything like this. She concluded that she’d much rather duck behind a shrub than risk that contraption.
A few feet away her eye caught sight of a similar bamboo cubicle housing a large metal container with a saucepan on top of it.
Alex thought she had seen it all. She lifted the lid off to find it filled with what she had hoped would be fresh water. It wasn’t. Instead, a trapped frog jumped out as soon as the lid came off, causing her to drop it noisily back onto the container. Again, the cubicle had been covered only on three sides, while her back was left completely exposed to the pitch-black jungle behind her. The lamp in her hand offered very little light, but it would have to do. She was desperate for a wash, albeit in her birthday suit in the middle of the jungle with a saucepan or three of stale water.
But, much to her surprise the jungle bathing was better than she had expected. Primal to say the least, but there was something so pure and natural about the experience that it had left her somewhat relaxed. Deep in thought, her eye caught the swift blinking of a red light below a surveillance camera that was attached to a tree, the lens aimed directly at the shower. And then it dawned on her.
“Oh, the pervert! Wait till I get my hands around your throat Ollie or Oliver or whoever you say you are!” She exclaimed while throwing her clothes on and stomping up the dark path toward where the two of them were busy gathering their slaughter.
“Just what exactly do you think you’re doing? How dare you?”
A surprised Sam flung around mere seconds before an equally surprised Ollie followed suit.
“It’s just a bear Sheila, relax. You’ll probably find you’ll enj—“
“I’m not talking about the bear, you pervert!” she cut in. “Is this what you do out here in the jungle, huh? Film naked women who you probably lure here. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was you who stole our vehicle. The perfect plan to—“
“Whoa, Sheila, calm down. You’re chasing the wrong bone here,” Ollie replied in a futile attempt to calm her down.
“Of course you’d say that. Where’s the recording?” Alex didn’t wait for an answer and stormed off up the stairs to where his laptop stood on the table inside the jungle house. Her mind raced through what seemed very obvious to her, finding it hard to still her pounding heart beneath her anger.
Sam came running up behind her, “Alex, what on earth’s the matter with you? It’s hardly a polite way to talk to someone taking us in for the night. What’s gotten into you?”
“Ha, polite talk, you’re joking right? Do you think our host is polite in recording me taking a shower? Polite, my foot!” she shouted as she flipped the laptop’s lid open.
“What are you talking about? He was with me the entire time.”
“The cameras, Sam! They’re all over the place. And he knew there’s one facing the shower. That’s what he was switching on with his computer earlier. He got it all on tape.”
“No, I didn’t,” Ollie interrupted, exceptionally calm for a man who just got busted. “They’re not cameras. They are motion sensors. The red light means it’s off. Green is on.”
Ollie nonchalantly walked over to the basin, washed his hands and started preparing the meat. On the other side of the tree house, Alex sat staring in silence at Ollie’s blank computer screen on her lap. Sam wiped his hands on a cloth, bent down and whispered to her.
“You are imagining things, Alex. For reasons not quite understood by me, I sense you don’t like the man, but he’s nothing but a decent guy seeking solitude in the jungle. A guy who saved us from being mauled by a bear and who is putting us up for the night when he didn’t have to. Not everyone is evil, you know.”
Sam kneeled on one knee in front of her and went quiet for a bit before he spoke again. “Perhaps you need to take your meds tonight, Alex.”
“No way! I don’t need the pills. I haven’t taken them since, Rhapta. I’m not overreacting, Sam.”
Sam’s raised eyebrow in response challenged her last comment.
“Fine. So I was perhaps wrong to assume those were cameras, but why would he need motion sensors in the middle of the jungle in the first place? And pretty sophisticated looking ones at that. I’m telling you. He’s hiding something.”
She slammed the laptop closed and walked out onto the porch with Sam following a few steps behind her. Her eyes focused on each device nailed to the trees all around the cabin. All the lights were green except for the one above the shower. She bit the inside of her lip as she realized Ollie had told the truth. Noticing it, Sam didn’t have to rub it in, so he kept quiet. It was good for her to be suspicious in these circumstances considering what had happened back in Tanzania. It had only been two years after all, and the uni made sure her expedition workload was not too taxing for her to handle. She had been off the pills all this time, so she had more than proven herself capable of coping with the challenges at hand with each new mission. But perhaps the fact that she had almost died at the waterfall earlier that day and the discovery of their stolen Cruiser triggered something inside her. None of the expeditions over the last couple of years were dangerous or threatening in any way; this one, not so much.
“It’s been a long day, Alex. Maybe you just need to rest. We’ll be safe here tonight. I’ll sleep with one eye open.”
Alex bit the flesh around her thumbnail while Sam continued his attempt to reassure her.
“We’ll head back to the hotel tomorrow, and then we can carry on with our mission to find the golden urn, okay? Just sit outside here for a bit and try to relax.“
Alex nodded as she watched Sam grab a towel and head for the shower. She looked back with wariness at Ollie where he was still busy preparing the bear stew in the kitchen. He hadn’t uttered a word since her outburst and whilst she owed him an apology, her gut told her she wasn’t wrong not to trust him fully. Something didn’t quite sit right with this guy. He was all Aussie and happy go lucky, a big ball of cheer, but her instincts had never been wrong. Ollie might fool Sam, but not her.
When they finally sat down for dinner, her suspicions were further piqued when she accidentally dropped her fork under her chair. She bent down to pick it up, and her eye caught sight of a pistol taped to the bottom of the table where Ollie sat. Sam noticed something in her eyes as she shuffled back into her seat but didn’t comment.
“Tuck in Sheila. Once you taste bear-meat, you’ll never go back to lamb. With any luck his last meal was berries.”
“I’m not hungry, thanks, and please, call me Alex.” She was starving, in truth, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, especially because he kept calling her Sheila.
Sam cleared his throat, hinting for her not to be rude and to eat something, only to get a kick in the shin in return which made him smile.
“So, Ollie, how long have you been living here?” Alex ventured, inviting another glare from Sam.
“Not long enough, Sheila,” irritating her on purpose. “I love it out here. As long as I mind my own business and stay out of trouble.”
“So you’re living here on your own then?” ignoring his obvious temptation to further crawl under her skin. She was far more focused on figuring out who he was and why he didn’t give her a straight answer.
“Indeed. How about some rice at least, huh? After a day like today surely you must be hungry? Come on. I promise I didn't poison it.”
Alex sensed he was trying to change the topic by evading her questions while clearly attempting to evoke a reaction from her.
“I wouldn’t mind some more thanks, Ollie,” Sam responded in an attempt to ease the tension around the dinner table. “You’re right. This stew is like nothing I’ve ever tasted.”
Alex wasn’t going to let up her inquiry by making small talk over the stupid stew.
“Why do you need motion sensors around your house, and why did you say, ‘the coast is clear’ when we arrived? Clear from who?”
“Are you always so suspicious of everyone, Sheila? In case you haven’t noticed. We are in the middle of a jungle with wild animals all around us. I have snares set up all around my house, and the motion sensors act as an alarm if they managed to escape the traps somehow and come too close. Satisfied?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer.
“Now, it seems I’m not the only one that should come under interrogation. You never answered my question. What are the two of you doing out here?”
Alex glanced at Sam across the table who tucked into the food like there was no tomorrow.
“Not that it’s any of your business, really, but as I said earlier, we are archaeologists out here on an expedition.”
“To find what? Archaeologists only come out here if they’re onto something. What are you looking to find? Perhaps I can be of some help.”
“Oh, I seriously doubt that very much!” Alex sneered as she straightened her fork next to her plate.
“A golden urn,” Sam answered in between two more bites, ignoring Alex’s angry stare in response.
“Now what do you know? So you’re the pair they hired to find it? How lucky can I be? Well then, let me volunteer my services to help you catch the buggers who stole it. I have some skills, and connections, that might be of worth to you, I reckon.”
Ollie sat back in his chair and sported an arrogant smirk as he waited for Alex to answer with some snarly remark.
“Do you now? And what skills are those?” she finally caved.
“Well, for starters, I speak Mandarin fluently. I don’t suppose you do?”
Alex felt her insides heat up in response to his smug revelation.
“I speak French, and we’ve been able to get around just fine.”
“French might help with the older generation, but if you’re relic hunting around here, you’d need to speak either Mandarin or Khmer. You would also have to go underground. The word on the street is that it was an inside job; possibly a black market operation. The urn is worth a small fortune on the black market. If it does contain Buddha’s remains as they say, then it could have been taken by anyone. Vietnam, Thailand, China, Japan, heck, even India. They’ve been fighting over the ownership for centuries.”
“That’s if it were, in fact, the actual artifact they stole in the first place.” It was Alex’s turn to look smug.
Her comment had precisely the effect she aimed it would have on Ollie as he immediately sat up and leaned forward.
“What do you mean? You think it was a fake?”
Sam had finally finished his second plate of food and joined the conversation.
“Exactly, there are rumors that the temple had a counterfeit one on display all these years. The monks are up in arms about it.
“Although we don’t know that for certain. It is possible, but there’s no proof of either at this stage,” Alex intervened.
“So the commissioner hired the two of you to hunt down the urn and prove the stolen one’s authenticity, interesting.” Ollie sat back in his chair again and folded his arms across his chest.
When Sam finally put his cutlery down and rubbed his full tummy with satisfaction he added.
“We have been following several leads over the recent couple of weeks, and each one sent us on a wild goose chase. The last of which led us to believe we’d find the urn in hidden tunnels belonging to a temple that was meant to lie concealed behind the waterfall. But there was no evidence of any temple ruins or tunnels anywhere. Alex almost died out there today when the rope chafed through and broke.”
“Crikey, Sheila, no wonder you’re peeved at the world. Wait. I’ve got just the thing for you.”
Ollie bolted across the room like a firecracker on New Year’s Eve to retrieve a glass jar of clear liquid and a couple of glasses from the kitchen cupboard.
“This should calm those nerves of yours in no time.”
Before Alex could object, she had a small tot glass in her hand, and raised into the air.
“Cheers Mates, here’s to finding the precious golden urn.”
The liquid might have looked like water but it most certainly wasn’t, and Alex found herself struggling to breathe much less talk after she swigged it back.
Ollie belted a laugh so loud he just about fell off his chair.
“Well, Sheila. Now I know how to keep you quiet.”
If Alex could speak—or move—she’d have punched that grin straight off his face.
“It’s a bit strong even for me, Ollie. What is it?” Sam came to her rescue, still trying to get his own breath back.
“My very own home-brewed moonshine. Made from the finest ingredients right in my backyard, Mate. Puts hair on your chest, doesn’t it? Here, have another one,” filling Sam’s glass with another shot.
Sam watched as the alcohol-induced spasm finally wore off enough for Alex to take a deep breath and gulp down a glass of water.
“Ha! Water won’t help, Sheila. Eat a chunk of bread.”
Alex had no choice but to give in to his suggestion, though it went against every fiber of her stubborn being and unfortunately for her, he was right. It helped, somewhat. Enough for her to get up and gather the plates in a feeble attempt to try gain control of the situation and escape Ollie’s mocking gaze.
Sam noticed Alex went from neutral to red to pale green.
“Right then, Ollie. Dinner was delicious, but if you’d show us to your spare bedroom, I think we’d better call it a night,” taking the plates from Alex’s hands and setting it on the edge of the kitchen sink.
“Down there to the left, Mate. We’ll hunt down your Cruiser in the morning. I’ll make a couple of calls to my connections and see what I can find out.”
“We’d appreciate that, thank you,” Sam replied.
“Oh, I don’t feel too good,” Alex groaned, catching them both by surprise. Seconds later, she bolted for the porch and made it just in time to deposit her paltry stomach contents over the railing.
“Firewater for a firecracker,” Ollie teased afterward as he launched a bucket of water over the railing.
Alex felt her cheeks glow underneath part embarrassment and part anger. She fought back the urge to shout a few unladylike words at him, choosing to instead storm off to the bedroom where she slammed the room’s door behind her. Battling to maintain her composure, she heard Sam politely thank Ollie for his hospitality and moments later joined her in the room.
“Why are you so angry with the guy, Alex? What has he done to make you dislike him so much?”
“I don’t know, Sam, but something isn’t right. He’s not all he portrays to be. I know it. I want to get out of here, Sam. As soon as the sun comes up, we start walking. Do you hear me? This brute can shove his bear stew right up his friendly Aussie you know what!“
“Easy there tiger. I think you need to sleep it off. We’ll figure it all out in the morning, okay?”
Sam knew all too well not to even try talking any sense into Alex when she was convinced of something, but he also knew she was clearly traumatized and needed rest more than anything right now. When she finally fell asleep in the bed, he settled into his make-shift bed of blankets and pillows on the floor beside her.