G'Day to Die: A Passport to Peril Mystery - By Maddy Hunter Page 0,63
week.”
He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “Besides that.”
“I won seven million dollars once.”
Conrad’s mouth puckered like a drawstring pulled too tight. “Oh.”
When we got the okay, we crowded onto the bus, gushing over the luxuriously cushy seats and fancy TV monitors. I claimed a window seat at the back, and Nana sat beside me. “I’ll move if one a your young men wants to sit here, dear.”
I glanced out the window to find them climbing onto the other bus. “Looks like they’ll be sitting with each other today.”
“Probably brushin’ up on new cusswords. If you overuse the old ones, they lose their effect.”
Guy Madelyn strolled down the aisle, taking candid shots of everyone. “I’m sorry, Marion,” he said when he reached us, “but I couldn’t help overhear your conversation with Conrad. I hope you won’t let his promise of pie in the sky influence your decision about coming to work for me. Has he fessed up about Australia’s track record with other significant discoveries? I hope you realize they have a habit of losing everything they find.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Gold reefs in the central desert. Ancient fossils. The topography is so monotonously similar that people make discoveries one day and lose them the next. That rat kangaroo I heard Conrad talking about? Don’t get your hopes up. Remember, here today, gone tomorrow. I’m offering you a sure thing, Marion. Give it some serious thought.”
He snapped our picture and moved on, leaving Nana in an uncharacteristically pensive mood. I squeezed her hand. “Will you be terribly disappointed if they never find your rat kangaroo?”
“Nah. But I was kinda lookin’ forward to havin’ my hair done.”
After introducing us to our driver—a typically young and handsome Australian named Trevor—Henry took a quick head count, then hurried down the aisle and handed me an envelope and pen. “Could I trouble you to be in charge of the card, Imily? That way, I know I’ll git it back.”
I agreed to be keeper of the card, though I worried a little about how to carry it around all day without dog-earing the corners. As we left the airport and headed south, I wrote a little note to Heath, signed my name, and handed the card to Nana.
“I’d like to offer you a frindly wilcome to Kangaroo Island,” Trevor said pleasantly, “the third largest island off the coast of Australia. We’re isolated from the mainland and haven’t sold our souls to devilopers, so our landscape and wildlife are the same now as they’ve always been. The last hundred pairs of scarlet fan-tailed glossy black cockatoos on the planet live on Kangaroo Island. Tin percint of the world’s sea lions waddle onto Seal Bay. We don’t offer nightlife or glitz, but we have an abundance of salt air, clear water, and the kind of solitude you’ll niveh find in Sydney or Milbourne.”
The scenery was unremarkable. Meadows and trees. A few fences. We could have been driving down a road anywhere in the Midwest. When we turned east, it got a little more exciting because the pavement ended, forcing us to continue down a rutted dirt road that bounced us around worse than the Star Wars ride at MGM Studios. Meadows and trees still abounded, but looking out the window at them was like watching a movie with a jumpy video track.
“Our first stop this morning will be Emu Ridge Eucalyptus and Craft Gallery. Sixty years ago the island supported forty eucalyptus oil distilleries. Today, Emu is the only one lift. They dimonstrate the extraction prociss every half hour, but if that’s not your cup a tea, you can shop the gallery for souvenirs and crafts. I ricommind the Ligurian honey, collected from hives first imported from the Italian province of Liguria back in eighteen-eighty-one. All the bees on the island are pure Ligurian and descinded from that original strain.”
We pulled into the parking lot of a rustic compound of squat bungalows with red roofs and whitewashed siding. Perched atop a building that identified itself as MACGILLIVRAY POST OFFICE 1953 was an emu weather vane that kept watch over derelict machinery in various stages of decay, mangy undergrowth, and a huge cauldron whose contents steamed like witch’s brew.
“We’re here for forty-five minutes,” announced Trevor. “The comfort station’s around back.”
I decided that watching eucalyptus leaves being pressed didn’t interest me, so I hit the gallery, amazed at how much merchandise could be shoehorned into a compact space. Hats, cloth bags, books, cards, dream catchers, paintings, magnets, T-shirts,