Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family. Lilian Darcy

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