Catherine Jinks TheRoad (22 page)

She let him declaim for a few minutes on one of his favourite subjects before another object by the road caught her eye. This time it wasn’t a car, however. This time it was a mailbox.

‘Oh, look,’ she said. ‘Could that be the mailbox they were talking about?’

‘Probably.’ Her husband didn’t spare it a glance.

‘It isn’t very far, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Could they walk there, do you think? Should we go back and tell them?’

‘Verlie,’ said Ross, ‘just because the mailbox isn’t far, doesn’t mean the house is close. It could be
miles
off the road. Miles and miles.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Anyway, we’ll be there in a minute. There’s no point going to look for a house when the town is so close. It’s a waste of time.’

‘I suppose so,’ Verlie repeated.

All the same, she didn’t like leaving three young children stranded on an outback highway. It didn’t seem right, somehow. It made her uneasy.

And she felt even worse when, a few kilometres down the road, they passed an empty truck – a big, white truck with two enormous trailers attached to it, parked in the middle of nowhere.

That
really
made her wonder.

‘We’re going to run outta gas soon,’ said Graham.

It was stating the obvious, Chris thought. He himself had been worrying about the fuel levels for at least fifteen minutes. He knew that something was wrong because he’d calculated his petrol consumption down to the last millilitre. He had that sort of mind and it had never let him down before.

‘I can’t believe we’re not there by now,’ he muttered. ‘What time is it? Half three? We should be there.’

‘We stopped at the roadhouse,’ Graham reminded him.

‘Yeah, but for how long? Twenty minutes? Half an hour at the
most
. And we left Mildura at ten thirty –’

‘Ten forty-five.’

‘We still should be there by now, eh, Alec?’ Graham appealed to the rescued truckie, who had hardly spoken since climbing onto the back seat. He had accepted Graham’s offer of a drink of water, and had revealed – upon being asked – that his payload was cement powder. But he was obviously a man of few words. Either that, or he had something on his mind. Chris suspected the latter. It was odd, the way he kept gnawing at his thumbnail and peering intently out the window.

‘Yeah,’ Alec said at last, as the Land Rover came to a halt on the side of the road. ‘Yeah, we shoulda been there by now.’

‘What are you doing?’ Graham inquired, turning to his brother. ‘Why are you stopping?’

‘To top up the tank.’

‘But we’re almost there.’

‘That’s what we thought half an hour ago.’

‘But we
must
be, Chris, I’ve been checking the map. We crossed Pine Creek before we even picked up Alec.’

‘Yeah. Well.’ Chris cut the engine and folded his arms across the top of the steering wheel. He gazed ahead, at the two low, hazy peaks in the distance. As far as he could recall, they had to be the Pinnacles.

So why didn’t they seem to be getting any closer?

‘Alec?’ he said.

‘Yeah?’