‘Maybe she wanted you to go find that gold for yourself,’ Greta says. ‘Maybe this pan is your inheritance. She wanted to give you something before . . .’ Greta doesn’t finish that sentence.
‘Before what?’ Molly asks.
‘Before she had to go away.’
Molly scratches at the pan, soaks it in the water again, scrubs it with her fingers.
‘I think she wanted me to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says.
She soaks the pan again, and a third set of words reveals itself in the afternoon light.
City of stone ’tween heaven and earth
The place beyond your place of birth
Greta kneels down beside Molly for a closer look.
‘“The place beyond your place of birth”,’ Greta considers. She dwells on this for a moment. ‘Where was your grandfather born?’
‘He was born in Halls Creek, across the border in Western Australia,’ Molly says.
‘Where were you born?’ Greta asks.
‘I think I was born in Darwin Hospital like my mum,’ Molly says.
‘You got any idea what he’s on about?’
‘Not yet,’ Molly replies. ‘We haven’t gone deep enough yet to find out.’
She soaks the pan again, scrubs at the bottom of the base and holds the pan up to the light once more. Her forefinger runs along more newly revealed words and the mystery of them sends a shiver down her twelve-year-old spine.
Own all you carry, carry all you own
Step inside your heart of stone
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Greta asks.
‘That’s what Longcoat Bob said he was going to do with his curse,’ Molly says. ‘He said he would turn our true hearts to stone.’ Molly thinks of the blood-red rock she’s carrying inside her duffel bag.
‘But how do you step inside a heart of stone?’ Greta asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Molly says. ‘Maybe we’ll only know when we know. We have to follow the path. One step at a time.’
She traces the map line with her fingernail. ‘When we find the silver road we follow this line going down here. And we look for things. I reckon my grandfather saw things like I see things sometimes. Maybe I’ll be able to see what he saw when I see those same things.’
Greta raises her eyebrows, takes another swig of water. ‘So what do you see now, Molly?’
Molly’s eyes follow the thin stretch of what’s left of Candlelight Creek, which snakes through the wetlands towards what appear to be, a mile or maybe two in the distance, two towering red sandstone plateaus split by a deep and miraculous canyon.
‘The water runs to the silver road,’ Molly says. ‘We follow the water to that range. The silver road is in there somewhere.’
Then she turns her head to the sun. ‘But we’d best get there before dark.’ And she keeps staring in the direction of that sun because she can see a flash of silver in the sky beneath it. She puts a palm to the top of her forehead and looks harder at the silver flash.
‘A plane,’ Molly says.
Greta turns her head to where Molly is looking. The silver plane moves closer. They can hear its engine now, the relentless buzz of its front propeller. Molly can tell how light and agile the plane is by the way it bobs and shudders in air pockets, but otherwise it maintains a steady course that she comes to realise is leading it straight towards them. Greta stands, confused, eyes up to the sky as the plane flies over her head. Then she sees the red circles. The red rising-sun circles of paint on the underside edges of the plane’s sparkling metal wings. A Japanese fighter plane. All this way from Japan via Pearl Harbor and the Darwin central business district. All that blue sky and the hornet buzz of the metal fighter cutting through it.
‘It’s a Jap,’ Greta says. ‘But what’s he doing all the way out here?’ The fighter zooms high over Greta’s head and banks hard left and circles back around to where it came from and Molly and Greta turn in a circle in the sloshy floodplain grass without taking their eyes off the plane.
‘What’s he doing?’ Molly asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Greta says.
The fighter comes lower this time. It halves its speed and it circles Greta and Molly.
‘Should we run for it?’ Molly asks.
Greta scans the floodplain. No trees for shelter. There’s an ochre-coloured termite mound taller than her, but it must be at least a hundred yards from where she stands in the open wetland. ‘We’d be dead already if he wanted to kill us,’ she says.
She turns in another circle, following the fighter plane as it orbits the blonde actress in the shimmering emerald dress and the gravedigger girl in the sky-blue dress that she hopes to dance in one day with handsome Sam Greenway the buffalo hunter. The plane circles the girls once more and this time it comes in so close and low that Greta can see directly into the plane’s cockpit. The pilot is staring back at her. He leans hard left on his control stick, but his eyes don’t care for direction, they appear to care only for the actress whose saddle shoes are waterlogged in the wetland slush.
Greta can see the man clearly now. A hard jawline beneath thick brown aviator goggles. A brown leather flight helmet, fur-lined, with its side flaps covering his ears. Then the engine seems to cut out and the plane appears to be gliding around her and there is no sound, only a metal flight machine floating on the breeze and the machinery of her heart beating fast beneath
