Mary: Happy Farms

Another day in Port Victoria and another perfect morning. Josh and I were back at it early, out on Keane's boat attempting to find Crayton's house from far out on the water. It seemed safer to me to play voyeur out on the ocean instead of attempting to creep up on land, though never having tried using binoculars at sea I was unprepared for just how maddening it is to focus on anything while being tossed about by the waves.

Regardless of the difficulties, by late morning we succeeded in locating what we thought was the correct address. It turned out to be an entire ranch (or "station" in Aussie slang) complete with sheep, pigs and cattle.


KEANE: Ugh, I'll be stuffed. I've heard of that station. Happy Farms, it's called, at least by the locals.

ME: What have you heard?

KEANE: They get a trespasser and they're set to spit the dummy. Was a mate of mine from school took a dare once and snuck on. The jackeroos [ranch hands-ed.] caught him and beat the absolute stuffing out of him. Put him in hospital for a month, but at least the station owner paid the freight to avoid the divvy van.

JOSH: The divvy... never mind. Why's it called Happy Farms?

KEANE: Even though the owner's a complete bastard, apparently it's a great place to work. No one's ever seen one of his people without a big smile on their face.


Josh and I exchanged looks, and I told them to bait the hooks on the lines so we could pretend to be fishing while we spied on the property. We spent the next hour just floating and watching. The main house was built on the edge of a small cliff about thirty feet high in the middle of a small cove, and right behind the house was a large dock, capable of comfortably mooring a boat the size of the Liberator, but the dock floated empty.

Farther out to sea we could see a pod of whales hunting for food, their blowholes punctuating the afternoon with irregularly-timed hisses. To the south stood the now-familiar sight of Wardang Island, but we had already gone around it a half-dozen times and found nothing. Reluctantly, we moved on so as not to draw too much attention to ourselves from shore.

The first mate Lachlan, already on his second "tinny" before noon said, "Maybe it's not here yet... still in transit, eh?" I thought about it, then shook my head. "How d'ya reckon?"

"Hunch."

He shrugged, uninterested in contemplating it much further as he was being paid by the hour anyway. The boat chugged through the chop back to Port Victoria's harbor as I sat on the aft deck, glumly pondering our next move.

Once back in port we retreated again to Keane's trailer where she barbecued some shrimp and fresh fish, all still in her bikini, which Josh certainly never failed to notice.

After lunch we sat in reclining lawn chairs on the beach. Lachlan kept an eye on his beer, Keane surreptitiously watched Lachlan, concerned for his sobriety, Josh drooled over Keane in her bikini and I divided my time between tsk'ing Josh and staring out to sea. We kept this up for a good hour before Keane's cell phone rang with her mother on the line asking if she could go out and bring her a few groceries in town.

Suddenly I had my idea. "Why not call him?" I got blank looks all around, then continued, "What if I called Crayton? Have him go meet me somewhere? Then we move in and have a closer look?"

Josh looked dubious. "What about the Smile- what about his helpers?" He caught himself. "I doubt he'd take them all with him."

"True, but at least we wouldn't have to deal with him and his tricks. And we might get to learn a little something if he slips up. As long as I call from a public phone, I don't see what we have to lose." He still appeared unconvinced, but Keane shrugged and Lachlan let out an enormous belch, so I took that as a majority vote for yes. "We'll wait until sunset, then make the call. Keane, I'll need to know a town about a half hour away from his house that I can have him meet me in, along with the name of a restaurant or diner, someplace public." She nodded. "Good. Have the boat ready to leave by dusk. In the meantime, I've got to think of how I'm going to ask out my 'date'."

Mary: Port Victoria

While on the last leg of our flight, I recalled the Australian professor I'd spoken to when I was first asking around about the Rabbit Calicivirus Project and gave her a call, filling her in on some of the less insane things that had gone on. Professor Sandra Liddel was as helpful and friendly as she had been the last time I chatted with her, and she was shocked when I informed her of her old colleague Doctor Shigekazu Yoshida's demise. Professor Liddel had moved to Melbourne to retire, but when I mentioned that we were looking for a missing boat she recommended a reliable local charter fisherman named Keane in Port Victoria whom we might be able to hire.

The drive from Adelaide took an uneventful three hours, which when combined with our (admittedly quite comfortable) twenty-one hour flight drained Josh and I of what was left of our energy. Somehow, though we'd left San Diego in the morning, by the grace of jumping many, many time zones we pulled in to Port Victoria at five o'clock in the evening. The town was smaller than I had expected, with only a few streets and a paint-peeled, single story hotel by the sea as its centerpiece. As we got out of the car, we could see the infamous Wardang Island just off the coast, the ocean waves smashing into it from the far side as it protected Port Victoria's shoreline.

We went inside the hotel, checked in and ate a light dinner, and while I wanted to call and arrange an appointment with the fisherman that day, I simply ran out of steam and went to my room to pass out for the night.


The next morning Josh and I awoke refreshed and walked out into a sunny, seventy degree day. After Atlanta, San Diego and now Port Victoria's glorious weather, both he and I were openly questioning why we had ever chosen to live in Wisconsin.

After asking the hotel owner where we could find Keane, Josh and I decided to walk there, the trip taking no more than ten minutes. Keane lived in a well-maintained trailer right on the ocean, a large pup tent set up just a few feet away on the sand. After a knock the door opened and a woman in her mid-twenties appeared wearing an apron. She had very curly, medium-length light brown hair, and her arms were toned and tan. She bounced down the step on her bare feet and grinned up at us, all five foot nothing of her. "G'day!"

"Um, good... hi," Josh said, quickly abandoning his attempt to speak as a native. "We're looking for Mister Keane, we're looking to hire him?"

Just then a man in his forties staggered out of the tent and waved, saying, "G'day, mates! Everything all right then, Helen?" He scratched a five-day-old graying beard absently, clearly not too concerned.

The woman nodded to him, and Josh started making his way over to the man before I put a hand on his arm to stop him. "Wha? Don't you want to talk to Keane? I thought-"

I gestured to the woman. "This is Keane."

He looked baffled, then shrugged and said, "Right. Detective. Moving on."

Keane gave him a playful punch on the arm that actually knocked him back a step. "Ha! She got one on you, mate! No worries, happens all the time, as you'd imagine. So, down to bizzo. What do you yanks need? Fishing? Whale watching? Scuba down by the wrecks?" She gestured us inside, explaining as we went that the man in the tent's name was Lachlan, her first mate and mechanic.

As usual, we were faced with the dilemma of how much to reveal about what's really going on, and while I certainly wasn't going to tell her everything I wanted to make sure that she was aware of the severity of the danger we faced. In the end I told her that we were searching for the lost ship Liberator and that on it was crucial evidence from a murder case back in the States. I also explicitly stated that the murderer and his accomplices were seeking the ship as well, and that they would stop at nothing to keep us from reaching it first.

It took longer to impart this information than it should have because the woman simply never stopped moving. She was a bouncing ball of curly-haired energy- a compact, well-muscled, bright-eyed cocker spaniel of a woman who remembered every word I said even as I doubted if she'd heard me in the first place. When I finished my explanation she pulled out a tray of chocolate chip cookies and set them on the stove to cool, saying, "Sounds like trouble. Not used to trouble, really."

Josh said, "I'll pay double. Not a problem." He absently rubbed the spot where Keane had punched him and said to me, "Would it be un-Australian to whine about how my arm still hurts?"

Keane gave a throaty laugh and winked at him. "Pretty quick to double. Why not triple, then, eh?" She stared at him with an eyebrow cocked.

I cleared my throat. "Two and a half times your going rate and not a penny more." I crossed my arms and tried to keep my eyes from darting over to the chocolate chip cookies, their irresistible aroma filling the small area.

"Why?" Her question seemed more out of curiosity than actual bargaining. "With how quick yer fella offered double I figure money's not a problem."

I gave her a level look. "General principle. And he's not my 'fella'."

"Ah, no worries. I saw the ring, thought you were married."

I looked down, realizing that I hadn't moved my ring from my ring finger since the time we were posing as married back in Atlanta. "Oh. I- honest mistake then." I started to take it off, then feeling her and Josh's eyes on me stopped.

Keane stared at me for a while, then at Josh and back again. Finally, she smiled that toothy grin and nodded. "Done and done. Let's go hunting."

Josh put up a hand, looking grave. "Firstly and most importantly, before we conduct any other business: can I have a chocolate chip cookie? And by that I mean five."