Tristan shrugged. “As I said, I don’t have all the answers. I suppose it has to be an inadvertent effect. I don’t have a clue as to how the women pick it up. TB is usually an airborne infection. How it gets to the fallopian tubes is beyond me.”

“That’s not how you make a diagnosis in medicine,” Marissa said. “All the symptoms and signs have to be related directly to the main diagnosis. Almost always it is one disease. I think TB has to be considered central to the problem.”

“Then you’re on your own,” Tristan said. “There’s no way I can explain what’s happened with that caveat.”

“So come with me,” Marissa begged. “You certainly have as much at stake as I do in learning the truth.”

“No!” Tristan said. “I’m not getting involved. Not again. Recently I’ve been thinking that enough time has passed and I’ve saved a lot of money, enough to take my son back and move someplace far away, maybe even the States.”

“Okay,” Marissa said. “I guess I can understand.” Her tone said she didn’t understand at all. “Thank you again for talking with me.” The two stood up. Marissa stuck her hand out and Tristan shook it.

“Good luck,” Tristan said.

Marissa squinted as she stepped outside into the blazing hot sun. She walked to her car and looked in at the dust. She was not relishing her ride back to Windorah, nor the odyssey back to Charleville the next day.

She got into the car as carefully as possible to avoid raising a dust cloud. After starting the engine, she drove out of the Wilmington Station, waving to a few of the stockmen working on a run of fence. She hung a left and started back toward Windorah.

As she drove through the forbidding countryside, she reviewed everything Tristan had told her. Although she hadn’t found out anything new about the TB salpingitis, she’d learned much she’d never expected, all of it disturbing. Perhaps the most disturbing was the suggestion of foul play in Tristan’s wife’s death. If Tristan was right, Marissa felt that lent greater plausibility to the idea that the sharks had been deliberately attracted by the two men tossing the chum. And if that were the case, her own life was in jeopardy.

Marissa drove the car by reflex as she wondered what she could do to protect herself. Unfortunately she didn’t have any particularly startling ideas. If people she didn’t know wanted to kill her, how would she know who they were? It was hard to protect herself from the unexpected. Danger could come at any moment.