Bones of Contention (26 page)

“You tricked him?”

“I’ll take a plea. Guilty as charged.”

“Liar. He wasn’t such a rube he couldn’t tell hemp from hay.”

“The weather was bad. He didn’t stick his nose under the tarp. It was his truck so I handed over the keys and took the passenger seat. The road was wet, slick in spots. A bolt of lightnin’ flushed a fox and it ran across the road in front of us. Hart braked, the truck flipped into the ditch. I climbed out without a scratch. He wasn’t so lucky.”

“Was he killed instantly?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Her chest was so tight she could scarcely breathe.

“He was pinned. I couldn’t save him.”

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t? Tell me the truth for once, damn you. He was alive and you left him to suffocate under a bale of wet weed.”

His eyes were unrepentant as stones. “There was nothin’ I coulda done.”

“I hate you.”

“Then I reckon you can stop hatin’ your daddy.”

No! Was she being had again? Had he exonerated her father just to make her feel better? To make himself feel human? Or was this just another ploy to make her more pliable and willing to do his bidding? “Does Mom…does Swan know?”

“Swan never knew any of it, Dinah. She ain’t like you. She don’t go lookin’ under rocks. She trusts what folks tell her.”

Trust. It seemed to Dinah as quaint a concept as corsets and crinolines. “I don’t know whether to believe you or not.”

“I’ve allocuted. Restored your daddy’s good name, vindicated his honor. You can believe me or not. It’s your choice. By and by, we all gotta choose what to believe.”

“What happened in Campiglio?”

His grip on the gun tightened and his eyes welled. “Swan, you remember.”

Sweet Jerusalem! What madness had she sparked? He was projecting her mother onto her. He’d lost it, forgotten who she was, forgotten the twins and the account in Panama, forgotten everything but Swan Fately, the woman he idolized, the woman who’d rejected him, the woman Dinah looked just like. He was going to take her out with him, to possess in death what he couldn’t possess in life.

She looked around wildly. What could she do? Lunge for the gun? Dive for the bushes?

He raised the gun to his head.

“Please, please, please no.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

The report erupted in her ears like Krakatoa. She felt sick. The air smelled burnt and bitter. She drew a ragged breath and forced herself to open her eyes.

Cleon was still standing. The gun dangled limply from his hand. He looked more surprised than she was. “I couldn’t do it.”

She felt a surge of relief. And to her astonishment, compassion. “I can’t hate you, Uncle Cleon.”

“Thank you, darlin’.” A sheepish smile creased his face. He seemed focused on some ineluctable irony on the horizon just behind her. She glanced over her shoulder as Margaret pumped two rounds into his chest.

Chapter Forty-six

Petunia bucked and bounced across the rough grass, gathered speed and lifted off at a cookie-pitching angle, her right wing clearing the red and yellow banded trees at the back of the lodge by inches. The lodge receded to postcard size. A miniscule Norton helped a miniscule Margaret into the Land Rover. Margaret shaded her eyes and looked up. Dinah looked away into a garish red and purple sunset. Like a hemorrhage, she thought.

When the police arrived, Margaret had stood ramrod straight, her head held high—not so much defiant as disinterested. She offered no denials. She’d been hovering outside the great room when Cleon admitted what he’d done to Wendell and to Dez. She’d been hovering just inside the door to the veranda when he described the night Hart Pelerin died. But Dinah didn’t think any of those sins were the reason she shot him.

“What will happen to her?” she asked Jacko.

He was somber. There’d been none of his usual banter this afternoon, no flippant Strine, no flak. He’d seemed genuinely moved by the tragedy. She loved him for that.

“Juries always have more sense than the government,” he said. “They’ll let her off light.”

“She’ll have to stand trial?”

“No such thing as justifiable homicide in Oz, luv. Not legally.”

“But she saved my life.” Dinah had rehearsed Margaret very carefully on the saved-my-life story. One or two more lies wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans next to the mountain of treacheries in this sorry tale and anyway, Margaret had only done what Cleon couldn’t do himself. Dinah wondered if his last thank-you was for her or for Margaret.

Jacko’s long nose twitched as if her perjurious thoughts gave off a sulfur smell. “With any luck, you won’t have to testify under oath.”

“But I want to if it will help Margaret.”

“Of course, you do. And your statement’s a perfect pearl. Mr. Cleon Dobbs confessed to the murder of Dr. Fisher and the framing of Mr. Wendell Dobbs and summarily aimed a gun at your heart. He threatened explicitly to kill you. Mrs. Margaret Dobbs, having returned unexpectedly from Katherine, showed up with a loaded pistol and Bob’s your uncle.” He slued his eyes at her and added, “I wasn’t trying to make a funny.”

“I know.” But his doubting tone irked her. “You don’t buy my story?”

“It’s a notch to the pat side, luv. You’ll want to throw in an earnest stammer now and again, and maybe a skerrick of doubt. Juries like probability, but not perfection. A dead cert cheats them out of the chance to be Sherlocks for a day.”

Was he suborning perjury or just letting her know he was onto her? Of course, he wasn’t onto all of her crimes. The piece of paper with the number of Cleon’s secret bank account in Panama nestled at the bottom of her purse like a live scorpion. She didn’t want to think about the jillion unpleasant ways it could bite her. Fishing it out of Cleon’s pocket while the blood pooled and spread would be a recurring nightmare. Margaret had stood stoically by while Dinah frisked the corpse. She didn’t offer to share the responsibility for dealing with the spoils of the drug trade, or the dangers. Maybe after the shock wore off, she’d have something to say about Cleon’s spiteful devices and devisals. But for now, Margaret seemed to have lost her stomach for anything to do with the man.

Jacko said, “We’ll need you to keep in touch in case there are more questions.”

“You have my mother’s address. I can be reached through her if anybody wants to subpoena me, or whatever you call it in Strine.”

“A subpoena, we call a bluey, after the blue paper it’s printed on. The truth, we call the truth, although it doesn’t always serve justice. I’m assuming your zeal for justice is why you’re covering for the first Mrs. Dobbs, but perjury’s a crime in Oz. You could go to prison for giving false evidence.”

“I’ll take that into account.”

“Right. Well, there may be some latitude in the system. I’ll have a chinwag with the prosecutor, see if he’ll reduce the charges against the lady to possession of an unlicensed firearm and manslaughter in defense of another person.”

He checked the altimeter and pointed Petunia’s nose north toward Darwin. Below them, the Stuart Highway snaked across the land, a rainbow serpent of commerce connecting the Southern Ocean to the Indian Ocean, the spatial footprint of the continent’s modern-day movers and shakers. She was beginning to cotton onto this song lines business—shape-shifting ancestral spirits unbound by time, trampling through your life with their outsized egos and festering passions, leaving behind an emotional geography you can’t escape and indelible tracks on your heart.

With Cleon’s confession, her father’s song line had veered into new territory, changing the landscape of the past. He was absolved, rehabilitated, an upstanding citizen who’d been rooked into doing something illegal. And her mother was innocent of any unsavory knowledge hidden under the rocks. If Cleon had told the truth. She wouldn’t decide until she heard what her mother had to say for herself. But no matter what she said, Dinah’s perspective on the history and inhabitants of her world had altered. Was altering still. As Mack said, the Dreaming is an ongoing process.

Lucien was certainly a case in point. She wasn’t sure who he was anymore or how he came to have such versatile ethics. She loved him, but it just wasn’t the same. She couldn’t trust him, and while trust wasn’t an essential component of love, it was kind of a big deal. To her, anyway. Still and all, it was oddly liberating not to feel like the mistake-prone kid sister forever kneeling at the altar of his greater experience and wiser judgment. They were on an equal footing now, all of their feet made of clay.

They’d said good-bye at the lodge. Lucien had catapulted through the door on his crutches just in time to see Cleon’s body loaded into the ambulance and driven away to the morgue. As promised, he hadn’t wept. And she hadn’t told him that his father killed hers. The secret was hers now, her legacy from Cleon. Telling Lucien would only complicate their relationship the more. She hoped Eduardo would win the battle for Lucien’s soul. But if Mack induced him into another round of forgeries, there was nothing she could do about it.

If it was true that Swan didn’t know about Cleon’s drug business, Dinah wouldn’t tell her the extent of his evil. Perhaps, she already suspected. But telling her for fact that her first husband had murdered her second because of her would be gratuitously cruel. Dinah was glad she’d found out the truth. But pop psychology to the contrary, the truth hadn’t set her free. It most definitely hadn’t set Margaret free. Confession, as it turned out, was more freeing for the confessor than the confessee.

When she got back from Panama, she would write to Neesha and ask what she and the twins needed during their transition period. She hoped Thad wouldn’t need a lot of medical care from his brush with the stinging tree. Maybe a few weeks of chastening pain would transform him into a decent young man. Or if that failed, there was always military school, something to cut his Dobbsian ego down to a safe size.

K.D. was an even thornier problem. Dinah had left her a note of condolence about Cleon and an apology for swiping her journal, but somehow that felt like a cop-out. K.D. was going to need somebody more down-to-earth than her mother, and somebody with more clout than her English teacher to help her through the throes of adolescence. She was an intelligent girl. Like Dinah, she might someday want to know the truth about
her
father. But she wouldn’t hear it from Dinah.

It was scary to be suddenly burdened with responsibility for a pair of spoiled, angry teenagers whose father had just been murdered and whose mother was embroiled in an affair with their incarcerated half-brother. She had left Cleon’s original will on the dresser in Neesha’s room next to her jewelry case. It would take the widow some time to digest the fact that Cleon had annihilated his wealth and bequeathed her a big fat goose egg. Dinah didn’t look forward to telling her that she controlled the purse strings now. But since she did, she was determined to contribute significantly to Wendell’s defense fund. If Cleon rolled over in his cryogenic crypt in Houston, so much the better.

“Isn’t there something you can do to spring Wendell, Jacko?”

“Maybe somewhere down the line. Right now, Wendell’s deep in the poo.”

“But when the prosecutor reads my account of his father’s dying declaration, the charges against Wendell will be dismissed, right?”

“Maybe the murder charge. As for the drug charges, it depends where he’s tried and whether the feds want to clear cases and beef up their conviction stats or do the right thing. From what I hear, Wendell’s lawyer will try to have him extradited to the States.”

“Cleon knew it would be like this. He knew that even if Wendell eventually walks, he’ll be caught up in a legal morass for years.”

“Junior’s copped the rough end of the pineapple, no question. The best thing he’s got going for him is your blooper.”

“Mine?”

“Scarpering with that memory stick, luv. The evidence wasn’t properly obtained and it was out of your possession while you were off consorting with your mates, the parrots and the snakes. It can probably be used against the rest of the gang. But a good mouthpiece will argue that somebody found it in your motel room, input false data to make Wendell the bunny, and put it back before you returned.”

“Bunny meaning the fall guy.”

“Strike a light! You’re becoming bilingual.” He reached under his seat and pulled out a Foster’s. “I don’t suppose you’d care for a coldie?”

“I don’t mind if I do.”

“There’s a girl!” He popped the tab and passed it over. “Apart from that line of legal brilliance and his big sad eyes, Wendell’s a no-hoper. The fella whose leg you broke has already cut a deal with the feds to testify against him in exchange for a lesser sentence.”

“But those lowlifes never even saw Wendell.”

“They never saw your uncle either, but he used Wendell’s name when he communicated with them.”

She rolled the frigid beer can across her forehead and took a deep draft. She’d like to get juiced tonight, enter one of those dissociative fugue states, forget everyone and everything. It occurred to her that Nick hadn’t crossed her mind in days, an excellent start on forgetting.

She said, “I still don’t understand how a gang of Nigerian poachers and smugglers could infiltrate the Aboriginal community.”

“They passed themselves off as tourists, probably bought off some malcontented locals to help them trap the animals. The big note with the frilly words who called himself Bill simply permitted you to assume he was an Aborigine.”

“Like you permitted me to assume you were just a nice guy with a thing for unsolved crimes, like Cleon permitted me to assume he was our family angel, like Seth permitted me to…nevermind.” She thought about his melting kisses and wondered if he’d make it out of the country with his sack full of cash.

Jacko turned his inquisitive eyes on her. “You were attracted to young Seth, weren’t you?”

“Not really. I have a glitch in my hypothalmus. And maybe bad karma.”

He laughed. “You’ll board the right tram next time, Dinah.”

He put on his earphones and turned his attention to flying. Dusk was settling over Darwin as they descended. The lights were beginning to wink on, but sailboats were still visible on Fannie Bay. This was where the Land of Oz ended, where her erroneous assumptions ended and the past and the future converged. She felt a terrible homesickness for her family, both living and dead, blood and non. She’d had a lot more she needed to say to Cleon and there was a lot more she’d needed to hear him say. But if she’d learned anything in this weird place, it was that your ancestors don’t shut up just because they’re dead. Cleon might not speak to her out of the trees or boulders, but he would speak to her again out of a safe deposit box in Panama.

Parallel rows of lights illuminated their glidepath. If only life were so straight and narrow and well lit. She felt the landing wheels drop and Petunia hit the runway like a kangaroo, hopping and boinking a few times before she decelerated to a glide. They taxied for a few minutes and came to rest some distance from the main terminal in front of a darkened hangar.

“Well, this is where we say oo-roo,” said Jacko. “You’ve been a pain in the arse, luv, but I admit I’ve grown fond of you. If you don’t come back, I’ll have you extradited.”

“I’ll be back. I’m going to stand by Wendell and Margaret, vouch for their innocence, do whatever I can to thwart the prosecution.”

He helped her climb down and set her suitcase on the tarmac. “You’re a pip, luv. If I were thirty years younger, I’d have a go at changing your mind about policemen.”

“You already have.” She stood on her toes, kissed him on the cheek and walked off toward the main terminal to begin the first leg of her odyssey across the International Date Line and another fusion of Time.