Bones of Contention (3 page)

Chapter Four

“Yoo-hoo! Dinah!”

She was on her way to ground transportation, ready to rent a car and look for a nearby motel, when an angular, loose-jointed character pranced out of the crowd waving his arms. He wore tan jodhpurs, a turquoise polo shirt, and a straw hat with a veil of wine corks bobbing from the brim.

“Eduardo?”

“C’est moi.” He parted the veil and bussed her on either cheek.

“I didn’t know you were coming.”

“Of course you did. Lucien couldn’t function without me.”

She scanned the crowd. “Where is he?”

“He couldn’t make it.”

“What do you mean he couldn’t make it?” Eduardo had been Lucien’s partner for five years and she liked him a lot, but in the circumstances he was no substitute. “Doesn’t he want to see me?”

“Don’t be silly. I’ll fill you in on the way to the lodge. Suivez moi.”

He took her suitcase and breezed out the door. Feeling irritable and slighted, she followed him to the parking lot and a dusty black hatchback with a smiley face grill.

“What is this smirky little car?”

“A Daihatsu Charade.”

“Did the Charade come with the chapeau? Or vice versa?”

“It’s called a Ned Kelly, after some Australian desperado. It looks goofy, but it keeps off the flies. One of the thousand plagues infesting this godawful country.” He loaded her suitcase in the back and opened the passenger door. “S’il vous plait.”

He pranced around, slid into the driver’s seat and tossed the Ned Kelly into the back seat. “Fasten your seatbelt.”

He peeled out of the parking lot and launched the Charade southbound onto the Stuart Highway. It took her a heartstopping few seconds to remember that Australians drive like the British, on the left. The Katherine airport disappeared behind them and the sign ahead read “Mataranka, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs.”

“Where is this lodge?”

“In the middle of effing nowhere. The drive will take over an hour.”

“Doesn’t Uncle Cleon need to be close to a hospital?”

“That would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it? Anyhow, his doctor is a guest at the lodge.”

“The same doctor who’s going to…?”

“Put him down? Mais oui.” Eduardo spruced up his hair in the rear view mirror and wrinkled his elegant Roman nose. “Dr. Desmond Fisher is to Death as the robin is to spring. He chirps about it endlessly. He struts about in safari garb like a bad imitation of Ernest Hemingway, preaching about the right to die until you positively yearn to perish just to get away from the man.”

“How did Cleon find a doctor willing to perform a suicide? Was he listed in the Yellow Pages under Physicians—Family Practice and Felonies?”

“He and Cleon met ages ago on a safari in Kenya and have been friends ever since, or so they say.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“Ha.”

“What do you mean, ha?”

“Oh, I believe they’ve known each other a long time. Fisher lives in one of those to-die-for Harbourside mansions in Sydney, not far from Cleon’s chateau, and he’s visited Cleon in Georgia a number of times. I just don’t believe they’re all that friendly. Fisher joined our entourage as soon as we arrived in Sydney, which is a stunning city and very cosmopolitan, and why God put it on this continent passeth all understanding. Be that as it may, Cleon’s given him an earful of his vintage abuse for over a week and if Fisher feels half as fed up as the rest of us, he can’t wait to sink the fatal syringe.”

“You seem to have your grief well in check.”

“It’s my manly façade. But even among the gentler sex, I think you’ll find true grief in short supply.”

Dinah kneaded her forehead. Eduardo was normally a blithe, sunny kind of guy. If he was peevish, the others must be foaming at the mouth.

She shifted her attention to the countryside, which was green and wooded, though not as verdant as the terrain she’d flown over with Jacko. To the south lay what her guidebook described as the Red Center, the arid and inhospitable heart of the continent. But here, the landscape wasn’t all that different from South Georgia.

Her thoughts returned to family matters. “Eddie, why did Cleon invite Margaret? They’ve been divorced for thirty-five years. Couldn’t he have said good-bye over the phone?”

“He invited Margaret to piss off Neesha. What else? Neesha plays the part of the adoring wife, but sharing the stage with the first wife is getting to her. Les femmes haven’t come to blows, but the sound of rattling beads and ruffling feathers is positively deafening.”

“I don’t believe Cleon means to piss off anybody. He still has feelings for Margaret and she is, after all, the mother of his firstborn. Maybe he just wanted to bring together all the people he loves for one last time. To tell us the things he should have told us, but never found the time.”

“Lucien thought that’s how he enticed you here.”

She bristled. Lucien could blab her secrets if he liked, but there were some matters on which she did not desire big brother’s opinion and most definitely she did not desire Eduardo’s. “If Uncle Cleon’s crotchety, it’s probably due to the drugs he’s on. Is he in a lot of pain?”

“Ha!”

“Come on, Eddie. Cut the man some slack. He must be suffering.”

“He’s certainly making everyone else suffer.”

“You’re prejudiced. You’ve never liked him.”

He swerved around the bloated carcass of a dead kangaroo into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer rig. Dinah looked up into the truck driver’s furious eyes as Eduardo swerved back to the left with no room to spare. The trucker laid on his horn and the Charade was rocked by a series of concussive gusts as three long trailers filled with bawling cattle rumbled by in the cab’s wake.

Eduardo thrust his arm out the window and pumped his middle finger. “Road trains! One pulling seven trailers passed me yesterday doing eighty. I barely kept from being blown off the road. The longer you’re in this bizarre country, the more you’ll understand why the Brits shipped their prisoners here as punishment.”

Dinah had no doubt that she was being punished. When her heart rate came down from the stratosphere, she said, “I don’t understand why he didn’t want to go home to die. The logistics would’ve been much easier in the U.S.”

“I don’t think he’s sick. He’s up to something.”

“What does he have to gain by dragging us here if he isn’t dying?”

“You’re the tea-leaf reader in the family, cherie.”

She wished. Her intuition had been seriously off-line of late and she couldn’t think why Lucien hadn’t come to the airport to meet her. Maybe he and Cleon were busy telling each other those touchy-feely, father-son things they should have said before but couldn’t. “How’s the situation between Cleon and Lucien?”

“Lucien hasn’t begun to gnash his teeth yet, but if Cleon keeps shooting barbs at him, it’s just a matter of time.”

So much for the feel-good scenario. “What kind of barbs is he shooting?”

“He heh-heh-hehs in that sly way of his and drops snarky little hints.”

“Hints about what?”

“You’ll have to decide for yourself.”

“Well, I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. You don’t trust him because he’s thrown his weight around a little bit in the past.”

“A little bit?” His voice rose, mocking and querulous. “A little bit?”

“Okay, a lot. But how can he possibly jerk anyone’s chain at this point?”

“Hello-oh? Are we talking about the same Cleon Dobbs? Chain jerker extraordinare? Master manipulator? Redneck Machiavelli? Alpha hick?”

“You’re being overly critical. Death changes people.”

“The only thing Cleon’s changing is his will.”

“How do you know? Did he say that he was?”

“It’s his constant refrain. He says he’s still making up his mind who’ll get what.”

She’d prepared herself for friction between the wives and there was always the possibly of a dustup between Cleon and Lucien. A money fight never crossed her mind. “Maybe he wants to distribute the estate more equitably. Fine-tune things, so to speak.”

“He’s fine-tuning, all right. Jabbing everybody up the ass with his tuning fork.”

“And how, pray, is he doing this jabbing?”

“He hints about past crimes and misdemeanors without saying exactly what it was that we did to put his nose out of joint. He runs all kinds of vindictive possibilities up the flagpole. He’s going to write off his children and leave all the money to their mothers, or he’s going to lock up all the money in a spendthrift trust under the control of a trustee who’ll make sure we don’t blow it on anything that would make us even remotely happy. Every day it’s something different. If he keeps it up, somebody will slit his throat before the doctor has a chance at him.”

It must be the climate, she thought. Everyone seemed to have murder on the brain. “Do you have a particular throat-slitter in mind?”

“No, but you wouldn’t believe the state we’re in. Someone will snap.”

“I’ll snap if I don’t get to a bed soon. How much farther?”

“The turnoff’s just ahead, but it’s ten miles down a dirt road after that. And if you were expecting the Ritz, forget about it. Crow Hill Lodge is a pit.”

“All I want is a shower and clean place to lie down.”

“Well, the sheets are clean, but inspect them for spiders before snuggling in. The toilet seat, too. And if there are frogs in the toilet bowl, scream your head off. It’s what I do.”

He whipped an abrupt right-hand turn onto a rutted dirt track. The car lurched like a mechanical bull, her seat belt seized and her head flew back and down. When it came up, a flock of startled cockatoos exploded from a tree overhead. She examined her teeth. She still had the full set, no thanks to her chauffeur.

“You’re in an awful damned hurry to get to this pit.”

“There’s an excellent single malt Scotch waiting for me at the end of the trail. The lodge has all the comforts and accoutrement of a gulag, but at least Cleon didn’t stint on the booze.”

Dinah still had a mild, palliative buzz from the Bloody Marys, but it was wearing off fast under Eduardo’s hail of complaints. She watched the miles roll by in silence and conjured up visions of a gulag crawling with frogs and barb throwers and fork jabbers and bead rattlers and throat slitters. Thinking negatively never helped, but she suspected that her horoscope didn’t bode happy times ahead.

Eduardo pursed his lips. “Did I mention that he brought those two little Winslow Homers that you like with him?”

“What?”

“When he moved to Sydney, he threw them in a suitcase he checked with the rest of the baggage. Carted them from Sydney to Katherine the same way.”

“But that’s nuts. You can’t bounce paintings around like that. In this heat? Never mind the baggage handlers, the temperature and humidity might have ruined them. Have you seen them since they were unpacked? Has Lucien seen them?”

“No and no.”

She could’ve wept. She loved that pair of Homer seascapes. They’d hung in the living room of Cleon’s old farmhouse for ten years like windows onto a storm-churned Atlantic. Just because Cleon owned them didn’t give him the right to slam them about from pillar to post. They were irreplaceable.

The open landscape changed and walls of gigantic, shaggy-barked trees closed in around them, blocking the sun. Dinah began to feel claustrophobic, as if she were being swallowed down the gullet of some strange animal. The trees, the colors, the smells—everything seemed alien and forbidding. Maybe that’s why Cleon had brought the paintings with him. Maybe they reminded him of home. In any case, the paintings were his. If they soothed him or took some of the sting out of dying, who was she to criticize?

On the other hand, she felt amply justified in criticizing Lucien. “What was so all-fired important that Lucien couldn’t trouble himself to meet me, Eddie? I mean, I know he said not to come. I know he doesn’t want me emoting all over the place, but Cleon’s been good to me. I owe him. Lucien should respect that.”

“There was a small mishap the day after we arrived here from Sydney.” He slowed down and his voice went flat. “Now don’t freak out on me, okay? It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

A queasy sensation roiled her insides. “What haven’t you told me?”

“Lucien was bitten by a death adder, Dinah. He’s laid up with a catheter in his leg.”

Chapter Five

Crow Hill Lodge loomed at the end of the track like a Wild West fort, a dark, near windowless box of rough-hewn logs seemingly carved out of the forest by somebody in a hurry. A few stumps scattered about the clearing added to the sense of frontier expediency. The only thing that looked modern was the white metal roof, agleam in the late afternoon sun.

Eddie pulled the Charade up close behind a line of other dusty cars and cut the engine. Dinah tore at the door handle.

“There’s no need to be frantic. Lucien’s going to be fine. He got the antivenin in time. I wouldn’t have left his side for an instant if he were in danger.”

“I know you wouldn’t, Eddie. But I have to see him with my own eyes. Right now.” She got out and started for the front door.

A gangling boy of about fourteen with rebellious eyes and an unruly mop of brown hair rounded the corner of the house. He’d grown a foot since she last saw him, but it was unmistakably Thad, the male half of Cleon’s twins with Neesha.

“They’re here,” he called over his shoulder and chucked a rock at a cawing crow. The terrorized bird broke across the housetop and Dinah remembered why she’d never liked Thad.

“Hi, Thad. Long time no see.”

“I’m cool with that.”

Twerp, she thought as she bounded up the steps and onto the small covered porch.

Thad’s sister, a smug-faced nymphet with long straight hair parted in the middle and an air of congenital entitlement, opened the door. As she did, a ball of yipping white fluff streaked out of the house and hurled itself against Dinah’s legs.

“Cantoo, leave it!”

It crossed Dinah’s mind that she’d been unwashed and uncombed for so many hours that she might actually be mistaken for an “it.” She pushed on through the door with the yipping, sniffing dog riding on her shoe tops.

“Kate deBeau, you’ve shot up like a weed.”

“That’s such a cliché. Can’t you think of anything else that’s tall?”

Noxious weed, thought Dinah, reminded why she didn’t like this one either.

“Mother thinks I should become a model, but I intend to be a famous writer and I’d prefer you call me K.D.”

“Catchy.” Dinah didn’t anticipate enough social back-and-forth with the twit to call her anything. “Where’s Lucien?”

“Upstairs.” K.D. called out to her twin. “It’s your turn to take Cantoo for a walk, Thad. Do be mature and accept responsibility.”

“Eat snot,” he shouted back and scuffed off down the lane.

Eduardo bustled through the door carrying her suitcase in one hand and his Ned Kelly in the other. He dropped the suitcase, yoo-hooed for somebody named Mackenzie, and took Dinah by the hand. “Allons, cherie.”

He led her through a dusky foyer and up a flight of narrow wooden stairs. There was a dank, fungal smell suggestive of a long wet season, the other extreme of the Dry that Jacko spoke of. They passed the first landing and headed up yet another flight. A rancid potpourri of mildew and must and dogginess emanated from the shabby carpet. When they topped out on the third floor, Eduardo ushered her down a long dreary hall with numbered doors on either side.

“He’s in an artistic frenzy,” he said. “Très bizarre.” He rapped on the last door on the right and walked in without waiting for an answer. “Yoohoo! C’est nous.”

Lucien sat in a wheelchair in front of an easel with a sullen frown and a loaded brush between his teeth. He didn’t look up.

She said, “Hey, Dobbs. You don’t have to gush, but a smile would be nice.”

He turned, trance-like, and seemed for a moment not to recognize her. He had a square jaw and deep-set blue eyes like his father, but there was a protean quality about his features that subverted the camera’s eye. No one had ever taken a good likeness of him.

“Hey, Pelerin. Like a moth to the flame, huh?” Unlike herself, Lucien had never been self-conscious about his accent or tried to moderate it. His drawl was thick as grits.

He put down the dripping brush and held out his arms. She hugged him as best she could while keeping clear of his bandaged, outstretched leg and the wet paint. His color was ashen, but she knew better than to go all fluttery and exclamatory.

“How could somebody who was raised in the Okefenokee Swamp with copperheads and water moccasins for playmates let a little death adder sneak up on him? You should be embarrassed.”

He grinned. “I am. Deeply.”

Eduardo checked out his flawless appearance in the dressing table mirror. “I’ll go and do the social thing with Margaret and Neesha and leave you two to bemoan your miserable ancestry in private. Shall I send you up a snack from the kitchen?”

“No thanks,” they answered in unison.

“Then bye-bye until happy hour.” He blew a kiss over his shoulder and left.

Dinah sat down at the end of the bed next to Lucien’s wheelchair.

He said, “Eddie begged and wheedled until I said he could come and now all he does is bitch.”

“He’s part of the family, too. He wants to help. We both do.”

“Yeah, well. I couldn’t convince either of you that the best way to help me was to leave me alone. But then you’ve got bigger fish to fry, don’t you?”

She tried to sound blasé. “Have you talked to Mom? She hasn’t changed her mind about coming, has she?”

“Not to my knowledge. She sent Dad a farewell letter. The way he goes on about it, you’d think he sleeps with it under his pillow.”

“That must frost Neesha.”

“I can’t see how it wouldn’t. Let’s hope he doesn’t put you in her cross hairs by treating you as Mom’s stand-in.”

“That’s not why he asked me to be here. Or if it is, he’s out of his gourd.”

“Earth to Dinah. He’s always been out of his gourd and if he keeps crapping on everybody, we’ll all sing hosannas when he’s gone.”

“I won’t. Jeez, Lucien, what’s wrong with you? You’ve had your differences, but if there was ever a time to mend fences…” She dabbed at a drop of red paint on his chin. “You and Cleon are just too stubborn to admit you love each other.”

He scowled. “Why’d you come, Dinah? Really?”

“I don’t know. To comfort you. To comfort Cleon. You know how good he’s been to Mom and me. I care about him. And I’m beholden.”

“And?”

“Okay. And I want him to fill in the blanks about my father.”

“Your father did what he did, Di. You need to get over it and move on. Anyway, what makes you think my dad would know anything about your dad’s moonlighting? If Mom didn’t know about it, Cleon sure wouldn’t.”

“Of course he wouldn’t know about the drugs, Lucien. But he and my father used to talk a lot. Men confide in each other sometimes, don’t they? Daddy might have said something to Cleon that he couldn’t or wouldn’t say to Mom. I have to know what was going on in his head that caused him to jeopardize everything he had for a sack full of money he didn’t need.”

Lucien curled his lip. “Why’s everybody so fucking hung-up on the past?” He picked up his brush and slathered a thick stripe of carmine across the wet canvas. “What do you think of my new painting?”

Baffled by his lack of sympathy but happy for a change of subject, she searched for meaning in the swirling shapes and drunken colors on the canvas. This was a radical departure from his usual work.

“A monster? A red monster pointing a white stick?”

“It’s a bone. You know about bone pointing?”

“You know me, Lucien. Myths are my thing. Bone pointing is an Aboriginal hex. A way to kill somebody from a distance. I’ve read that some people believe the superstition so strongly that, if a shaman points the bone at them, they actually get sick and die. Mind over matter.”

He applied another layer of red on top of the violent impasto. “I’ve been reading some Aboriginal myths myself. The deadliest of the bone pointers was a snake god called Taipan. If he got you in his sights, it was curtains.”

“So that red blotchy thing is Taipan?”

“You don’t sound impressed.”

“Just puzzled by your change of style.”

“When in Rome.” He leaned back and analyzed his handiwork. “It’s a little short on method, but I’ll get it. Anyhoo. This Taipan was a heavy-duty snake god. He could heal all kinds of ailments. He created blood and told it how to flow through the body so I painted him inside-out, all veins and raw meat.”

“Lovely. What are those blue and green squiggles in the foreground?”

“The wives. He had three of them, two water snakes and a death adder.”

“Not too subtle.”

He dipped a clean brush into a blob of white and scrawled a jagged Z pointing down from the Taipan’s other hand. “Maybe I’ve been possessed by the snake god. That’s how it is with a lot of Aboriginal artists. They don’t feel as if they’re physically doing the painting themselves, but some metaphysical force is moving their hands and speaking through them.”

“Like a Ouija board.” She leaned back on the bed and propped on her elbows.

“Could be. I’ve been reading a lot about Aboriginal art, too. Have you met Mack?”

“No.”

“Well, he’s got some pictures of snakes that’ll knock your eyes out. Speaking of snakes, there’s an actual snake called a taipan that’s fifty times as poisonous as a death adder. It would be a great way to snuff somebody.”

“I hope your infatuation with snakes and death is a side effect of the meds you’re taking and will soon pass.”

“Is that a comment about my character or my painting?”

“It’s a comment on the climate. Everyone I’ve met today has been harping on murder.”

“Murdah, murdah, murdah.” His voice rose to a girly falsetto. “Fiddle-de-dee, Miss Scarlett. This murdah talk is spoilin’ th’ fun at all th’ pahties this season.”

She laughed and fell all the way back on the bed. The show of humor reassured her. “Not everyone’s obsessed. I met a hot bartender at the airport who bucked the trend.”

“And are we meetin’ this hot bartendah again?”

“Never you mind, big brother.”

He grimaced. “Oh, I almost forgot. Nick called.”

“Nick!” She sat up as if she’d been stung. “How’d he get your international cell number?”

“Beats me, unless you gave it to him.”

Shit. She must have left it in the apartment.

“He says to call him back ASAP. How’s ol’ Nick doing? The last time we talked, things between you two sounded serious.”

“They weren’t. They’re not. Nick and I are kaput. If he calls again, tell him I’m in the wind. No forwarding address.”

“Another one bites the dust.”

“None of your gibes about my checkered past, Dobbs. I walked in on this one banging a redhead. What was I supposed to do? Give him a medal?”

“Gosh, I dunno. Upbraid him severely?”

“If I’d had a gun I’d have shot him dead on the spot.”

“Now who’s harping on murder?”

They both laughed and she felt better. She didn’t know how they’d gotten off on the wrong foot. “Now that I know the Taipan myth, the painting makes sense. Is that white zigzag coming out of his hand lightning?”

“Yeah. Too bad I don’t have a tube of fluorescent white for the thunderbolt. Taipan zaps the wicked before he turns into a snake and disappears into the earth.”

The door burst open with a loud crack. “Dinah, darlin’.”

“Uncle Cleon!”

“Come give us a kiss.” He held out his arms.

She stood up and went to him. “Uncle Cleon, you look…fine.” He wore a quilted maroon dressing gown, a blue silk scarf tucked around his oak-thick neck, and a grin as wide and taut as a crossbow.

“I ain’t hurtin’ none.” He enfolded her in a python embrace and planted a kiss on her forehead. His ruddy complexion and robust strength didn’t jibe with impending death.

“Come on downstairs with me, doll, and let’s have a drink. We got ourselves some catchin’ up to do.”

“I’m really frazzled. A drink would wipe me out.”

“Bullpucky. If I remember rightly, you’ve got a head for spirits. You take after your daddy in that way. Your mama now, she’s apt to get a little too feisty on the firewater. I wish Swan could’ve been here. She’d sure liven things up.” He let out a wistful sigh. “But, no use bellyachin’. Lucien, your paramour sends word he’ll be up shortly to help you downstairs. Me and Dinah are gonna have ourselves a confab in the bar.”

This wasn’t the Cleon she’d bargained on. Suddenly, she wanted an ally. “We can help you downstairs if you’ll join us, Lucien.”

But Lucien shook his head and scowled at his painting of Taipan. “Y’all go on down and catch up. I’ll be down in a while.”

“Take your time.” Cleon dragged her out the door. “Still woozy from the snakebite, I reckon. Or maybe he’s allergic to weasel fur. Did you know that’s what they make paint brushes out of? Weasels and squirrels. It can’t be healthy.”