Bones of Contention (4 page)

Chapter Six

Cleon towed her down the hall, down the two flights of stairs, through the foyer and into a large, dim great room.

“Name your poison, doll. Bourbon? Vodka? Scotch? I got a kind of genius for the classic gin martini. Dry as a nun’s fart. Will that do you? I asked the others to leave us to ourselves for a while. Too many mouths yappin’ and nobody gets a word in edgewise.”

He stepped behind a tarnished mahogany bar and dropped some ice cubes into the scarred old silver shaker she’d seen him flourish so many times before. He’d carted that from Georgia, too. While he busied himself with the rituals of the perfect martini, Dinah perched on a bar stool and took in the ambience. Across from the bar a pair of murky windows looked out on rotting porch columns colonized by moss. Framing the view, faded green draperies draggled on the dirty wood floor. A pair of stuffed boars’ heads had been mounted on the wall on either side of the windows. Their dead eyes stared back at her with a penetrating hopelessness. A grouping of dilapidated leather chairs leaked gray stuffing onto the threadbare carpet and the dark paneled walls exuded the bleakness of a mortuary. Eduardo’s description of the place had been kind.

Her reverie was broken by the sound of ice clattering inside the shaker.

“You gotta bruise the gin to bring out the flavor, but you don’t want to inflict a mortal wound.” He unscrewed the cap and drizzled the icy gin into frost-rimed glasses. He clinked his glass against hers. “Here’s lookin’ up your record.”

“Cheers.” Her initial plan to get blitzed and stay blitzed seemed the last best hope of cheer in this dump. She drained half the gin in a single gulp.

Cleon sat down on the stool next to her and savored his drink. “Yes, I wish your mama was here to see me off to the hereafter, but it’s prob’ly for the best. Neesha don’t mind poor ol’ Margaret so much, but she’s tetchy about Swan. Can’t get it out of her head I loved her best.”

Doesn’t, thought Dinah. Neesha
doesn’t
mind Margaret, you old liar. Did that slip out? The line between thought and speech had grown muzzy.

She said, “This isn’t just another one of your all-inclusive Christmas parties, Uncle Cleon. At a time like this, any wife would want her husband all to herself. I’m sure that’s how Neesha feels. I know you and Margaret are still friendly, but you’ve been divorced forever. Couldn’t you have said what you had to say to her over the phone?”

“Margaret and I were high school sweethearts. She was in on the ground floor. Havin’ her here with me now lends a kind of symmetry.”

“You could’ve had your symmetry in Sydney and sent her home.”

“We didn’t finish discussin’ our mutual creation, Wendell. Maggie frets that I don’t dote on her boy like I oughta. Thinks I play favorites. I wanted to talk with Swan about
our
mutual creation, Lucien. She mighta helped Lucien and me iron out a little misunderstandin’. But…” He chugged his martini, “I reckon a man can’t have everything he wants.”

Dinah felt a pang of guilt. Her mother’s being here would have meant a lot to him. But she would have squelched all discussion of Hart Pelerin, the co-creator of Dinah. Call it symmetry or curiosity or plain old masochism, but once and for all Dinah wanted a discussion of her late father. There could be no reason to hold back now.

Her mother had loved her father deeply, of that she was sure. Even when Dinah was a child, centered on her own grief and loss, she’d recognized the anguish in her mother’s eyes when the trooper told them he was dead. Swan hadn’t screamed or cried or put on a show of her grief. Not then. Not ever. There was a tensile strength in her, Seminole genes that wouldn’t surrender—to an invading army, to personal grief, to anything. She’d taken the hit, closed the wound, and gone on with her life. But for Swan, going on meant never looking back. She’d barred the door to the past. But the past didn’t belong to her alone. Part of it belonged to Dinah and she’d put off exploring it until the only other link to Hart Pelerin was on a fast countdown to oblivion.

“What’s the matter, toots? Cat got your tongue?”

“Why here?” she blurted.

He erupted in laughter. “You ain’t changed a lick, doll. Run straight at it just like your mama. That’s what I’ve always loved about you.”

She didn’t fault the man for his drawl, but the backwoods dialect was an affectation and after all these years it still irked her. Cleon was a senior partner in a prestigious international law firm with clients all over the world.

She said, “You didn’t answer my question. Why not Sydney? Why not Oregon?”

“I’ve got unfinished business in this neck of the woods. What’s on tap is gonna discombobulate some in the family.”

“What kind of unfinished business?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.” His blue eyes twinkled with mischief.

Eduardo was right. He
was
up to something and he was enjoying it enormously.

She couldn’t help but marvel at his zest for life, his determination to impose dominion over the House of Dobbs to his very last breath. For a few days more, he would hold Death at bay and exert his earthly powers. Well, God bless him. If he left one heir a little more money than another or put a few strings on how his young widow could spend her bundle, so what? Amending his will was the last power he’d wield in this world and anyone who begrudged him the privilege was being petty.

She said, “I hear you brought the Winslow Homers. What a beautiful idea.”

“I reckon you’re the only one who thinks so.”

“If they bring you pleasure, that’s all that matters.”

“I ain’t got around to hangin’ ’em. We’ll have us an unveilin’ soon. Mack can scare us up some wine and cheese and make it festive like.”

“Who’s Mack?”

“He owns this place. I think of him as the cruise director for my final voyage. He keeps the deck chairs lined up, the liquor flowing, and our various druthers satisfied.” He refilled their glasses. “Lucien informs me you’ve got yourself a beau up in Seattle.”

“Not anymore. We split.”

“What’s the matter? He a dud in the sack?”

“As the attorney I used to work for might say, your question lacks foundation and it’s way beyond the scope.”

He cackled. “You’d be a hard witness to depose. Allow counsel to reframe the question. Are you well and truly shut of him or am I gonna miss your wedding?”

“You won’t miss any wedding. Not mine. Not to…No, I’m definitely shed of him.” She was touched that the thought of missing her wedding would bother him. If she had married while he was alive, he would have been the one to give her away.

“Uncle Cleon, I’d like to depose you about something. It doesn’t have to be tonight, but I want you to tell me about my father. The truth behind the facts.”

“That’s a mighty fine distinction, sugah.”

“You know what I mean. What was he thinking to botch up our lives the way he did?”

Cleon skewed his mouth to one side and rubbed his jaw. “You asked me why here. I’ll ask you why now?”

“I wanted the truth twenty years ago, but everybody coddled and there-thered me and I taught myself not to think about him. I had a secret mantra, one of Grandma’s Seminole sayings, and whenever his name popped into my head I’d say it three times to cast out his spirit.” She took a fortifying sip of gin. “It wasn’t very effective and, like they say, the truth makes you free.”

“Truth ain’t for sissies, sugah.” He seemed to ponder the seriousness of her request. “When you get to my place in life and it’s all behind you or fixin’ to be, you may want to shade the truth a tetch for your own peace of mind or somebody else’s. Knowing too much about the folks we love can lead to a mighty lot of bitterness. But if you gotta know…”

She faltered. Had her father’s corruption gone even deeper than she’d imagined?

“Sorry to interrupt, sir.” A stocky man with skin the color of wet sand and a close-cropped thatch of wiry hair appeared like a last-minute reprieve.

“Come on in, Mack, and meet my niece, Dinah Pelerin.”

Mack smiled and shook her hand. “Ian Mackenzie. Everyone calls me Mack. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dinah.”

“Likewise.” It came out
lackwise
and she cringed. She was backsliding into the lazy vowels she’d grown up with.

Cleon said, “Don’t let his British accent fool you. Mack’s mama was a genuine Australian Aborigine. And Dinah’s part Native American, Mack. Y’all should hit it off like gin and vermouth.”

“I’m sure we will.” He turned to Cleon. “You have a telephone call, sir. A private investigator, Mr. Kellerman. He says it’s urgent.”

Cleon polished off his olive. “When you ain’t got but a week, it’s all urgent. Show Dinah to her room, Mack. We dine late, sugah, so you can snooze for a couple of hours. I hope you brought a fancy dress. Me kickin’ the bucket don’t keep Neesha from insistin’ on the proprieties.”

Chapter Seven

Being cruise director had its own urgencies. An agitated Aboriginal woman in a white apron flagged Mack down before he and Dinah had reached the stairs.

“There’s no baking powder. Lady says follow the recipe, don’t leave nothing out, it’s his special favorite. How am I gonna follow the recipe for baking powder biscuits without baking powder?” She was short and stout and obviously on the brink of revolt. “You’re the head man. You’re the one buys all the fixings she wants. You be the one to tell her it can’t be done.”

“Calm down, Tanya.” He tamped the air like a conductor trying to hush a rogue horn. “It’s in the pantry.”

“I looked there. No baking powder. Just soda.”

“I’ll take care of it as soon as I’ve shown Miss Pelerin to her room.”

“I got the fish stock for her Charleston bisque simmering, parsnips to peel, cake to ice. Lamb needs watching all the time and her and that crazy doctor standing over my shoulder, do this, do that. You come now or I quit.”

“Just tell me the room number,” said Dinah. “Indians are born trackers.”

He laughed. “Thanks. Room eight, third floor, directly across the hall from Lucien. I set your bag next to the armoire.”

Mack and Tanya hurried off to the kitchen and Dinah trudged up the stairs. She’d been looking forward to a bed since the dawn of time and she’d been given two lousy hours to lie in it before they came to roust her out for a fancy-dress dinner. So far, nobody looked or behaved the way she’d expected and as soon as she was rested and thinking straight, she’d think about why. But not tonight. Definitely not in formal attire. She had a cache of Italian Valium tucked away in the bottom of her suitcase. That on top of Cleon’s martinis would put her safely out of their clutches until tomorrow. Just let them try to wake her.

At the end of the hall, the lopsided wrought-iron 8 on the door reminded her of handcuffs, which reminded her of Nick, which reminded her what a fool she’d been not to break it off with him sooner. And he wanted her to call him? The monumental gall of the man boggled the mind. Call him? She could only hope he was holding his breath.

She shoved open the door to Number 8 and fell back in surprise as Cantoo threw himself into her shins, yipping and sniffing.

“Leave it, Cantoo.” K.D. lay on the bottom bunk, her long legs hiked up so that her feet pushed against the mattress above.

“Sorry. Wrong room.”

“No, it’s not. We’re roomies. You get the top bunk.”

Dinah ran her eyes around the seedy little room, made even less desirable by the pert, pink-jeaned presence of K.D. So much for privacy.

Hell, a bed was a bed. She didn’t plan to be conscious for long. Her suitcase was next to the armoire, as promised. She hoisted it onto a luggage rack, unzipped the lid, and felt around for the Valium.

“I’m writing a short story about each of the seven deadly sins,” announced K.D. A spiral notebook rested on her bare tummy and she waggled a pen between her manicured fingers. “My English teacher says they’re the tools of the writer’s trade. Can you name them?”

“Wrath,” said Dinah. The Valium was gone. Surely she’d packed more neatly than this. Had one of those Transportation Security goons rummaged through her suitcase and lifted it? Didn’t they have to notify you if they confiscated your stuff? Or had somebody else…? She regarded her roomie with budding suspicion.

K.D. didn’t notice. “I’ve already finished the Wrath story. Living with Thad makes that a no-brainer. The one I’m working on now is Lust. Mother says that ladies don’t Lust, they only Love, but Mother is so Victorian.”

Dinah shook a few aspirin into her palm. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“There’s a sink and a toilet in there.” She nodded toward a warped door on the far side of the bed. “The shower’s at the other end of the hall.”

Terrific. She may as well have said the other end of the earth. Dinah yanked open the sticky bathroom door, found a clean glass above the sink and turned on the faucet. At the last instant, she saw the spider. Ruthlessly, she sluiced it down the sink in a torrent of scalding water and rinsed the glass. She downed the aspirin and examined the toilet seat on both sides for spiders before sitting down. Tomorrow she would light out for Katherine, on foot if necessary, and check into a hotel. She would phone the Russell Crowe guy, Robbie whatshisname, send Uncle Cleon a nice note and a box of cigars, and let the dead bury the dead.

When she emerged from the toilet, K.D. started up where she’d left off. “I’ve based all of my stories on Daddy’s life, only I’ve given the characters different names and occupations. Daddy says I need to watch out I’m not sued for libel.”

“Mm.”

“That doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of verisimilitude, which means Truth. Verisimilitude and observation are the keys to great writing. My teacher says that a writer must be constantly observing Life.”

“Sounds strenuous.” Sneezing repeatedly, Dinah pulled a dress and a couple of shirts out of her jumbled suitcase and hung them in the armoire. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow I’ll tell Uncle Cleon I’m allergic to the dog and move into a hotel in Katherine.

“Envy’s another of the deadly sins,” continued K.D., failing to observe Dinah’s conspicuous disinterest. “That story is mostly about Margaret. I called her Millicent. She’s an aging movie star married to a brilliant film director, Charles—that’s Daddy, of course. She gets fat after having a baby and he divorces her to marry Sybil. Sybil’s your mother, Swan.” The name Swan came saturated with condescension.

Dinah’s hackles rose. “My mother didn’t set out to wreck Cleon’s marriage, you know. He pursued her. Relentlessly.”

“She used her wiles on him,” said K.D., supremely self-assured. “So. When Charles finds out that Sybil’s cheated on him, he’s devastated at first. But then he meets a beautiful model, Natasha, that’s
my
mother, and falls passionately in love. Sybil’s onto the next man and doesn’t care, but Millicent envies Natasha’s power over Charles because she wants her son Wharton to inherit his fortune. Wharton is my name for Wendell.”

What a rigmarole, thought Dinah. Yet it wasn’t so awfully far from the reality. The family mythology had soaked into her own imagination just as it had soaked into K.D.’s. Cleon forsaking his first wife, Margaret, and their son, Wendell, to run off with Swan Fately, a fiery Seminole beauty. His legendary crackup when Swan took their son, Lucien, and ran off with Hart Pelerin. Cleon’s fight to win joint custody of Lucien. The period of reconciliation during which he offered his friendship to Swan and her new husband and showered gifts and attention on their daughter, Dinah. The shock and upheaval following Hart Pelerin’s death. Cleon’s strange and abiding alliance with Margaret and finally, his May-December marriage to a former Miss Georgia, Neesha Symms. K.D. had enough material for several potboilers.

Dinah sifted through her suitcase for a nightshirt and came up with an oversized tee with “Feel Safe Tonight, Sleep With A Cop” stenciled on the back. Shit. This is what came of hasty packing. Was this all she had to sleep in? If she’d been alone, she’d have set fire to it and slept in the nude. She gritted her teeth, stripped off her sweaty clothes and slipped into the damned thing.

The Constant Observer looked up from her opus. “Do you sleep with a cop?”

“No.”

“Then why do you wear that?”

“Penance. I bought it in the hair shirt department at Nordstrom.” Tomorrow she’d go into town and buy a replacement. Something with a picture of Russell Crowe or a wallaby. She climbed up to the top bunk and clasped a pillow over her chest. Why had Nick called? Was he arrogant enough to think she’d ever speak to him again?

“I haven’t had actual sex yet,” said K.D. “There aren’t any mature boys in my school. They’re all really short, and sooo dorky. I feel I’m ready for a sexual experience, but with an older man. Someone worldly and evolved. Like Aleksandr Petrovsky on
Sex and the City
.”

Dinah squashed the pillow over her face. How long had Nick been cheating and who was that redhead? She’d seen her someplace before. How many others had there been? Tomorrow, she’d ask Cleon’s doctor for a dose of Penicillin. Better safe than venereal.

The author prated on. “A name says so much about a character, don’t you think? Wharton is stuffy and boring, like poor Wendell. Millicent is old-timey and strait-laced like Margaret and Sybil is sooo pagan. The perfect name for your mother. Of course, the story has lots of conflict and bitchy dialogue.”

Dinah was tempted to give the little hack a one-on-one tutorial in bitchiness, punctuated by a few hard whaps to the derriere. But she hadn’t defended her mother’s honor since fifth grade when she lopped off Mindy Frye’s ponytail for calling her a squaw. A lot had changed since then and it was hard to explain her mother’s flighty temperament and serial, short-lived marriages. Even so, if K.D.’s stories were meant for Cleon’s reading, she’d be well advised to sheathe her claws. He had an old-school sense of gallantry about the women he’d loved and didn’t like them meowing about each other.

“Daddy’s old secretary, Darla, is the protagonist of the Lust story. He had an affair with her before he met Mother and they went to Paris together once or twice. She still writes to him. Mother doesn’t like it, but Daddy just laughs. He cherishes loyalty. I call Darla Dierdre and she’s an equestrienne, because I’m mad about horses. Write what you know. That’s key. But I need a mysterious setting. Paris is so trite. What’s the most mysterious place you’ve ever been?”

Kingdom Come! The torturers at Guantánamo could take lessons from this chatterbox. “I don’t know. Istanbul.”

“That’s actually rather good. I just read about Turkey in my social studies class.”

There was the sound of energetic scribbling. Dinah rolled over and thought about Turkey, where she’d gone to study First Century cave churches with her anthropology professor a few years back. The most prevalent superstition in Turkey is a belief in the evil eye. If a person looks with envy at another man’s wife or his children or his orchard, the power of that envious look can cause illness or injury or even death. Everyone carries a talisman to stave off the evil eye. She wished she had a talisman to stave off the obnoxious author, something to cause sleepiness or writer’s block or speechlessness. A gag and a roll of duct tape came to mind.

“Okay, how’s this? Charles murders an evil imam and there’s a fatwa against him. He flees down an alley, climbs over a wall, and drops into Dierdre’s garden. He breaks into her house to steal some clothes and disguise himself and Dierdre walks into her bedroom and sees him undressed. So here comes the good part:
Dierdre’s sultry, sapphire eyes devoured the glistening beauty of his naked, virile body and she lusted
for him with every fiber of her being.
”

With every fiber of her being, Dinah wished she could strangle this pest. She strangled her pillow instead and tried to ignore her, but there was no ignoring K.D.

“Are you listening up there? What do you think? Is
every fiber
too much of a cliché? It’s what Eduardo said to Lucien the other day.
You’ve cheated and you’ve lied and I’ll make you regret it with every fiber of your being
.”

So that’s what’s eating them, thought Dinah, and fell asleep feeling even more down on love.