Bones of Contention (5 page)

Chapter Eight

There was a racket. Knocking, barking, voices, a banging door. Dinah rolled over and nearly tumbled off the bunk. She held onto the edge and focused. K.D., in a rustle of fuchsia satin, pirouetted and preened.

“That was Mackenzie,” she said and twirled in front of the armoire mirror. “You have a half-hour until dinner. Did you bring an evening dress? Mother says just because Daddy moved us into this horror doesn’t mean we can’t still be chic.”

Dinah’s self-restraint was waning fast. “I didn’t know your father’s death would be cause for a gala.”

“You needn’t be sarcastic. Daddy’s made us all promise not to cry for him. He’s lived a magnificent life and he wants no hearts and flowers.” She glossed her lips and tossed her hair. “Anyway, you’re not even his real niece.” And she sailed out the door with Cantoo romping along behind.

“Shit.” Dinah pushed herself out of the squishy mattress and climbed down from her roost. As she stepped onto the bottom bunk, something sharp dug into her foot. “Double shit!”

It was the wire binding of the Constant Observer’s anthology of deadly sins. She picked up the notebook and leafed through it. In addition to the titled stories, K.D. had devoted a separate section to each member of the family. Cleon, Neesha, Margaret, Wendell, Lucien, Eduardo and an apparently recent entry for Dinah. After that bombshell about Lucien cheating, Dinah couldn’t resist reading what the little snoop had gleaned from her eavesdropping. Maybe lust was what was eating Lucien, and jealousy was what was eating Eduardo.

Uh-oh. Could Mack be the Other Man? That would certainly make an interesting triangle.

She skipped to the entry on herself.

Dinah threw the book down and stalked off to the toilet. When had she been sharp-tongued? Whenever she went home to Georgia and had to socialize, she talked so sweet her teeth itched.
And as for her mother being slutty, Swan Fately might be fickle. She might marry and divorce too casually and too often. But she had more class and generosity in her little finger than Neesha had in her whole body. More than K.D. would have if she lived to be a hundred. More than I have, too, thought Dinah, sorry she hadn’t stuck up for her. Lucien would have.

She appraised her voodoo eyes in the mirror above the rust-stained basin. You shouldn’t have come, she told her reflection. You should have sent a wreath or a headless chicken. Jeez!

The aroma of roasting meat wafted up from the kitchen. Her stomach growled. The last meal she remembered was a brick of kiln-dried lasagna and two sawdust breadsticks at 30,000 feet over the Pacific. Even more than sleep, she needed food. Just chill, Dinah. Put on your game face and go out there and strew compliments and congeniality like beads at Mardi Gras.

She donned her all-purpose little black dress, which was her only dress, pinned a pair of crystal shoulder-dusters in her ears, and pronounced herself passable. For a pushy foreigner. For a freaking wake. She squared her shoulders and marched downstairs.

On the second floor landing, a scratching noise arrested her attention and she stuck her head around the corner. Thad and a black boy of about the same age were picking the lock on a door at the end of the hall. She ducked out of sight and listened to them whispering and sniggering.

The punks. They must be ripping off the whole house on a room-by-room basis. And who rated a room with a lock in this fleabag? Looting her room had been as easy as turning the knob.

Well, if they thought they could get away with it, they had another think coming. There wasn’t enough Valium in the bottle to do more than make them drowsy, but she’d make sure the next pills they swiped out of her suitcase would teach them a lesson. She added a strong laxative to her Katherine shopping list and continued downstairs.

In the great room, everyone milled about with a cocktail in hand. Dinah stood on the periphery and watched. Cleon was engaged in conversation with a thickset, silver-haired man in a belted safari jacket. He sported a full, salt-and-pepper beard and a cigarette in a plastic filter clenched between his teeth. By the process of elimination, she ID’d him as Dr. Desmond Fisher.

Neesha, glamorous in a clingy, floor-length mauve gown, sat enthroned in one of the leather chairs in the center of the room. Her platinum hair was hooked behind one ear and her plump lips curved in a rueful smile. She held out her right hand to Wendell, Cleon’s eldest, and said, “It’s from that elegant little shop in the Harbour Hotel. A keepsake from Cleon.”

Wendell, balder and heavier than when Dinah last saw him, bent forward in his chair for a closer look. He’d been a football jock in high school and college, but time and the sedentary life of a banker had turned muscle to fat and his jacket strained at the seams. His face was solemn and stiff, as if he’d been botoxed from the eyes down, and his voice was sepulchral. “That’s quite a rock.”

Eduardo rolled Lucien’s wheelchair to Neesha’s side and the two of them bowed their heads over the ring like lapidaries. “Well, aren’t we the pampered one,” said Eduardo. “How many carats?”

“Ten.” She dropped her chin and lifted her eyes, studiedly demure. “Of course, he shouldn’t have.”

“You deserve twenty,” said Lucien, “after all these years putting up with the old tyrant.”

She threw a nervous look around the room and took back her hand.

Eddie giggled. If he was steamed about Lucien’s cheating, he was covering it well.

Cleon’s first wife Margaret, a handsome woman in her early sixties with gray-blond hair sleeked back from a widow’s peak into a bun at the nape of her neck, leaned her back against the bar and surveyed the room, alert as a raptor. She was that rare woman who actually looked good in gold lamé.

Dinah had to start somewhere and Margaret was the one standing closest to the champagne. Dinah went to say hello. “Margaret. It’s good to see you.”

“Dinah, Cleon must be tickled pink. He tried to woo your mother into coming, but she had too much sense. You’ll be his consolation prize.”

Grin and bear it, thought Dinah. Up to a point. She poured herself a flute of champagne. “It’s just possible that Uncle Cleon likes me for myself, Margaret.”

She smiled and put a hand on Dinah’s arm. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I happen to know that Cleon likes you very much, indeed, and so do I. I’m overjoyed to have somebody with a brain to talk to.” She shifted her eyes to Neesha. “The widow-in-waiting is blinging tonight. That bauble must’ve addled her brain or she wouldn’t have let him Svengali her to this boondocks.”

“You’ve got more sense than anyone I know, Margaret. How’d he Svengali you?”

“When I married him forty years ago I wanted the usual
’til death do us part
boilerplate. He overruled me with
so long as we both shall love
. Providence has finally overruled him and I wouldn’t miss this parting for all the tea in China.”

Dinah saw what Eduardo meant about grief being in short supply.

Margaret’s out-of-context smile was disconcerting. “Cleon can pull the wool over Neesha’s eyes. She’s never looked any deeper than his pockets. But I know him down to the ground. He’s plotting something.”

“Changing his will, you mean?”

“There’s that. I’d hate to see him do Wendell out of his rightful share of the estate. Wen’s a good son, but he’s a cream puff. He won’t stand up to Cleon or compete for his birthright. But Cleon’s nothing if not devious. Something tells me the will is a red herring.” She gestured with her eyes toward Neesha. “Miss Georgia made a mistake by letting him come to Australia by himself.”

“Hasn’t she been with him in Sydney these last few months?”

“No, no. She didn’t want to take the children out of school in Atlanta. She and the kids arrived in Sydney only a day or so before Wendell and I did.”

K.D. hovered behind her mother’s chair, no doubt gathering material for her little book of invective. Neesha kept up a conversation with Wendell while darting surreptitious looks at Margaret and herself. Eduardo and Lucien had gone off into a corner by themselves. They seemed simpatico, although Eduardo’s smile appeared somewhat forced.

Margaret’s eyes sparkled with malice. “Neesha and I declared a truce in Sydney, but I don’t think she quite believes it.”

The doctor emitted a braying laugh at something Cleon had said and Cleon clapped him on the shoulder and chuckled. Eduardo said that Cleon had given Fisher an earful in Sydney, but they certainly seemed chummy enough tonight. Margaret excused herself and moved off to listen in on their conversation.

In a black dinner jacket befitting a gig at Buckingham Palace, Mack sallied across the room with a tray of canapés. “The kitchen isn’t equipped to handle a large number of hors d’oeuvres. I’m afraid the shrimp got a bit crusty under the broiler.”

“They look great to me.” Dinah helped herself to two.

“The place isn’t officially open for business, but your uncle was adamant. Don’t sweat the niceties, he said. But I wish there was more and better help in the kitchen. Your party are the first guests.”

She said, “I can live without some niceties, but I’m squeamish about spiders.”

“You saw a spider?”

“It was tiny, but one roomie’s enough.”

“It was probably an assassin. They eat other spiders.”

“Then I’m sorry I killed it. I’m also squeamish about snakes. I hope there are no more death adders lurking around.”

“I’m sure what happened to Lucien was a oncer.”

Maybe death adders weren’t everyday callers at Crow Hill, but his offhanded certainty made her want to knock wood. “How long have you been running the lodge, Mack?”

“I bought it last year. The place had been derelict for a long time. I’ve been slow to renovate. More spiders than money, I’m afraid. Ultimately, I plan to turn it into a destination resort with original Aboriginal art in every room and art and cultural tours. Of course, I’ll need to raise quite a lot of money. Your uncle’s offer to pay top dollar for a week’s stay was a godsend.”

Dinah wanted to ask if the price covered the risk of allowing an illegal suicide on the premises, but self-censored. Mack might not know. And if he wondered why a wealthy American sought out his spidery, no-niceties inn in the boonies, top dollar had evidently allayed his concerns.

Tanya, the disgruntled Aboriginal cook, came around with a tray of stuffed mushrooms. Mack took one for himself and one for Dinah. “You can manage two trays at once, can’t you, Tanya?” He pressed the shrimp tray into her free hand.

She glared mutinously and stumped off with a tray balanced precariously on either arm.

Dinah foresaw employee relations issues in Mack’s future. “What did you do before taking on this place, Mack?”

“I was concierge at the Godfrey Arms in London. When the hotel went bankrupt and closed its doors, I decided to return to Australia, reconnect with my roots, and track down my birth mother.” He glanced around the room. Everyone was deep in conversation and Tanya was circulating with the shrimp. “If you’d like, I’ll show you some of what I have in mind for the place.”

“Sure.” Maybe he had a private room in mind for her.

He led her back into the foyer, past the stairs, and turned left down a long, dismal hallway. A few paces along and another, shorter hall turned left again and doglegged behind the stairs. Dinah followed Mack to where it dead-ended at a dwarf-sized door. What was this? A storm cellar? A storage room? The pit where he kept his pet snake?

He opened the door, switched on the light, and motioned her inside.

She looked at the diminutive door and balked. “You know, Eduardo is wild about interior design. He’d just love to see your ideas. I’ll run back and get him.”

Mack’s chin jutted. “I assure you I’m thoroughly domesticated and trustworthy.” He turned a cold, indignant shoulder, stooped, and went inside.

Oh, for crying out loud. She was probably being paranoid.

“Geronimo,” she said under her breath and followed him three steps down into the basement.

Chapter Nine

“Wow!”

The room was windowless but beautifully lit and redolent of fresh paint. Shelves lined the back wall and Aboriginal art adorned the other three. A campaign table in the center of the room was stacked with books on Aboriginal art, culture, and mythology.

“This is my study.” He smiled broadly, mollified by her admiration.

“I can see where Lucien’s been learning about Aboriginal myths and art.”

“He’s been in to browse every day. He’s going to buy two paintings and Neesha’s also expressed a strong interest. The paintings are all by highly respected local artists, and all based on Aboriginal myths.”

It sounded like a sales pitch. She said, “Aboriginal mythology seems so much more esoteric and mystical than other mythologies I’ve studied. My Western bias, I guess.” She stroked the feathers on a pair of brightly painted poles. “What are these?”

“They’re morning star poles, used in burial ceremonies. The morning star connects the feathered string to the deceased’s soul to guide it to the Land of the Dead.”

She spied a quartet of intricately painted sticks in the corner. Each stick was different, whimsical, like figures in some children’s game. “These are fun.”

“Burial poles. The more ornate the pole, the more important the dead man.”

Was she hypersensitive or did the Top End overdo the death motif? She ambled around the room taking in the art. There were crocodiles and crocodile men in a design of wavy lines and diamonds. There was a kangaroo with x-ray bones being speared by an elongated striped man. There were leaves and flowers and arcane symbols in a complex mosaic of dots, all in the vivid ochres and browns and reds of the Australian earth.

“It’s a fascinating collection. A fine start toward reconnecting.”

He riffled through some papers on the table and handed her a magazine article titled
The Stolen Generation
. “Until nineteen-seventy-one, it was the policy of the Australian government to assimilate their Aborigines through a program of eugenics until the race died out. This agenda entailed, among other things, the removal of mixed race children like myself from their black mothers and placement in detention centers. I was one of those children.”

“You grew up in a detention center?”

“After a year I was adopted by an English couple. They took me back to England and I grew up with only a vague awareness of my origins.”

She supposed from the relatively light color of his skin that Mack’s non-Aboriginal parent was white. “You have no idea who your real father might have been?”

“None. He was probably just some drunk who raped an Aborigine woman and went cavalierly on his way.” His tone was caustic.

“How old were you when you were adopted?”

“About three.”

“And now you’re back to reclaim your Aboriginal identity.”

“Well, I won’t chant or dance or do any body painting. Not while your family is visiting anyway.”

Dinah laughed. “Wise decision. Neesha would brook no body painting. She’s really pouring on the pomp.”

“She wants to make the last few days of Cleon’s life a celebration rather than a prelude to death, something she and the children can remember in a positive way.”

So he did know. Not finicky about the nation’s laws, she decided.

She paused in front of a large serpent coiled around what she assumed were eggs. “Snakes seem to figure prominently in Aboriginal art and mythology. Is this the Taipan?”

“Not necessarily. The Rainbow serpent is known by many names. He’s the father who gave healing powers to the shamans. He could create or destroy. The painting next to it is the mother deity who gives us our monsoons here in the North. Her travels across the land during the Dreaming formed the topography of Kakadu National Park. It’s a World Heritage site. For cultural as well as natural reasons.”

“I had an anthropology professor in college who’d be enthralled by your myths.”

Clearly, Mack was enthralled. He could scarcely contain his enthusiasm. “There are thousands of stories handed down orally from generation to generation. These last few months I’ve immersed myself, compiling my own dictionary of deities and symbols.”

“Then maybe you can explain song lines to me. I was reading about them, but I can’t quite grasp the concept.”

“Try to think of them as footprints, the trails of the ancestors who created the land. In the beginning of the Dreaming, there were no visible landmarks. As the ancestors traveled and assumed different shapes, the world took on shape. Their songs brought the land into existence and each geographical feature retains their spiritual essence and perpetuates it.”

She said, “It sounds similar to the Native Americans’ reverence for the earth.”

“Similar, but song lines are more than that. These paintings, the ceremonies, the storytelling and dancing—all Aboriginal art forms are song lines. The ancestors live on in everything around us and continue to impart their wisdom to those in a receptive state of mind.”

Dinah envied the Aborigines their rapport with the dead. She had a hard time gouging information out of the living.

A painting of a turtle stopped her cold. “Mack, did you hear anything about a journalist who was murdered on top of a sea turtle on Melville Island last week?”

“Oh, yes. The papers were full of it. The fact that he died on Aboriginal land brought the local population a lot of unwanted publicity. Tourism is a growing part of the economy. Anything that scares away visitors is a problem.”

“Was there much speculation about who might have killed the man?”

“One paper speculated that he was killed by pirates. Piracy’s become more common of late. Another tried to make a case against the Tiwis. Completely unfair. In fact, the coverage came perilously close to racist.”

“What was the murdered man’s name?”

“Hambrick, I believe. Bryce Hambrick.”

“I understand he made some enemies in the green movement. A man I met in Darwin thought the killer was a greenie terrorist.”

“Strange things have been happening in several of our coastal areas. I’ve heard rumors of poaching and vandalism and thefts. But I don’t believe environmentalists had anything to do with Hambrick’s murder.”

“Why not?”

“Because they are by and large nonviolent people who respect the earth and want to make it a better place. Like the Aborigines. But the police have turned a blind eye to other groups, people with far more reason to kill anyone who got in their way.”

“What groups?”

“The boat people.”

“You mean illegal immigrants?”

“That’s right.” His delivery grew animated. Obviously, Jacko wasn’t the only one gripped by the Hambrick murder mystery. “Some from Indonesia. Some from the Middle East by way of Indonesia. Iraqis, some of them, people habituated to war and violence.”

“Are boat people a problem in Australia?”

“Enough so that the government has detention camps and sponsors TV ads warning asylum seekers against debarking in certain coastal areas. They could find themselves a midnight snack for sharks or crocs.”

She was surprised that Jacko hadn’t considered the boat people. Maybe he’d been too fixated on the relevance of the water spirit. Did the turtle have any bearing on the Brit’s murder, or was it just in the wrong place at the wrong time? “Mack, do you know any Aboriginal myths about sea turtles?”

“Let’s see.” He communed with the ceiling for a few seconds. “During the Dreamtime, there were two turtle sisters who had a secret reservoir of water under their shells. They were selfish and tried to keep all the water for themselves, but a kangaroo rat kicked them in the chest and water geysered out all over the place and formed the lagoons and creeks and rivers.”

Dinah didn’t think the man who speared the turtle on Melville Island was looking for water. The poor creature was probably just an unlucky bystander. She halfway wished Jacko were here to “noodle” a few more theories with her. Unless the police solved the crime soon, she might never find out what happened.

“Mack, thank you so much for sharing all this with me. I truly hope you’re able to locate your mother.”

“It’s rather a forlorn hope. The adoption records were destroyed and I don’t even know which clan she belonged to.”

“Your adoptive parents don’t know anything at all?”

“Only that my father was an American serviceman. The records at the time contained a note that my birth mother had contacted the American Embassy to ask them to intervene because I was half-American.”

Dinah judged Mack to be somewhere in his mid-to-late thirties, which would place this putative American serviceman in the Vietnam age bracket.

A wild thought sprang into her mind. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jericho and Jerusalem. Could this be the answer to
why here
? Was former Marine Lieutenant Cleon Dobbs’s decision to change his will and do himself in at Ian Mackenzie’s middle-of-nowhere hostelry a coincidence, or was he going to announce over dinner that he’d fathered an Aborigine son out of wedlock?

“You looked perplexed,” Mack said.

“What? No, no. It’s just hard to believe how heartless a…a government can be.”

He said something, but she didn’t hear. She was gnawing on Cleon’s remark about unfinished business in this neck of the woods. She was mulling the implications of the verb
discombobulate
.