Bones of Contention (6 page)

Chapter Ten

“Dear Dinah. We’re so happy you could be here.” Neesha simpered and held out her arms.

Dinah squeezed out an answering smile, steadied herself, and forged into the dining room. “You look well, Neesha. The strain doesn’t show.”

“You’re sweet to say so. We’re all under a dark cloud, of course.”

Dinah frowned. Was it possible she knew about Mack’s origins and was making a bad double entendre?

“What a darling little dress you’re wearing. I told K.D. that you’d wear something simple as pie and make it look chic. I know you think we’re puttin’ on the dog, but the finery is for Cleon. I want his last hours to be filled with beauty, even in this depressing place.”

“He doesn’t seem depressed,” said Dinah.

“Oh, he is. We all are. We’re just trying to make it easy on one another. It’s what Cleon wants.”

Cleon had already ensconced himself at the head of the long, rectangular dining table. “I trust you ladies won’t take umbrage if an old invalid don’t rise for y’all.”

“Of course not,” said Neesha. “Here’s my place card. Don’t you want me next to you, Cleon?”

“Not tonight, darlin’. I told Tanya to shuffle us up, give a couple of the others a chance to partake of my companionship.”

Wendell held out Neesha’s chair for her, one seat removed from Cleon.

“Thank you, kind sir.” Neesha patted the chair to her left. “And dear Dinah’s gonna be right here next to me.”

Wendell held out the chair for Dinah. She exchanged a look with Cleon and sat down with a nebulous sense of dread. There was enough tension without the introduction of a brand new Dobbs.

Eduardo flitted around the table humming tunelessly, reading the place cards. “Here you are, Lucien, in the hot seat again.” He moved a chair out of the way and parked Lucien’s wheelchair between Cleon and Neesha. “Voilà.”

Cleon said, “But for your fine manners elevatin’ the tone, I don’t reckon we could call ourselves civilized, Eduardo.”

Eduardo sashayed around the table and found his place card in the middle of the table directly opposite Dinah. He leaned across the table and mouthed, “See what I mean?”

Wendell seated Margaret and Little Miss Hatchet Job, K.D., and took his place at the foot of the table opposite Cleon.

Cleon said, “You fairly outdo yourself bein’ chivalrous, Wendell. We shoulda named him Lancelot, shouldn’t we, Maggie?”

Lucien laughed and Cleon turned his mischievous eyes on him. “On the subject of names, I hear tell that in Da Vinci’s paintin’ of the Last Supper, nobody knows if it’s John or Mary at the right hand of Jesus.”

Dinah couldn’t believe her ears. Cleon never dissed Lucien or anybody else for being gay. He had stood against bigotry of all kinds for as long as she’d known him. It was one of his most endearing qualities. Was he trying to provoke a fight?

Lucien scowled. “Since when did you give a damn about art or religion?”

“Don’t underestimate me, son. I could have a deathbed conversion.”

“Lucien.” Neesha diverted his attention. “Is your poor leg simply excruciating? Eduardo says you’re back painting already. Tell me about it, do.”

Seemingly relieved by the distraction, Lucien jockeyed his wheelchair closer to the table and started to regurgitate the Taipan myth.

Dr. Fisher entered the room carrying a highball and looking deeply self-satisfied.

He walked around the table and found his place on Dinah’s left. “You must be Dinah. Desmond Fisher. Call me Dez. Everybody does.” He gave off an effluvium of cigarette smoke and the Hemingway beard could have used a thorough wash and a trim. His Australian accent wasn’t nearly as broad as Jacko’s, but he had an irritating, staccato speaking style.

“Nice to meet you, Dez.”

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

She acknowledged that she did not.

“Wouldn’t expect you to. You were climbing trees and chasing a pair of wild kittens around the yard back then. I went hunting with your father once or twice.”

“You knew my father?”

“Crow Hill’s not the most luxurious place to carry out your uncle’s last wishes, but Big Brother prohibits suicide so we had to improvise.”

“Right. I never knew my father hunted. When was this?”

“Government nannies putting their beaks in everybody’s business, protecting us from ourselves. If we’re not careful, they’ll regulate what we can eat and drink. Can’t even lie in the sun without catching a scolding. And look how they’ve pared away the rights of smokers. You a smoker, Dinah?”

“Once in a while. About my Dad, what can you…?”

“Good girl. Don’t let the stickybeaks tell you what to do.”

“You’ve drunk too many Scotches, Desmond.” Margaret’s voice was freighted with disapproval. “Don’t harangue the girl.”

“And don’t you be a killjoy, Margaret. We’re here to give Cleon a rousing send-off, isn’t that right, Cleon?”

“That’s the plan,” said Cleon. “Wouldn’t want anybody killin’ the joy.”

Eduardo rolled his eyes.

Lucien uttered a short laugh and resumed his conversation with Neesha. “Tell me about your plans for the gallery, Neesha.”

“Well, it’s got a super location right on Peachtree Road near the Phipps Plaza and it’s just a fabulous space. Cleon’s already paid for the first year’s lease. I’ve got several pieces on consignment from a great Atlanta artist, Laura Mitchell. Do you know her? But I’d love for you and Eduardo to introduce me to some of your artist friends and acquire some good pieces. Of course, I’d be happy to hang your work. And would you help me pack the Homers for the return flight? I think I should buy extra insurance, don’t you. I simply couldn’t bear to lose them.”

Dinah tried to steer the doctor back to the subject she was interested in. “You were telling me about my father, Doctor…Dez.”

“Hart Pelerin?” He put away the last of his Scotch and looked around as if he needed a refill. “Yes, sorry to hear about his death. Untimely. Couldn’t have been much past forty. Young or old, we all die. Trouble is, people don’t accept the reality. Cleon’s got the right idea, leave on your own terms. You have a living will, Dinah?”

“I don’t have a will of any kind.”

“Well, you should, and a medical directive that prescribes how far they should take resuscitation efforts when you’re in a vegetative state and unable to speak for yourself like that woman in Florida. What’s her name?”

“Terri Schiavo?”

“That’s the one. Keeled over brain-dead at twenty-six. If she’d had a medical directive and a living will, she’d have saved her family and the whole country a lot of hoo-ha. They’d have pulled the plug. It pays to plan ahead.”

Dinah suppressed a whimper. It was going to be a long evening and the doctor was going to ride his hobbyhorse from soup to nuts. Or until she went nuts. Maybe in the morning when he wasn’t soused, she could get him to share his recollections of her father.

“Shall I pour the first wine, sir?” Mack had lined up a row of wine bottles on the sideboard behind Dinah’s chair.

“I reckon we’re about settled,” said Cleon. “Let Neesha be the taster. She chose it.”

Mack took a white wine out of a tub of ice and poured an inch into Neesha’s glass.

She swished it around and tasted. “Pouilly Fuissé. It’s scrumptious.”

“At the price, it oughta be,” said Cleon. “Pour it all around, Mack, and sit down.” He thumped the plate to his left. “You’ve got my left wing.”

The seating arrangement confirmed Dinah’s suspicions that Mack was due for a genealogical eye-opener. When he finished pouring, he took his assigned seat beside Cleon. A vacant chair remained between himself and Margaret.

Thad. Dinah felt a twinge of alarm. Where was the little perp? Had he boosted more drugs from other people’s rooms? A doctor could have narcotics or opiates in his bag. He’d have the lethal drug meant for Cleon.

As if reading her thoughts, Cleon demanded, “Where’s Thadeus?”

“He’ll be down in a minute, dear.” Neesha’s smile turned hectic. “You know how he gets caught up in whatever he’s doing and forgets the time.”

“Only an idiot forgets to feed hisself. He havin’ one of his squirrely days?”

“He’s not an idiot, Cleon. He’s just not punctual.”

“He’s damned peculiar is what he is. We got the psychiatrist’s bills to prove it.”

“Thad’s coping with a lot of confusion and this, this suicide you’re subjecting us to is too much. He has attention deficit disorder. What did you expect?”

“All right, Neesha, you’ve made your point. Lord knows, his peculiarity don’t stand out none in this family.”

Doesn’t
, thought Dinah. His peculiarity
doesn’t
stand out
any
. But the news that Thad had psychiatric problems ramped her stress level into the red zone. She was on the verge of declaring an emergency when the kid shambled into the room and flopped into the chair between Margaret and Mack.

Cleon said, “You gonna tell us why you’re late to the table, Thadeus?”

“If I’d known you’d be raggin’ on me I wouldn’t be here at all.”

“You’d be here if I had to hogtie you. Push your hair out of your face and straighten your necktie. You look like a heathen.”

“Oh, for chrissakes,” said Lucien. “Don’t take out your spite on the kid.”

“Discipline ain’t spite, but what do any of my young’uns know about discipline? It ain’t a trait that runs rampant in our family.”

Wendell said, “Don’t be too hard on him, Dad. He didn’t mean any disrespect, now did you, Thad?”

Neesha smiled her gratitude.

But Lucien was off on a tangent. “If we lack discipline, it’s because you never noticed us when we were good. The only times you notice us are when we raise hell.”

Here we go, thought Dinah. The customary Lucien-Cleon headbutt.

Neesha tried pouring oil on troubled waters. “Neither you nor Cleon is feeling well, Lucien, but this isn’t the time or the place for such talk.”

Wendell said, “Dad’s work was very demanding. He did the best that he could and he’s been openhanded and generous with all of us. To say otherwise is ungrateful and downright mean-spirited.” He had a ponderous speaking style. It wasn’t just his Southern accent. It was as if each word labored under a heavy weight of gravitas.

“Money,” said Lucien, “was what he gave us instead of time. When did he ever ask how your life was going, Wen, or give you a pat on the back for being such a Boy Scout? It’s not like he supported our interests or talents.”

K.D. piped up. “You’re being childish, Lucien. Daddy is extremely supportive of my writing. And your plebeian paintings are all over the house in Atlanta.”

“If they are,” said Lucien, “it’s because of Neesha. Dad’s only interested in dead artists.”

Margaret said, “It surprises me, Lucien, that you think Cleon didn’t pay you enough attention as a child. He was so smitten with your mother, I’d have thought you got the best of his fathering. I hope he apportions his estate more impartially.”

“For heaven’s sake,” said Wendell, “don’t go down that road again, mother.”

“He deserted you when you were in diapers, Wen. It wounded you emotionally.”

“He deserted you, not me, and I’m not wounded.”

“Can’t we please have a peaceful dinner together without all this bickering?” pleaded Neesha.

Cleon chortled as if the bickering entertained him hugely. “Now people, don’t y’all be perturbed by Lucien mouthin’ off. He was just playin’ a broken-winged mama duck to draw my ill humor away from Thad, and so he has. Top up everybody’s wine, Mack. The gang’s all here. Let’s carpe this fine diem.”

Chapter Eleven

Dinah woke up clammy and disoriented. A spider roved across the ceiling, not two feet above her face. The smell of mildew and dry rot and dog dander clogged her sinuses. From somewhere deep in the recesses of the architecture, Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias sang,
To all the girls I’ve loved before, who’ve traveled in and out my door…

Last night’s dinner came back to her in a reflux of disagreeable flashbacks. Fisher maundering about death. Lucien whining about ancient injustices. Eduardo rolling his eyes. Wendell acting the goody-goody, Neesha fawning, Margaret gloating, the twins being their usual insufferable selves. Cleon pushing everybody’s buttons and chortling. He hadn’t sprung the news about Mack’s parentage and Mack seemed unaware that his status was about to change. Maybe the private eye who’d telephoned Cleon with the urgent matter had other things to check out before he could validate Mack’s bona fides. Or maybe she’d guessed wrong. Anyway, the evening was about as much fun as a blister. A whole passel of blisters. So far as she could see, the only plus at this end of the globe was a minus: there was no Nick.

Keeping a wary eye on the spider, she sat up and dangled her feet over the edge of the bunk. How long before she stopped thinking about Nick when she woke up in the morning? How long before she stopped missing his hands and his mouth?

A wave of mortification engulfed her. She jumped to the floor, threw off the odious Sleep With A Cop nightshirt, and dressed for a hike down the hall to the shower. She took some comfort from the fact that K.D. was already out and about. One crack from that piss-ant this morning and she’d skin her alive.

The hall was dark and empty and the communal washroom unlocked. She slipped inside and slid the bolt. The room smelled of some eye-wateringly potent disinfectant. She hung her clothes on the door hook, whisked aside the white plastic shower curtain, and inspected the area for spiders. The shower was the size of an upright coffin, discolored and leaky, but spider-free. She ran the water from cold to lukewarm, stepped inside, and tried to project the course of her life post-Crow Hill.

As present, her debts exceeded her assets by just a few hundred. But if she didn’t get her act together soon, she’d be destitute, busking on street corners and passing the hat. She didn’t need or want a lot of money, just enough to afford a measure of freedom. She liked to think of herself as an intelligent woman who hadn’t yet found her niche, and that someday she would do big things—
Golden Bough
-ish things. That lost city, the myth-laden relics, they were out there just waiting for her to show up and reveal them to the world. Or so she’d once believed. Lately, she was beginning to fear that the greatest myth of all was her own potential.

Well, why fight it? She had no prospect of doing any big things in the near term, and choosing so poorly in the romantic line demolished any conceit that she was an intelligent woman. The pressure was off and she might as well own up to the fact that she was hoping Cleon would leave her a few thou, or enough at least to pay off her bills and give her a fresh start.

She had to believe he’d come through with a little something. Would he have asked her to travel all this way if he didn’t have at least a token bequest in store for her? As Neesha had sniped via K.D.’s journal, he felt an attachment to her. And Dinah cared about him, too, although her feelings were muddled. There was affection and gratitude and admiration, diluted in no small measure by exasperation and embarrassment and generational misunderstanding. He’d been especially unlovable last night, although Lucien had said some pretty mean things back to him. The tensions between them must have been building like steam inside a volcano during that week in Sydney.

There was no fan in the bathroom. The mirror fogged and the towels felt damp and rough against her skin. She dried and dressed in the steamy mist and admonished herself not to count her chickens before they hatched. Even if Cleon left her some money, it wouldn’t be available for weeks, maybe months, while the will went through probate. She hated to touch Lucien for a loan. But she needed cash to tide her over and with sales of his art flourishing, he and Eduardo were rolling in the green.

It was noon when she passed Lucien’s door. Should she knock? She wavered. He’d had a lot to drink last night and if he was hung-over or poring over that dreadful Taipan painting, he’d be a bear. Maybe this afternoon would be a more auspicious time to talk money, after a bite of lunch and a few sociable preliminaries.

She didn’t see or hear anyone on her way downstairs. The house was quiet. Not a creature was stirring, not even Cantoo. Willie and Julio had ceased their warbling and no sounds from the outside world penetrated the musty silence. Had she slept through a neutron bomb? A massacre? The Rapture?

She peeked into the great room. “Hello?”

Empty. Just the boars’ heads mounted like sentinels over their private tomb. She tried the dining room. Nobody there either. She followed the stale smell of fried meat into the kitchen. The room was dark. She scouted around and found the light switch. There was a pan on the cold stove with a piece of mutton in a lake of congealed grease. On the counter, she espied a glass pot with a couple of inches of either crankcase oil or coffee. She took a chance, found a cup and heated it in the microwave.

Where was everybody? She took her cup, retraced her steps through the foyer and looked out the front door. All the cars were gone. Had there been another crisis? Another snakebite? Why had they skipped out en masse? She didn’t crave human company, but she didn’t like being left alone with the spiders and snakes either.

Maybe Mack was sequestered in his hideaway. She traipsed down the hall to the midget-sized door and knocked.

“Mack?” She opened it a crack and hit the light. As she entered, the colorful array of painted lizards and snakes and kangaroos jumped out at her like spooks. They seemed to be the only ones at home today. Involuntarily, or so it seemed, she gravitated to the painting of the turtle. The specter of the dead man on the turtle had lodged in her brain like a squatter. She wondered if Mack had clipped any articles about the case.

She sat down at the table and perused a few magazine articles. They were mostly about the lost generation and the resulting cultural alienation of those forcibly removed from their Aboriginal homes. There was one article on contemporary Aboriginal art. Of the 30,000 Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory, an astounding 6,000 of them were artists producing some kind of art or crafts for sale. Her eyebrows shot up. Could all of this output be telepathically communicated from an ancestral spirit?

There was nothing in his stockpile of articles about the murdered Brit and she felt a bit let down. She made another circuit of the room, pausing in front of each painting, receptive to whatever wisdom the spirits might bestow. But if these spirits were talking, they were talking in a language she couldn’t parse.

She soon lost interest and went to reconnoiter the veranda. She found Tanya sitting on an upended wooden keg grinding some sort of yellow-brown substance to a powder in a large stone mortar. There were a dozen tin cans lined up in front of her. Dinah pulled up a chair and watched. As each batch was pulverized, Tanya funneled it into an empty can, dropped a fresh clump of the stuff into her mortar and began working her pestle.

“What is that?”

“Limonite oxide.”

The mineralogical exactitude took Dinah aback. “What’s it for?”

“It’s ochre.”

“For paint, you mean?”

Tanya’s snort was obviously Aboriginal for
duh
.

Dinah laughed. “Are you an artist?”

“I find the ants’ nests and dig out the limonite for the ones that paint. Not much money, but not that much work either.”

“My brother’s an artist, but I guess you know that already.”

“Hmmph.”

Dinah considered explaining that the work currently on Lucien’s easel wasn’t nearly as good as the rest of his work, but thought better of it. Tanya wouldn’t have occasion to view Lucien’s other work and maybe her contempt had more to do with the subject matter of the piece than the style or execution. Taipan was, after all, one of Tanya’s ancestors and a god, to boot. Who knew how much leeway she’d grant to a foreigner to portray him?

The sun felt warm and reenergizing. Dinah shaded her eyes and gazed across the untended yard at the encroaching woods, no doubt teeming with ancestral fauna. Wombats and bandicoots, Tasmanian devils and deadly vipers. And painted trees. “What are those red and yellow bands on the trees about, Tanya? Is it part of some Aboriginal…” she thought twice and edited the word superstition…“tradition?”

“Wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

Ooh-kay. From the moment she slopped the Charleston bisque into the bowls last night, Tanya had made it plain that sociability was not her nature and food service was not her first love. Dinah held neither of these aversions against her. She closed her eyes, turned her face to the sun and listened to a medley of unfamiliar birdsong and the rhythmic grating of Tanya’s pestle. It took her back to her childhood, sitting beside her Seminole grandmother on her ramshackle back porch beside the Okefenokee as she shelled beans or wove reeds and reminisced about her childhood on the Big Cypress Reservation. There was a beauty in that placid, simple way of life. Of course, it would bore anyone under the age of ninety wild.

Tanya didn’t look much past fifty, but there was an intimation of antiquity about her, as if she’d been misplaced in Time. Perhaps it was her serenity. She was a lot more serene grinding limonite oxide than she was cooking and serving.

Dinah’s curiosity finally got the better of her and she tried to draw her out. “Will you stay on with Mack or is this a temporary position?”

Tanya didn’t deign to respond.

Dinah tried again. “I worked for a caterer once, drudging all day in a hot kitchen. It was miserable. I’d rather work outside in the fresh air anytime.”

Still no comeback.

“It must be a good feeling to know you provide the artists with their colors. It makes what they paint partly your creation.”

“Don’t be a nong.” She whanged her pestle on the side of the mortar a few times and surprisingly, her stolid face cracked into a smile. “I’m the yellows.”

Dinah felt the thrill of conquest. She’d broken the ice. “You’re a whole spectrum of colors—yellow to brown to orange to red. The artists would be lost without you.”

“Not all of them use the true ochre.”

“Still, the demand must be high. So many people in the Territory are artists.”

“Not many jobs around. People need money. Most do woodcarving or painting or some kind of art. Some I could name take advantage. Commerce men. They buy cheap and sell high to rich tourists who don’t know what they’re looking at.”

With the frame of reference between them this small, naming names wasn’t necessary. Dinah let a minute go by. “Mack certainly has a beautiful collection of paintings.”

“Hmmph.”

Was that a judgment on his principles or his taste? Or was
hmmph
just a verbal tic, no more pejorative than
I hear you
? Whatever it meant, Tanya didn’t explain.

Dinah persevered. “It’s terrible that he was taken away from his mother and deprived of his Aboriginal heritage, but he seems dedicated to learning everything he can about the culture and reintegrating himself into the community.”

Tanya emptied the last of the ochre into a can, stood up and brushed off her apron. “If you’re hungry, there’s bread in the pantry and cheese in the refrigerator. I got no time to cook for you special. Have to start dinner soon as Mack and the lady come back from town with the groceries. Soup, two kinds of fish, beef in red wine, some kind of meringue pie and she’ll want it all poshed up and garnished with flowers and leaves. Too much to remember and people in and out all the time. The old man wanting olives for his martinis, the cripple wanting a poultice for his leg. Always somebody wanting something.”

Neesha’s insistence on four-course, gourmet dinners mystified Dinah as much as it aggravated Tanya. Much as he loved his martinis, Cleon had always been a meat-and-potatoes, no-frills kind of eater and the rest of the family should have gotten its fill of haute cuisine in Sydney. But Neesha had been living in Atlanta unconstrained by Cleon’s likes and dislikes for the last six months. She fawned and kowtowed to him still, but maybe these banquets were a passive-aggressive statement that she intended to spread her wings when he was gone and do as she pleased.

The thing that would please Dinah right now was a heart-to-heart with Lucien. “Did Lucien and Eddie go into Katherine, too?”

“Them, the old man, the doctor. They all went. Wendell took my nephew, Victor, with him and the young ones. Victor sees them spending money like water, he’ll think we should be able to do the same. He’ll come home wanting an iPod and forget who he is.”

Dinah felt a stab of guilt. Tanya had no rich relatives to mooch off, no one to hit up for a loan, no inheritance to hope for. It put Dinah’s troubles in perspective. She resolved to stop sniveling about her little setbacks and be thankful she didn’t have to raid ants’ nests or bake meringue pies to make ends meet.