Where the Bones are Buried

by Jeanne Matthews

  She sniffed. “There are more important things than the law. Who knows that better than you? You’ve been sitting on Cleon’s illegal drug money for the last four years.”

  Dinah ground the gears as she shoved the stick into reverse and jerked the Golf out of the parking space.

  “For goodness’ sake,” said Swan. “You’ve gone and upset her, Margaret. You should have waited until after we’ve kicked off our shoes and had a nice glass of merlot. She probably hasn’t told her young man about that drug money yet. Didn’t you tell me he was in some branch of law enforcement, baby?”

  Dinah’s stomach took a roller-coaster plunge. Was that an expression of concern or an implied threat? Her fingers clenched the steering wheel as the implications sizzled through her brain.

  Swan didn’t wait for an answer. She chattered on, seemingly oblivious. “Your brother Lucien sent you a sweet little watercolor of the pier on Cumberland Island that he painted for your new home and I smuggled a jar of your favorite kudzu honey past the TSA guards.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “I showed it to a young man and asked very politely if he could please let me through with it. He apologized like a gentleman and put it in a barrel on the far side of that machine that takes naked pictures and when I walked through and saw his head was turned, I grabbed the jar back and put it in my carry-on.”

  “You could’ve landed yourself in trouble, Mom.”

  “But I didn’t. And I brought you something else. I’ve decided it’s time to pass on your grandmother’s sapphire pendant. She always wanted you to have it.”

  “It’s no use trying to inveigle the girl with honey and geegaws, Swan. She’s no fool.”

  Swan sighed. “It’s sad to think everybody’s some kind of an inveigler, Margaret.”

  “Sad, but true.” Margaret blew her nose as if to trumpet her contempt.

  And I’m in the company of two of the best, thought Dinah. If she could, she would put them out on the side of the road and make a break for it. But blood and history held her. She was tied to these women, and to the ghost of Cleon Dobbs, like a tin can to the bumper of a speeding getaway car. She could imagine cutting the cord, but in the crunch, she couldn’t go through with it. Instead, she bottled her anger and followed the signs out of the airport on the Zugfahrt Zum Flughafen.

  When she had nosed the Golf safely onto the road and reached cruising speed, she took a deep breath and asked, “Who is this alleged tax cheat and how did you find out about him?”

  Chapter Three

  Dinah retraced her route, doglegging onto Tegeler Weg, a four-lane highway divided by a median. The now-bucketing rain obscured visibility, but traffic didn’t slow. Cars slalomed in and out of their lanes like Olympic racers as brake lights flashed and horns blared. Driving in Berlin was not for the faint of heart even in good weather, and this rain turned the road into an obstacle course. If she could make it back to Bismarckstrasse, she could wend her way across to the Tiergarten and from there, she knew the way home.

  Thor had leased a townhouse in an upscale neighborhood near Hausvogteiplatz in the central part of the city, the Mitte. The owner had painted their unit lavender, which made her feel a shade conspicuous, but the location was convenient to the Norwegian Embassy and within walking distance to Humboldt University on Unter den Linden. Proximity to the Tiergarten, a magnificent park with miles of walking paths, was an added bonus.

  The car in front of her braked and she took the slowdown as an opportunity to elicit a bit more information. “Who is this man you want to find, Mom? Who was he to Uncle Cleon?”

  “Don’t let’s talk about it until everyone is bright and fresh in the morning.”

  Dinah didn’t expect a refreshing sleep, or any sleep at all, for that matter. But her mother refused to elaborate and there was nothing she could do but stew. She felt cornered, like a mouse without a bolt hole. Her thoughts darted every which way. She had no idea how much Swan had known about Cleon’s crimes while they were married. She had always claimed ignorance. But truth-telling didn’t run rampant in Dinah’s family. Everyone she’d ever loved lied, except maybe Thor. He’d bent the truth once when he neglected to inform her that he was working undercover in Greece. But that was a matter of national security. He’d had no choice. In personal matters he was honest almost to a fault. He would freak if he found out that she had inherited one of the last numbered bank accounts in the world, a financial dinosaur built on the sale of illegal drugs.

  Some people aspire to crime. Some have crime thrust upon them. Dinah considered herself to be in the second category. She hadn’t wanted to come into possession of a pile of dirty money. She hadn’t wanted to be stuck with a dead drug lord’s millions or become his posthumous accessory-after-the-fact. But Cleon had held a gun to her head. Literally. He had pointed a gun and reeled off a summary of his sins against the world, against her, against his ex-wives and their grown children, and against his current wife and her young children. To spite them all, he had exhausted his legitimate assets. There was nothing left but a nefarious bank account in Panama and if Dinah didn’t assume control of it, his minor children would be out in the cold, reduced to rags. He had stated his terms and then he’d turned the gun on himself. Ironically, he didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger. Margaret had done that for him.

  When he was dead and his betrayals revealed, Dinah felt bound to do what she could for the sake of the people he screwed. She had traveled to Panama, met with Cleon’s shady “personal banker,” showed him the number and code Cleon had given her, and withdrawn money to pay for Margaret’s defense lawyers. No questions asked. Thereafter, she periodically took out money for the ongoing needs of his children. She had never spent a penny on herself, although she’d been tempted once or twice. She would gladly have washed her hands of it if she could. If she explained the situation to Thor in that way, would he understand? Somehow, she didn’t think so. He was as incorruptible as salt. He would never allow himself to be maneuvered into an illegal bind.

  The jam up ahead cleared suddenly and traffic spurted ahead. A bus in the left-hand lane sloshed a cascade of dirty water across the windshield. She gave it a couple of squirts of washer fluid and boosted the wiper speed.

  “I’ll bet you’re a sensation here in Berlin,” said Swan. “The Germans are positively obsessed with us Injuns.”

  Dinah had a master’s degree in sociocultural anthropology and zero teaching experience. But no one at Humboldt University had alluded to her ancestry and she attributed the offer to teach a survey course in Native American cultures to Thor’s connections. She said, “I haven’t met anyone who’s obsessed.”

  “Well, I have. Online. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.” She laughed and wiggled two fingers over her head. “It seems there are thousands of Indian clubs. A man named Florian Farber who calls himself Thunder Moon found my name in the Seminole tribal registry and asked me to friend him on Facebook. He collects ‘friends’ from every native tribe in America. I’m his first Seminole, but the main interest over here is in the Western tribes. Apaches and Comanches.”

  “Weird,” said Dinah.

  “A little. But Florian is so enthusiastic you can’t help but like him. He and his club hold powwows in the woods every summer. He posts pictures of their parties on the Internet, everybody with painted faces and animal skins dancing around a fire whoopin’ like in an old Western movie. It’s the funniest thing.”

  “Sick,” Margaret croaked from the backseat.

  Dinah didn’t know if she was referring to the whooping German Indians or herself. “Should I take you to a pharmacy, Margaret? Most Germans speak some English. They could tell you what medicine you should take.”

  “All I need is a stiff nightcap and a soft bed to stretch out on.”

  “We’ll be home soon. I booked you into a bed and breakfast that’s practically next door to ou
r apartment.”

  Swan looked hurt. “We can’t stay with you?”

  “You’ll be more comfortable at the Gasthaus Wunderbar. Friendly as you and Margaret have become, I didn’t think you’d want to share a bed. And our sofa is hard and short, more of a loveseat really.”

  “I don’t care where we sleep as long as we get there soon,” said Margaret.

  Swan swiveled her head and recited. “‘Don’t Care was made to care; Don’t Care was hung; Don’t Care was put in a pot and boiled till she was done.’”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Margaret.

  “Nothin’ at all. It’s just a silly verse about caring.”

  Swan had a rhyme for every occasion. Dinah knew that the “silly verse” was a not-so-oblique gibe at her. For her lack of hospitality. For throwing cold water on their cockamamie plan to track down one of Cleon’s accomplices. For not caring. She might have pointed out that caring was a two-way street. But reasoning with Swan was like jousting with smoke. She changed the subject. “Do you plan to meet Mr. Thunder Moon, aka Farber, while you’re in the country?”

  “I do. He invited me to one of their powwows. I told him my daughter is a cultural anthropologist who knows simply everything there is to know about native rituals and beliefs. I promised I’d bring you along to—”

  Something whammed against the left rear of the Golf, knocking it sideways. Swan screamed and a loud crack exploded in Dinah’s ears. She gripped the wheel and steered the car back into its lane, but a black hulk in her blind spot rammed them again. She couldn’t correct and swerved into a concrete guardrail. The right fender and doors scraped along the rail, metal screaking. Dinah stood on the brakes and the Golf skidded to a stop. The red taillights of the car that hit them surged away in the left lane and disappeared.

  Heart racing, Dinah reached for her mother. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Just scared.”

  “Me, too.” She turned on the overhead light and looked in the backseat. “Margaret?”

  “I think so, except I’ve got a lap full of glass pebbles from the broken window.” She unbuckled her seatbelt and tried to open the rear door, but it was too close to the guardrail. She started to brush off the glass with her hand.

  “You’ll cut yourself,” said Dinah. “There’s a snowbrush under your seat.”

  Margaret found the brush and swept the rubble off her slacks onto the floor. Dinah squinted through the downpour and took stock. They were in the middle of a bridge over one of Berlin’s many canals. She looked for an emergency phone box. They appeared at intervals all along the autobahns, but apparently not here. A blur of red lights whizzed past them. Where was a cop when you needed one? She took out her mobile.

  “What are you doing?” Swan asked.

  “Calling the police.”

  “Do we really need to bother the police?”

  Dinah stared at her mother in disbelief. “Some lunatic tried to run us off the road, twice, and then fled the scene. Of course, we need to bother the police.”

  “They won’t catch him. He’s already ten miles gone by now.”

  The whoosh of traffic made the Golf shimmy and wind rushing through the broken rear window whipped Dinah’s hair across her face. Since she’d been in Germany, she hadn’t seen a single jaywalker or litterbug, and while Berlin drivers were aggressive, they adhered to the rules of the road and honked when others did not. This was bizarre. She dialed 1-1-0, the police emergency number, and asked for assistance in English. The dispatcher responded fluently, asked her location, and advised her to wait for help.

  Dinah hung up and turned on the emergency blinker. “It shouldn’t be long.”

  Margaret sneezed explosively and Swan jumped.

  Dinah took off her sweater and handed it over the seat. “Put this around your shoulders and move away from the window so you don’t get damp.”

  “Thanks.” She blew her nose and scooched into the middle seat. “Has your boyfriend been in any shoot-outs lately?”

  “What?” Dinah turned around.

  “Something’s punched a hole in the seatback.” She pointed the snowbrush at a dark spot in the upholstery of the seat behind Dinah. “Looks like a bullet hole to me.”

  Chapter Four

  It was after midnight when Dinah got back to the apartment. Her hand shook as she unlocked the door and flipped on the light. She closed the door and leaned her back against it. Until a few hours ago, her life had been a bowl of cherries—a loving partner, a paying job doing work she enjoyed, and the unprecedented luxury of a beautiful apartment. She had read Nassim Taleb’s theory of “black swans,” impossible-to-predict events of extreme magnitude and monumental consequences. Now she had a flesh-and-blood Swan to contend with, and all the leading indicators suggested that her good luck was about to be swept away in a tsunami of black secrets.

  She threw her purse on the foyer table and walked into the living room. Aphrodite had hawked up a hair ball on the new rug. Aphrodite was the semi-feral kitten that K.D., Cleon’s seventeen-year-old daughter, had rescued from a dumpster in Greece, brought to Berlin, and foisted off on Dinah when she decided to return to Georgia. K.D. and her twin brother were co-beneficiaries of Cleon’s money. If their mother could be trusted not to squander it all at once and arouse the feds’ suspicion, Dinah would sign over control of the account to her with pleasure. At least that’s what she’d told herself she’d do. Just now, it sounded like a lame excuse for doing nothing.

  She cleaned up Aphrodite’s mess, sat down at the kitchen table, took out her mobile and listened to her voice mail.

  “Hi, kjære. I got your text. Hope your mother arrived safely. I’ll try to finish my meetings early and be home on Saturday night. I’m looking forward to meeting her and your friend, Margaret. If your mother tells half as many funny stories as you do, I know I’ll like her.”

  Oh, she’s a regular riot, thought Dinah. The computer voice asked if she would like to replay, erase, or save the message in the archives. She erased it and powered off, wondering if there was an idiom in Norwegian that meant, “love me, love my dog.” She couldn’t expect Thor to understand or accept her dysfunctional, criminally minded clan. One night, flush with wine and in an expansive mood, she had tried to diagram her family tree for him, but he’d gotten lost in the multiple divorces and unorthodox alliances. Cleon Dobbs was at the center of the web. A folksy country lawyer with a brilliant mind and a wry sense of humor, he was still the most charismatic man she’d ever met.

  From the day her father died when she was ten years old, Cleon had been like a surrogate father to her. He had been in love with her mother and seemed to love Dinah by extension. He’d showered her with books and trips and paid her way through college. Through the power of money and personal magnetism, he exerted control over his ex-wives and their children even after he took a new young wife and started a third family. He pulled strings and pushed buttons and manipulated them all shamelessly in order to get his way. Dinah had never known him to be deliberately cruel or evil. The truth crashed in on her four years ago when she found out that he had operated a drug-smuggling ring for more than two decades and that, with malice aforethought, he had caused the death of her father.

  She had grilled Swan about her knowledge of Cleon’s drug crimes, but she had never asked if Swan knew that Cleon killed Hart Pelerin in the hope of winning her back. The question haunted Dinah, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to ask. If Swan had known and done nothing, it would make her complicit and Dinah didn’t think she could adapt to so stark a recasting of her mother’s image. Willful ignorance didn’t excuse Swan, but it was a failing Dinah understood. She kicked herself every time she let the hard question slide, but she saw Swan rarely. Especially since she’d met Thor, she’d been preoccupied with happier thoughts and anyway, Cleon had done too much already to blight her life and undermine her sense of trus
t. Of course the final monkey wrench he had thrown into her life was the money.

  He said she was the only one he trusted, the only one who had the common sense to know what to do with it. Ha! The fact that she’d done his bidding in the first place demonstrated a spectacular lack of common sense, and the fact that she’d failed to report it after four years, bordered on idiocy. Maybe the IRS would have granted her amnesty, awarded his children enough money to see them through college, even given her a reward. Well, it was too late now. She couldn’t expect forgiveness from the government or from Thor. He had made allowances for a lot of her kinks. A hidden cache of drug money would be one kink too many for an officer in the Norwegian Criminal Investigative Service.

  The cuckoo popped out of its house and hooted one o’clock. She’d gotten used to the ridiculous thing, but she didn’t like it. Berlin wasn’t the natural habitat of the cuckoo clock, but Thor had found it in a Christmas specialty store on the Kurfürstendamm and thought it would be a hilarious addition to their German love nest. Tonight, in particular, the humor didn’t come through.

  She poured herself a glass of wine and went into the spare bedroom. Since K.D. had changed her mind and gone home, she and Thor had converted it into an office with their desks placed against opposite walls. Thor’s desk was neat and organized, Dinah’s piled high with reference books and notes on tribal customs and the power of taboos. Her first class wasn’t scheduled until next Tuesday, a week away. Today was just Tuesday…well, Wednesday at one a.m. She had six days to prepare, give or take. She didn’t like to think what outlay of time and energy might be required to sort out Swan and Margaret, and getting the Golf repaired would eat into her time, as well as her finances. Thor usually drove an Embassy loaner when he was in town. She hoped she could get the Golf hammered back into shape and repainted without him seeing the damage.

  As it was a hit-and-run and she hadn’t gotten the license plate number, there was nothing the police could do but file a report. The incident seemed to perplex them. Germany had its share of gun violence and shootings, but drive-bys were a rarity. The investigating officers had extracted the bullet and said they’d be in touch if additional information turned up, but they didn’t sound optimistic. They could only speculate that he must have been übergeschnappt, a crazy Italian or a Turk driving under the influence of alcohol.