She didn’t know whether to laugh or take cover.
The bartender reappeared. “No scrounging from the customers, Speed.” He brought out a banana, peeled it, and set it down at the opposite end of the bar. “Here’s your bloody munga, mate. Come and get it.”
Speed waddled off, squawking.
“Does munga mean banana?” asked Dinah.
“It’s whatever there is to eat. Speed’s not picky. How about you? Another Mary?”
“Sure.” What the hell. If Lucien bloody Dobbs didn’t show soon, he’d find her blitzed. But blitzed might be the best way to ride out this week. She predicted the atmosphere at the lodge would be combustible. In more crowded venues—Cleon’s annual Christmas bash, for example—the wives tolerated each other with polite disdain. But in close quarters, in a situation fraught with so much emotion, repressed hostilities between the first Mrs. Dobbs and the third Mrs. Dobbs could flare into open warfare at the slightest provocation. Fortunately for all concerned, Dinah’s mother, the second and most provocative of the Mrs. Dobbs, had sent her regrets.
The pain must be unbearable for a man who loved life as much as Cleon did to shorten it by even an hour. He’d always been so full of drive and gusto. She’d considered him practically immortal. It was hard to picture him weak and ailing, harder still to learn that he’d asked for assistance to end his life. The Cleon she knew would’ve shot himself without fuss in his own back forty. But having opted to die in this way, it was strange that he didn’t go to Oregon or Washington or someplace more accessible where assisted suicide was quasi-legal.
She nursed her second Mary for half an hour, reorganized her purse, read a few sentences in her guidebook on Aboriginal myths, something about the physical contours of the country being encoded in “song lines.” Only these “songs” weren’t music, not in the ordinary sense. They were some kind of a divine navigational system, the energy currents generated by the ancestors as they traversed the land. It was too deep to fathom just now. Maybe after she’d rested and her own energy currents had regenerated.
She checked her watch, craned her neck. Maybe Lucien had a flat tire or a dead battery or an emergency of some kind. Oh, God. Maybe Cleon had passed away ahead of schedule.
“Did he stand you up?” The sexy bartender again.
“What?”
“You’ve been watching the clock ever since you sat down. I’ll be off in a quarter hour. If you’re staying in town, I’ll give you a ride to your hotel.” His eyes offered something way racier than a lift into town.
“Not today, thanks. Family obligations.”
“I’ll take a rain check. My name’s Robbie. What’s yours?”
“Dinah. From Seattle.”
“Well, Dinah from Seattle, give me a call if you shake free and fancy a bit of night life.” He jotted a number on her napkin and flashed a bad-boy grin.
“Maybe I will,” she said. He looked like primo post-Nick therapy, but she’d had enough excitement in the Land of Oz for one day.
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 f
ound 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 scatt
ered 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?”
Bones of Contention Page 3