Bones of Contention

by Jeanne Matthews

  “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.

  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.

  E. and L. fought every single day in Sydney, but E. was beside himself after the snake bit L. L. spent two whole days behind closed doors with Mack after we got here. E. totally postal after that. L. fought with Daddy last night, too. Both drinking. I think L. has something Daddy wants.

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

  She skipped to the entry on herself.

  I guess you could call her attractive in a dark, foreign way. (Her eyes are black as a voodoo spell.) Mother thinks she’s sharp-tongued and pushy and she can’t understand why Daddy is so attached to her. Everybody knows how slutty her mother is. And D. sleeps with a policeman. How plebeian is that?

  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.”