Bones of Contention

by Jeanne Matthews

  “There’s a new law?”

  “It’s a crime to discuss end-of-life options by telephone or e-mail. Unfortunately, I did both. Dr. Fisher contacted me by telephone and offered me a tidy sum if I’d allow an assisted suicide under my roof and your uncle e-mailed me later to confirm. I don’t know if the law is retroactive and I don’t want to find out.”

  “You can’t even talk about suicide? Isn’t there a constitutional right to free speech in Australia?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m sorry we’ve put you in a spot, Mack.” She thought about his reaction to Tanya’s galka remark. “Did you tell Tanya about the suicide?”

  “Certainly not. Suicide is taboo for Aboriginal people. If Tanya learned what he was planning, it wasn’t from me. Your family talked about it among themselves, you know, Cleon loudest of all. It’s all of a piece. If you’re black, you’re guilty. Neesha even blames poor Victor for Thad’s mischief with the petrol-sniffing.”

  It was hardly a surprise that Neesha could overlook her son’s petrol-sniffing. Dinah’s mother could apparently overlook forgery and fraud in her son. She said, “Lucien doesn’t blame you for anything, Mack. He doesn’t think you took the paintings.”

  “I should hope not. But Eduardo, well. If you want my opinion, he’s a fool. I can’t understand why a serious artist like Lucien would pair up with someone so frivolous.”

  Better frivolous than fraudulent, thought Dinah, not as trusting of Mack’s blamelessness as Lucien. “Where are you off to today?” she asked.

  “I’m meeting a Jawoyn acquaintance who runs a tourist camp on Aboriginal land to the south. My adoptive parents conjectured that my mother might be Jawoyn. Maybe he can suggest the name of an elder who might remember a young girl whose baby was taken about that time. She’d be in her late fifties or early sixties by now.”

  It crossed Dinah’s mind what an irony it would be if Tanya turned out to be Mack’s mother. Her age was hard to gauge, but she had to be past fifty. If they should someday discover that they were mother and son, Dinah didn’t think the news would bring either one of them much joy.

  “Will Tanya continue to work at the lodge after we’re gone?”

  “I think so. She needs the money. Victor’s parents are dead and she’s saving to buy a house in Jabiru.”

  She let a mile or so go by and asked, “What does galka mean?”

  He eased the car over a rock as if he were afraid it would cry out in pain. “What was the word again?”

  “Galka. Don’t you remember? Tanya called Dr. Fisher a galka after he fell into her.”

  “It doesn’t sound like any word I’ve heard. She was probably saying, don’t gawk. Something like that.”

  Dinah awarded him points for verbal gymnastics and didn’t labor the point. “Jabiru is near the entrance to Kakadu National Park, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Have you been to the Park?”

  “No. I’m told that it’s a true natural wonder. Wetlands, mostly. Thousands of birds and animals. The rainbow serpent stories of the region are beautiful. The most powerful spirit is Kuringali. She can be tempestuous when crossed. Some legends have her sending earthquakes and floods, some have her eating people alive.”

  “Don’t go into advertising, Mack. The habitat of a quake-sending, people-eating snake woman doesn’t fit most folks’ definition of Paradise.”

  He laughed and at long last, they turned onto the non-sacred Stuart Highway and he speeded up. “There’s a small Aboriginal town in the park, Oenpelli, that I’d like to visit. It’s famous for its bark paintings and pandanus weavings. Screenprinted fabrics, too.”

  “Have you ever visited the Tiwi Islands? Melville?”

  “No. I’ve been meaning to go. It’s just across Van Diemen Gulf from the Cobourg Peninsula, but the Tiwi people don’t issue permits unless you’ve booked a tour. A friend with a boat would come in handy, but alas, I haven’t met one yet.”

  Dinah enjoyed a lie as much as the next person. The nimbleness of conception, the round, plausible feel of it in the mouth, the pride of accomplishment when you deliver a beauty and watch it swallowed whole. Being lied to was considerably less enjoyable but, of late, it seemed her lot in life.

  Why would Mack lie about visiting Melville? She hadn’t asked him if he stole a load of burial poles or killed anybody. All he had to say was that he’d been on the island wheeling and dealing close to the time Bryce Hambrick was murdered and, alas, wasn’t it awful. His inexplicable lie, combined with his scheme to sell sham artworks, bumped him into the top tier of suspects.

  When they reached Katherine, she asked him to drop her in front of the library.

  He pulled the car into a space in front of the bright and cheerful mural that graced the front of the library. “How will you get back to the lodge?”

  “Lucien’s meeting me later this afternoon,” she lied. “He says his leg feels well enough so he can drive now and he wants to show me a few of the galleries.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll see you again before you and your family leave,” he said. “Perhaps, I should say good-bye to you now.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we’ll see each other again, Mack. Inspector Newby will probably bring us all together for the climax of his investigation and the thief and the killer will be unmasked.”

  His eyes flashed with indignation and he drove off without further adieu.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Dinah drove her blue Toyota Rav 4WD Cruiser away from the Thrifty Car Rental thinking how much she had missed the freedom of having her own wheels. The Rav’s ABS, EBD, VSC, Traction Control, air-conditioning with dust filter, dual sunroof, and throaty vroom were neat, but it was the mobility that pepped up her spirits. Mobility was one of life’s most empowering feelings—the option to vamoose if a relationship or a job or the general course of events went bad. She’d vamoosed many times in the little Porsche Boxster that Cleon had given her when she graduated from college. It finally conked out in Seattle and she’d done without a car for the last year. If Cleon had left her anything other than forged paintings, she’d have bought another one as soon as she got back to the States. Alas, as Mack would say.

  She wondered about poor, ill-treated Mack and the missing Homers. He wasn’t as up on American art as Aboriginal art and wouldn’t realize they were fakes until he tried to sell them. Even then, he probably had contacts who could help him peddle them to some unsuspecting soul. In fact, if he held onto them until the Dobbs clan left the country, he’d be sitting pretty. But Lucien was positive that Wendell had taken the paintings for Neesha and Dinah had no choice but to start the recovery effort with him. Any other shakedowns, whether of Mack or anybody else, would have to wait. Today she would review the material on Wendell’s Flash Voyager, see if it provided any leverage, and go from there.

  She meandered through Katherine looking first for a comfortable place to spend the night. The lush and palm-shaded Katherine Lodge Motel on the banks of the Katherine River on Giles Street seemed the best of a limited lot. The lobby was clean and modern, the price reasonable for a place with an ensuite bathroom and insect screens, and she registered for one night. She would’ve gone straight to her room for a nap, but it was too early for check-in. She left her suitcase and started toward the in-house restaurant, the Cheeky Croc, for a quick lunch. A diffuse, institutional smell that reminded her of a school cafeteria stopped her at the door and she decided to scout out something more appetizing. On her way out, she asked the woman at the front desk where she might find an internet café. As luck would have it, that was in-house, too.

  The woman showed her a small room just off the reception area with a row of clunky old computers and dial-up access only. Dinah was beginning to feel like a frontiersman. But doubtful she’d find anything better, she postponed lunch and sat down to begin the tedious process of connecting. After a century or so, she was on-line.

  Before inser
ting Wendell’s flash drive, she checked her e-mail. The first four messages were from Nick and she deleted them unread along with the airline promotions and bookstore coupons.

  There was a newsy note from her friend, Mallory, full of excitement about her new boyfriend and the cool new clothes she’d bought to go with him, and there was a blast from the past from her boyfriend before Nick.

  Dear Dinah,

  Every day I look out across the Valley to the mountains and wonder if today’s the day you’ll come back to me. The folks at the book exchange over in Butte ask after you whenever I’m in town. Hope you’re moving up the ladder in your new job, but don’t forget I love you. xxx, Ty

  Tyler Colby. She hadn’t seen the guy in over a year, hadn’t told him she’d been living with another man, hadn’t told him her job ladder was a step-stool to nowhere. Eddie’s words rained down on her head like hot coals. She had done many things she wasn’t proud of and letting Ty go on loving her when she’d long since relegated him to a historical footnote was one of the worst.

  Dear Ty, I miss you, too, and think about you every day.

  E-lies required no skill. No shifty eyes, no shaky voice, no hemming or hawing to give you away. But she felt guilty anyway and deleted “every day.” There was a grain of truth in “miss you.” At least, she wished that she missed him, which was almost the same thing. It wasn’t as if she’d ruled him out of her life plan. There was a Native American Studies department at the University of Montana. Maybe she could finagle a job as a teaching assistant or something and in her spare time, put together an encyclopedia of Native myths.

  As a matter of fact, Ty, I quit my job. I’m in Australia juggling a poisoning, an impaling, a derailed euthanasia, and the theft of forged art.

  It sounded as if she were hyperventilating. She scratched the last sentence.

  I’m on vacation with my brother dealing with family issues. My plans right now are iffy, but I promise I’ll call you soon. xxx, Dinah

  She had hoped there’d be an offer from her anthropology professor—an immediate assignment in Timbuktu or Kizil Arvat or the International Space Station. But it probably wouldn’t do her any good. Jacko hadn’t confiscated her passport yet, but it was just a matter of time before he grounded the whole family.

  She inserted Wendell’s flash drive into the computer. The good news, he hadn’t installed password protection. The bad news, he hadn’t copied his E-mail onto the Flash Voyager. She brought up the list of files. Baltimore, Barranquilla, Black Point, Brunswick, Cayenne, Davao, La Guaira, Manado, Miami, Montevideo, Surabaya, Tampico, Veracruz.

  It was like Jeopardy with only one category—geography. She didn’t know where all of them were, but water seemed to be the common denominator. Baltimore and Brunswick were U.S. ports on the Atlantic, Veracruz was situated on the Gulf of Mexico and wasn’t La Guaira the seaport town next door to Caracas? Black Point. Hadn’t she seen that mentioned in her Northern Territory Lonely Planet Guide?

  She signed onto Google Earth and called up a scan map of the Territory. Black Point was a small dot on the tip of the Cobourg Peninsula northwest of Kakadu Park in Arnhem Land, which was owned by the Aborigines. From the descriptions she’d read, Black Point was little more than a wide spot with one store where you could charter a boat and buy fuel and basic provisions. But on Wendell’s flash drive, Black Point kept company with some heavyweight ports. Why?

  She opened the Brunswick file. The Port of Brunswick was one of the busiest on the east coast, importing and exporting automobiles and agri-products of all kinds. It was also where Wendell lived and worked and, presumably, the center of Fisher’s business empire. She scrolled down a list of numbers that appeared to represent dates. After each date, if it was a date, there was a row of letters, possibly representing the name of the buyer or seller. Next to each name, if it was a name, was another number and a small k—kilobytes? kilometers? kilograms? And next to that number were more names. Lucky Rascal, Sea Rover, Windcheater, Aces Full, Wave Walker. Boats. The Wave Walker was what Wendell had named his Bayliner, the one he took his kids to Florida on.

  Did fish processing plants keep their records in code? Did professional fishing boats usually have such frolicsome names? Wouldn’t the plant have to designate the type of fish it was purchasing and wouldn’t there be a different price for each variety? She looked at the k again. Wouldn’t American fisherman sell their fish by the ton rather than by kilograms?

  She opened the Black Point file. BH-PROB. DF2GO5317BP. If this were a simple abbreviation, PROB would be problem. A problem with BH. Bad Hair? Boat House? Boat Hitch? Bags of Heroin? Heroin was sold in kilograms.

  Drugs. Desmond Fisher owned a necklace of waterfront properties perfect for smuggling drugs. The fish plant was a perfect front and Wendell, the drab and respectable banker, was his perfect front man and accomplice. If this all meant what she thought it did, he and Wendell were involved in a criminal enterprise on a massive scale. Seth might also be involved. He had a passport with stamps from the most prolific drug producing countries in the world and she had a feeling he knew more about the doctor’s still-missing satchel of cash than he’d admit.

  BH. What if BH-PROB stood for Bryce Hambrick problem? DF—Desmond Fisher to go May 31, 2007, Black Point. Holy Moly. She felt the exhilaration of certainty. Jacko had been right. Hambrick was murdered somewhere else and brought to Melville to keep the other place secret. To keep Black Point secret. The clues, if there were any, were in Black Point.

  If Wendell was operating a drug cartel, it was a fire she didn’t want to play with. Her head told her to call Jacko, but if she did, she might inadvertently blow the gaff on Lucien’s forgery.

  She removed the flash drive and pushed it through a small hole in the lining of her tote. She sandwiched a pad of the motel’s stationery between K.D.’s journal, swiped while K.D. slept this morning, and the Manila envelope containing Cleon’s original Last Will and Testament, which he’d left lying on the sideboard. For no particular reason, she’d also lifted a snapshot of Wendell and his son at the helm of the Wave Walker out of the side pocket of his briefcase last night.

  On impulse, she’d snitched one other item. Seth’s Glock lay camouflaged in his navy windbreaker under the rest of her plunder. After Jacko had searched all the rooms, while Seth was making himself scarce and everyone else was clamoring for Jacko’s attention, she’d crept into Seth’s room to see if the gun was still there. It was. Given all that Jacko knew and suspected about him, it seemed like an oversight. An oversight she corrected. At the time, she couldn’t have imagined that she would be dickering with a drug lord for the return of Lucien’s paintings. Maybe her ESP was back on track at last.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The T-shirts on sale in the Katherine Oasis Shopping Center ran the gamut of Australian icons. The Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef, kangaroos and koalas, Akubra hats and vegemite. Dinah was drawn to a shirt with an erect, open-jawed crocodile in red boxing gloves—The Boxing Croc of Humpty Doo. The woman at the sales counter informed her that Humpty Doo was a small town near Darwin and the giant Boxing Croc was a famous landmark in the Territory, one of the country’s Big Things.

  “What kind of big things?” asked Dinah.

  “Oh, there’s the Big Beer Can, the Big Mosquito, the Big Banana, the Big Prawn. There’s lots of Big Things in Oz. It’s kind of an art form. The tourists love ’em.”

  “Is Humpty Doo an Aboriginal name?”

  “I’m not sure. Some say it means fine and good. But whenever things turn out wrong or upside down, my mum says they’ve gone humpty doo.”

  “Perfect,” said Dinah. “I can always use another name for trouble.”

  With her new boxing croc nightshirt in the bag, she had a taste for hot Italian sausage and Chianti. She drove through the town in search of a trattoria and ended up at a place called Diggers Den—a rather unprepossessing pub that claimed to ser
ve Italian food. She had just been seated and handed the menu when who to her wandering eye should appear but Margaret. She spotted Dinah at the same time and turned to leave, then about-faced with an expression that seemed more a nod to the inevitable than a glad hello.

  “I had to get away from that place for a few hours. As we used to say back in the sixties, it has bad vibes.”

  “It’s still said today, Margaret, and I agree. Crow Hill has very bad vibes.”

  “I drove Lucien’s car. He said that he and Eduardo wouldn’t be needing it for the next couple of days. Lucien doesn’t look well. I hope it’s not a relapse.”

  “He’s on edge like the rest of us.” Dinah was happy to see Margaret and hoped she could update her on the scene at Crow Hill. “Have you had dinner? You’re more than welcome to join me. I haven’t ordered yet.”

  “Why, yes. It’ll be good to talk with someone who isn’t having histrionics.” She sat down and blew out a heavy sigh. Her face showed the strain of the last forty-eight hours, but her eyes still had that hawk-like vigilance. She was a full-figured woman and gravity was winning out, but she held her chin high and her posture was finishing-school perfect. She’d obviously turned heads thirty years ago and even now, there was a knowing quality about her that some men might find attractive.

  “Who’s having histrionics?”

  “K.D.’s having a hissy because Thad stole her journal. Wendell thinks the Inspector overreached his authority and took something he had no right to. Lucien and Eduardo are saying hateful things about Wen behind his back. Neesha has locked herself in her room and the Farraday person is prowling through the house like a cat burglar. Of course, Tanya’s with Victor at the hospital and Mack’s absconded, could be with your paintings.”

  “What’s Cleon doing?” asked Dinah.

  “Making out his new will.”