Bones of Contention

by Jeanne Matthews

  “I can’t get them by then. I left them with someone for safekeeping. I can’t get in touch with him.”

  “When can you have them?”

  “I don’t know. Look, can’t we talk tonight?” His voice lightened. “I’ll come to you, wherever you are. I can explain everything. Just tell me where…”

  She slammed down the phone. That last glass of Shiraz had clouded her thinking. Margaret was too looped to drive after dinner and Dinah had checked her into the motel to sleep it off. But what if she phoned Wendell to say nighty-night? What if she happened to mention that her drinking buddy Dinah was two doors down the hall?

  Suddenly, Dinah wasn’t so eager to confront Wendell. The lines of demarcation between who did what to whom blurred, but one thing was sure. She was up against a murderer, and she’d just given him a reason to murder her.

  It took her less than twenty minutes to pack up and beat feet. Less than an hour later, Mallory Hayes stretched out on her bed at the Kookaburra Motel, reading K.D.’s journal and formulating a new plan. It began with a visit to the Katherine Public Library first thing in the morning.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Speeding north out of Katherine on the busy Stuart Highway, Dinah revved the Rav 4’s air conditioning as high as it would go and clawed at a fresh mosquito bite on her left ankle. The fever she’d been flirting with for the last three days seemed to have spiked. Her insides felt frothy. Her skin felt as if she’d slept in a bed of nettles. In fact, she couldn’t remember sleeping at all. Maybe she was asleep right now and the traffic whizzing by on all sides was a particularly vivid dream. Maybe she’d contracted malaria from the mosquitos. Maybe she was delirious.

  Dinah Pelerin, who might one day have unearthed lost cities or owned an apartment in Paris, dead of fever. Ashes to ashes.

  She blew past the entrance to Nitmiluk National Park and Edith Falls. She was in full flight, no time to dawdle. Over the long, sleepless night, doubts besieged her. Sounds outside her window made her cower. Shadows made her jump. She must have reached for the Glock a hundred times. And leaving the library this morning, she thought she saw Wendell in one of those Akubra hats lurking behind the reference shelves. But with all the fear and anxiety, one thought had crystallized to a certainty. Wendell didn’t have the Homers. The one who had them had flat out confessed and she’d been too psyched out by all the theatrics to take it in.

  Another bug splatted against the windshield. It was a Rorschach of bug juice, gooey yellows and whites. She flicked the windshield washer lever, squirted a few jets of blue cleaner fluid over the carnage, and turned on the wipers. The resulting mess reminded her of a Jackson Pollock abstract.

  She thought about Lucien’s talent for painterly imitation, his predilection to fraud. And he had the unmitigated gall to brag about the “miraculous light” he’d achieved in his copies, the gall to blame Cleon for holding him accountable for bilking him. This wasn’t the Lucien she knew. Had he deceived her or had she deceived herself? Had she invented a perfect brother to make up for her outlaw father?

  Somehow, Cleon learned that Lucien had foisted off a pair of fakes on him and he’d rubbed Lucien’s nose in his trickery by pretending to will them to his vagabond sister who’d be sure to sell them at the first opportunity. But it was pure theater. Lucien was Swan’s cygnet, like Margaret said. Cleon wanted to punish Lucien for not playing straight with him, but he must have gone to great lengths to redeem Lucien’s other forgeries. How he found and acquired them would probably constitute a whole litany of felonies. And the fact they’d ended up in Desmond Fisher’s will was proof aplenty that Cleon had known that Fisher would cark before he did.

  Lucien had an equally fine talent for euphemism. Peccadillo. That was rich. She could handle peccadillos. But in her world, sins didn’t come in a size small. Infidelity. Forgery. Robbery. Murder. And churning in the pit of her stomach was the growing suspicion that Cleon had been in the drug business for years, that he might actually have recruited her father to mule for him and gotten him killed for his trouble. She pictured her father’s pickup with its load of contraband flying hellbent down the road. It was coming right behind her. The past was worse than she could ever have dreamed and it was catching up fast. No kudos to her character, but her first instinct was to try and outrun it.

  She went around a speeding road train and thought was swallowed up in the noise. It was like being inside a whirlwind. She became the noise. She became the speed. And still she couldn’t outdistance the rolling avalanche of revisionist thoughts.

  If both Cleon and her father were drug smugglers, then ipso ugly facto, her mother had been a co-conspirator. She must have known. How could she not? She’d been married to both men. No wonder she never talked about them. If they were the kingpins, she was their queen. Either she’d been actively complicit in their corruption or she’d condoned it. It didn’t matter. Dinah was moving too fast to split hairs.

  Strange as it seemed to her now, she had never considered her own complicity. For at least a dozen years, she’d known that her little trust fund was founded on drug money and not once had she considered turning it over to the government. She’d rationalized. At this point, they’d probably arrest her as an accessory after the fact. And as for the harm posed by the marijuana her father had been hauling, why, compared to the cornucopia of killer drugs on the street today, it was practically wholesome. Weed had medical uses, for crying out loud. Besides, her father had paid for his crimes with his life. That trust money was compensation for what the government had taken away from her. It was old drug money, not some nouveau, degenerate pile derived from hooking kids on heroin or meth.

  Or so she’d thought. But what if marijuana wasn’t the only drug in the pipeline from Barranquilla to Black Point to Brunswick? What if the money that Cleon had set aside for her came from smack or coke or some virulent pharmaceutical that ate men’s brains?

  A bird hit the windshield with a sickening splat.

  “Oh, God!”

  The mop of feathers slid down the glass leaving behind a thin line of red. She slowed to a crawl and it dropped onto the hood and fell on the road. Eyes streaming, she shuddered and pulled off onto the shoulder. She got out of the car and walked back to the pile of gray-blue feathers in the middle of the road. Tanya’s voice echoed in her ear, waste of life. In her worldview, this bird probably symbolized somebody’s ancestor.

  She took a step into the road, but the road train she’d passed lumbered over the horizon like a juggernaut. The shiny steel cowcatcher mounted on the front looked big enough to stop a T Rex. She jumped out of the road and the driver smiled and waved at her. She held onto her wind-whipped hair as four bright green trailers boomed by and by and by and by. It was like watching a football field in locomotion. When it had passed, the bird was nothing but a greasy spot and a few scattered feathers eddying in the train’s draft.

  The Seminole prayer for the dead she’d learned from her grandmother came back to her. “They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind.”

  She walked back to the car, blew her nose, and cleaned off the windshield as best she could. She had to snap out of stampede mode. If she was going to fall to pieces over a dead bird, she might as well throw in the towel and call Jacko to come get her. He’d probably have some choice words for a buttinski who makes off with the evidence and then goes all weak-kneed and blubbery because her mommy neglected to inform her that Cleon was dirty as sin and so was she.

  And in spite of Cleon’s contempt for him, Wendell had followed in his footsteps. Father and son had probably conspired in their illegal trade for years along with Desmond Fisher, but with Cleon’s health failing, Wendell had taken over the operation. Had he and Fisher wrangled over who would take over the reins? Smashed on Scotch, Fisher said he was through taking orders from Cleon. Was he also unwilling to take orders from Wendell? Was that unwillingness the reason he was killed or did his sortie to Melville Island and the murder of Br
yce Hambrick lead to his own murder? The flash drive didn’t answer those questions.

  The phrase “chain of custody” sprang to mind. Belatedly. Like most of her rational thoughts these days. It would be her word against Wendell’s that the gizmo belonged to him. He could claim it belonged to Fisher or to Lucien or to her. By running off with it, she’d probably made the prosecutor’s job impossible. She should’ve returned to Crow Hill after she’d read the thing, sneaked it back into Wendell’s pocket, and dimed him out to Jacko. But waiting wasn’t part of her skill set and anyway, what could Jacko do with the information? At this point, her interpretation was pure supposition. It would take the police time to decipher the code and afterward, there’d be legal red tape.

  She walked around the car a few times and tried to think what to do next. Her meddling had compromised the flash drive’s usefulness, but there was no turning back now. If she were going to make amends, she’d have to ferret out fresh evidence against Wendell. This was no time to go off the deep end over ancient crimes. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. What she had to do was concentrate on nailing Wendell.

  Nobody in the world knew where she was right now. This was an advantage. She would take a break in the next town, chill out for an hour or so and clear her head. She threw a last look over her shoulder at the splotched feathers, climbed in the car, and drove away subdued, but dry-eyed and determined.

  Where the Kakadu Highway branched off to the east toward Jabiru and the Kakadu National Park, she drove west. In a kilometer or so she pulled into the town of Pine Creek. After the rush and roar of the highway, it was like entering a chapel. The tranquility was unsettling. The boy at the petrol station where she pulled in to hose off the windshield and buy a pack of cigarettes was soft-spoken and friendly. There were flower boxes under the windows and a bird feeder above the door with two birds whose brilliant plumage took her breath away.

  “Are they parrots?”

  “Rainbow lorikeets,” the boy informed her. “Never shy about taking a handout, those bludgers.”

  She sent up a silent thanks that the bird she’d hit wasn’t a lorikeet and then felt guilty for valuing one creature over another just because its feathers were more beautiful.

  Leaving the station, she tootled along the sun-dappled main street with her windows rolled down, listening to the birds and soaking up the tranquility. A few cars poked along as if they had no particular place to be and no time by which they had to be there. She drove under a banner advertising GOLD RUSH FESTIVAL, but it had apparently come and gone and today nothing seemed to be happening in Pine Creek but sunshine and birdsong.

  She parked the Rav on Main Street and walked. The pedestrians she met smiled and asked, “How are ya?”

  She smiled back. “Fine, thanks.” Who knew? A few hours in this flowery, friendly town might actually make it so.

  An antique steam locomotive sat on the grass going nowhere in front of an old railway station. Old mining implements rusted quietly in the sunshine. How restful it must be to just lie in the grass and rust, build up a thick ferrous scab of forgetfulness over the old hurts. Maybe when this ordeal was behind her, she’d settle down in Pine Creek under her new alias and steep herself in the humid air until all tracks to the past had rusted out.

  Old photographs and placards on display in shop windows sketched the history of the town. Posthole diggers for the Overland Telegraph Line had discovered gold in the 1870s and thousands of prospectors descended on the town to “fossick” for gold. Chinese laborers were recruited to work in the mines and the population grew. A lot of people made their fortunes during the boom. A lot more lost their lives, either in the fire that razed the town or the malaria epidemic that ravaged it. When the gold petered out, most of the miners and the merchants who supplied them moved on.

  Dinah followed the signs to the Enterprise Pit Lookout above the town. It was a steep climb up an asphalt road and there were no other walkers, but the physical effort felt good. Breathing in the pine-scented air felt good. Returning the waves and how-are-yas from passing cars felt good. Spotting another lorikeet felt really good.

  The higher she climbed, the calmer she felt. Under this warm mantle of sunshine, a plan began to sprout. Last night, before her courage had wilted, before she lammed off to the Kookaburra Motel in a cold sweat, she’d concluded that the likely point of departure for Bryce Hambrick was Black Point, just a few nautical miles around the tip of the Cobourg Peninsula from Melville Island. Why not go and have a look-see? If Hambrick traveled there overland, he would have passed through Jabiru and Oenpelli en route. She’d appropriated from the Katherine Library’s archives the relevant copies of the Northern Territory News and the Darwin Star with his photo on the front page. Some alert resident might remember seeing him. If she could place Fisher or Wendell in Hambrick’s company, Jacko might have what he needed to solve the murder. It was a long shot, but worth a try.

  At the top of the hill she looked out over the open-cut pit, some 800 feet wide and filled with water the color of green antifreeze. She sat down on a shaded bench and mused on the consequences of digging too deep.

  An hour went by. Her stomach grumbled and she stood up and stretched. It didn’t pay to get too metaphorical. Sufficient unto the day…

  Back on Main Street, she bought a copy of the Katherine Times from a vending machine and wandered into a cutesy café, the Leaping Flea. It had blue-checked curtains and blue-checked tablecloths and a sign that said Seat Yourself. No sooner had she sat than a smiling, round-faced woman wearing a blue-checked apron appeared.

  “I’ll just clear the shrapnel out of your way,” she said, raking the preceding customer’s tip into her pocket before laying a fresh placemat and a roll of flatware. “There now.” She handed Dinah the menu. “Specials are on the blackboard, dearie. Take a squiz and I’ll be right back.”

  Dinah glanced over the bill of fare. Kangaroo pot pie, Tasmanian possum and beans on toast. The menu supplemented this selection with meat pie and meatburger, no attribution to a specific animal, something called spag, and something called snag.

  Snag? She was feeling better, but not kangaroo or possum better, and snag sounded like an intestinal parasite. When the waitress returned, she ordered the spag, enunciating the p very clearly, and a glass of lemonade.

  While she waited, she paged through the newspaper. There was a report about toxic chemicals in imported furniture endangering Australians’ health. Three human skulls had been dug up on a roadworks site. A sex shop had caused a kerfuffle with its advertisement to entertain kids with coloring books while the parents shopped. A feature captioned KNOCK DOWN THE BIGGEST GRUNTERS advised boar hunters how to maximize bullet penetration.

  She skipped to the obituaries.

  Desmond Fisher’s face stared back at her. EUTHANASIA DOCTOR DIES. Desmond Fisher, 66, vocal proponent of assisted suicide, died suddenly while visiting friends at a lodge near Katherine. No cause of death was given.

  “Arvo!”

  Dinah jumped. A lanky man in a Padres Football cap was smiling down at her.

  “How are ya?” he asked.

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  He kept standing there, smiling. She closed the paper and smiled back, which seemed to ease his mind. He doffed his cap and moved off to a table next to the kitchen.

  The waitress beamed. “Arvo, Fred. How are ya?”

  “I’m feeling crook, Em. Up half the bloody night playing poker with Tom’s gang of crunchers and when I got home, the ball and chain gave me a right roaring-up. No need to show me the bloody card. Just bring me a meat sanger and a cold stubby. Hop Thief if you’ve got it.”

  Fred’s lingo reminded Dinah of Jacko. He would already have deduced that she was the one who swiped K.D.’s journal and Cleon’s will. She didn’t think that Seth would report his missing Glock or Wendell his missing flash drive, but their antsiness and unease wouldn’t be lost on Jacko. She wondered if he’d made any headway in winn
owing out the suspects for Fisher’s murder. She didn’t know what part Seth had played, but Wendell and Cleon were in it up to their necks. It hardly mattered which one meted out the poisonous entrail.

  She went back to Fisher’s obituary.

  Fisher, who lost his license to practice medicine in 1990 following accusations that he administered lethal drugs to an elderly patient, espoused the right of the terminally ill to die at the time and place of their choosing. Over the past two decades he has urged passage of a national law permitting assisted suicide. In the last year, his essays and opinion pieces have become more frequent and more vehement.

  If Cleon was telling the truth, Fisher’s wife had died a lingering, painful death. Dinah wondered if he’d loved her as much as Cleon loved Swan. Was their grief over lost and irretrievable women what had drawn the two men together all those years ago? She remembered Cleon’s leeriness when she asked if they’d been in business together. It was obvious now. They’d been in cahoots in the drug business.

  Em came out of the kitchen carrying a tray. She set a bottle of beer and a glass on Fred’s table. “Your sanger will be out in a tick, Fred. I put a fresh basket of chips on to fry.”

  She set a plate of spaghetti on toast and a pint of lemonade in front of Dinah. “Would you care for the dead horse, dearie?”

  Dinah hesitated. She was on her own in the Land of Oz. No interpreter. No net. If she were going to get along with the local populace, she’d have to adapt, learn the lingua franca, go with the flow. She smiled. “Yes, please.”

  Em grabbed a bottle of ketchup off an adjacent table and put it down next to the spag. “Save room now for the lamington.”

  “Sure thing,” said Dinah.

  Enriched by several shakes of ketchup, the spag wasn’t half bad. Lots of sodium. Lots of carbs. And the lemonade, while it seemed to have no actual lemon in it, had lots of sugar and yellow dye. Tucker of champions. And a lamington next up. She was on a roll.