Death is Forever (25 page)

Dawn was a silent tidal wave of heat and savage light. The Kimberley Plateau’s big birds of prey spread dark wings and leaped from their boab tree perch into the rising inferno. Erin crouched over first one tripod and then another, triggering the shutters repeatedly, refocusing, triggering again, moving quickly until the rapid
snick snick snick
of the motor drive fed the last thin strip of film and fell silent.

Even as she reached for the third camera body she’d loaded with film, she sighed and knew it was too late. The moment of the predatory kites’ dark awakening was over. She stretched her back, sighed, and began removing cameras from their tripod mounts.

“That’s it?” Cole asked, rising from the darkness beneath an acacia tree.

She jumped. She’d been so intent on her work that she’d forgotten he was nearby, watching her, shotgun in hand.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m through for now.”

She packed up her camera equipment, shouldered all of it, and looked around at the land that was slowly, inescapably being transformed by the rising violence of the sun. She was learning new rhythms in this strange, austere country. One of them was to rise early and savor the relative coolness.

For a few minutes each morning the sun felt almost welcome.

Almost, but not quite. Despite the fact that dawn was less than five minutes old, the temperature was already in the high eighties. The heavy blanket of air simply didn’t let the land cool off, even during the hours of darkness. Each day was hotter and more humid than the one before. Each day the clouds teased and muttered and didn’t deliver rain.

Squinting against the early light, she looked up at the black designs made by the Kimberley kites soaring gracefully in a sky that seethed with light.

“I’ve always wondered,” she said softly, watching the kites, “whether birds of prey spend so much time hanging in the sky because they can, or because they must.”

“Probably they can because they must.”

When Cole reached for the straps of the camera bags, his fingers brushed over the bare skin of Erin’s arm. She flinched and stepped back, saying without words that she didn’t want his touch or his help.

His mouth flattened as he turned away and started walking. She hadn’t fought his order that she never be out of his sight, but she’d made it clear that theirs was now a business relationship. He hadn’t liked it, but he hadn’t tried to change her mind. Pushing her would only drive her further away.

As they walked the short distance to the station house, the sounds of unfamiliar birds poured from every acacia and gum. Abe’s well and stock tank had created a mecca for wild animals of all kinds, making her job of photography easier. In the two days since she’d been at the station, she’d managed to capture fourteen different varieties of local animal life. She’d also learned a gut-deep appreciation of why predators waited at waterholes in dry country.

It worked.

“Which mine are we looking at today?” she asked.

“Dog Four.”

“Again?”

He nodded.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because it’s close to another site I want to look at.”

“Isn’t Dog Four where we saw the goanna?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Good. I’m having trouble getting a handle on the best way to shoot one.”

“With a twelve-gauge.”

She smiled despite her vow to keep the relationship between them on a purely business basis. It was difficult now for the same reason it had been difficult in the beginning—Cole’s intelligence and quick, deadpan humor were even greater lures for her than any regularity of face or strength of body he had.

He’s even bright enough not to try to get in bed with me again,
she told herself grimly.
Or maybe it’s just that sweet, delicate Lai is taking care of his business.

Yet even as the thought came, Erin knew it wasn’t true. When she and Cole were at the station, he was always near her. They slept in the same room, they ate at the same table, and they flew the land in the same helicopter.

Maybe it’s not just for my safety. Maybe he’s afraid to be alone with Lai.

Erin’s mouth turned down. He hadn’t looked afraid when she’d walked into the room and seen his big hand caressing Lai’s neck. He hadn’t looked particularly passionate, either. He’d looked…suspended, patient, curious, coiled.

Predatory.

A feeling of unease shivered through Erin. Whatever had happened between Lai and Cole in the past had gone deep. Love, hate, or both tangled together, it didn’t matter. Cole had given Lai more than his body. She’d given him proof that women were what Abe had called them—mistresses of lies.

Erin stepped from the uncertain shade of the acacia grove into the spinifex. The sun was a steaming, searing shroud wrapping around her. Sweat stood on her skin and gathered in rivulets between her breasts and beneath her arms. Flies came at her in ragged squadrons but didn’t land on her. The combination of insect repellent and sunscreen the Australians used actually worked.

She only wished they had a repellent for the insufferable Kimberley climate. Already she could feel herself becoming surly, tense, wanting to lash out at anything within reach. She suspected Cole felt the same way, but he disguised it better.

That, too, irritated her, making her want to pry beneath his self-control.

“How long does the buildup last?” she asked.

“Until it rains.”

She made a disgusted sound.

Cole slanted a sideways look at her. Her pale skin was already flushed with heat and shiny with sweat. He took off his hat and dropped it over the burning mahogany of her hair.

“Where’s your hat?” he demanded. “I told you not to—”

“And I told you I can’t work with a damned hat flopping and flapping in my eyes,” she retorted, cutting across his words. “Besides, I knew we wouldn’t be out in the sun for more than the time it took to walk back to the house.”

She yanked the hat off and shoved it at Cole. He pushed it over her head again.

“Wear it,” he said flatly. “Two weeks ago you were sitting on a glacier at the other end of the earth, getting ready for winter. Now you’re sitting on a stove waiting for summer. Your body is still trying to figure out what hit it.”

“Yours seems to be doing just fine,” she said resentfully.

“I was in Brazil. Different stove, same temperature, same season. Stop wasting your energy trying to prove you can take the climate as well as I can. You can’t. Give me the bloody camera gear.”

He didn’t wait for her to agree. He simply stripped the gear from her.

They finished the walk to the station in silence.

When they arrived Lai was waiting at the table that had been set in the shade of a wide white awning. The awning stretched across the back of the house, helping both to shade and to extend the living space. A big white tent had been set up fifty feet beyond the house. The eight Chinese men lived there. They serviced the array of equipment and, Erin suspected, guarded it as well.

Lai looked like golden porcelain, cool and delicate, perfectly formed within her indigo silk slacks and shirt. She nodded politely before she withdrew into the house.

“Doesn’t she ever sweat?” Erin muttered beneath her breath.

“Stone doesn’t sweat. Sit down. I’ll get breakfast. The coffee you make is strong enough to etch stainless steel.”

“So is yours.”

“Yeah. We make a great team, don’t we? Sit there.”

Giving him a wary look, she sat down at the table in the chair he’d told her to use. He stacked her camera gear next to her and went into the kitchen. She knew without turning around that he could see her from inside the house, which was why he wanted her in that particular chair. Cursing wearily, she flapped the cloth of her tank top, trying to create breeze.

It just made her hotter.

She dropped the cloth and began rummaging in one of her camera bags for the old photos she kept there along with Abe’s poetry. The envelope was becoming soft and rather fuzzy from humidity and frequent handling. The photos weren’t. She held them carefully by the edges, looking at each image intently before going on to the next.

“Do you think the secret of the diamond mine is in those photographs?” Lai asked softly.

Erin’s breath came in with a startled sound. She wondered whether Lai tiptoed around deliberately or if she simply didn’t have enough weight to make sounds when she walked.

“No,” Erin said. “But they might tell me the secret of Crazy Abe—why he lived and why he hated and why he died.”

“He died of sunstroke,” Lai said as she looked over Erin’s shoulder at a photograph.

It was Erin’s favorite, the one of her grandmother standing on a steep rise with dark, odd-looking rocks and stunted acacias all around, and a tall man standing off to the right watching with hungry eyes. With Cole’s help, she’d discovered that many of the photos were taken in the same area as Bridget’s Hill, but from different angles and distances. One of the shots showed only the white slash of a woman’s skirt poised on the top of a ridge like a star rising over the vast land.

Erin wondered if her grandmother had amused herself climbing the rise while the photographer took other pictures.

“Who is that?” Lai asked.

“My grandmother.”

“And the man is your grandfather?”

Erin shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Are they still alive?”

“No.”

Clear black eyes looked unflinchingly at the photo, then at Erin, then at the photo again. After the space of four breaths Lai turned away.

“Human secrets have little value unless they lead to control,” Lai said as she headed back into the house. “Knowing the secrets of the dead is useless. The dead cannot be controlled.”

Erin turned to give Lai a startled look, but the other woman had left as silently as she’d come.

Relieved, Erin went back to staring at the haunting picture that had been taken when people now dead were young, vivid, vital, poised on the threshold of decisions that would shape their lives and the lives of those who came after them. She turned the photo over and read again the faded lines.

On an impulse she bent down and sorted by touch through a camera bag, not looking away from the lines of poetry. After a moment she found the folded sheets of “Chunder.” She pulled them up to the table, shook them out, and laid them next to the photograph.

A chill prickled over her skin.

When Cole came back out to the table, Erin was motionless, her eyes fixed on the lines of “Chunder.”

“Feeling masochistic?” he asked, setting the coffee down.

Erin looked up.

In the light beneath the awning her eyes were a luminous green so pure he couldn’t help staring. He’d seen nothing quite so beautiful to him, even the green diamond itself.

“How much does a man’s handwriting change over the course of his life?” she asked.

“A lot more before he’s twenty-five than after, unless he’s sick, drunk, or injured. Why?”

“I think Abe wrote the lines on the back of this photo.”

Cole stood close behind her, looking over her shoulder at the photo and the poetry. The longer he compared them, the more he agreed. There was a similarity about many of the letters that went beyond the careful Victorian handwriting style that both brothers would have had, because they’d both attended the same school.

“Could be,” Cole agreed. “Does it matter?”

“I don’t know. It just seems odd that Grandfather would end up with this picture if it had been written on by Abe.”

Cole grunted. “Not if they were both sleeping with the same woman.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “They might have been your grandparents, but they were human. Your grandmother wouldn’t have been the first woman in creation to be engaged to one man and engaged
with
another.”

“‘Mistress of lies…’”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that would explain why the two of them left for America.”

“Especially if she was carrying the wrong man’s child.”

Erin made a sound of protest. “That’s not likely.”

“Why not? Birth control and abortion were hit-and-miss in those days, and lust hasn’t changed much since Eve seduced Adam into eating from her hand.”

“You have a rather bitter view of women.”

“I could say the same about your view of men.”

Ignoring him, Erin turned the photo over and looked at the glossy, faded image again.

“Is that limestone?” she asked, pointing to the oddly shaped rocks that stood knee and waist high to Bridget McQueen Windsor.

“Probably.”

“And underneath the rise?”

“More of the same.”

“‘A dead sea’s bones.’”

Cole grunted. “When those pictures were taken, Abe was looking for water for his cattle, not diamonds.”

“Still, I wonder where this was taken.”

“Why?”

“It’s as close to a real hill as I’ve found here,” Erin said dryly. “I’d like to see what the world looks like from the top of it.”

For an instant his crystalline gray eyes focused completely on the photos in front of her, measuring the steepness of the rise against his unusually precise memories of the land he’d seen at various times on Windsor station. After a few minutes he decided that she was right. There wasn’t a hill like that on the station. He doubted that there was a hill like that on the other claims, either. Most of them were on land that was even flatter than the station itself.

“Odd,” he muttered, staring at the series of photos again. “It can’t be that far away from camp or from a settlement.”

“Why?”

“Bridget’s dress is wrinkled but not dirty. White gets dirty real fast out here.”

He picked up the photo that had been taken from a distance, pulled a loupe from one of the many pockets in his bush shorts, and looked closely at the image.

“I’ll be damned,” he said after a moment. “That handsome jackaroo is Abe.”

“Are you sure?”

“I can see a scar on his left wrist. Abe had one in the same spot, reminder of the day when he was young and foolish enough to rope a brush bull. It nearly did for him. He was lucky he didn’t lose the hand.”

“He’s looking at Bridget with such longing.”

“Poor son of a bitch. He doesn’t know yet.”

“What?” asked Erin.

“It’s as clear as the sly, sexy little smile on her face. She wants the man behind the camera, not Abe.”

“That must be Grandfather. It was a good match. She stayed with him the rest of her life.”

Cole grunted, unimpressed. He moved the loupe slowly, examining the rest of the photo. “I don’t see anything that looks like a seep, much less a billabong. But it was the dry when this was taken, which means they were going from waterhole to waterhole.”

“Walking?”

“In those shoes? Abe used to ride everywhere before he turned the horses loose to live or die with whatever was left of his cattle. He and his brother and Bridget were probably on horseback, camping out and taking pictures and looking over the best place for the happy couple to build a home.”

The savage irony beneath the surface of Cole’s words made Erin uneasy. She sensed he was lumping her with her grandmother and Lai and Eve, women who had betrayed the men who loved them.

But Cole doesn’t love me, so the comparison doesn’t apply. Besides, I wasn’t the one who was stirring through old ashes looking for sparks.

He made a sound of surprise, slanted the photo to catch the light better, and peered at a corner through the loupe.

“Find something?” she asked.

“They were camping. There’s a pack saddle and dry goods in the shade of one of the distant trees. Can’t see a waterhole or anything like the kind of plants a waterhole would support.”

“Maybe they carried their own water.”

“Doubt it. Water is heavy and horses need a lot. You reach the point of diminishing returns real fast.”

She watched him study the photo with an intensity that was almost tangible. It tempted her to grab a camera and take a portrait of him.

Instead, she reached for the coffee and scones he’d brought from the kitchen. As she ate, she thumbed idly through the pages of “Chunder from Down Under.” When she remembered what the title meant, she grimaced. “Vomit from Australia.” Then she thought how diamonds came to the surface in a violent rush of magma from the depths of the earth.

“Did Abe have a sense of humor?” she asked.

“After a fashion. Why?”

“Would it have amused him to think of diamonds as a kind of cosmic vomit?”

Black eyebrows went up. He turned the full force of his attention on her, making her feel like she’d just been pinned by a megawatt searchlight.

“Yes,” Cole said. “Any other thoughts?”

She hesitated, then pointed to the photo where Bridget McQueen stood on the windy rise. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but those rocks look kind of like black swans to me.”

For an instant he was motionless. Then he picked up the photo and his loupe.

“No,” she said. “Not that way. Put down the loupe and let your eyes kind of go unfocused.”

“Like I was drunk?” he asked dryly.

“Why not? Abe seemed to spend most of his time soused to his widow’s peak.”

After a few moments Cole said, “It’s possible those are swans, but the same probably could be said of any ridge capped by lumps of eroded limestone that had turned dark.”

“But this isn’t just any ridge. This is the ridge where Bridget McQueen stood and smiled at the man who was to become her husband, while Abe stood to one side, thinking she was his.”

“McQueen…Queen of Lies.” Cole frowned. “It fits, but Abe didn’t know diamonds from quartz in those days.”

“Would you say he was obsessed with my grandmother?”

“Probably. For revenge, if nothing else. A man who’s been used like that wants his pound of flesh and then some.”

Erin looked at the picture but it was Lai she saw, Lai of the flawless features and feline body.

Revenge could easily be an extension of betrayed love.

She glanced up quickly, wanting to ask Cole if it was revenge and hatred that bound him to Lai rather than love. But that would have been the kind of personal question Erin had declared off limits.

“Isn’t it possible,” she said carefully, looking only at the photos, “that Abe went back to this place many times, as a kind of perverse shrine?”

“It’s more than possible. It would have been just like him to go there, drink, remember, and rage away the days until he was too spent to care about anything.”

She barely kept herself from asking Cole if he had his own private shrine of betrayal and rage.

“How many brothers and sisters does your father have?” Cole asked absently.

She blinked. “None. He’s an only child.”

“If we’re right about Bridget and Abe, you realize what it means, don’t you?” Before Erin could speak, Cole quoted from the verses that had accompanied the diamonds. “‘Then come to my land/Grandchild of deceit/Blood of my blood/Bone of my bone….’” Colelooked straight at her. “You’re Abe’s granddaughter, not his great-niece. You’re the ‘Descendant of deceit.’”

“Charming,” she said, but her tone said the opposite. “Just what I always wanted, an ancestor who was certifiable.”

Cole smiled crookedly. “Don’t worry. If there were any bad genes, they gave your father a pass. He’s as hardheaded and tightly wrapped as they come.”

She started searching through the poem once more. “‘Find it if you can,/If you dare to go/Where the dark swan floats/Over a dead sea’s bones….’ Well, that’s clearenough,” she muttered. “But the next part is beyond me.”

“Want me to explain it again?” he offered.

“Pass,” she said quickly. “I learned enough yesterday about Aussie sexual slang to last a lifetime.”

“You asked.”

“And you answered.” She grimaced. “Talk about reducing something to its logical absurdity…. On the other hand, I have to admit that the man had a knack for double and triple meanings. Look at the title. It can be read as a comment on the poetry, as a comment on how diamonds are formed, and as a comment on diamonds themselves. Not bad. Not pretty, mind you, but not stupid.”

Cole waited, watching her long, slender fingers tracing over the poetry. But she wasn’t reading. Her eyes were unfocused. He sensed the same intense concentration in her that she normally reserved for photography—or making love.

“Are you sure there aren’t any caves on the station or the mineral claims?” she asked finally.

“None that I know of.”

She sighed. “Well, it was a nice idea.”

“What was?”

“If there were caves or passages through the dead sea’s bones, and if you had Abe’s warped view of life, you might see a man’s penetration of a cave in sexual terms. As for seeing the cave in feminine terms, Mother Earth is a common metaphor.”

Cole shot her a surprised look.

“I was an English major in college,” she said. “Words were my passion. Then I discovered photography. Anyway, Abe was supposed to be some kind of literary scholar, wasn’t he?”

“A good one, when he was sober. He used to recite Milton and Pope to me while we drank.”

“Poor baby.”

“Would you believe I liked it? He had an amazing voice.”

Erin looked at Cole and realized that she did believe it. He was a man of unpredictable interests.

“But there’s a problem with your interpretation of the poetry,” he continued. “Several, actually.”

“What?”

“No caves.”

“We just have to find one.”

“Right,” he said dryly. “That leaves Abe.”

“I don’t understand.”

“‘Crazy bloke/Drank holy’ pretty well describes him.”

“Wasn’t he ever sober?”

“Yes. That’s what I’m worried about. Remember the last lines of the poetry in the will?”

Erin shook her head and started searching through the papers in front of her.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “‘Goodbye, my Queen of Lies./And I am the King.’ This whole thing could be Abe’s gigantic joke on the world.”

“But the diamonds are real.”

“As real as death. ‘Secrets blacker than death/And truth it’s death to speak./But I will speak to you…child of rue.’” Cole’s mouth turned down. “It’s you he’s speaking to, Erin. ‘Child of deceit/Cleave unto me./My grave, my bones,/Hear them moan.’ It’s
you
he’s offering death.”

“You should have been an English major. You’re reading more into the lines than I am.” She looked at the watch on his wrist. “How much time before we go prospecting again?”

There was an electric silence before Cole accepted the change of subject. “I’ll go run up the chopper.”

He turned and went toward the helicopter without another word about death and poetry.