Van Luik took another small sip of ale, wondering why he had the uneasy feeling that Street was lying.
“How is the woman standing up to the rigors of the climate and the land?” van Luik asked.
“The buildup got to her real quick. She’s short-tempered as a cat in a bath. She and Blackburn aren’t as chummy as they were.”
“How close were they?”
“Fucking close.”
Van Luik grimaced. “Has she made any progress on finding clues in ‘Chunder’?”
“She spends a lot of time reading it.”
“Good.”
“Why?”
“A person does not work on a puzzle that is already solved.” There was silence while van Luik fought against the impulse to squeeze the bridge of his nose. “How is Mr. Blackburn holding up?”
“Mean as a snake,” Street said cheerfully. “Going on short rations will do that to a man.”
“Rations? Is there a problem getting food to the station?”
“Food isn’t the problem. Sex is. They’re sleeping in the same room but not on the same blanket.”
“Your information is quite complete.”
“That’s my job,” Street said. “If you don’t believe me, go to the station yourself.”
“I will leave that dubious pleasure to you.” Van Luik drew a thin parcel from his suit coat and slid it across the table. The packet was wrapped in bright yellow plastic and secured with string wrapped in a figure eight around two buttons. “Do not open it.”
Street glanced down. “What is it?”
“Your entree, a letter of introduction to Miss Windsor.” Van Luik reached into his pocket and withdrew a sheet of paper. “This is a photocopy.”
Without a word, Street took the sheet, read quickly, and looked up.
“Genuine?” Street asked bluntly.
“Does it matter?”
“Not as long as the signature passes muster.”
“There will be no difficulty with the signature.”
“Bloody hell. Somebody really twisted the CIA’s balls.” Street shot van Luik a glance. “ConMin? Or was it their own government?”
Van Luik retrieved the copy, stood, and walked out without a word.
It wasn’t until the plane was over the vast Pacific Ocean that painkillers subdued van Luik’s savage headache. Just as he slid into sleep, the thought that had nagged beneath the pulses of agony surfaced.
Street had never mentioned having any satellite scrambler except the one van Luik had given him.
32
Abe’s station
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.
Some love for silver, some love for gold,
We love for the heat that never runs cold.
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.
33
Abe’s station
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.”
Death is Forever Page 26
