Bones of Contention Read Online Free PDF Page A

façade. But even among the gentler sex, I think you’ll find true grief in short supply.”
    Dinah kneaded her forehead. Eduardo was normally a blithe, sunny kind of guy. If he was peevish, the others must be foaming at the mouth.
    She shifted her attention to the countryside, which was green and wooded, though not as verdant as the terrain she’d flown over with Jacko. To the south lay what her guidebook described as the Red Center, the arid and inhospitable heart of the continent. But here, the landscape wasn’t all that different from South Georgia.
    Her thoughts returned to family matters. “Eddie, why did Cleon invite Margaret? They’ve been divorced for thirty-five years. Couldn’t he have said good-bye over the phone?”
    “He invited Margaret to piss off Neesha. What else? Neesha plays the part of the adoring wife, but sharing the stage with the first wife is getting to her. Les femmes haven’t come to blows, but the sound of rattling beads and ruffling feathers is positively deafening.”
    “I don’t believe Cleon means to piss off anybody. He still has feelings for Margaret and she is, after all, the mother of his firstborn. Maybe he just wanted to bring together all the people he loves for one last time. To tell us the things he should have told us, but never found the time.”
    “Lucien thought that’s how he enticed you here.”
    She bristled. Lucien could blab her secrets if he liked, but there were some matters on which she did not desire big brother’s opinion and most definitely she did not desire Eduardo’s. “If Uncle Cleon’s crotchety, it’s probably due to the drugs he’s on. Is he in a lot of pain?”
    “Ha!”
    “Come on, Eddie. Cut the man some slack. He must be suffering.”
    “He’s certainly making everyone else suffer.”
    “You’re prejudiced. You’ve never liked him.”
    He swerved around the bloated carcass of a dead kangaroo into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer rig. Dinah looked up into the truck driver’s furious eyes as Eduardo swerved back to the left with no room to spare. The trucker laid on his horn and the Charade was rocked by a series of concussive gusts as three long trailers filled with bawling cattle rumbled by in the cab’s wake.
    Eduardo thrust his arm out the window and pumped his middle finger. “Road trains! One pulling seven trailers passed me yesterday doing eighty. I barely kept from being blown off the road. The longer you’re in this bizarre country, the more you’ll understand why the Brits shipped their prisoners here as punishment.”
    Dinah had no doubt that she was being punished. When her heart rate came down from the stratosphere, she said, “I don’t understand why he didn’t want to go home to die. The logistics would’ve been much easier in the U.S.”
    “I don’t think he’s sick. He’s up to something.”
    “What does he have to gain by dragging us here if he isn’t dying?”
    “You’re the tea-leaf reader in the family, cherie.”
    She wished. Her intuition had been seriously off-line of late and she couldn’t think why Lucien hadn’t come to the airport to meet her. Maybe he and Cleon were busy telling each other those touchy-feely, father-son things they should have said before but couldn’t. “How’s the situation between Cleon and Lucien?”
    “Lucien hasn’t begun to gnash his teeth yet, but if Cleon keeps shooting barbs at him, it’s just a matter of time.”
    So much for the feel-good scenario. “What kind of barbs is he shooting?”
    “He heh-heh-hehs in that sly way of his and drops snarky little hints.”
    “Hints about what?”
    “You’ll have to decide for yourself.”
    “Well, I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. You don’t trust him because he’s thrown his weight around a little bit in the past.”
    “A little bit?” His voice rose, mocking and querulous. “A little bit?”
    “Okay, a lot. But how can he possibly jerk anyone’s chain at this