Bones of Contention Read Online Free PDF

point?”
    “Hello-oh? Are we talking about the same Cleon Dobbs? Chain jerker extraordinare? Master manipulator? Redneck Machiavelli? Alpha hick?”
    “You’re being overly critical. Death changes people.”
    “The only thing Cleon’s changing is his will.”
    “How do you know? Did he say that he was?”
    “It’s his constant refrain. He says he’s still making up his mind who’ll get what.”
    She’d prepared herself for friction between the wives and there was always the possibly of a dustup between Cleon and Lucien. A money fight never crossed her mind. “Maybe he wants to distribute the estate more equitably. Fine-tune things, so to speak.”
    “He’s fine-tuning, all right. Jabbing everybody up the ass with his tuning fork.”
    “And how, pray, is he doing this jabbing?”
    “He hints about past crimes and misdemeanors without saying exactly what it was that we did to put his nose out of joint. He runs all kinds of vindictive possibilities up the flagpole. He’s going to write off his children and leave all the money to their mothers, or he’s going to lock up all the money in a spendthrift trust under the control of a trustee who’ll make sure we don’t blow it on anything that would make us even remotely happy. Every day it’s something different. If he keeps it up, somebody will slit his throat before the doctor has a chance at him.”
    It must be the climate, she thought. Everyone seemed to have murder on the brain. “Do you have a particular throat-slitter in mind?”
    “No, but you wouldn’t believe the state we’re in. Someone will snap.”
    “I’ll snap if I don’t get to a bed soon. How much farther?”
    “The turnoff’s just ahead, but it’s ten miles down a dirt road after that. And if you were expecting the Ritz, forget about it. Crow Hill Lodge is a pit.”
    “All I want is a shower and clean place to lie down.”
    “Well, the sheets are clean, but inspect them for spiders before snuggling in. The toilet seat, too. And if there are frogs in the toilet bowl, scream your head off. It’s what I do.”
    He whipped an abrupt right-hand turn onto a rutted dirt track. The car lurched like a mechanical bull, her seat belt seized and her head flew back and down. When it came up, a flock of startled cockatoos exploded from a tree overhead. She examined her teeth. She still had the full set, no thanks to her chauffeur.
    “You’re in an awful damned hurry to get to this pit.”
    “There’s an excellent single malt Scotch waiting for me at the end of the trail. The lodge has all the comforts and accoutrement of a gulag, but at least Cleon didn’t stint on the booze.”
    Dinah still had a mild, palliative buzz from the Bloody Marys, but it was wearing off fast under Eduardo’s hail of complaints. She watched the miles roll by in silence and conjured up visions of a gulag crawling with frogs and barb throwers and fork jabbers and bead rattlers and throat slitters. Thinking negatively never helped, but she suspected that her horoscope didn’t bode happy times ahead.
    Eduardo pursed his lips. “Did I mention that he brought those two little Winslow Homers that you like with him?”
    “What?”
    “When he moved to Sydney, he threw them in a suitcase he checked with the rest of the baggage. Carted them from Sydney to Katherine the same way.”
    “But that’s nuts. You can’t bounce paintings around like that. In this heat? Never mind the baggage handlers, the temperature and humidity might have ruined them. Have you seen them since they were unpacked? Has Lucien seen them?”
    “No and no.”
    She could’ve wept. She loved that pair of Homer seascapes. They’d hung in the living room of Cleon’s old farmhouse for ten years like windows onto a storm-churned Atlantic. Just because Cleon owned them didn’t give him the right to slam them about from pillar to post. They were irreplaceable.
    The open landscape changed and walls of gigantic, shaggy-barked trees closed in around