Death is Forever

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