Death is Forever

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?”