Death is Forever

she asked.
    “They were camping. There’s a pack saddle and dry goods in the shade of one of the distant trees. Can’t see a waterhole or anything like the kind of plants a waterhole would support.”
    “Maybe they carried their own water.”
    “Doubt it. Water is heavy and horses need a lot. You reach the point of diminishing returns real fast.”
    She watched him study the photo with an intensity that was almost tangible. It tempted her to grab a camera and take a portrait of him.
    Instead, she reached for the coffee and scones he’d brought from the kitchen. As she ate, she thumbed idly through the pages of “Chunder from Down Under.” When she remembered what the title meant, she grimaced. “Vomit from Australia.” Then she thought how diamonds came to the surface in a violent rush of magma from the depths of the earth.
    “Did Abe have a sense of humor?” she asked.
    “After a fashion. Why?”
    “Would it have amused him to think of diamonds as a kind of cosmic vomit?”
    Black eyebrows went up. He turned the full force of his attention on her, making her feel like she’d just been pinned by a megawatt searchlight.
    “Yes,” Cole said. “Any other thoughts?”
    She hesitated, then pointed to the photo where Bridget McQueen stood on the windy rise. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but those rocks look kind of like black swans to me.”
    For an instant he was motionless. Then he picked up the photo and his loupe.
    “No,” she said. “Not that way. Put down the loupe and let your eyes kind of go unfocused.”
    “Like I was drunk?” he asked dryly.
    “Why not? Abe seemed to spend most of his time soused to his widow’s peak.”
    After a few moments Cole said, “It’s possible those are swans, but the same probably could be said of any ridge capped by lumps of eroded limestone that had turned dark.”
    “But this isn’t just any ridge. This is the ridge where Bridget McQueen stood and smiled at the man who was to become her husband, while Abe stood to one side, thinking she was his.”
    “McQueen…Queen of Lies.” Cole frowned. “It fits, but Abe didn’t know diamonds from quartz in those days.”
    “Would you say he was obsessed with my grandmother?”
    “Probably. For revenge, if nothing else. A man who’s been used like that wants his pound of flesh and then some.”
    Erin looked at the picture but it was Lai she saw, Lai of the flawless features and feline body.
    Revenge could easily be an extension of betrayed love.
    She glanced up quickly, wanting to ask Cole if it was revenge and hatred that bound him to Lai rather than love. But that would have been the kind of personal question Erin had declared off limits.
    “Isn’t it possible,” she said carefully, looking only at the photos, “that Abe went back to this place many times, as a kind of perverse shrine?”
    “It’s more than possible. It would have been just like him to go there, drink, remember, and rage away the days until he was too spent to care about anything.”
    She barely kept herself from asking Cole if he had his own private shrine of betrayal and rage.
    “How many brothers and sisters does your father have?” Cole asked absently.
    She blinked. “None. He’s an only child.”
    “If we’re right about Bridget and Abe, you realize what it means, don’t you?” Before Erin could speak, Cole quoted from the verses that had accompanied the diamonds. “‘Then come to my land/Grandchild of deceit/Blood of my blood/Bone of my bone….’” Colelooked straight at her. “You’re Abe’s granddaughter, not his great-niece. You’re the ‘Descendant of deceit.’”
    “Charming,” she said, but her tone said the opposite. “Just what I always wanted, an ancestor who was certifiable.”
    Cole smiled crookedly. “Don’t worry. If there were any bad genes, they gave your father a pass. He’s as hardheaded and tightly wrapped as they come.”
    She started searching through the poem once more. “‘Find it if you can,/If you dare to go/Where the dark swan floats/Over a dead sea’s bones….’ Well, that’s clearenough,” she muttered. “But the next part is beyond me.”
    “Want me to explain it again?” he offered.
    “Pass,” she said quickly. “I learned enough yesterday about Aussie sexual slang to last a lifetime.”
    “You asked.”
    “And you answered.” She grimaced. “Talk about reducing something to its logical absurdity…. On the other hand, I have to admit that the man