Death is Forever

the aching constriction of her throat. “I meant very little to Cole. I was a small affair on the way to a big strike.”
    “For God’s sake, Erin—”
    “Is that all, Mr. Chen?” she asked, cutting across her father’s words.
    “Except for the matter of turning your property over to you, yes.”
    “What property? You’ve already replaced the camera equipment that was destroyed when the Rover was buried in a flash flood. I took everything else I owned out of the station when I left.”
    “Not quite.”
    With quick, graceful movements, Wing opened the carton that sat in the center of the table. He tipped over the box. Eight-by-ten color photos cascaded across the surface of the polished wood. Pieces of the outback flashed and gleamed like glass in a kaleidoscope.
    Termite mounds creating an alien city beneath a steamy silver sky.
    Fragile, dusty, incredibly stubborn acacia trees growing out of stone.
    Lightning arcing across an empty sky.
    Empty stretching away to all horizons, relentlessly desolate, absolutely flat, the quintessence of loneliness.
    And over all, the sun, always the sun, the blazing eye of an all powerful god.
    “But…these are mine,” she whispered.
    Every single image had been taken from the rolls of film Erin had left behind in the sabotaged Rover.
    “The negatives have been duplicated,” Wing said. “One set is in a vault in the government casino in Darwin. The other set is in the safe here. A third is in your father’s own safe. Cole did not want to take a chance on losing any of your work.”
    She tried to speak. She couldn’t. She could only stare at images she’d been certain were lost forever.
    “These are really good,” Windsor said, sifting through the photos intently. “Hell, they’re incredible. It’s the best work I’ve seen you do, and that includes Arctic Odyssey. What do you think, baby?”
    “I think—” Her voice broke. “Why did you lie about the Rover, Mr. Wing? It wasn’t destroyed. These photos are taken from all the rolls of film I had to leave behind.”
    “The Rover and everything in it was destroyed,” Wing said. “Cole carried the exposed film in his rucksack until you went down into the cave.”
    “But why?” she whispered, going through the photos as though the answer was in one of the images. “After the Rover was sabotaged, we were desperate. Every ounce he carried was for our immediate survival. There were pounds of film. He can’t have wasted his strength carrying it. That’s crazy, and Cole isn’t crazy.”
    “I pointed that out to him,” Wing said dryly. “He said you had taught him there was more to life than just survival, but all he had taught you was the opposite.”
    Numbly, fighting emotions she couldn’t even name, she sifted through photo after photo. There were hundreds of them, but only one drew her eye again and again, Cole in the dry watercourse just before the helicopter had come and sent them on a desperate hike across the Kimberley. Cole had been examining a handful of dry-panned grit when he had noticed her stalking him. He’d looked up the instant before she’d triggered the camera. Even shadowed by the brim of his hat, his eyes shone like clear crystal. The intensity in him was stunning, as was the hunger for her he’d never bothered to hide.
    If I had Abe’s diamond mine right now, I’d trade it for film and give it to you.
    She closed her eyes. She couldn’t look any longer and know that Cole had carried her film through a hell of thirst and pain and danger and had never given up so much as an ounce of his burden.
    “You really didn’t know, did you?” Wing asked, watching the slow, silent fall of Erin’s tears.
    “He never said anything about saving my film,” she whispered.
    “Not the film. Cole. He loves you.”
    A shudder went through her body. In the silence that followed Wing’s statement, she heard echoes of other words, her own accusation: You and Abe were a lot alike. Once burned, forever shy.
    And Cole’s matter-of-fact response.
    You should know, honey. You’re backing away from the fire as fast as you can.
    Tilting her head back against the tears that wouldn’t stop falling, she asked herself if what he’d said was true.
    “Forgive me, Miss Windsor,” Wing said, “but I must ask again. What are you going to do with your half of Black Dog Mines?”
    Without a word Erin stood up and walked out of the room.

48
London Two days later
    Like the multicolored foam of a breaking