Death is Forever

Let me handle your legacy for you.”
    “I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”
    “Why?” Faulkner asked.
    “The terms of the will require that I live on the station for five years to gain final title, or until the mine is found, whichever comes first.”
    “No amount of money is worth getting killed for,” Windsor said.
    “It isn’t the money,” Erin said. “In fact, there’s no guarantee I’ll find a single diamond. Apparently Abe was the only one who knew where the diamond mine was, and he didn’t talk before he died. He didn’t leave a map, either.”
    Windsor refused to be drawn away from his main point. “If you’re not after money, why are you going to Australia?”
    “It’s a whole new continent,” she said simply. “A whole new world. I want to smell it, taste it, see it, photograph it, live it.”
    “That’s the point, baby. You could die there instead of living.”
    “I was told the same thing about the arctic.” She tried to avoid a shouting match by changing the subject. “Do you know much about Abelard Windsor?”
    Her father shook his head. “Dad never mentioned him.”
    “His own brother?”
    “Things happen, Erin. Things that tear families apart.”
    Things like Hans Schmidt, foreign agent.
    But neither father nor daughter spoke the thought aloud.
    Erin got up, took the tin box from her oversize purse, and pulled out the sheaf of papers. “Until I knew the stones were real, I didn’t know if the whole inheritance was an elaborate hoax. Frankly, after reading ‘Chunder from Down Under,’ I thought Great-uncle Abe might have concocted the whole thing in some Australian psycho ward. Here. Read this. Clues to finding the mine are supposed to be in it.”
    For several minutes the only sound in the room was that of dried, rough paper rustling as Windsor scanned a sheet rapidly, then passed it to Faulkner. He glanced up after the fifth sheet.
    “Is it all the same?” he asked.
    “Different words,” Erin said, “but the same.”
    He grunted, shuffled through the remaining pages, then took the first page from Faulkner again.
    “It doesn’t improve with rereading,” Erin said dryly. “I’ve read it and read it and read it, using all the tricks and tools I learned as an English major at the university.”
    “And?” Windsor asked.
    “I didn’t find any meanings but the obvious one. The hero eats raw croc liver, drinks, talks about black swans, drinks, pees, drinks, apparently screws everything that moves and some things that don’t, eats more raw croc, pees. And he drinks. Did I mention that?”
    “It could be a code or cipher of some type,” Faulkner said. “Would you mind if we copied it and sent it to Washington for analysis?”
    “An Australian might be more helpful than a code expert,” Erin said. “Do you know what ‘chunder’ is? Poetic thunder, maybe?”
    “Never heard of it,” Windsor said. “My parents might have been Australian, but they never talked about their life before America.”
    “That’s kind of odd, isn’t it?” Erin asked.
    Windsor shrugged. “Runs in the family, like chasing after a diamond mine that might not exist but could kill you anyway.”
    The daughter’s shrug was an exact match of the father’s.
    “Shit, baby. Why are you really doing this? What does Australia have that you don’t have here? A crazy old man’s mythical diamond mine? Is that what you want from life?”
    “It’s not a bad start,” she retorted. Then she sighed and tried to put into words something she’d sensed about herself but never pinned down. “After Arctic Odyssey , there just hasn’t been another project I wanted to do. I found some peace in the arctic, but I don’t believe anymore that it’s my future. Maybe Australia is. Maybe it isn’t. I won’t know until I go there.”
    “What about here in America?”
    “I don’t think I’d see you any less if I live in Australia than I’ve seen you while I was living off and on in the arctic.”
    “Baby—”
    “That’s just it,” Erin interrupted calmly. “I’m not a baby. I’ve been making my own decisions for seven years.”
    Windsor closed his eyes for an instant, then opened them again, focusing on his daughter, the image of the woman he’d loved and lost when a drunk driver failed to hold his lane at ninety miles an hour.
    “It’s all yours, Nan,” he said finally. “I told you she wouldn’t turn it over to me.”
    Windsor went to stand by the window,