Bet Your Bones

by Jeanne Matthews

  For all its beauty, Hawaii did not lack for violence. And Pele seemed to go especially hard on lovers. Dinah recalled a myth about Pele falling in love with a handsome chief named Lohi’au on the island of Kaui. But being a goddess carried responsibilities and she was obliged to return to Hawaii to churn out more lava and make more land. She promised Lohi’au that she’d send for him as soon as possible. True to her word, she asked her most trusted sibling, Hi’iaka, to go and ferry him back to Hawaii. Hi’iaka agreed, asking only that while she was away, Pele protect a grove of pandanus trees that she treasured. Pele promised and Hi’iaka set out for Kaui. But by the time she arrived, poor lovelorn Lohi’au had hanged himself.

  Hi’iaka revived him and enticed his errant soul back into his body, but when he woke up and saw her sweet face, he did an emotional one-eighty and declared his love for her instead of Pele. Hi’iaka rebuffed him and dragged him back toward Hawaii. But as they drew near, Hi’iaka spotted a wildfire devouring the trees Pele had promised to protect. Enraged, Hi’iaka pasted a long, retaliatory kiss on Lohi’au’s fickle lips in full view of her pyromaniac sister. But hell hath no fury like Pele when she’s scorned. She flooded the mountain with fire and incinerated her faithless lover.

  Apparently, it was no accident that the Hawaiian word for “love” also meant “good-bye” and “alas.” Aloha had its dark side and Dinah couldn’t seem to say aloha to thoughts of murder.

  The forest ended abruptly and the bleak, black expanse of the crater floor opened out in front of her like Hell’s foyer. There were several groups of hikers. Some gathered around numbered cairns, which marked the trail, to peruse the correspondingly numbered descriptions in their guide brochure. Some snapped pictures. Some explored the off-trail sights—cinder cones and steam vents and weird rocky depressions.

  Dinah had no desire to explore this charred and eerie landscape, the aftermath of a flood of Pele’s fire. She was about to turn around and start back up the hill when she clocked Eleanor Kalolo in a red-striped muumuu like a carnival tent. Eleanor stood under a flowery parasol minutely examining the single flame-red blossom on a lone, incongruous tree. As Dinah and any number of tourists watched, she pulled a pair of shears out of her pocket and, indifferent both to federal law and Pele’s wrath, snipped off the blossom.

  Dinah walked about a hundred yards across the lava to speak to her. “Hello, Eleanor.”

  She looked up with a testy expression. But when she saw who it was, her expression changed to one of benevolence, more or less. “You come wid me. Time we talk story.” She took Dinah’s arm and leaned heavily against her. “You help me back up the mountain. I haven’t walked this far in a long time. When Leilani and I were little, our father brought us down here and we cooked a chicken in the hot lava. It was against the law, of course. Haole law.”

  Dinah supported Eleanor’s unsteady bulk as best she could. “Did you hear about Raif Reid’s murder yesterday?”

  “Of course, I heard. He was my niece’s husband.” She handed Dinah the red blossom she’d picked. “It’s called an ohia. It’s one of the first to grow in lava. It was named for a handsome warrior Pele wanted to marry, only he fell in love with another woman, Lehua. Pele punished Ohia by…”

  “Incineration,” supplied Dinah. “That seems to be Pele’s modus operandi.” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice. She was losing her taste for Pele myths.

  Eleanor glowered as if to say, pearls-before-swine. “Pele punished him by turning him into a tree. But the other gods felt sorry for Lehua. They turned her into the red flower that grows on the tree so that the two lovers could always be together.”

  Talking story was apparently not the same as talking turkey or, if it was, Eleanor must enjoy having the story gouged out of her. “What do you know about Raif’s sins, Eleanor?”

  “He cheated.”

  “I know he cheated on Lyssa. Did he cheat at cards, too?”

  “Cheat at one thing, cheat at everything. He was kolohe when he played cards and moekolohe when he slept with other women. He was scum.”

  Dinah was surprised by her vehemence. She wouldn’t have thought that Eleanor cared one way or the other about Raif’s transgressions. “Did Jon tell you about Raif’s kolohe ways or was it Lyssa?”

  “I talk to my nephew sometimes. Lyssa hasn’t talked to me since she married that bum. She’s my niece, my own blood, and I love her. But she’s vain and willful like her mother. She didn’t care that her husband was a parasite. All she saw was his handsome face and his hiluhilu friends.”

  “What do you mean Raif was a parasite?”

  “It’s just a word. It’s what Jon called him.”

  “Do you have any idea who killed him? Besides Pele, I mean.”

  Eleanor stumped along in silence for a minute. The only sounds were her whistling breath and the scuffing of her ankle-high brogans across the lava. When she deigned to answer, her words were dipped in acid. “Xander Garst kill ‘im. ‘Apaka, kolohe, ho’opunipuni. It’s his hala dat brings po’ino to both his children. What goes around comes around.”

  Dinah’s temper flared. “Stop it. Stop toggling in and out of pidgin and Hawaiian and stop your mysterious hints about Xander’s crimes and misdemeanors and hala huna whatever. Either spit out your criticism in the language I speak and tell me what this Pash thing is about or put a sock in it.”

  “Kaii. Boddah you I talk stink ‘bout Garst, eh? Boddah you I talk pidgin and Hawaiian? If there were any justice in this world, Garst would be dead instead of my sister and you’d be deferring to me, speaking my language in my homeland.”

  They had reached the trail leading up through the forest and back to the road. Eleanor let go of Dinah’s arm and sat down heavily on a boulder. She closed her parasol and blotted the sweat off her forehead. “I feel junk.”

  With a mixture of concern and contrition, Dinah offered her her water bottle.

  She took it and drank. When she was finished, she screwed the top back on the bottle and handed it back. “Mo bettah. Mahalo.” With the thank you, her voice softened, as if she were feeling a little contrite, herself, and she reverted to standard English. “I don’t wish Garst dead. I want him to lose his money on Uwahi, I want him to lose his good name, and I want your friend to see that he is a liar and a fraud and save herself. He killed my sister.”

  “How could he have killed your sister? He was in California when she died. Did something happen there that made her want to kill herself?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Garst was unfaithful to her.”

  “How do you know that? How did she know that?”

  “Somebody called her from the convention, somebody who’d seen him carrying on with a woman. Leilani was furious. She cried all the time she tried to talk to me.”

  That phone call again, and yet more infidelity. Louis Sykes had been fooling around with another woman, too, or so went the gossip among the U.S.G.S. “oldtimers.” The earth sciences people must be a lusty bunch and a gossipy bunch. The blabbermouth who’d tipped off Leilani to her husband’s fling must have been shocked by her reaction. Shocked and guilt-ridden.

  “It must have been one of Xander’s colleagues who called her. You never found out who it was?”

  “No. She didn’t say.”

  “What did you and Leilani argue about when she brought the children to your house the day she killed herself? Jon remembers you yelling and calling each other names.”

  “We argued about what we always argued about. I told her she should stick to her own people, stop being embarrassed by her ancestors. I said raise your children like Hawaiians. They were born in Hawaii to a Hawaiian woman descended from royalty. There’s no blood quantum that makes Jon and Lyssa less Hawaiian. But she wanted them to be haole. She said the old ways are pau, finished, and that I wanted something tha
t doesn’t exist anymore. She called me old, antique, kahiko. I was about your age.” She made a guttural noise in the back of her throat.

  It took Dinah a few seconds to recognize the noise as a laugh. She felt obliged to say something consoling. “Leilani sang meles to the children. Jon seems proud of his Hawaiian ancestry. He seems in love with the land and the culture.”

  Eleanor didn’t reply.

  “Did you see Leilani again after you argued?”

  “No. We had no reconciliation. No kala ‘ana.” She squinted up at Dinah, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. “Kala ‘ana is kala ‘ana. It means what it means. Hawaiian isn’t a code for something else. But I will tell you what it comes closest to meaning in English. To give kala ‘ana is to lift the burden of anger. It is forgiveness. I can never have my sister’s kala ‘ana now. I can never tell her that I loved her. Love her still. That’s what Garst took from me.”

  “And you’re getting back at him by obstructing the sale of Uwahi?”

  “Uwahi was salt in the wound. My family owned the land back when Garst married Leilani. It wasn’t a leasehold on trust lands. We owned it in fee simple. My father revered the land and wanted to protect it. He signed a conservation easement, a legal agreement that restricts future uses of the property regardless of who owns it. When he died, my mother was forced to sell the land, but we knew the land would be preserved because the restrictions still applied. They ran with the title. No building. But Garst had always coveted the place. He brokered a land swap between the owner of a much larger tract and the land trust charged with enforcing the easement. He and his lawyers gamed the system. The trust consented to lift the easement and Garst bought it. That’s when I turned to lawyers, myself.”

  “What did you mean by Pash? What is it?”

  “It’s a law. Public Access Shoreline Hawaii. The law grants us Hawaiians access to land that has cultural and religious uses. The bones of King Keawenui are buried under the lava at Uwahi. I pray there. I won’t let Garst defile it.”

  “But the closing is tomorrow morning, Eleanor. You won’t be fighting Xander anymore. You’ll be fighting a Texan named Jarvis.”

  “Kaiii! I know who he is.”

  “Then why haven’t you gone directly to him with your claim?”

  “Jon told me about the sale, but he didn’t tell me who the buyer was until you told me just now.” Using her parasol as a cane, she pushed herself off the boulder. “I thought the land would be used for building houses, more seaside mansions for haole millionaires. I didn’t know that Paul Jarvis was conniving to buy Uwahi. He and his boosters have been lobbying the legislature for over a year to legalize gambling in Hawaii. He wants to build a chain of casinos and, if the state so chooses, it can dole out some of the profits to Native Hawaiians. He says that gambling will make us all rich.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Claude Ann sat alone at Jon’s kitchen table in front of a glass of red wine, drumming her fingers and looking daggers. “It’s about time you dawdled in. I have something to say to you.”

  “Hold the thought.” Dinah proceeded into the bedroom, threw off her clothes, stepped into the shower, and turned the water on full force. She was tired. Tired from towing Eleanor up a hill no woman her size should have walked down in the first place. Tired of mixing with people who minced the truth into misleading little bites, people who acted as though they’d sooner chop off an arm than cough up the whole truth. In the space of a single day, she’d been privy to Tess’ bizarre emotional outburst, George Knack’s coded threat, Xander’s questionable disclaimer, and Eleanor’s insistence that Xander’s far-off hanky-panky had killed her sister as surely as if he’d pushed her over that cliff. Eleanor is oversaturated with Hawaiian myth and so am I, thought Dinah. A long-distance phone call couldn’t kill a person the way Pele’s spate of fire killed Ohia.

  Dinah walked out of the shower feeling prickly, in no mood to take any shit from Claude Ann. Instead of slamming Raif and wishing he was dead, Claude Ann should have taken Dinah into her confidence and told her he was blackmailing Xander. Either they were friends or they weren’t. She swaddled herself in Jon’s oversized robe, combed her wet hair, and marched back to the kitchen. She took a wine glass out of the cupboard, clunked it on the table, and sat down. “I suppose Xander’s told you that I pried into his personal affairs this afternoon. You can lay into me about it if you want, Claudy, but we’re past the time for fabricating excuses or editing out the uncomfortable parts of the story. We’ve got a murder on our hands and you and Xander could both end up as suspects. So no more lies, no more holding back, no more waffling.”

  Claude Ann poured Dinah a glass of wine and pushed it across the table. “The thing that ticks me off is the way you stirred up Tess Wilhite. Didn’t growin’ up in Needmore teach you anything? Jiminy Christmas, you don’t have to wake up a snake to kill it.”

  “That’s a peculiar thing to say, especially as Tess seems to think that Xander killed Raif and that he wants to kill her.”

  “You know what I meant. You shouldn’t have clued her in about Raif’s murder. She could have read about it in the papers and never connected Xander or any of us to the crime. Now Xander says she’s all riled up and threatening to go to the police. She’ll dish up another crock about Xander and make everything that much worse.”

  “Maybe. But if she goes to the police, she’ll have to cop to blackmail. She’ll have quite a lot of explaining to do about her relationship with Raif. And her employer, or one of them, has good reason to rein her in.”

  Claude Ann finished her wine and emptied the rest of the bottle into her glass. “I’m fated. Every time I start to get married, my life falls to pieces.”

  Dinah forbore to remark that, considering Raif’s fate, Claude Ann’s wasn’t half so bad. But more than a few things had gone awry and Claude Ann was entitled to feel rotten. Dinah certainly did. She said, “Maybe I’m the jinx. If you ever decide to marry again, don’t invite me. Just e-mail me your new name and address.”

  “This will be my last weddin’. I just hope it doesn’t take place in the prison chapel.”

  It was pitch dark outside now and the rain had returned. It pelted against the metal roof and dribbled down the window panes—the pathetic fallacy. Dinah couldn’t tell whether Claude Ann believed that Xander had, in fact, killed Raif or whether she merely feared that he would be blamed. Either way, she sounded determined to marry him and Dinah could only wonder what that kind of unconditional love must feel like.

  The room felt cold. Dinah went to light the gas heater, but Jon hadn’t turned the gas back on since the earthquake. She pulled his robe tighter around her. It smelled of Scotch and sandalwood soap and she felt a stab of almost Pele-esque jealousy. Had Tess worn this robe after passionate nights of lovemaking with the pre-scarred Jon? Had she really twisted him around her little finger? Had Jon blown his stack when he found out that she’d been doing Raif at the same time she was doing him? Had Jon swiped Claude Ann’s gun in Honolulu, tracked Raif down in Pahoa, and given him a taste of what hot lava felt like against the skin before shooting him?

  “Open another bottle of wine,” said Claude Ann, emptying Dinah’s undrunk glass into her own.

  Dinah hunted in the cupboard and found a bottle with a label that read “Deadly Zin.” How apropos. She opened it, and went back to the table. “I don’t know who killed Raif, Claudy, but the more the police know, the better the odds of catching him. Or her. We have to tell them everything and trust them to nail the right person.”

  “Since when are you gonna trust anybody, let alone the police? You made it sound like that detective you lived with in Seattle disappointed the crap out of you. And this Hawaiian outfit, Langford and Fujita, they don’t act like they’re wowed by our Southern charm and high moral tone. Langford keeps pesterin’ me about the gun, like he thinks I’m gonna break down and admit tha
t I shot that blackmailin’ varmint.”

  “And all you did was wish that he was dead.” Dinah filled her glass with Deadly Zin. “Who else besides you knew that you had a gun?”

  “Nobody except Hank and maybe Marywave. I didn’t take it out and spin it or play quick-draw at parties.”

  “Okay, then who was in your suite? Think. Xander, of course, and Hank. Who else?”

  “Gosh, Xan and I had been on the Big Island for a couple of weeks and when we moved over to Oahu, I had a party in my suite the first night we checked into the Olopana. Raif and Lyssa were there.”

  “Jon?”

  “No, he wasn’t there.”

  Dinah took heart. “So unless he broke in on the day of Xan’s big party, he couldn’t have filched the gun.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “Was anyone else at the party in your suite?”

  “Avery Wilhite and his wife, Kay, were there. And Steve and his girlfriend, Jessica.”

  “Steve has a girlfriend?”

  “Well, I don’t know if they’re a regular item. She was a real pretty blonde and he was all over her. I had just bought into Uwahi as a sort of silent partner and Steve added my name to the official documents, whatever you call ’em, and we drank champagne.”

  Dinah downed several sips of Deadly Zin. Wasn’t Jessica the name of the girl at the front desk at Peacequest, the one who looked like a glass of warm milk? What did Steve see in her? Dinah banished the thought. Sometimes a coincidence was just a coincidence.

  “How much money did you put into Uwahi, Claude Ann?”

  “Seven-fifty.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand? Holy shit. How much money did you walk away with after the divorce?”

  “Seven-fifty. Not counting my alimony and Marywave’s child supprt.”

  “You gambled your whole nest egg on this land deal?”