Bet Your Bones

by Jeanne Matthews

  “It’s not a gamble. It’s a sure thing.”

  Dinah put her head in her hands. “If you’re worried the wedding might have to take place in prison, isn’t it time to rethink the groom and his assurances?”

  “Stop actin’ so superior, Dinah Pelerin. You always act like you have some, I don’t know, some deep insight into the men I love. Like you know what makes ’em tick and I don’t know squat. That’s how it was with Wesley and Hank and now you’re doin’ it again with Xander.”

  “Okay, Claudy. Let’s deal with those first two. I have to get something off my conscience once and for all. My big insight about Hank is that you never loved him. You took advantage of the fact that he loved you and you married him to save face. You couldn’t stand anyone thinking you’d been jilted, but you were. And here’s my big insight about Wesley. The reason he punked out and didn’t marry you is that he’s gay.”

  “Gay?” She seemed stunned. “You mean, homo gay?”

  “Yes, and that derogatory spin you put on the word ‘homo’ is the reason he didn’t tell you and stayed in the closet. He ran off to Atlanta to live with my brother.”

  Claude Ann let this sink in and, after a minute, threw back her head and laughed so hard she cried. “I should’ve guessed. After the first couple of times we did it, he didn’t seem all that interested in sex. Lucky for me that Hank was hot to trot.”

  It was Dinah’s turn to be stunned. “What?”

  “God’s garters, Dinah. How’d you get through school if you can’t even count to nine? I was pregnant when I married Hank in late February. Marywave’s birthday is September third. She’s Wesley’s child.”

  “And all that business about me making a fool of you and you had to get married to keep from being a laughing stock, that was all a lie?”

  “No, it wasn’t. How would you feel if I galloped off to Seattle to find that Nick guy you were so crazy about and told him how he’d broken your poor heart and you were pinin’ away for him and would he please, please come back to you or you’d wither up and die?”

  “I’d wring your neck.”

  “Well, so there. I told you the truth, only I left some stuff out of the story.”

  “And threw some stuff in,” shot Dinah, cursing herself for her blind stupidity. “She favors Hank, doesn’t she? Yeah, right.”

  “I’m sorry if I made you feel guilty, Di, but I kept my secret for the same reason Wes kept his. It was Needmore. I’d have had the baby out of wedlock if it was anyplace else. But you know how folks treated you after your daddy ran afoul of the town’s morals. If I hadn’t gotten myself a husband fast, Mama and Daddy couldn’t have held their heads up. They’d have had to sell the farm and move and Marywave would’ve been as much of a social reject as you were.”

  “Does Hank know about Marywave?”

  “Are you kidding? No, Marywave was a real tiny baby and Hank’s no better at math than you are, thank goodness. He loves her like she was his and after all he’s been through, I could never tell him. Someday when Marywave’s all grown-up, I may tell her. But it would be the last straw for poor Hank.” She laughed again. “Wesley gay. Jiminy Christmas. No wonder he looked so funny when I told him he was a papa.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Dinah’s bed bucked. Once, twice. She opened her eyes. Another little jiggler, not half as violent as the knocking that had been going on inside her head for the last hour. She threw off the quilt embroidered with scarlet lehua blossoms and looked out the window. The rain had ceased and the sun poured through the jungle like pancake syrup. The birds had set up an energetic racket and paradise was revved up and doing its thing. The intense green made her slightly nauseous. She swallowed three aspirins and plodded into the kitchen. The Deadly Zin had lived up to its name. She felt like the walking-dead.

  Nine o’clock. She wondered if Claude Ann had a hangover, too. She’d intended to attend the Uwahi closing with Xander. It must already be well underway by now. If everything went through as planned, SAX Associates would be rolling in dough and the bones of King Whatshisname would be Paul Jarvis’ lookout. Even if the burden of ferreting out the risks was on Jarvis and his lawyers, it still seemed unethical to Dinah. But Jarvis was no babe in the woods. He looked like a man who was working angles of his own behind the smoke screen of his big cigar. Anyway, when the check was cut, Claude Ann or Xander would be able to afford first-rate legal representation should either of them be charged with fraud or, God forbid, murder.

  While Dinah was schlepping up the hill with Eleanor yesterday afternoon, Langford and Fujita and the forensic squad had shown up to fingerprint everyone. Maybe she should go to the police station, apologize for being truant, and volunteer to be fingerprinted. If she shared what she’d learned from George Knack, maybe Langford would reciprocate and share any additional information that he’d learned. He’d told her about the Beretta. But after a cup of strong coffee, she decided that Langford was unlikely to share anything else with her.

  Knocking again. This time not under her feet or inside her head. She went to the door and saw Jon. In the harsh light of day, her jealousy of Tess seemed like a figment brought on by too much Deadly Zin.

  He said, “I thought you’d want to know. The police picked up Hank Kemper last night.”

  “That’s a relief,” she said before remembering that Hank would tell Langford about Xander’s meeting with Tess.

  “They’re calling him a ‘person of interest.’ But I think we’re all persons of interest.”

  “There does seem to be a plenitude.” Dinah’s head wasn’t clear enough to discuss the subject. “There was another earthquake this morning.”

  “I’ve just come back from the Observatory. The seismographs picked up a harmonic tremor under the East Rift Zone.” He made it sound dire.

  “Isn’t it a good thing to be harmonic?”

  “A harmonic tremor means that magma is moving through underground chambers. It might signal an eruption, or it might not.”

  “Uncertainty seems to be the watchword in Hawaii. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

  “No. I was wondering…would you like to go for a drive? I know a pagan temple where you can get rid of those bad luck earrings of yours.”

  How could the opinion of a leading light in the field of volcanology that Pele’s tears were bad luck not magnify Dinah’s own retrograde superstitions? The bride converts a handful of volcanic pebbles into a pair of earrings and the groom’s son-in-law is murdered. Who could say for sure that it wasn’t Pele’s revenge? It didn’t pay to ignore local legends.

  “How long will it take? The memorial service for Raif is this afternoon.”

  “It’s in Hilo. Wear what you were going to wear to the service and we’ll go together. Bring along some walking shoes, too. The temple’s not far off the road, but the footing’s rough.”

  Dinah dressed in the blue linen suit Claude Ann had left for her and put the offending earrings in her pocket. She wore her sandals, but grabbed her Nikes off the rack as they left the cottage.

  As Jon pulled out of the driveway, she asked after Lyssa. “Can she be left alone? Xander says that she’s distraught.”

  “Having a mother who committed suicide…it’s not a good role model when you’re depressed. But she’s with Raif’s parents this morning. Dad thinks we should get her some kind of grief counseling, but I…I don’t think she’ll go for it.”

  Dinah considered telling him about her meeting with Tess, but thought better of it. Maybe he’d heard already from Xander. Maybe that’s why he seemed so halting and self-conscious this morning.

  He reached behind him and pulled out a pint of gin and handed it to her. “I brought this along for Madame Pele. Something to sweeten your offering.”

  Dinah dandled the bottle on her knees, feeling more than a little ridiculous. Maybe Jon was, too
. “You don’t seriously believe that Pele is causing the bad luck, do you?”

  “I wanted some time alone with you. If getting right with Pele is what persuaded you to come, she’s good luck.”

  “So this is just a pretext.”

  “A plan can have a dual purpose.”

  And so can a man, she thought. There was a hesitancy about Jon in the back of her mind now, an apprehension that she didn’t understand the first thing about him. The Jon she thought he was didn’t mesh with the Tess Dinah thought she was and it was hard to recalibrate first impressions in the middle of a murder investigation.

  As the Sidekick spiraled south along the Chain of Craters Road, he amped up the volume on the CD player. Bruddah Iz was singing “You Don’t Know Me.”

  It was a lyric Dinah could relate to. She didn’t feel as if she knew anyone. She had misread Claude Ann as badly as she had misread her brother all those years ago. She was forever being blindsided by secrets, the back story tucked away behind the smiling faces. Knowing that Wes was gay had blinded her to the possibility that he might be Marywave’s father. Knowing that Raif was a hustler and that he gambled with punters and pros made her less willing to believe that someone more sympathetic had killed him—Jon, for instance. People seemed a certain way, but the more she learned about them, the more she realized that the seeming was all in her head. For all she knew, she was on her way to the temple of a mythical goddess with a murderer as her guide. And Eleanor’s duality made Dinah’s head spin. She said, “You were right about what PASH means. Pacific Access Shoreline Hawaii.”

  “It gets mentioned in a lot of natural resources reports.”

  “Where is Uwahi?”

  “The property’s on the Puna Coast, southeast of Mauna Loa.”

  “It’s all over but the shouting now. After the closing, Xander and your buddy Steve will be rich.”

  “I guess.”

  “What do you know about the burial cave that’s on the property?”

  “I don’t know that there is one.”

  “Your Aunt Eleanor says there is. I’ve read that a king’s bones contain some pretty potent mana. A king’s bones could put the kibosh on the closing if Mr. Jarvis knew about them. It doesn’t seem cricket to withhold the information from the buyer.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Eleanor says you told her about the pending sale. You’ve been in cahoots with her against Xander from the get-go. Why did you lie?”

  “Maybe I just wanted to even the playing field.”

  “But you didn’t tell her that Jarvis was the buyer. Why?”

  “Dual loyalties, I suppose. A lot of big-money interests have been working in the shadows to push through the deal. Hawaii’s broke and legalized gambling in a glitzy new casino could be a boon to everyone. Not just Dad and Claude Ann and Avery and Steve.”

  “With all the earthquakes and harmonic tremors, do you think Uwahi is safe to build on?”

  “It’s lava land. It’s been overrun before. It could be overrun again. Lava is what Hawaii is made of. Lava is Pele.”

  The road dropped away in a breathtaking zigzag to the sea. A tall plume of smoke coiled above the horizon. Volcanic gas. Dinah looked around at the black and barren lava as far as the eye could see. The continuous eruptions from Kilauea had added hundreds of acres of lava land just like this and, in the process, houses and roads and entire communities had been annihilated. On Hawaii, everything was in a state of perpetual flux.

  Jon pulled off the road and parked. “The temple is about a half mile from here. All that’s left of it is a stone slab. The ancients used to place gifts there to be sanctified, then they’d take the sanctified object into a game or a battle to test its potency. If it brought them luck, that meant the god liked it.”

  She changed her shoes and stuffed the gin into her hobo bag, but that sense of hesitancy mounted. It occurred to her that no one else in the world knew where she was or who she was with. It occurred to her that Raif had walked onto a lava field much like this one and it turned into a one-way trip. “Jon, I have an awful hangover and I forgot my sunglasses. Will you take the earrings and the gin and leave them for me?”

  He didn’t say anything. He just looked at her.

  Shit. She flogged herself for her cowardice, for not trusting anyone, not even her own intuition. She didn’t believe that Jon killed Raif and, even if he had, he had no reason to kill her. A George Santayana line popped into her mind, something about daring to trust the soul’s invincible surmise. “Oh, all right. You lead the way.”

  There was no trail and the lava was so jagged and uneven that she had to keep her eyes on the ground in front of her, glancing up from time to time to see which way he was heading. There was a tang of sulfur in the wind and the sun reflecting off the rocks hurt her eyes. After about ten minutes, she saw a small clump of ohia trees and bushes like an island rising out of a choppy black ocean.

  Jon was standing beside a rough, bed-shaped stone, maybe four feet high, in the center of the island. “It’s called the Heiau He’a. Temple of Blood Sacrifice.”

  She felt a rabbit run over her grave. “Did the Polynesians offer human sacrifices here?”

  “Not to Pele. But when the Tahitians emigrated to the islands, they brought along a war god named Ku who demanded human sacrifice. Luakini. This was one of Ku’s luakini temples.”

  “Lu-a-ki-ni. The Hawaiian language makes even human sacrifice sound melodious.”

  “At least, the Hawaiians only sacrificed enemies they captured in battle. They didn’t kill people just because they disagreed on matters of doctrine.”

  She pictured the victims splayed upon the altar waiting to be disemboweled. “It gives me goose bumps.”

  “It gives the locals goose bumps, too. They call this a chicken-skin place.”

  “Won’t Pele resent that I’m returning her belongings at Ku’s altar?”

  “You’re standing on a kipuka, an area of land surrounded by lava. Pele’s diverted lava flows around this heiau for probably hundreds of years, so she must regard it as hers now. Give me the earrings and the gin.” He laid the offerings on the altar and rattled off some Hawaiian words.

  “What did you say?”

  “I asked for kala ‘ana.”

  “Eleanor told me that means forgiveness.”

  “Dinah…I want you to…” He seemed at a loss for English words. “I haven’t felt the desire to explain myself to anyone in a long time, but I…I want you to understand that the rift between me and my father isn’t about Tess.”

  “Xander told you that I met her?”

  “Yes. I already knew that she and Raif were lovers. I’ve known that since I saw them kiss outside my hospital window the day she came to tell me the rape story was a fantasy and we were finished. I’ve shunned Raif as much as possible. Unfortunately, that’s meant seeing less of Lyssa, which she’s never understood. I hoped she’d come to her senses and realize what a lowlife Raif was, but she wouldn’t hear a word against him from me or from Dad. Raif banked on that. Anyway, I’ve been over Tess since the day I walked out of the hospital. If I had ever been tempted to kill Raif, it would’ve happened a long time ago.”

  Dinah set aside for the moment George Knack’s assertion that Lyssa knew all about Raif’s philandering and may have been tempted to kill Raif, herself. She said, “If Xander had known that you were aware of Tess’ amour with Raif, it would have saved him a lot in blackmail.”

  “I didn’t know about the blackmail.”

  “So if it wasn’t Tess’ rape accusation, what did cause the rift between you and Xander?”

  “That’s what I want to try to explain to you. I want to show you something. Will you come with me?”

  This would be the dual purpose of the outing. Her reservations about him hadn’t entirely lifted with
this speech, but they had abated and she was anxious to get away from this evil altar. “As long as we get back to Hilo in time for the memorial service. I promised Claude Ann I’d be there.”

  They returned to the car and Jon drove on toward the ocean. The road swept downward in wide curves and near the point on the horizon where the water touched the sky, the road bent sharply to the left. Ahead she could see where a thick tentacle of lava had snaked across the road and blocked it.

  He parked facing the water. “That’s Holei Sea Arch. Come, I’ll show you.”

  He helped her out the car and they walked past another cautionary sign. Hazardous coastline, frequent high winds and waves, steep cliffs. Where the land ended, she held her thrashing hair out of her eyes with both hands and looked down. They stood some ninety feet above the sea while below her, wild waves churned and crashed against the soaring cliffs, eating into the base of the rock face and sending up a stupendous white spray.

  Dinah looked across at the dizzying bridge of the arch. She wasn’t usually acrophobic, but the slashing wind confused her sense of balance and she felt the need to cling to the low rock barrier in front of her. “Is this the place you came to think on the day of Raif’s murder?”

  “Yes. There are sea arches all around the island, but this is one of the few that’s easy to get to. I’ve been coming here off and on for years, doing the Camus thing, wrestling with the only truly philosophical problem—suicide.”

  Dinah’s stomach tensed. “Is this the cliff where your mother jumped?”

  “Yes. Did you know that the children of a parent who commits suicide are statistically more likely to die by suicide?”

  “It doesn’t surprise me. Is that why you and Xander are so worried about Lyssa?”

  “She was younger when our mother died and, I guess you could say, more psychologically vulnerable. I must have been a hardhearted little devil because I didn’t start thinking about my mother and why she found life not worth living until I was in my teens. You know, there’s a theory that suicide is really just murder by proxy. The suicide has someone in mind that he wishes to kill, but the kapu against murder is too strong and so he kills himself. It’s a powerful statement of hatred.”