The most interesting news about the church is recent. Reverend Abram Palmer, Waldo’s grandson, pressed by the dwindling finances of the congregation and a lengthy court battle with the descendants of the natives wanting their land back, finally opens up Kapu for limited ecotourism. It quickly makes the “Best Of” magazine lists: Best Secret Exotic Beach, Best Getaway for the Ultra-Rich, Best Place to Escape the Real World. The church is characterized as a quaint holdout along the lines of the Amish or Pennsylvania Dutch, but no photos are allowed to be taken—in fact, the church has banned the use of any camera on the island, which only adds to the allure.
Then there’s Kapu. The name itself means “forbidden,” or “sacred.” While no photography is allowed, there are pictures that people have taken over the years from their boats. A striking jagged peak rises from the center, the collapsed remains of an ancient volcano. It looks ethereal, unreal. Julia found one daring photo taken in a small cove of a redheaded young woman in a bikini posing on a small pebbled beach, some kind of cave or cavern behind her. A white flower is tucked behind her ear: the photo is captioned Going Native. Other than that, there are only a handful of pictures of the island’s interior, taken in the late 1800s by a pair of Mormon missionaries. Palm-thatched huts with lava rock walls, bare-chested women wearing grass skirts weaving baskets, a boy holding up a fish half his size. The missionaries moved on though. No explanation. A few conspiracy websites say that Kapu was used by the US military to stage beach invasions prior to the Korean War, complete with bombing runs, and one site protesting the use of the island as a resort for only the very wealthy has an ongoing petition for an environmental impact study, with only twenty-eight signatures.
Costs a lot of money to leave the rest of the world behind. Although details about the eco-resort are kept pretty hush, she did find one thread that dropped the weekly rate. Ten thousand dollars. Not something that had to come out of her installment—thankfully, Aunt Liddy covered it directly.
Julia takes another long sip of her merlot. After the vinegar she’s been drinking, it tastes like heaven.
There’s one final mystery. A man not present in the story, but who could be at the heart of it. Dr. Alfred Greer. It took a good chunk of her first payment installment to locate and buy a copy of The Fall of Man, the Birth of Gods, but she felt it important to get under the skin of the family patriarch. A part of her wishes she hadn’t.
It is our God-given duty to apply eugenically artificial selection for the betterment of man . . . he’d written. Permitting degenerates, imbeciles, and low races to propagate will cause the decline and fall of Western civilization as we know it. . . . We must be indifferent to happiness and act with the cold precision of a surgeon bent on removing a decaying part to save the whole. . . . Nothing can ever be off-limits, true genius is the application of clarity against the dark mythos of religion, superstition, and societal norms. . . . We must remain open to the role technology may have in our perfection, and, if need be, tear the living secrets out of the breast of nature herself to form the ideal race.
Nice. She’s glad she’s related to the woman who broke all ties. But she wonders if Aunt Liddy has truly rejected the philosophy, because her name appears on research papers online like “Human Heredity: The Application of Modern Genetics for a Better World”; “Modern Gene Therapy and Responses to Ethical Concerns”; “Future People: Myths, Marvels, and Medical Benefits.” Anything directly referencing eugenics is carefully skirted with more oblique language—gene selection, genetic screening, preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Options at a high-tech genetic salad bar for parents who can afford it. But every once in a while, a different note creeps in. Phrases like “the evolution of rational design is a twenty-first-century necessity, particularly as classes become increasingly stratified,” “reducing unwanted traits, like the predisposition toward psychopathy, violence, and other personality flaws could be the vanguard of a more peaceful society,” and “with the advent of life-prolonging and potential age-reversing technologies, the question of population and resources must be addressed.”
Not the same thing, but close for damn sure.
“What exactly are you up to, Aunt Liddy?” Julia says out loud.
She swirls the wine in her glass, puts the notebook on the bed, and walks over to the sliding glass doors of the balcony, takes in the ocean view, the night sky. Sees her own reflection staring pensively back at her.
The truth is, right now she feels like she’s about to jump out of a plane, unsure whether the parachute will open.
CHAPTER 6
THE MAUI AIRPORT IS TWENTY degrees cooler than Los Angeles, but it’s still sweltering, just in a different way. No trade winds, apparently, so even though it’s open in most parts, the air isn’t moving, and there’s a volcanic haze courtesy of the Big Island’s Mauna Kea. The moisture makes Julia feel like she’s trapped in a sauna, and the place is packed, too, a mosh pit of distracted tourists, pale, thick-waisted Midwesterners loading up in the gift shops, Japanese taking selfies, young lovers walking languidly, holding hands. A few professionals in business suits here and there, cutting through the tourists, focused on point A, point B, not even looking where they’re going because they already know. It doesn’t help that she got exactly zero sleep the night before; maybe an effect of the wine, her nerves, hard to say.
But the worst part is that the promised escort was a no-show—Someone will be holding a sign with your name, Bailey had told her—and even though it’s a small airport, even though she’s walked the length of the concourse at least three times, she can’t seem to find the gate for the flight to Kapu, and no one she’s asked seems to know anything either. She’s directed to talk to a supervisor at her arrival gate, check Visitor Information, call the company that booked the trip (no office hours on Saturday) . . . has she tried searching online? Julia can’t help but shake the feeling that she’s being purposefully misdirected. There’s something about the way eyes shift; they look down at the floor, over her left shoulder, at a piece of paper that’s become suddenly interesting. Smiles grow still. Pensive.
For the fifth time, Julia flattens her inkjet copy of the itinerary on the desk at Visitor Information. “It’s a charter flight. A private company. You’ve never heard of it?”
The woman behind the counter has long black hair and a plumeria flower behind her ear. A metal name tag, KALANI. She scans the itinerary as if it’s the first time she’s seen it (it’s not).
“No, like I said, I don’t know, but I’m new here. If you call the company you booked it through, I’m sure—”
“I tried, but it’s Saturday and the office isn’t open. Please, is there anyone you can ask . . . ?”
Sweat beads Julia’s forehead, trickles down the curve of her spine. There’s a family standing behind her; she feels the press of a toddler against her legs. She’s holding up the line.
“You have my bag, right? I checked it at LAX. It must be somewhere.” Christ, if they lost my suitcase, I’m screwed.
“I can try calling my manager again. . . .” The woman looks over Julia’s shoulder at the people behind her. “I’ll be with you folks in just a minute.”
The toddler starts stomping; out of the corner of her eye Julia catches flashes of red light from the baby’s sneakers.
“That’s okay,” says Julia, taking her paper. “I’ll ask around some more. Hopefully my bag hasn’t already taken off without me.”
The agent gives her a courteous smile, barely able to hide her relief. Julia steps away from the desk, decides on taking another pass by the gates. Will they take off without her? What if they found the secret compartment in her suitcase? She gets a vision of a SWAT team pouring out of a navy van.
Don’t psych yourself out, Julia. She pulls her cell phone out again—a burner she’d bought out of a vending machine—dials a number Bailey said was secure. She’s already left two voice-mail messages—where the hell can she be? Maybe something more sinister is at play.
Maybe you should go to the bar, says Ethan. Have a drink, wait in the air-conditioning until the Great White Witch calls you back.
“Fuck you, Ethan,” she whispers.
You have to forgive him before you can truly move forward, Dr. Stolz would say.
She wishes they’d all get the fuck out of her head. Christ, she needs to get a grip. She eyes the bathroom, thinks about going in, splashing some cool water on her face for a cogent moment, but just then an Asian-looking pilot strolls down the concourse with a small rolling suitcase, crowds of pasty-white tourists parting before him. His blue shirt remarkably crisp despite the humidity. He might know.
Julia raises a hand and approaches him. “Excuse me . . . can you tell me which gate is for private charter planes?”
He stops, and smiles broadly. “Can do. Where you going?”
“Kapu.”
His smile falters. He looks away. Here we go again. For a moment, there seems to be some kind of an internal struggle, and just as she’s sure she’s going to get the runaround again, he seems to make a decision. He looks her in her eyes, dead serious.
“That’s really where you’re going . . . ?”
“Yes. Why, what’s the problem?”
He hesitates again, then says, “Not a lot to do there. Just one beach, bad currents. Big bugs, too, the size of your fist. If I were you, I’d just stay here on Maui. Much nicer. Lots of great hotels, great food.”
Julia feels a trickle of sweat drip down her forehead. “I’m not going there for . . . fun, exactly. And I really need to catch my flight. If you could just point me—”
“I heard one time, someone came back with rat lungworm disease. I have a cousin who treated him at Maui Memorial.” He sounds genial, friendly, but there’s a current underneath of things unsaid.
She doesn’t have the time, or the energy, to figure out what. “Um . . . thanks,” Julia says. “You know what, I’ll ask the front desk—”
“It’s not for you.” The shift in tone is so abrupt she’s momentarily shocked into silence.
“It’s sacred,” he continues, looking at her steadily. “Your people have no place there.”
A relative, perhaps, of one of the dislocated natives? The world around them seems to retreat; for the first time she notices black lines of a tribal-looking tattoo peeking out from the edge of his shirtsleeve.
“My people. You mean haoles,” says Julia. She’d seen the word in Irene’s letters and looked up the meaning. A word for the strange Europeans who wouldn’t lean in to mingle breath as a greeting, who instead gave salutations with handshakes, and smallpox, and musket balls. Not a slur, exactly, but close. Is that how he sees her?
But why wouldn’t he? It’s the money from the ecotourists that are supporting the church, and their legal fight to keep the land. Is that why she’s been misdirected ever since she arrived?
“I don’t mean to offend,” he adds a little more kindly. “Kapu is not . . . It’s just, there’s a reason why its very name means ‘forbidden.’ When the sacred isn’t respected, it can become dangerous.”
Her head feels light all of a sudden, and she watches a group of teen girls trying on leis at the gift shop opposite them. They tease and pull and jostle each other. Aunt Liddy told her to trust no one, but with the pilot, she feels, only the truth will do. Or part of it.
“I know it’s dangerous,” Julia quietly says. She turns to face him. “My great-grandmother died there. I’m going to bring her body home, so we can bury her with our family.”
He can’t hide his surprise. A few seconds pass, a few more. “You know, the Hawaiian word for ‘burying the dead’ is the same as the word for ‘planting.’ ”
He stares at her, waiting for some kind of acknowledgment, but she doesn’t know exactly what he means, or what he’s asking of her. It’s a test she apparently fails, because he finally sighs, and looks away. She senses his mind floating to other priorities, his next flight maybe.
“You’d better hurry then,” he says, still not looking at her. “There’s a VIP lounge at the end of the terminal. They’ll know what to do. Tell them to page Leanne if they give you any trouble.”
“Thanks. Really . . . thanks.”
He nods again—his fingers grip the handle of his suitcase tighter. Another internal struggle, like he’s wondering if anything else he might say would be worth the effort. Finally he says, “Don’t cross the wall.” He looks up, his gaze piercing. “Stay on the makai, the ocean side of it.”
Julia swallows. “Why?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
With that he turns and walks away, the sound of his rolling suitcase wheels echoing off the concrete until it’s lost among all the other sounds, until he disappears in the crowd, leaving her with the feeling that if she had any sense whatsoever, she’d never step foot on that island at all.
There’s a heated discussion in the VIP lounge—a highly irritated service agent stands across from Julia, a phone receiver pressed into her ear, They’re already boarding and there’s no Julia Greer on the list—but at least the lounge has air-conditioning. Julia’s warm sweat has chilled, making her even cooler. She tries to shake off what the pilot said. Superstition, she tells herself. It’s just superstition. Don’t let your imagination get the best of you.
She wishes she could take advantage of the light refreshments arranged on a long table—lemonade, iced tea, pineapple slices, and butter cookies shaped like pineapples. A little food in her stomach wouldn’t be a bad thing. There’d been nothing about meeting in the VIP lounge on the itinerary; apparently that had been covered in a preflight package she never received because she was a late addition, and according to the brochure in front of her, she’d missed out on other perks too. Indulge in a massage or spa treatment; enjoy lightning-speed free Wi-Fi; sample exotic island pupus in air-conditioned comfort. Goddamn. She could have gotten a massage. But then, it had all been last-minute—Aunt Liddy had apparently paid off one of the tourists in order to get her the spot since the wait list was a year long. She could only imagine what it cost to bump the passenger.
“Fine,” says the service agent in a clipped tone. She’s savagely thin, with penciled-in eyebrows, sun-damaged skin, and a fake plumeria behind her ear, obviously a token gesture to aloha. CYNTHIA, says her name tag.
Cynthia hangs up the phone. “I apologize for the confusion.” Her tone isn’t apologetic in the least. “They’re holding the flight for you. Leanne will come by shortly to take you to the gate. Please enjoy our complementary snacks and beverages.” With that, the woman picks up a Hawaiian Airlines in-flight magazine, effectively dismissing her.
Oh, thank God. Julia’s about to make a run for the lemonade when her own phone rings—an unknown number, but with a Pasadena area code. Should she accept, decline? She clicks accept, and steps out of earshot.
“Are they holding the flight?” asks a crisp voice. Bailey.
“Yes, apparently. Where the hell have you been?”
“Putting out fires. We just got all your messages. Someone hacked my SIM card, and the landline to the house was mysteriously cut from inside the house. We had to do some serious negotiating to keep that plane on the tarmac. The county will be getting a whole new youth recreational center, all thanks to you.”
Sabotage from inside the house . . . ? Just what have I gotten myself into here?
Julia’s heart begins to race. “And the escort?”
“We haven’t been able to get a hold of him. Our guess is whoever cut the lines also paid him to not show.”
“Goddammit.” Julia runs a hand through her hair.
“We’re instituting extra precautions. You should be fine with the satellite phone, but I’m texting you right now a new number to call in. Don’t accept any calls if it’s not from that number. Write it down, then ditch your burner phone. I recommend a good dunk in the toilet, then tossing it in the bathroom trash. But whatever you do, don’t take it on the plane. They confiscate the cell phones before
takeoff—it could get into anyone’s hands.”
Damn, damn, damn. Julia thinks about all the other things she could have packed in the false bottom of the case that would have been useful. Mace, perhaps. A gun, definitely.
An automated voice is broadcast over the speakers, each word a staccato note. Now boarding flight 572 for Oahu at Gate 17. Two men wearing aloha shirts and black slacks quickly stand and start packing their computer bags; some kind of joke is exchanged. There’s nothing that says she can’t abort right now. She has the cash, she could book a flight back to the mainland, pull all the money out of the account and stuff it under a mattress.
But Evie. The feel of her small hand in hers. Just the thought almost drops her to her knees. Every cell tells her she’s headed in the wrong direction—it all now feels unnatural, dangerous, to add more miles and an ocean between them.
“Are you still there?” Bailey asks.
The men leave—there’s a whoosh of warm air that swirls in when they open the frosted-glass doors.
But feelings aren’t always right. She felt Ethan loved her, and look what happened there. No, it’s not really a choice. She needs the money. She needs equal footing, at the very least. So she needs to keep on, no matter how insane this situation is getting by the moment. She turns her back to the door.
“I’m still here. Look, Bailey, if something happens . . .”
She can’t finish the sentence. The words to me don’t need to be spoken.
“I just want Evie . . . I just want her to know I tried. That I didn’t abandon her.”
This time it’s Bailey with the long pause. “Julia, I . . .”
Julia feels warm air again on the back of her neck again, and suddenly there’s a very loud male voice behind her.
“I was told I might be too late, but is this where they pick you up for the flight to Kapu?”
Julia turns to find a man in his late thirties, maybe early forties, with patches of gray in his hair and beard, his nose raw and pink from a sunburn. He wears a Red Sox cap, a rumpled brown shirt, equally rumpled cargo shorts, Birkenstocks with socks. A purple lei hangs limply around his neck, and his right hand grips the handle of a battered gray rolling suitcase.
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