by Aaron Elkins
From that moment on she was the family mystic, the Knower of Strange Things, a role she had embraced, first out of contrariness, and then, over the years, with a certain amount of conviction. Now, three decades later, she was the proprietor of one of the island’s many holistic retreats, the Hui Ho’olana Wellness Center for Spiritual Healing and Body-Centered Empowerment.
The Center was situated on the land she had inherited from her Uncle Magnus, a narrow strip ill-suited for cattle-raising but blessed with several restful groves of eucalyptus and pine, a small, tranquil lake, and the house that she had grown up in with her widowed father and her three siblings. It was smaller than either Axel’s or Inge’s inheritances, but spiritual healing hardly required great tracts of open rangeland. What it did require was an environment conducive to inward contemplation. In other words, peace and quiet.
The trouble was, Hui Ho’olana bordered her sister Inge’s property, which was neither peaceful nor quiet. Inge, too, had converted her inheritance into a money-making enterprise—the Kohala Trails Adventure Ranch, an upscale dude ranch that had become popular with junketing Far Eastern businessmen, due mostly to a lucrative arrangement with two Asian airlines. As a result, it was often filled with weekend cowboys from Indonesia or Thailand engaged in various kinds of loud and violent activities. Today, the Center’s afternoon self-affirmation session had been a shambles on account of the noise from one of Kohala Trails’ signature activities, ridiculous in the extreme: a quick-draw contest for which guests were issued cowboy hats, chaps, and holsters with pellet-shooting six-guns, with prizes going to the winners.
A steaming Hedwig had gone straight to her office to use the half-hour before cocktails (non-alcoholic) and hors d’oeuvres (vegan) to send a furious e-mail to Inge, complaining about the disruption. It was the second time this month, and she was damned tired of it. When she opened up her Outlook Express, however, she found the new message from Inge awaiting her. She read it with a steadily sinking heart. Her anger faded. Problems of noise and disruption sank to a distant second place.
“Whoa,” she murmured. “This is really bad karma.”
FELIX Adolphus Torkelsson was the only one of the current crop of Torkelsson siblings who had chosen not to live on the land his uncle Magnus had left him. His first semester at the University of Hawaii, during which he’d roomed with three footloose and free-thinking bachelor friends, had convinced him that the peace and simplicity of rural life weren’t for him. When he’d finished his law degree he’d settled in Honolulu’s modest Palolo Valley neighborhood while he repaid his loans, passed the bar (on his second try), and worked his way up through a couple of law firms. But soon after he’d been made partner at what was now Gergen, Dugan, Torkelsson, and Karsch (“Like the sound of a huge rank of giant toilets flushing at almost, but not quite, the same time,” was the in-house joke), he’d bought his dream condominium on Kalakaua Avenue, a twenty-fourth-floor corner unit looking northeast over the grand hotels and white-sand beaches.
Felix was a robust man given to loud speech and expansive gestures. His reaction to reading the print-out of Inge’s e-mail (he didn’t like reading computer screens; all of his e-mail was automatically printed out) was to utter a not-so-muffled oath and to fling the sheet of paper ceilingward. Or rather skyward, inasmuch as he was sitting on the balcony of his condo. A man of quick reactions despite his size, he managed to jump to his feet and snatch it out of the air before it drifted over the edge and got away. Then he sat down again with the end-of-a-good-day’s-work double martini he had mixed for himself and reread it, his open, cheerful face slowly darkening.
Inge was wrong about its being no big deal. It could turn into a very big deal indeed, with outcomes that none of them would care to see. The important thing was going to be to keep the police out of it. And that might not be so easy, inasmuch as they were already aware the plane had been found. But the more he thought about it (and the more of the martini he drank), the more it seemed to him that there might not be so much to worry about after all. Really, why should the police want to get involved again? So the plane had been found. So there were human remains in it. What did that prove? What unanswered questions did it raise?
No, if they handled this calmly and rationally and made sure they were all on the same wavelength, there would be no problem. He went to the railing, taking in his vast domain of sea, sand, and hotel, thoughtfully swirling the ice in his glass. Almost directly below him, adjacent to Kuhio Beach Park, was the Waikiki Division of the Honolulu Police Department, which shot another little jolt of worry through him. Not about HPD itself—they had nothing to do with it—but about John Lau, who had worked in that very building before he’d hired on with the FBI. The idea of having an FBI agent and ex-cop hanging around at this particular time, even an old friend of the family’s like John, was a little nervous-making. And that friend he was bringing—Gideon Something? Oliver Something? Wasn’t he some kind of forensic expert, too?
He shook his head slowly back and forth. They were going to have to watch their step, all right.
Oh boy.
THREE
“BILLIE? Hi, it’s Norma. Guess where I am right this minute. I’m sitting on the plane in Honolulu. Yes, I am . . .”
What was this irresistible impulse, Gideon mused, sitting six or seven rows in front of the speaker, that compelled people to flip open their cell phones the second they got on a plane or train, and inform someone, somewhere, that they had just gotten on a plane or train? And what was it that then turned ordinary, perfectly-normal-voiced men and women into people who could be heard—who couldn’t be ignored—from six or seven rows away?
Ah, well, these were mysteries best left for another day. Right now, he didn’t intend to let anything bother him during the brief flight to the Big Island. He was relaxed, even a bit sleepy, he was looking forward to the next few days, and he was, frankly, a little hung over—enough to want to do nothing but vegetate for the next forty-five minutes, looking down on blue water and lush green islands, and maybe catching a doze or two.
At a large-boned, well-put-together 6’1” he was cramped in the window seat, but he was used to that, and in a flight this short it wasn’t going to bother him. It’d be nice, though, if the aisle seat beside him remained empty. Now there was another mystery for you: Why did the seat next to you so often remain appealingly vacant until the last minute, so that you got your hopes up, only to have a sweating, panting 250-pounder come jogging down the aisle just as the door closed and the jet-way swung aside? He sighed. How the gods loved to toy with our emotions.
Gideon Paul Oliver, Professor of Physical Anthropology at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus, was, in general, feeling pretty good. He was coming from the annual meeting of WAFA, the Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists, held this year at the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Field in Honolulu. He’d caught up on things, presented a paper on blunt-force post-cranial trauma, contributed an oddball item or two to the guess-what-happened-to-this quiz (a much-pitted cervical vertebra that had been through the digestive system of a cougar; a scapula that had been perforated by a pneumatic riveter), and renewed some friendships. His only mistake, and it wasn’t much of a mistake, had been the extra couple of beers at the annual pizza party last night.
He was on his way now, or would be when the 717 took off, to Kona Airport on the island of Hawaii, some 125 miles to the south. He’d been to Kona before, and to Hilo on the opposite coast as well, but he’d never spent any time in the northern uplands of the Big Island, other than to drive through them on his way from one coast to the other. He’d also never spent any time on a working cattle ranch. Now he’d be doing both, thanks to John Lau.
John, a special agent at the FBI’s Seattle office, wasn’t quite Gideon’s oldest friend, but he was the closest. A big, hearty, resilient man with whom Gideon had worked on several cases, he had once saved Gideon’s life on a flowered hillside above Germany’s Rhei
ngau. Gideon had returned the favor a few years later in Normandy, on the treacherous tidal flats of Mont St. Michel. As if that weren’t enough, the two men had simply clicked from the beginning, and now Gideon and his wife Julie, and John and his wife Marti, were a frequent foursome for dinner in the city, at a Mariner game at Safeco Field, or on a hike in the Olympics.
John was a native Hawaiian, born to a Tahitian-Chinese mother and a Hawaiian father, and though he had lived on the mainland for almost twenty years the lilt of the islands was still in his speech and in his laugh. Once every couple of years he and Marti went to stay with his relatives near Papeete and in Hilo, and when he realized that this year’s family visit coincided with Gideon’s trip to Honolulu for the anthropological meetings, he had suggested that Gideon stay on in the islands. He could hop a plane to the Big Island and spend a week or so in the clean, fresh air of the Little Hoaloha cattle ranch, a sprawling, eleven-thousand-acre spread owned by his old college friend Axel Torkelsson. It had been Axel himself who had extended the invitation, and he’d generously included Julie in it, which naturally cinched it once she’d heard about it. Julie, a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park headquarters in Port Angeles, was an enthusiastic horsewoman, and the prospect of a vacation spent cantering over open rangeland on well-trained horses was too much for her to resist. Especially in Hawaii. She would be arriving in a couple of days for a week’s stay before they all headed back the following Friday.
And that was something Gideon was very much looking forward to as well. Even after seven years of marriage, the last four days had seemed like a long, long time to be away from her.
As expected, the Law of Late-Arriving Seatmates was in full force. Five seconds before the door was pulled shut, a flushed, flustered-looking woman came trotting down the aisle, hauling a wheeled carry-on and juggling three plastic ABC Store plastic bags and a hefty purse. She wasn’t sweating and she wasn’t a 250-pounder, but you could see from the look of her that she was something worse: an affable, inquisitive chatterer. So he was not to have his forty-five minutes of peace after all. With an inward sigh and an outward smile he got up to help her get her carry-on into the overhead rack, and then to try to stuff the rest in after it.
“Just push’em in,” she said cheerfully. “It’s just junk.”
Once she sat down beside him and strapped herself in, she looked appraisingly at him for a few seconds, then apparently decided that the hard-backed book she’d brought with her would be more entertaining. She opened it to the book-mark, and was quickly, deeply absorbed. Gideon caught a glimpse of the title: Making Compost in Fourteen Days.
It made him laugh. He propped a pillow against the window, leaned his head on it, and was asleep, still chuckling, before the plane left the runway.
AMONG the few contributions that Hawaiian has made to the language of science are the words for two common types of volcanic lava: pahoehoe and a’a. On the Big Island of Hawaii, pahoehoe predominates, familiar to anyone who has ever watched a television documentary on the unending eruptions of Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano, in the south of the island. The word means “like ropes,” but it could just as well mean “like giant licorice twists”; great, black loops and coils of ropey lava cover Kilauea’s flanks and extend all the way to the sea’s edge in the southeast, not so very far below Hilo town. This pahoehoe form results when red-hot, flowing lava slows and stops gradually as it cools and becomes more viscous, so that its original, rounded, curving shapes are preserved in the newly formed rock. The effect of standing in a field of pahoehoe is grand and somber; one feels not quite secure in this vast, tarry, black world. It’s all too easy to visualize the petrified black landscape as the boiling, subterranean, liquid rock it was not so long ago, and one is always looking over one’s shoulder for the next eruption.
But in the northwest, above Kona, the effect is more desolate than grand, more drab than somber. Here, the lava is a’a, which is lava that flowed more quickly and cooled more suddenly, cracking and splitting into great fields of dull, brown basaltic “clinkers”—spiny, jagged chunks of honeycombed volcanic rock, mostly not much bigger than a fist. The Hawaiians say with a straight face that it is called a’a because that’s the sound people make when they walk on it with bare feet. There is nothing pretty or inspiring about a field of a’a, and driving northward from Kona International Airport on the Queen Kaahumanu Highway, for the first fifteen miles at any rate, is pretty much like driving through fifteen miles of scorched rubble, its barrenness emphasized rather than relieved by the sparkling blue sea a couple of miles to the east and the fresh green slope of Mauna Kea in the west.
“Isn’t this great?” John enthused from behind the wheel of the dusty, non-air-conditioned pickup truck he’d borrowed from the ranch. “I love this part of the island!”
“It’s . . . different,” Gideon said. He knew that his friend wasn’t joking. John had been born and had grown up in Hilo, the rainiest city in the United States and one of the chillier places in Hawaii, and it had left him with an abiding love of hot, dry weather, the hotter and drier the better. Although not a complainer by nature, he frequently bemoaned the evil turn of fate that had gotten him assigned to Seattle, of all places. He was just waiting—so he said—for the Bureau to open a regional office in Yuma or Needles, before he applied for a transfer.
Gideon pointed toward the gently sloping mountains twenty miles ahead, where the landscape gradually turned to bright, crisp green with the change in elevation. “Is that where we’re headed?” he asked hopefully.
“Yeah, the ranch is up there, on those slopes. We’re probably looking at it right now. I know you can see the coast when you’re on it, looking down. You’ll love it, Doc. Fog every morning, lots of rain—mist, anyway—cold. You need a jacket two days out of three. Just your kind of place. Uck.”
“Sounds great.” Gideon had been raised in sun-drenched Los Angeles. Unlike John, he had come to love the pearly, cool days of the Pacific Northwest. And Honolulu had been not only hot but miserably muggy. Cool mist sounded wonderful.
“So when’s Julie coming in, Doc?”
John had been calling him “Doc” from the first day he’d known him. When Gideon had suggested “Gideon” instead, John had shaken his head. “Sounds like I’m talking to someone in the Bible.” He had offered “Gid” instead, but Gideon had promptly rejected that, and it had been “Doc” ever since. They were both long-comfortable with it by now.
“One-fifteen, the day after tomorrow. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Nah, it’s only a forty-minute trip down from the ranch. No sweat. We can come down and meet her together. Or you can drive yourself if you want. The pickup’s ours to use while we’re here.”
“Great. And what about Marti? Is she already up there?”
“No, she’s not going to make it. She flew home yesterday, from Hilo. Staff emergency at the hospital. Two people down with the flu.”
“Ah, that’s too bad.”
John hunched his shoulders. “Yeah, but aside from being bummed out about missing time with you and Julie, she’s not too disappointed. The truth is, she doesn’t get along with the Torkelssons too well.”
“You’re kidding me. I always thought Marti got along with everybody.”
“It’s nothing serious. She just gets a little tense when she’s around these people. I mean, they eat beefsteak five times a week.”
Gideon nodded his understanding. “Ah.”
John’s wife was a nutritionist at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, where she enthusiastically invented saltless, fatless, sugarless, meatless recipes for her captive clientele. Happily for her marriage to John, who was an enthusiastic trencherman and an undiscriminating omnivore, she didn’t enjoy the hands-on process of cooking, so they ate out most evenings.
“It’s not that they eat the stuff, you understand,” John said, “it’s that they’re so goddamn healthy. That’s what bugs her. It’s against her prin
ciples.”
“I understand completely,” Gideon said. “Uh, John, look. If you’d rather be home with Marti, if you’re staying on for our sake, we could just—”
“Forget it,” John said at once. “I’d rather be here. She invited her sister and her meathead of a husband to house-sit while we were gone, and they’re staying on the rest of the week even though she’s home early. You know me, I get along with most people—”
“That’s true,” Gideon said.
“But Meathead drives me up the wall. It’s not just what he says, it’s the way he says it. This little pinchy smile, like he knows so much more than you . . . It’s . . . I don’t know, it’s a chemical thing. Anyway, forget about getting rid of me. I’m not going home till the coast is clear. Understood?”
“Understood.”
They rode in easy silence for a while, with the windows rolled down. The highway ran, straight and level, paralleling the coast for twenty-five miles, and then turned inland to begin climbing the long, steady incline that was the southwestern flank of the Kohala mountain range. The natural landscape was still brown and scrubby at best, but the temperature soon dropped by a few degrees; the air became crisper and less humid, and Gideon breathed more freely. On his side, John rolled up the window.
“John, tell me something about the ranch. How does your friend Axel come to be running a cattle ranch on the island of Hawaii?”
“Oh, ranching’s been big business up there in the north forever. There’ve been cattle here since 1793. It all started way back, with Vancouver—”
“No, I know all about Vancouver and his gift of cattle to Kamehameha I, and how they turned wild, and how John Palmer Parker arrived and started up his ranch with a land grant from Kamehameha III in the 1830s, and all that. What I meant—”