Death in the Orchid Garden

by Ann Ripley

  Bruce Bouting walked away with his loyal employee Christopher Bailey, but Louise noticed that when Christopher reached out and took the older man’s elbow, Bouting shrugged him off and stalked forward with the help of his cane. So much for the buddy system, she thought.

  To Louise’s disappointment, John grabbed Anne Lansing by the hand and whisked her away as if they were young lovers. She frowned, for she had wanted to share this experience with her colleague, not some person she’d met only days ago.

  Though the two Kauai police came to oversee things, Louise noted they’d already drifted off, seemingly spell-bound by the shooting fountains of lava. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for Hawaiian residents as well as visitors.

  She looked around and through the dimness saw Tom Schoonover standing nearby. “I guess it’s you and me,” she said, smiling.

  “My pleasure, Louise. Let’s be off.” They went to a line de-marked by yellow electric flares placed a few feet apart in the ground. The crowd was wandering this line, but Louise could see none of the people in their party, for darkness was closing in fast.

  Inside the flairs the treacherous pahoehoe slowly descended at a southeast angle and eventually would cross the Chain of Craters Road. This beleaguered road was moved once before because of lava flows. As well as houses and beaches, it was gradually being obliterated by Kilauea’s eruptions.

  To Louise, the lava looked like a thick, slow-moving, hydra-headed orange monster, each head with an ugly snub nose. It curved itself into sinewy patterns as it moved slowly down the slope. She gasped, to be so close to the earth in an act of creation. Then suddenly she gagged and choked, as a strong whiff of sulfur came her way. Hurriedly, she covered her nose with her bandanna.

  Tom was doing the same thing. “The wind is shifting,” he said, “and that’s not good. Let’s step back a little; I think we’ll be more comfortable.” She followed him and they stationed themselves farther away from the flow, halfway between the vent and the ocean. The biggest crowds were uphill and downhill from them, either watching the lava as it burst out of the vent, or as it rolled into the sea, creating hissing steam clouds five stories high. A huge spurt of liquid orange, twice as high as the fifteen- or twenty-foot spouts that had been coming out of the new vent, blew its way into the dark sky.

  Louise could hear the crowd of hundreds oohing and aahing. A few even applauded, as if nature were a stage impresario trying to please his audience. But she noticed park rangers hurriedly moving uphill to warn the crowd. The surface flow appeared dangerous.

  “Wow,” said Tom, “Kilauea’s certainly putting on a show. With fountains that high, I’d think those rangers would establish a wider perimeter. I hope those people who’ve climbed close to the vent are safe.”

  Louise worried about her colleague, John. Was he safe, from both the lava and the woman he was with?

  They watched in respectful silence for a few minutes before they were interrupted. “Excuse me, Dr. Schoonover,” said a man’s voice out of the darkness. It was Sergeant Yee. “I need to talk to you.” He took him aside, which immediately alarmed Louise. She edged closer to the two and heard enough to scare her.

  “. . . and I’m afraid people are scattered all over; we can’t find half of them. These fumes are a big concern.”

  Tom turned back to her. He gripped her arm for a moment. “Louise, you know the way to the car, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then either remain here, or if the wind changes again and the fumes are getting to you, wait at the vans. Would you do that?”

  “What’s wrong? Can I help?”

  “I have to leave,” he said impatiently. “Just don’t get lost, okay?”

  “I won’t.”

  The two men hurried up the hill toward the volcano vent. Louise had a sick notion in her gut. Where was John? Then she realized her protective instincts were kicking in again and that John Batchelder was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.

  She patiently waited for five minutes, though it seemed like an hour. Out of the darkness a figure appeared, coughing and hacking. It was Anne Lansing. She moaned, “I have to get out of this. It’s too much for my lungs.”

  “Anne, did you see John?” cried Louise from behind the handkerchief she held on her face. The fumes were coming their way again.

  Anne pointed vaguely uphill. “He was so darned timid that I left him with some old women. Everyone’s moving—it’s gotten less safe, the rangers say. People in our crowd are going every which way; I just saw Henry Hilaeo wandering around alone. Ralph Pinsky is way up top, about as close as you can get to the vent.” She put a hand on her chest and coughed almost convulsively. “But not me. I’m sorry—I have to get out of here. I should have stayed with John on safer ground. I’ll be at the car.” As she hurried off, she called back, “If I were you, I’d stand back farther from that line. Or else come back to the vans with me.”

  Louise hesitated, even as she suppressed a cough and realized Anne was the smart one here—Anne and Ralph Pinsky, the one with the business face mask.

  Where was John? Tom Schoonover and the policeman were already looking higher up for people. On a hunch, she decided to search downhill. Coughing from the effects of another whiff of sulfur, she pulled her bandanna securely over her lower face. Then she walked along the line of electric flares, encountering few others. Warily, she eyed the tendrils of orange-red lava meandering ever closer to the flairs. Then she heard a faint cry of pain. “Aww w ww!”

  “John!” she yelled, “is that you?”

  “Louise . . .” It was a muffled lament, followed by spasms of coughing. “Louise, help us, I beg you . . .”

  30

  In spite of the heat, an icy fear overcame her, but did not stop her from charging downhill toward his voice. “John, where are you?” she screamed. The heat was closing in on her, the fumes constricting her throat.

  “Here!” he faintly cried.

  She raced down the hill a few more yards and straight across the safety barrier, accidentally kicking some kind of stick on the ground as she went. Ahead was a dark shape dangerously close to the molten rock. “Oh, my God,” she muttered, rushing toward the river of orange as she pulled her Maglite flashlight from her cargo pants. Focusing the thin beam ahead of her, she saw John lying on the ground. His left arm was extended, holding onto the hand of another man who was caught in the stream of lava.

  The condition of Bruce Bouting made her cry out in horror. His prostrate body was being devoured by that many-headed orange monster; she saw that there was no saving him, as his clothes and body smoldered and seemed ready to burst into flame. She had to act quickly to save John. Shoving the flashlight back in her pocket, she reached down and twined one of his arms in hers and said, “Let go of his hand, John. Someone will come for him. I need to take both of your arms.”

  He let go, but howled with pain as she connected with his other arm and dragged him away from the lava. She screamed, “Help us! My God, please help us!”

  As she pulled John across the ground, passersby rushed over to help her get him to a place of safety outside the perimeter of lights. She crouched down, got her flashlight out of her pocket, and shone it on him. “Oh, John, you poor thing,” she groaned. The left side of his face and his left arm were burned an ugly red and black. “But you’re going to be okay. I know you are. And you can see, can’t you? That’s the important thing.”

  He looked up at her and his amber-colored eyes were wide with a blank expression. “Yes, Louise, I can see you. Not well, but I can see everything . . . and you have to understand. . . it was all for love . . .”

  She knelt down and kissed him on the right side of his face. “You were very brave. You tried to save Bouting’s life, didn’t you?”

  He stared up but no longer seemed to see her. It was as if he’d moved into another world.

  “Oh, my God, he’s dying!” she cried.

  Tom and the two Kauai policemen rushed up. Tom tried to pu
ll her to her feet. She tensed her thigh muscles, hunched her back, and resisted. “No,” she said.

  “Louise,” the scientist explained, “I don’t think he’s dead; I think he’s in shock. The ambulance crew will be here in a moment. They’ll take care of him. Look.” He pointed to a group of uniformed EMTs approaching. “They’re here now with a stretcher. You’ve done enough.”

  At last she allowed Tom to help her stand up. He put an arm around her and gently led her away. After a few feet she refused to go farther. “No. I want to stay here. I want to know what happened.”

  “And so do I,” said Tom.

  The two ambulances had arrived silently, without sirens, probably afraid that sirens would panic the sizable crowd. Quickly, they set up two small floodlights, so what occurred next seemed to Louise like a macabre play, with her as one of the players. Technicians concentrated on the first casualty at hand, moving John Batchelder onto a stretcher, slapping an oxygen mask onto his face, and rushing him to an ambulance. Two other technicians scrambled into special gear that covered their heads and faces. She was startled to see a large fire extinguisher in the hand of one.

  Louise went over to the ambulance, wanting to do something. John’s eyes had closed. “I can go with him,” she pleaded with the muscular man who appeared to lead the rescue team. “I think it would help.”

  The man put his hands up to bar her way, as two EMTs unceremoniously shoved her colleague into the vehicle. He shook his head back and forth. “No, ma’am, you’ll be more help letting us do our work of trying to save him.”

  The man slammed the ambulance doors shut and Louise turned away, her gaze drawn back to the line of flares. Beyond it the orange lava continued on its relentless path. She looked up and saw that Tom Schoonover still stood at her side. “I don’t need a nursemaid,” she told the scientist.

  “I know that,” said Tom. The two technicians, looking like two astronauts on the moon, had reached Bouting with a stretcher. There was a hiss and a plume of steam from the fire extinguisher and she realized that Bouting’s clothes were no longer smoldering. They carried out his body, a mass of livid third-degree burns clad in singed tan cotton. Burned to a lesser extent was the hand that John had been clutching in his attempt to drag Bouting away from the killing lava.

  Looking around, she noticed that all but two of the people in their party were now gathered around the rescue workers. There were soft exclamations from a few, but mostly awestruck silence, as they watched the man being delivered to the second ambulance. True, the body had an oxygen mask on, but the EMT wielding one end of the stretcher grimly shook his head as someone quietly inquired about the condition of the man.

  A figure suddenly ran into the circle of light. “Oh, no, Bruce!” screamed Anne Lansing, who had just arrived from the car park and recognized the victim. She rushed to the stretcher as it was being lifted into the vehicle and tried to embrace the elderly scientist, but the muscular technician pulled her away. Then, seeing that she was about to collapse on the ground, he held her awkwardly in his arms.

  Next, Christopher Bailey, the second of the missing people, appeared out of the darkness and rushed to the ambulance, where the stretcher had already been put in place. Hopping up into the vehicle, he looked down at his badly burned employer. “For Christ’s sake, what happened to him!” he yelled. Technicians gently ushered him back onto the ground, where he stood looking wildly around through his thick glasses. He saw Anne Lansing standing nearby, bent over with grief; he strode over and took her in his arms. From above her head resting on his shoulder, he looked out at the spectators—Charles Reuter, George Wyant, Henry Hilaeo, Ralph Pinsky, Tom Schoonover, and Louise. It was as if he were cataloging each of their crimes.

  While they stood there together, the lava, which to Louise was now like a living presence, continued its inexorable flow downhill, making loud crackling noises as if defying humans to interfere with its course toward the sea. With difficulty she switched her attention to the park rangers and the two Kauai patrolmen. They were efficiently querying people about what they had seen.

  She had the ghastly feeling that this scene had been played before in Volcanoes National Park. It was simply standard operating procedure. She’d read a little about the dark side of the park, though it did not advertise its disasters. Just as the tempting waters of the Hawaiian beaches led to X number of drowning deaths per year—was it fifty to sixty a year, as the beach oracle had told her?—the tempting surface lava flows of the Big Island, the fieriest place on earth, led to a burning death every now and then, often enough that there was a standard operating procedure. Their questions were polite, but their underlying questions were, How did the dumb jerks get so close to the lava? Didn’t we warn you all?

  No one appeared to know how or why Bouting and John went over that safety line. Were they lured there, Louise wondered, by a desire to get up next to that dangerous orange river? Bruce Bouting, they all knew, was fixated on this earthly wonder; she wouldn’t put it past him. Perhaps John had spied him there and tried to help him out of danger.

  “I was up and down the line,” said Ralph Pinsky, in a muffled voice. He still had not removed his mask, but that made sense, for they stood on the edge of the electric torch barrier and the wind sent an occasional drift of sulfur their way. “I saw Bruce doing the same thing, walking the line, then changing his mind and going the other way.”

  Tom Schoonover put it to Christopher Bailey, “Christopher, you and Bruce were supposed to be a pair. And there he was, with a bad knee at that. What happened and how did he get within that line of lights?”

  Bailey, who still had an arm around the despairing Anne Lansing, glared at him. “First, who do you think you are, Dr. Schoonover? I’ll tell the authorities, but you’re not one of them.” Turning to a park ranger who appeared to be in charge, he said, “I was paired off with Dr. Bouting, who incidentally is my employer and my mentor.” Another dirty look sent Schoonover’s way. “He walked with the aid of a cane, because he had a bad knee that was kicking up.”

  The park ranger said, “We found a cane not too far from the body.”

  “He was an independent kind of a man,” said Bailey, “and he didn’t like me holding his arm. In fact, he told me to get lost, because he wanted to plod around on his own.” Bailey’s eyes teared behind the thick glasses. He let loose of Anne, took off the spectacles, and unashamedly let them flow. “I don’t know where he went, because that big flare of lava went up and it distracted us all. When that excitement died down and you park police told us to move back from the line, he’d disappeared. I spent the rest of the time looking uphill for him, because I figured he’d go where there was the most action.”

  “Thanks,” said the ranger. “Anyone else with a sighting of this Dr. Bouting and the younger man who was found with him?”

  “Sure, I saw him,” said Henry Hilaeo, who was standing on the edge of the crowd. “Bouting, that is. Ralph had disappeared, I don’t know where. And then along came Bouting, hurrying uphill as fast as his bad knee would carry him. Earlier, I’d seen him crabbing at Chris Bailey there”—he nodded his head in Bailey’s direction—“and saw that the two of them weren’t gonna stay together.”

  Anne Lansing raised her head. “I was with John, uh, whatever his last name is. He was very timid about everything, not wanting to go uphill, not wanting to go closer than ten or fifteen feet outside the established boundary.” She closed her eyes as if in torment. “I finally told him, unfortunately, that I wanted to go explore on my own, for I couldn’t see things that well from the distance. The last I saw, he was talking happily with a group of older women.”

  Others chimed in, only to say that they could hardly see anyone in the darkness and had observed neither Bruce Bouting nor John Batchelder.

  “Unfortunately, these accidents happen,” said the park ranger. Sergeant Yee was on his phone; Louise suspected he was talking to Chief Randy Hau in Kauai. Yee pulled the ranger aside and talked to him quietly,
after which the ranger announced, “We’d like to question you a little more up at park headquarters.”

  In the headquarters near Volcano House, it was Louise, the park ranger, and Sergeant Binder, though she would have preferred Sergeant Yee, whom she now felt she knew. But he was busy questioning others. While the park ranger already seemed to have concluded that this was another unfortunate accident, Binder saw it in a more suspicious light. He asked the questions.

  “Mrs. Eldridge, Mr. Batchelder is your coworker. Then why did he hang out today with Dr. Bouting’s group?”

  “He preferred not to take the Kilauea Iki hike, so he went with the other group. He seemed to be enjoying the company of Bouting’s assistant, Anne Lansing. They were together again tonight, but then Anne had a coughing spell and had to go to the car.”

  “Would Mr. Batchelder take that kind of chance, going across the line of lights, wanting to brave it and see just how close he could come to disaster?”

  “He wasn’t that type of person. In fact, he was just the opposite. He didn’t even enjoy flying in airplanes.”

  “Tell us exactly what led you to walk down the hill and what happened once you heard John Batchelder cry out.”

  She gave him all the details she could remember, including the fact that when she was a few feet inside the safety line, she kicked a big stick that lay on the ground. “Later, I realized it probably was Dr. Bouting’s silver-tipped cane.”

  “And how far away was this cane from Dr. Bouting’s body?”

  “It was a good ten feet away and I probably kicked it five or six feet closer to the two men.”

  She looked her interrogator in the eye and they both drew a somber conclusion. There was no earthly reason for Bouting to chuck his precious cane. Did someone separate him from it?

  “Did Mr. Batchelder have any enemies in the group of thirteen that came with you from Kauai?”

  “No. The only possible enemy he could have had was me. I was the only one there who knew him for more than four days.”