Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 12 - Where There's A Will

by Where There's A Will

  Synopsis:

  Alex Torkelsson has just gotten word: after going missing ten years ago, Alex’s late uncle Magnus’s plane has been found south of Hawaii’s Big Island. So too have Magnus’s few skeletal remains, now handed over to the only man who can fit together the pieces of this mystery. But what forensic detective Gideon Oliver discovers could shake the Torkelsson family tree.

  Where There’s A Will

  Aaron Elkins

  Book 12 in the Gideon Oliver series

  Copyright © 2005 by Aaron Elkins.

  ONE

  November 4, 1994, Latitude 16.28N, Longitude 161.06W

  SILENCE, as sudden as a stopped heart.

  After the monotonous grind of the engine for the last three and a half hours, and then the brief stuttering and missing, it seemed to Claudia that the absence of sound had a physical presence, a doughy mass that filled the cockpit, pressing on her eardrums and stopping her nostrils.

  “The fuel’s run out,” she told the old man.

  “So that’s that, then,” he said. He’d had plenty of time to get used to the idea, and he spoke as much in resignation as in fear. In the red glow from the instrument panel, his weathered face, even the billy-goat scrap of beard, might have been a carved mask, all stark planes and angles. On his lap, his left hand gently cradled his heavily bandaged right. The bleeding had slowed down to an ooze now, or maybe it had stopped altogether. For a while it had been pumping steadily, soaking the gauze and staining his pants. He’d fainted a couple of times, and she’d thought he might die on her, right there in the cockpit.

  As if it would have made much difference.

  “Yup, that’s that,” Claudia said in the same emotionless tone. “We’re going down.”

  She thought she heard him sigh, very softly.

  A light plane that has run out of fuel at an altitude of 10,500 feet does not plummet to earth like a safe falling out of a window. It drifts down, slowly and silently, borne on the wind, gliding two or three miles for every thousand feet of altitude lost. To descend more than ten thousand feet takes twenty or twenty-five minutes, and once the trim is adjusted there isn’t much to do, especially when there is nothing below to look for—no beacon light to aim toward, no obstacles to avoid—nothing but the cold swath of stars above and the black, vast, empty Pacific Ocean below.

  There is plenty of time to think.

  IT seemed to her now that she’d known in her heart from the beginning that they weren’t going to make it. She should have said no in the first place. She was a daytime flier, a visual-flight-rules pilot, and she’d never claimed to be anything else. Did the boss want to go to the Hawi airport? Fine, let’s go. Fly north along the eastern slope of the Kohala ridge with the coast on your right and keep an eye out for the runway, nothing to it. Hana? Just point the nose toward Maui and go; you couldn’t miss it. Even Honolulu, where they’d gone for the Cattlemen’s Expo—fix the bearing and keep flying until you see Diamond Head and the airport. But this instrument-flying, this flying in the dark, wasn’t for her; she wasn’t used to it. And a rushed, crazy flight like this—with barely enough time to do the chart, four hundred miles over empty ocean to some rinky-dink, flyspeck island in the middle of nowhere—that was plain stupid.

  Still, she had done everything right, everything by the book. Scared or not, she’d used the North Pacific navigational chart to locate the damn island in the first place, find the distance, and plot the bearing. She’d contacted the flight services center for the wind conditions and adjusted the bearing accordingly. She’d checked everything three times. The plane was fully fueled, newly maintained, and ready to go. The destination was well within the Grumman’s range, especially if she flew high and kept to fifty-five percent power, which was her plan. Fortunately, the whiskey compass was as reliable as it could be, having been adjusted on the compass rose only four days earlier, and as they’d taxied slowly down the runway of the deserted Waimea airport she’d carefully set the gyrocompass to it and rechecked it against the correction card. And, daytime flier or not, she was a damn good pilot; she had a feel for flying, she could do this.

  All the same, fifteen minutes into the flight, as the airport beacon shrank to a fading spark in the blackness, her courage failed her. “This is impossible. I can’t do this,” she said abruptly. “We have to go back.” She was already easing down the left rudder and beginning to turn the yoke to circle back toward the Big Island.

  “We’re not going back,” Torkelsson said curtly. “You know I can’t.”

  “To Honolulu then. You’ll be safe there, and you can take a plane anywhere. We can lock in—”

  “Claudia.” With his uninjured hand he reached across to stay her arm. “They’ll be looking for me there, too. If we land in Honolulu it’ll be the end of me.” Pleading didn’t come naturally to him, and he seemed to realize it. His clutch tightened, grinding her wrist bones together, an old man’s claw. “And I’ll see to it that it’s the end of you, too. I promise you that. I’ll tell them everything.”

  But threats weren’t his style either, and with a grunt of embarrassment he let go of her arm. “It’s not something I want to do,” he said. “You know that. But so help me, God, if you drive me to it . . .”

  “Okay, okay,” she said grimly and found her original bearing—what she hoped was her bearing—again. On to Tarabao Island.

  Just as the Torkelssons had given her back her life, they could take it away again. It had been Magnus Torkelsson who had first seen something in her four years before, when she was a neurotic, dope-addled twenty-one-year-old on the fast track to self-destruction. What she was doing in Hawaii, exactly how or why she had come there from East Texas, she didn’t know—literally could not remember—but someone had gotten her a seasonal job clearing brush at Hoaloha, the Torkelssons’ big cattle ranch, and the rugged outdoor work had suited her. She was a big, strong girl who knew a little about ranching, a willing worker with a mechanical bent, and inside of a year she was on their year-round windmill and pump maintenance team. Then, when their regular pilot started talking about moving on and she had expressed some interest in flying, they had sent her to flight-training school in Hilo. For a while she had shared piloting duties with one of the Torkelsson nephews, but when he got tired of it she had taken the job over completely, flying somewhere, usually just to another part of the island, three or four times a week. She’d enjoyed it, too.

  They were good people, people of the land. They had been straightforward and open with her, and she had responded the same way. And there lay the problem. Torkelsson knew all about the sad mess of her teens—the dope, the psychiatric hospitalizations, the expunged record of juvenile crimes, even the two outstanding warrants. All he had to do was go to the FAA, and goodbye to her commercial pilot’s license. Her flying days would be over, the law would come down on her, and more than likely she’d wind up back in East Texas, maybe in jail, or worse yet, living with her parents.

  Trying to find Tarabao Island in the dark was better than that.

  As frightened as she was, Claudia’s instincts told her that they were staying pretty much on course. The gyrocompass was reassuringly steady and undeviating. Checking it every few minutes against the whiskey compass, there was never a need to adjust it. And the night was crystalline. She’d be able to spot the airport beacon and runway lights—they’d be the only illuminated objects for two hundred miles in every direction—if they were actually turned on as promised. And, of course, if she came anywhere within visual range of Tarabao. But that much she was certain she could manage. Almost certain.

  Th
ey flew for more than three tense hours during which Torkelsson rarely spoke. The first time was to ask, timidly: “Why do they call it a whiskey compass? I’ve always wondered.” He was trying to make amends.

  “Because the fluid the needle floats in is supposed to be alcohol,” she barked, unwilling to let him off that easily. Who gave a shit why they called it a whiskey compass? “But it’s not, it’s some kind of kerosene or something. Who cares?”

  The next time, about an hour later, staring fixedly out the window at nothing—there was nothing to see—he said: “About where are we now, would you say?”

  “About halfway there, probably.”

  “Yes, but where, exactly? Can’t you check it on the chart?”

  She laughed, a nasty, grating laugh that hurt her throat. How could he have flown so many hours beside her, and beside Gus, and beside his nephew, and know so pathetically little? “What would looking at the chart tell me? What good is it over an empty ocean? There’s nothing to see. And if there was, we couldn’t see it anyway. It’s dark out there, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “I was merely asking a question, Claudia,” he said stiffly. “I just wanted to know where I was.”

  And something inside her, whatever it was that had been holding her together, snapped. She began ranting, screaming at him in the small cabin. If he hadn’t been too cheap to buy a goddamned GPS, they’d know where they were, and more important, they’d know where Tarabao Island was and how to get there. How many times had she asked them for one? What did they cost, a lousy couple of hundred bucks? But no, the used Grumman Cheetah had come without a GPS in 1986—and without an ADF as well—and Gus had flown it just fine for eighteen years without seeing the need for them, and they’d never had a problem, and what was the point of wasting money—

  The stricken look on his face made her stop. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to him like that. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m a little tense.”

  “I understand, Claudia,” he said mildly. “I’m a little tense myself.”

  She groped for something to say. “How’s the hand?”

  He smiled at her—a sweet, achingly wistful smile. What does it matter how my hand is? “It throbs a little, that’s all. It’ll be fine once I get it taken care of.”

  “Sure, it will.”

  Again they fell silent. Ten minutes passed. “Claudia,” he said pensively, “do you like wood?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you like wood, working with it?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “I love wood. Love the smell of it, love the feel of the curls that come off when you plane it down. In Sweden I was apprenticed to a furniture maker, did you know that?”

  His voice was dreamy, his mind a million miles away. “You know what I’m going to do when I get settled? I think I’m going to make furniture for people—chairs, cabinets, that kind of thing. Everybody needs furniture. In Australia, I was thinking.”

  “I thought you were coming home when everything quieted down.”

  “No . . . that was the plan, but I don’t really think that would be the best idea,” he said, almost as if they were talking about something that might actually happen. “I’ve got some money socked away in a mainland account; more than enough to set up shop, and I wouldn’t have to make very much—wouldn’t want to make very much—just enough to live a nice, quiet life. Wouldn’t that be something? No more hoof-and-mouth, no more blackleg, no more pinkeye, no more cattle stink—just that clean, fresh smell of pine, of oak, of fir . . . they all smell different once you know them, did you know that?”

  “That sounds nice,” she said.

  “Well, I was wondering . . . do you think you might like to work for me—with me? It’d be good to have somebody I trust. You’re a strong, smart girl, you’d pick up the craft in no time, and then, after I’m gone, you’d have a real profession. You’d be surprised, there’s a lot of pleasure that comes from turning out a quality piece of handmade furniture. We could maybe share a house, or I could live in back of the shop and you could rent somewhere if you’d like that better. We could take jobs or turn them down, whatever we feel like. What do you think?”

  She smiled at him. “Sure, Mr. T. I’d like that.”

  “We’ll plan on it, then.”

  Her throat was aching. “You bet.”

  After that, they flew on without speaking, deep in their own thoughts, their own regrets, until the last of the fuel ran out and the Cheetah had started its final descent.

  YUP, that’s that. We’re going down.

  She had known for the last twenty minutes that they had missed the island. Since then they had flown in expanding circles, hoping somehow to find the beacon. But she had little hope of finding Tarabao or anyplace else. It was a minuscule island, and the Pacific down this way was very empty. In going on four hours since they’d left Hawaii they’d never seen a single light, not even from some lonely freighter.

  She trimmed the tabs slightly back for as long and slow a descent as possible—funny how, even now, you did whatever you could to give yourself maybe two more minutes aloft, as if it made any difference—sat back, and slid open the window to let in the cool night air. She took two deep breaths, shivered, and closed it again.

  “What do we do now?” Torkelsson asked.

  “First get your life jacket on. And you know there’s a raft stowed right behind us, right? If something happens to me and I can’t—”

  “Claudia—”

  “—and I can’t open it for us, you just pull the inflation handle, you don’t have to open the valise. Make sure you wait till you get it out the door first.”

  He managed a dry laugh. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “Now get that jacket on. And then pull the seat belt tight. Don’t worry, we’re going to be all right.”

  “Of course we are.” He said it like a man already dead, but he shrugged the mildewed orange jacket over his head and pulled the bands tight. Claudia did the same with hers.

  “I’m really sorry I yelled at you like that,” she said a few moments later. “I had no call to do that. You’ve been great to me, Mr. Torkelsson, you and your brother both.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, I had it coming.” He was very calm, very still. “Can I do something to help?”

  “No, there’s really not much to do. Can you see anything down there?”

  “No, it’s black as ink.”

  She checked the altimeter. “We’re at sixteen hundred feet now. I’m going to put on the landing lights. If you can help me look for the waves, that’d be a help.”

  “Look for the waves?” he said blankly.

  “Which way they’re running. We want to come in parallel to them, between the crests, if we can. If we run smack into them, it’ll be like running into a stone wall. Into a row of stone walls.”

  “I see. Yes, all right, I’ll try.”

  Neither of them said what they both knew to be true: What did it matter whether they landed in one piece or ran head-on into a wave and got it over with all at once? They were in one of the most remote, little-traveled areas of the largest body of water in the world, it was pitch-black, and, most important, no one had any idea of where they were. They had taken off from Waimea after-hours, with no attendant around. No flight plan had been filed, the transponder had been turned off, no radio contact had been made. The chances of anyone accidentally spotting their little orange raft, if they ever made it out of the plane, were a million to one, probably less.

  But the will to live, if even for a few hours longer, didn’t depend on such considerations, and when she turned on the lights they both peered hard to determine how the waves were running.

  It took a while for them to make sense of the water’s surface. “I don’t see any waves at all,” Torkelsson said.

  “There have to be waves.”

  “No, it’s like a lake, there’s nothing.”

  “There have to be waves,” she said ag
ain, but she couldn’t see any either, only a flat surface of green so pale it was almost white. She’d never come in over water at night, so she wasn’t sure if the color was the result of her lights, or if it was a sign of relatively shallow water. Shallow water . . . no waves, she thought with a little jet of hope. Could it be a lagoon? If it’s a lagoon, that means land . . . an island—

  “Watch out!” Torkelsson shouted.

  “What? I don’t see—”

  But in his agitation he had lashed out, and his arm hit her wrist, jerking the steering yoke to the left. The ailerons responded as they must: Up went the left one, down came the right one. The plane dipped precipitously to its left. The left wingtip touched the surface of the water. Like a stone skimmed over a lake, it touched, skipped, touched, skipped, touched . . . and finally broke the surface. The wing entered the water and caught.

  The plane cart-wheeled, its forward momentum carrying it through the air for half a revolution, so that for one long, strange, dizzy second they were looking straight down into the floodlit water, tumbling tail-first. Claudia’s ear was warm and wet with blood. She had hit her head on something but had never felt it. Helplessly suspended upside down in her harness, seemingly suspended in time and space, she saw the tow bar and a pair of sunglasses on a lanyard float past the windshield, caught in the glare of the landing lights.

  Like in The Wizard of Oz, she thought dazedly, when Dorothy was inside the tornado and things were whizzing all around her . . .

  No, no, it’s only the baggage locker that’s popped open, she told herself. It was her last coherent thought. When the left wing hit the water the fourth time, there was a terrible rending of metal, and the plane bounced once more, hung heavily in the air for another endless moment, and flopped with a terrific, bursting impact onto its belly. Claudia never heard Torkelsson’s cut-off scream.