Where There's a Will (4 page)

He shook his head slowly back and forth. They were going to have to watch their step, all right.

Oh boy.

“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 Rheingau. 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 principles.”

“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-”

John sighed. “Jesus, Doc, you can really be irritating sometimes, you know that? I know you’re a professor and all, so you can’t help it, but it’d be nice if once in a while there was something you didn’t know more about than anybody else. Could you try that sometime? Just as a change of pace?”

“Look, the fact is, I didn’t know anything about it before, but once I knew I was coming up here, naturally I took a little time and read up on it. I read Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery, Dawes’ history of the islands, Brennan’s books on the early Parker ranch-”

“Naturally.” John was shaking his head. “You’re the only guy I know who treats a vacation like a Ph. D. research project. Pathetic.”

“Well, it was interesting,” Gideon said defensively. “And it wasn’t as if I read every word. I was just skimming.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Anyway, I was really asking about your friend. Axel Torkelsson doesn’t exactly sound like the name of a guy who runs a cattle ranch in Hawaii. How did that come about?”

“He inherited it from his uncle a few years ago. Magnus Torkelsson. There were nieces and nephews; they all got a piece of the old ranch from old Magnus.”