Where There's a Will (3 page)

The thing is, they saw some human bones in the cockpit! Can you imagine?

I told Pacheco I’d get back to him in a couple of days. I don’t think this is going to turn into a big deal, but I’m sure everyone will agree we’d better talk about it when we get together on Thursday-not at dinner, though, because John is coming with his friend at six. Suppose we meet here at four and we can talk it through. The last of my customers will be gone by then.

I should know more by the time I see you.

“Oh, dear,” Dagmar murmured, with an illogical but deeply felt sense that she had made this happen, that this unwelcome message from her niece wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t been maundering on about Torkel and Magnus, and about that appalling night. What would this mean? God forbid that the whole affair was going to be ripped open and reexposed like an ill-healed scar. Did she have the strength to go through it again? She was an old woman now. It would kill her.

She reread the message, this time with growing irritation. How flippant they were, this new generation, how little respect, how little appreciation, they had for the old people, the ones who had thanklessly slaved their lives away to build something for them. Silently, she shook her head. Hold on to your socks -as if this were an amusing bit of trivia to be passed on. Oh, it wasn’t that she didn’t love them-they were all she had-but they were almost like strangers to her now, this gaggle of nephews and nieces; members of a different species. They talked too fast, laughed too much Faustino cleared his throat. “Would you like to send a reply, Mrs. Torkelsson?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “But I believe I’d like to rest here a little longer than usual today. Will you bring my dinner at six instead of five? And please cancel the rack of lamb. I think all I want tonight is a large bowl of the chicken-and-rice soup. I realize it’s not on tonight’s menu, but Gabriel will make it up for me.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

“Thank you, Steven,” she said, absently reaching with two fingers for another sardine and holding it up by its tail. “Here, Greta.”

Fifteen miles from where Dagmar sat communing with her turtles, in a sprawling ranch house in the cool, interior uplands of the island, her nephew Axel Torkelsson was having an argument with his wife Malani. A friendly argument, to be sure, but vexing all the same. As usual, it was about ranch expenditures.

Alone among the four Torkelsson nephews and nieces that constituted the current generation, Axel was carrying on the family’s ranching tradition. He’d been bitten early by the cattle-ranching bug; at thirteen he’d declared to his Uncle Magnus that he would study rangeland management and ecology when he went to the University of Hawaii. He had, too, with Magnus’s generous financial help, and he’d rarely regretted it.

Like the others, he had inherited a sizable piece of the 30,000-acre Hoaloha Cattle Ranch that his uncles and aunt had built, but while the rest-his sisters Inge and Hedwig and his brother Felix-had put theirs to other uses, Axel had kept his 11,000 acres as a ranch-the Little Hoaloha.

No one would mistake him for a sinewy, rough-riding cowboy, either by physique or by temperament, but he was devoted to the idea of building and maintaining a productive, profitable cattle ranch according to modern, ecologically sound principles of livestock management and production. The trouble was, you had to spend money to make money, and when it came to spending money, Malani, who kept the books, was a tough sell.

Today’s dispute was about a new retinal scanning system for the herd, which he dearly wanted, and he was at his most bright-eyed and enthusiastic. “Honey, try to look at this reasonably. Retinal scan would give us a tremendously more accurate database for breeding and for life history, and for disease control. I mean, think about the mad cow scare on the mainland.”

“Highly unlikely to be a problem here,” Malani said absently. They were having their afternoon coffee in the ranch house living room, Axel with the GlobalAdvantage Retinal-Scan Livestock Tracking System brochure on his lap, Malani with the laptop computer on hers as she went through the day’s e-mail, deleting one piece of spam after another. “Our cattle are range-fed. How could they get mad cow disease?”

“That was just an example. What about blackleg? What about pinkeye? If we ever had another outbreak of anything like that, God forbid, we’d know for certain exactly which animals had or hadn’t come in contact with the diseased ones. And after the initial cost, it wouldn’t be that much more than the barcoded tags and transponders we put on their ears now.”

“ After the initial cost, yes,” she said dryly, clicking steadily away at the DELETE key. “Have you noticed that that always seems to be the catch?”

“Well, you can’t very well make money if you don’t-”

“Spend money,” she said, reaching for her cup. “Oh, look, here’s an actual message from a live person, someone we know, imagine that! It’s a note from Inge. It’s to all of you.” She scanned it, sipping her coffee. “Oh, my,” she said, looking up. “It looks like they’ve found your Uncle Magnus.”

“They what? ” He got up to come and peer over her shoulder at the message, leaning close and adjusting his glasses to see it better. “Holy moley,” he said quietly. “Well, that would explain why we never heard from him. He never got where he was going. The plane went down.”

“But how would they know it’s his plane?”

“The registration number, I suppose. It’s on the fuselage.”

“Do you think it’s really Magnus? The bones, I mean. It’s kind of gruesome.”

Axel shrugged. “I don’t know who else it would be, assuming they’ve got the right plane.”

“So what’s next? What are you all going to do? Do you bring the bones back?”

With another shrug he turned away. “Now how would I know that? I’m guessing that’s what the meeting is for.”

“What are you getting mad at me about?”

“Ah, I’m not… I’m just…” He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry, Malani. I guess it’s just kind of a shock. The thing is, we just finished reliving that whole miserable business when they finally declared him legally dead, and now-”

“That was three years ago.”

“It was?” He blew out his cheeks. “Yes, I guess it was, at that.”

“Time does fly when you’re having fun.”

Axel tried but wasn’t quite able to smile in return. “I sure thought that was the end of it, didn’t you?” he said, shaking his head. “And now this. It seems like we just can’t put it behind us.”

Malani held out her mug for him to refill. “Look at the bright side,” she said. “At least this means we now know for sure he’s not going to show up someday and say, ‘Hey, there, you people, I’m still alive, I’m not dead, and I want my property back.’ I always wondered about that, you know-about what would happen with the will if he turned out to not be dead after all. Would we have to give up the ranch?”

“I know. I used to worry about that, too. He was a funny guy. With Magnus, you never knew.” He sipped meditatively at his coffee, thoughts of retinal scanning gone from his mind. “God, I wonder how Hedwig is going to react to this.”

“Why Hedwig in particular?”

“Well, you know Hedwig. She’s going to think this is bad karma.”

Malani laughed. “To Hedwig, what isn’t?”

She went back to scanning the junk mail. “Here’s one for you,” she said. “Are you interested in having your john-son enlarged?”

That did bring a smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”

Malani thought for a moment. “Couldn’t hurt,” she said.

For some people, their roles in life-the personas they henceforth occupy, not always full-heartedly-are thrust upon them as children, as often as not by some casual or inadvertent happening. For Axel, the groundwork was laid when he was eight: a combination of protruding, weak eyes, bookish interests, and an oddly grown-up vocabulary, oddly delivered. The Torkelsson adults began to refer to him affectionately as “the little man,” and then, almost inevitably, as “the little professor.” And with that, the wheels of his life had been set in their ruts. Axel was, and would always be, the deep thinker in the family, the impractical far-reaching visionary who couldn’t see what was six inches in front of his eyes.

For his sister Hedwig, the crucial moment had come a few years later. Like Axel, she was a reader, voracious and wide-ranging in her choice of books, and one day, one of the stack she’d brought home from the library in Hilo had been Astral Travel for Beginners: The Linga-Sharira Pathway to Experiencing Other Realms of Existence. Her response to being teased about it at lunch a few days later had been to rise from the table, to dramatically quote the book’s epigram: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and to stalk majestically from the room. She had been thirteen.

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?