while most remained in the net.
“ Some look to be male.”
“ Male?”
“ Either that or quite large women, and Kowona doesn't do large women. He does-”
“ Small women,” he finished for her.
“ Petite women, yes.”
“ Then this has been just another wild-goose chase, all for nothing?” He cursed under his breath and glared at one of the bones he held in his hand, making her believe he was about to hurl it back into the depths from which it had come.
“ Don't jump the gun. We need to study them all. Maybe we've got a real mixed bag here. Maybe some of the pieces'll fit our puzzle, some not. It'll take some lab time.”
“ Yeah, sure…” he finally agreed, dropping the femur he held in his hand back into the net. “Come on, let's pack up and be ready for the chopper. We've got to get back up the trail with the tanks and our cache.”
“ If it helps, two of the skulls are definitely female, and they look relatively new, in comparison to the others, I mean, and I think they came from the top of the mound.”
'That's something, but how do you explain the others?”
“ Well, there once was a community here, you said.”
“ But they buried their dead in the earth. You saw the graveyard, the stones.”
She considered this, turning one of the skulls in her hand as she did so. “What if they had some members of the village who weren't exactly fit for what they considered a proper burial? Do you know anything about Hawaiian religious practices and rites? Suppose they did sacrifices at one time…”
“ To the sea? I haven't ever heard of it, no.”
'To the sea… to the Spout?” she suggested.
He pondered this possibility. “Of course, makes good sense… more 'n' likely, you're right.”
“ And if Kowona grew up in a primal culture like they say, he'd have seen the ceremony performed, perhaps more than once. Perhaps it's the way the bones of his brother went, if the old great-granduncle of Kaniola can be believed. Maybe it's what led Lopaka to the Blow Hole, and maybe here before that?”
“ Now I feel strange about taking these bones from their eternal resting place,” lamented Parry. “I mean, for all intents and purposes, it's rather ghoulish, seeing as how it was their burial ground.”
“ We can always return the bones that belong here, but we need to know the truth about those that may not.”
“ Can you make good enough distinctions now, so we can return the older bones?”
“ I think so, but there's no time for another dive.”
“ Hell, we can shoot them back through the Spout.”
“ And they'll likely return to within feet of where we found them,” she agreed.
Just hurry. I don't want anyone seeing us. Some tourists come poking about here and see us, and God knows the consequences.”
She began to cull the bones, soon finding it easy to discriminate between the newer and older, particularly the skulls. Above ground, under the illumination of the sun, she found no difficulty in distinguishing a male jawbone from a woman's, a male hipbone from a female's, and so it went. She placed all the bone parts they would keep to one side, refilling the net with the others. The amount of new bones was considerably less than the old, and as she worked with the aged bones, finding them so brittle to the touch, worn paper-thin by time and water, they flaked easily in their new, arid environment. She realized just how ancient some of the bones were; certain they must date at least to the early 1900s and perhaps the late 1800s.
She kept one ancient bone fragment for comparison and carbon-14 dating later.
While she conducted this process, Jim worked on getting all their gear back to the chopper pad. He was pretty much finished when he found her at the Spout with the net filled with returnable bones. He helped her out over the ledge with her burden and together they lifted the net and allowed the bones to return to the outgoing waters via the Spout. Standing there, Jessica could imagine the ancients worshipping this place as sacred.
Each roaring plume of the geyser was an angry godlike outburst, a counterpoint to her quiet thoughts.
Several of the thigh bones and long bones of the arm and hand got caught up in the netting and refused to return to the sea so easily. Jim fished them from the net and one by one tossed these final fragments back into the sea. The entire time they both were drenched by the incoming tide as it flew into the funnel of the Spout and cascaded up and over them. Before it was over, they were soaking wet. They returned to the most likely usable bones from their cache and replaced them in the net. Jim carried these up along the winding trail with Jessica following.
“ I'll give you the background on the missing Maui women… kids really, all the medical papers, see if you can match any of the dental charts with the two skulls we've got.”
“ It should prove interesting,” she said from behind, watching her footing as they went, seeing now just how awfully treacherous both the terrain and the pukas hereabouts were. One hole in particular looked like the mouth of an enormous serpent just asleep below the earth, waiting patiently for a passerby to careen down into its gut. The bottom was mere darkness. She dared stare too long into this natural abyss, feeling a dizzying disorientation wash over her. Maybe she'd gone too long without a bite to eat, she thought, regaining her composure.
After the chopper's arrival, they flew on to Kahului, where they disembarked with all that belonged to them. A rental car awaited them at the airport, the bones carefully concealed in its trunk as quickly as possible to arouse no one's concern. While still on the helicopter, Jim had radioed authorities in Maui about the find and the likelihood it might prove connected with the Kowona case. He'd made arrangements for a field operative based on Maui to meet them at the airport and see personally to the careful boxing and transporting of the evidence to Lau's labs back on Oahu while Jessica drew up instructions for Lau to go along with the bones. Working with local authorities on Maui, Parry warned that Kowona could be somewhere on their island. Patrols were stepped up, everyone put on alert, and a surveillance team was sent out to monitor the area around the Spout for any sign of a man dumping any sort of strange parcels into the ocean there.
Lopaka Kowona, Jim was assured by one patrol officer, would not slip through the hands of the authorities on Maui as he had with those “fools” on Oahu.
“ That hurt,” Jim said to her when the transmission ended.
From the airport they drove to their next destination, a quaint cow town like something out of a movie set in the deserts around L.A., she thought. But even though there were hitching posts along the main street and horses tied to the posts, there were also Ford, Chevy and Dodge pickup trucks sporting gun racks and rifles through cab windows.
There were hardware stores, feed stores, millinery stores, grills, bars and taverns-she counted four within the two-block length of the little town of Makawao, where a banner proclaimed the date for the upcoming rodeo, to be held on July 4th, long since come and gone though the tattered banner waved on.
Everyone walking the concrete walks and onto the boarded steps of establishments here had chaps and boots, it seemed, and the cowboys were of every size, shape and ancestry.
“ What the hell is this?” she asked.
“ Kowona's home for a long time. He worked the Omaopio Ranch just outside of town here, same as Ewelo the Paniolo. People here will know Kowona, and maybe they'll talk.”
“ Let's do it, then. You want to canvass together or make a split?”
“ Together. We might be less threatening that way.”
“ Or more.”
“ Just follow my lead.” They got out of the car and instantly the locals pegged them as not the usual touristy couple. In fact, Jessica fit right in with her tomboy appearance, in two-day-old jeans, her hair stringy from the early morning dive, bruises showing on her arm as if her man had given her a good and deserved smacking around. She couldn't help but feel self-conscious, and it didn't help having the locals stare at them as if they were wearing horns. She wasn't wearing a cowboy hat, a big belt buckle or boots, and she didn't know how to square-dance, nor did she know the achy-breaky line dance. Over the saloon door a notice for tonight's dance was posted.
Parry, trying to fit in, actually sauntered to the bar, leaving her to traipse after in the best Western tradition, following her man like a heifer in heat. She wasn't sure she liked the role, even for a little bit.
“ Looking for some information,” Parry said to the man behind the bar.
