Oh, sure, that made a lot of sense. Pele's miffed because this sweet young thing made off with an ounce and a half of lava, so she dumps two feet of rain on her
Brenda frowned.
'I don't believe it,” she said aloud. “Therese.'
Mrs. Laney glanced up from the triple-taped container she had been trying unsuccessfully to breach.
Brenda raised the letter. “Unbelievable. This is from my cousin.'
Mrs. Laney's plucked eyebrows rose. Her half-moon glasses slid farther down her nose. “Really? Your own personal cousin?'
Yes her own personal cousin. Therese, whose mother was Aunt Celine, Brenda's mother's older sister. Therese, whose father, the bigger-than-life, transplanted American Nick Druett, owned not a cabbage farm but a thriving Tahitian coffee plantation, two thousand prosperous acres carved out of the jungly flanks of Mt. Iviroa, twenty-five miles south of Papeete and three thousand miles southeast of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
Brenda bent to the letter again.
She rose thoughtfully and headed for the door.
Mrs. Laney, who had been eagerly awaiting more information, was indignant. “And that's all you're going to tell me? That it's from your cousin?'
'What?” Brenda was already in the hallway, re-reading the letter as she walked. “Oh...I need to make a phone call, Ruby...'
* * * *
'I don't understand,” Therese said in that soft, appealingly hesitant voice of hers. “How do you know about my letter?'
'It came right to me,” Brenda said. “I'm the one who opens them.'
'But—aren't you in California, at Kings Canyon?'
'Not anymore. Therese, I'm here at Hawaii Volcanoes. I've been trying to get back here for years. I've been here since March.'
'Oh,” Therese said. “Nobody told me.'
There was nothing surprising about that. The two branches of the family were not in frequent contact. Brenda was a Lau by birth, her father a native Hawaiian, her mother a Tahitian-born Chinese who had moved to Hilo in 1950 to marry Brenda's father. Therese was a Druett, half-Chinese, half-American. Her mother—Brenda's aunt Celine—had been a famous beauty who had been swept off her feet by Nick Druett, the swashbuckling young American newly come to the South Seas to make his fortune, which he very soon did. They had had a daughter, Maggie, not long after they married (well, before they married, but nobody talked about that); then, ten years later, as something of a surprise, along had come the beautiful Therese, now twenty-eight.
Living as they did in two different hemispheres, the Laus and the Druetts didn't see each other often, but there was affection between them, and Brenda was particularly fond of Therese, eight years her junior. Therese had never quite taken up life in the real world, but she was warmhearted and without guile. What you saw on the surface was all there was underneath.
'Therese, I had no idea these things were going on at the plantation.'
'No, well, you know my father. He doesn't like to advertise things. Brenda—will those stones really go back into