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-
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 bookmark, and was quickly, deeply absorbed. Gideon caught a glimpse of the title:
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:
But in the northwest, above Kona, the effect is more desolate than grand, more drab than somber. Here, the lava is
“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.