“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
“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
“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
“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.”
