“Wait a minute,” Gideon said. “These would have been Andreas’s kids? The brother that died before? And your friend Axel was one of them?”
“Right. Axel and his brother and his two sisters. Axel’s the only one who’s running his property as a ranch.”
“The
“Yup, if you can call eleven thousand acres little. But the rest of them all had different ideas. You interested enough to know the details, or am I boring you?”
“No, you’re not boring me. I’ll let you know when you are.”
“Well, there’s Inge, Axel’s sister. She turned hers into a yuppie dude ranch, and from what I hear it’s doing okay. Then there’s his sister, Hedwig. She... what?”
“You rolled your eyes when you said ‘Hedwig.’ I wondered what that meant.”
“I did? Ah, Hedwig’s all right, I guess, if you can stand...well, you’ll see. Anyway, she runs hers as a well-ness center.”
“She’s a doctor?”
“Um...no.”
“A therapist?”
“Um... no, I wouldn’t say that. She’s into, like, karmic power massage, and, um, past-life regression, and —”
“Okay, I get the picture,” Gideon said, charitably resisting the urge to roll his own eyes. “And then there’s one more, right?”
“Felix. He’s a lawyer. He lives in Honolulu.”
“He didn’t inherit a piece of the ranch?”
“Oh, yeah, he got the smallest piece... only a couple of hundred acres, with no buildings, no water, no decent grazing land, nothing like that—but it includes a quarter-mile of prime, white-sand oceanfront up above Kawaihae. It’s probably worth more than all the rest put together, and he’s selling it to some Swiss chain that develops these super-upscale communities. Felix’s pretty sharp about that kind of thing—he’s a land-use attorney—and he’s gonna be one rich Torkelsson.”
“Interesting family,” Gideon said. “Unusual.”
“And you’re gonna meet every last one of them in a few hours.”
“I am?”
“Yup. We’re invited to dinner.”
“That’s nice of them, but—I don’t know, didn’t you say they’d be talking about what to do about Magnus’s remains? I’d be a complete outsider at something like that. Maybe I could just—”
“Don’t worry about it. They meet once a month anyway to hassle out any problems, and they get that stuff out of the way early. By the time we show up, they’ll have their family matters settled and everybody’ll be pretty well into the schnapps. You’ll enjoy it, you’ll see. Anything you ever heard about these ‘dour’ Swedes, forget it. And you wouldn’t want to miss the dinner. Best steaks you ever had; from prime ranch cattle.”
Leaving Aioli’s, they headed back east and John turned the truck north on Highway 250, at the edge of town. They were soon back in open country and climbing again. Now occasional straggling lines of chestnut-brown cattle, heads lowered to the grass, could be seen.
“Herefords,” John said. “You can always tell from the white faces. In case you wanted to know. If they were Jerseys they’d be brown all over.”
“Thank you, I always wondered about that. So you said tonight’s steaks would be from ranch cattle. Dinner’s at the ranch, then? At Axel’s?”
“No. That’s where we’re staying, but the family dinners are always at Inge’s—at the dude ranch. She closes it to paying customers for the day. See, Inge and Hedwig are the only ones with professional cooks—because of their businesses—and naturally nobody wants to have it at Hedwig’s, so it’s always at Inge’s. Felix flies in from Honolulu, Dagmar hires a limo to drive her up from the coast, and— here we are. This is Axel’s and Malani’s place. Home for the next week. Open the gate, would you?”
Gideon jumped out, pulled open the unlocked swinging gate in the barbed wire fence, and closed it once the truck was through. The only indication of where they were were the neatly stenciled words on the mailbox mounted on the gatepost:
“It’s one of the old section managers’ houses,” John said. “They built them in separate units back then: cook house, bath house, laundry house, bunk house—I spent a few nights in the old bunk house myself. Murder going out
to the privy on a cold night.”
Gideon frowned. “And we’re staying...where?”
“Don’t worry, we’re in the main house. Indoor plumbing.” He laughed. “Jeez, Doc, what a weenie you are. I always thought anthropologists slept out on rocks when they had to, and ate bugs and snakes. Till I met you.”
“I happen to love eating bugs and snakes. I was thinking of Julie.”
“Yeah, right.” John pulled the car into the dusty parking area beside the porch and turned off the ignition. “Okay, let’s go find ’em. Knowing Axel, he’ll be right where I left him.”
The interior of the house was just what the exterior suggested: roomy, worn, simply built of wooden planks in
