Where There's a Will

“Well, okay, two hitmen. Anything else?”

“Yeah, the place was burned to the ground with everything in it—machinery, heavy equipment, supplies. That goes along with the retribution scenario, too.”

“So the police knew for sure it was arson?”

John nodded until he got a mouthful of food down and could speak again. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they did. There was kerosene or gasoline or something splashed all over the place.” John put down the hamburger and wiped his grease-smeared fingers. The neat stack of clean napkins was becoming rapidly smaller, the pile of crumpled ones growing. “Doc, what’s up with you, why all the questions? If you got another one of your theories about what ‘really’ happened, I don’t think I want to hear it.”

“Just asking,” Gideon said thoughtfully. And for once it was true. More or less.

THEY met Julie’s flight from Seattle at Honolulu International, something she hadn’t expected, and her transparently delighted expression on seeing Gideon went to his heart like a shaft of sunlight. How lucky I am—the thought rolled through him, and not for the first time—how lucky I am that this terrific woman should be so happy to see ME.

Julie was Gideon’s second wife. His first, Nora, had been killed in an automobile accident nine years before, plunging him into a year of stonelike apathy. He had loved Nora with all his heart—although it was starting to seem like a long time ago now—and had thought himself incapable of ever feeling anything like it again. It was something he hadn’t even wanted. And then, when his guard was down, or rather non-existent, out of nowhere had come this pretty, black-haired park ranger, Julie Tendler, brimming with wit and sparkle and intelligence. She had brought him back to life; he had actually fallen in love again, deeply and totally. They had been married now for seven years (astonishing thought!), and when it occurred to him occasionally how accidental their coming together had been, how very easily they might have missed each other and never met, how improbable that they should both have been unattached at that moment, he would have knocked on the nearest wood, were he not a professor of anthropology and above such things.

“But what are you doing in Honolulu?” she asked when she’d gotten over her surprise and they’d finished embracing. “I thought you two were going to meet me in Kona.”

“That’s a long story,” said John.

They started their explanation on the bus to the interisland terminal, but it wasn’t until they were ten minutes into the flight to Kona that they finished, with John having done most of the talking. When he was done, she sat there nodding her head and smiling in a manner that suggested some long-held theory had just been confirmed yet again.

“Amazing. This must be a record, Gideon. Not even two full days into a Hawaiian vacation and you’re already knee-deep in bone fragments and mistaken identities. Usually, you wait a little longer. I have no idea how you do it.”

“You want to know what I think?” John said from across the aisle. “I think he brings it on himself.”

“Hey, they asked me, remember?” Gideon said. “What was I supposed to say?”

“My guess is,” John went on, “that it’s his aura. Julie, did you know he had an aura? On the astral plane?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Julie said.

When the flight attendant brought the drink cart around, John and Gideon got coffee, Julie a bottle of water.

“John, do you happen to know what was in Torkel’s will?” she said, breaking the seal and unscrewing the cap. “That is, how he divided the ranch, or if he divided it at all?”

“Torkel? No idea,” said John. “These guys were kind of like two peas in a pod, so it was probably the same as Mag-nus’s...” He paused, frowning. “But I’m just guessing, I don’t really know. Why?”

“Well, if the person in the plane was really Torkel and not Magnus—am I getting the names straight?—and the one who was shot and buried back on Hawaii was really Magnus...whew... then that means that Magnus must have died first and Torkel must have died last.”

“That’d be true,” said Gideon, who saw where she was heading.

“All right, then. With these reciprocal wills that John was talking about, wouldn’t that mean that Torkel’s will was the one that really should have gone into effect? Since he was the last one alive?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” John said slowly. “Technically, Magnus would have left everything to Torkel—for what it looks like turned out to be only a few hours, till Torkel went down in the plane. And when that happened—”

“Torkel’s will would have become the operational one,” Julie said. “So does that mean that Magnus’s will is going to be invalidated now?”

“Beats me,” said John. “Good question.”

“Beats me, too,” said Gideon. “But the thing is, there’s no proof that the one in the grave is Magnus.”

“Who else could it be?” asked Julie.

“I have no idea. It probably is Magnus, but I doubt if ‘probably’ is going to be enough to get the question of wills reopened. Not after all this time.”

“What if you looked at the body? Couldn’t you tell?”

“You mean examine it? Get it exhumed?”

She nodded.

“Well, maybe, but who knows what condition it’s in? It was burned, remember, and it’s been eight years. That’s a long time.”

“It’s been eight years since Torkel died, too, and you identified him. From one foot.”