Where There's a Will

now and then anyway, if I’m on my way to Kona.”

“No, that’s all right. Auntie Dagmar and I are old pals.”

Axel hesitated. “You’re not going to grill her, are you?”

John laughed. “No, Axel, I’m not going to grill her. I’ll leave my rubber hose back at the house.”

“WE worked your friend over a little hard,” Gideon said when Willie Akau had dropped them off in the equipment yard near the ranch house. “I feel kind of bad about it.”

John nodded. “Had to be done. We’ll make it up to him. How do you think it went? Do you buy what he said? About none of them knowing?”

“I don’t know, John. It’s pretty hard to believe that the reason nobody spoke up about the ring is that every single one of them just conveniently forgot about it.”

John nodded. “You’re right about that, but as far as Axel himself is concerned, whatever else he is, he’s no con artist. With Axel, what you see is what you get.”

FOURTEEN

EVENwith the cell phone jammed against her ear, Inge could hardly hear him, what with all the yee-ha-ing and kiyi-yi-ying, let alone the mooing and stamping of the cows. She was riding postern on the afternoon’s Cattle Drive Adventure (“An honest-to-goodness cattle drive in which you will ride trained cow horses as you help the wranglers drive our mini-herd of Angus crossbreeds over the open range”), and she had been lucky simply to hear the phone beep.

She pulled her horse to the side and cantered away from the tumult.

“Axel, calm down. Say again?”

“I said I think they know everything! Or they’re about two inches away from it. John and Gideon, they were just here. You should have heard their questions. And... and...”

“Axel, take a deep breath. Now, what the hell are you talking about?” She took a breath herself and closed her eyes. Don’t let this be what I think.

But it was. Through his babbling she managed to make out the gist of what he was saying. No, she thought, they hadn’t figured out everything, but they were close. At the least they knew that the accepted version of events had some holes, big holes, in it. She’d feared this might happen from the moment they’d came back from Maravovo with the news about Torkel, but by that time there had simply been no way to head them off. Think, she told herself. Think.

Axel was just repeating himself now, in stuttery, fragmented phrases, like an old-fashioned record with a needle stuck in a groove, and she interrupted. “What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them anything. Inge, they kept talking about the wills, and how the wrong one went into effect, and how we could be accomplices—I mean accessories—”

“How did they find out there was a ring?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they—”

“What did you say when they asked why nobody mentioned it?”

“I said...I don’t remember what I said. But I know I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Butyoudon’trememberwhatyousaid,”Ingesaidwryly.

She’d dismounted now and was wandering about with the reins in her hand, letting Betsy nibble at the coarse grass. She could hear him clearly now. The whooping Indonesians and the disgusted cattle had moved off a hundred yards.

“No, but I know I didn’t tell them anything that... Inge, I was so flustered, I hardly knew what I was saying. They kept talking about how the will might be invalidated if we knew all along it was Torkel in the plane—”

“Okay, Axel, shh, it’s all right, you did fine. It couldn’t be helped.”

What rotten dumb luck that they had picked him to come to with their questions. If it had been her, she might have...well, what?

“Inge, they asked me if Torkel killed Magnus!”

That stopped her. “They asked you what?”

“They asked me—”

“I heard you, I heard you! Where would they get that idea?”

“I don’t know! It was Gideon—”

“And what did you say to that? Or don’t you remember that either?”

“What do you mean, what did I say? I told them it was ridiculous. But the fact that they would even come up with a question like that... what does it mean?”

“It means they were fishing. They know something’s wrong, but they don’t know what. This isn’t good, Axel.”

“You don’t ...you don’t think...I mean, nothing could happen, not after all this time, could it?”

“Nothing serious, only that we might all go to jail and lose our inheritances,” she snapped.

She heard his gasp. “But what should we do now?” he whispered.

“Let me make sure I have this straight. This Sergeant Fukida wants to look into it, but he’s given John and Gideon a couple of days leeway before he gets started, and John is going to see Dagmar Tuesday? The day after