Where There's a Will

transgressions committed ten years before in an effort to protect the life of her one living brother and to help her beloved family through a difficult time. Besides, there were statutes of limitation that applied, blah blah blah. No, no, nothing at all to worry about there.

Easy for him to say.

The last of the pastries had been thrown to the turtles now, and she abstractedly wiped her fingers on the linen napkin. The turtles, not so different from her nieces and nephews, turned and swam off the second they saw they had nothing more to get from her. She filled the cap of her flask with aquavit, drank, and refilled it. It had been a long time since she’d been really soused, but if this wasn’t a good day to get soused, she didn’t know what was. Tomorrow would be time enough to deal with her problems.

There were a few crumbs left on the liner of the pastry basket and without knowing it she lifted them to her mouth with a moistened finger. She had lit a cigarillo earlier but had let it go out after one puff; her throat was too tight and raw to smoke. A few more tipples would take care of that.

When she heard a footstep on the gravel path behind her she instinctively reached for her wig, but then changed her mind. The hell with it, it was far too early for the good-looking kid with her dinner, and who else did she need to put on any pretenses for? She was eighty-two years old, she had a right to be going bald if she wanted to. If whoever it was didn’t like it, that was too bad for him, he could just keep going.

So deeply was she mired in resentment and recrimination that his presence didn’t register again until she sensed it just behind her. Her neck prickled. He was standing too close. She didn’t like that, didn’t like anyone looking right down at the top of her scalp. She should have slipped the wig on, damn it.

He was so close now that she felt his belt buckle brush against the back of her head. Repulsed, she pulled angrily to one side to get away from him. “Now see here—”

But when his hand clamped on her shoulder from behind like some terrible talon, the air went out of her, as much from astonishment as pain. What... what...

Too quickly for her to absorb, his other hand closed on her wrist, and she was somehow no longer in contact with the earth, but flopping wildly in the air, dropping like a stone toward the sharp, black rocks that rimmed the cove. She goggled at them, and then at the cloudless blue sky as she tumbled, mouth open, eyes wide with incomprehension.

What... what...

EIGHTEEN

THE needle-sharp bisection of the North Kohala lowlands into parched lava fields and huge, lavish coastal resorts is stunning. On one side of the coast highway is a brown, dusty, lifeless plain of a’a lava. On the other is the lushest landscape that can be imagined: thick, soft grass, palm trees, frangipani, jacaranda, glorious masses of wonderfully fragrant blossoms—red, orange, white, purple. Two people could walk along the border, practically hand in hand, for miles, with one in a moist, green land of tropical plants, bright colors, and verdant lawns all the way, and the other never leaving a blasted, barren moonscape of jagged, dun-colored rocks.

Taking the turnoff for the Outrigger and the other Waikoloa area resorts, John, Julie, and Gideon turned abruptly from the latter into the former, heading down a broad, curving parkway lined with lush trees and redolent with every sweet smell of the tropics.

“I’ve been thinking...” Julie began.

“Uh-oh,” John said. He’d been in one of his funks ever since the session with Fukida, and this was as close as he’d come to a coherent sentence in a while. They’d picked up Julie, had a late lunch at the Greek restaurant, and headed back to the hotel, all without any notable input from him.

Gideon looked over his shoulder at him. “John, do you know that whenever anybody says, ‘I’ve been thinking,’ you say, ‘uh-oh’?”

“Not anybody. Mostly just you two.” He laughed and sat himself up straighter in the back seat, signs that he was ready to rejoin the world. As his funks went, it had been a long one.

“What have you been thinking, Julie?” Gideon asked.

“Well, you know how you keep wondering why they let you get involved with this thing in the first place? I think I know.”

That surprised him. “Why?”

“Well, who exactly asked you to go out to that atoll?”

“They all asked him,” John said.

“That’s right,” Gideon agreed.

“No, that’s not what you said when you first told me about it. You said Malani asked you.”

We did? Gideon thought.

“Umm...” said John, thinking.

“Yes, you did. You said she was the one that called the salvage company, and when she came back from talking to them, she said—”

“She said they didn’t know how to handle skeletons,” Gideon remembered, “and she volunteered me.”

“That’s right, and why wouldn’t she? From what Inge and Dagmar said, she didn’t know anything about the cover-up. She didn’t know there was anything to hide.”

“That’s a good point, but look, they all agreed to it, no objections. Why would they do that? Felix even put us up in Honolulu.”

“What choice did they have?” Julie countered. “Think about it. How would it have looked if they said no you couldn’t, after the salvage company said they wanted you and you said you would?”

“But how could they not have worried that I’d find out it was Torkel in that plane? You’d think they’d have come up with some excuse, any excuse, to keep me from—”