Where There's a Will

“No, thank you,” she said. “But I believe I’d like to rest here a little longer than usual today. Will you bring my dinner at six instead of five? And please cancel the rack of lamb. I think all I want tonight is a large bowl of the chicken-and-rice soup. I realize it’s not on tonight’s menu, but Gabriel will make it up for me.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

“Thank you, Steven,” she said, absently reaching with two fingers for another sardine and holding it up by its tail. “Here, Greta.”

FIFTEEN miles from where Dagmar sat communing with her turtles, in a sprawling ranch house in the cool, interior uplands of the island, her nephew Axel Torkelsson was having an argument with his wife Malani. A friendly argument, to be sure, but vexing all the same. As usual, it was about ranch expenditures.

Alone among the four Torkelsson nephews and nieces that constituted the current generation, Axel was carrying on the family’s ranching tradition. He’d been bitten early by the cattle-ranching bug; at thirteen he’d declared to his Uncle Magnus that he would study rangeland management and ecology when he went to the University of Hawaii. He had, too, with Magnus’s generous financial help, and he’d rarely regretted it.

Like the others, he had inherited a sizable piece of the 30,000-acre Hoaloha Cattle Ranch that his uncles and aunt had built, but while the rest—his sisters Inge and Hedwig and his brother Felix—had put theirs to other uses, Axel had kept his 11,000 acres as a ranch—the Little Hoaloha.

No one would mistake him for a sinewy, rough-riding cowboy, either by physique or by temperament, but he was devoted to the idea of building and maintaining a productive, profitable cattle ranch according to modern, ecologically sound principles of livestock management and production. The trouble was, you had to spend money to make money, and when it came to spending money, Malani, who kept the books, was a tough sell.

Today’s dispute was about a new retinal scanning system for the herd, which he dearly wanted, and he was at his most bright-eyed and enthusiastic. “Honey, try to look at this reasonably. Retinal scan would give us a tremendously more accurate database for breeding and for life history, and for disease control. I mean, think about the mad cow scare on the mainland.”

“Highly unlikely to be a problem here,” Malani said absently. They were having their afternoon coffee in the ranch house living room, Axel with the GlobalAdvantage Retinal-Scan Livestock Tracking System brochure on his lap, Malani with the laptop computer on hers as she went through the day’s e-mail, deleting one piece of spam after another. “Our cattle are range-fed. How could they get mad cow disease?”

“That was just an example. What about blackleg? What about pinkeye? If we ever had another outbreak of anything like that, God forbid, we’d know for certain exactly which animals had or hadn’t come in contact with the diseased ones. And after the initial cost, it wouldn’t be that much more than the barcoded tags and transponders we put on their ears now.”

“After the initial cost, yes,” she said dryly, clicking steadily away at the delete key. “Have you noticed that that always seems to be the catch?”

“Well, you can’t very well make money if you don’t—”

“Spend money,” she said, reaching for her cup. “Oh, look, here’s an actual message from a live person, someone we know, imagine that! It’s a note from Inge. It’s to all of you.” She scanned it, sipping her coffee. “Oh, my,” she said, looking up. “It looks like they’ve found your Uncle Magnus.”

“They what?” He got up to come and peer over her shoulder at the message, leaning close and adjusting his glasses to see it better. “Holy moley,” he said quietly. “Well, that would explain why we never heard from him. He never got where he was going. The plane went down.”

“But how would they know it’s his plane?”

“The registration number, I suppose. It’s on the fuselage.”

“Do you think it’s really Magnus? The bones, I mean. It’s kind of gruesome.”

Axel shrugged. “I don’t know who else it would be, assuming they’ve got the right plane.”

“So what’s next? What are you all going to do? Do you bring the bones back?”

With another shrug he turned away. “Now how would I know that? I’m guessing that’s what the meeting is for.”

“What are you getting mad at me about?”

“Ah, I’m not... I’m just...” He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry, Malani. I guess it’s just kind of a shock. The thing is, we just finished reliving that whole miserable business when they finally declared him legally dead, and now—”

“That was three years ago.”

“It was?” He blew out his cheeks. “Yes, I guess it was, at that.”

“Time does fly when you’re having fun.”

Axel tried but wasn’t quite able to smile in return. “I sure thought that was the end of it, didn’t you?” he said, shaking his head. “And now this. It seems like we just can’t put it behind us.”

Malani held out her mug for him to refill. “Look at the bright side,” she said. “At least this means we now know for sure he’s not going to show up someday and say, ‘Hey, there, you people, I’m still alive, I’m not dead, and I want my property back.’ I always wondered about that, you know—about what would happen with the will if he turned out to not be dead after all. Would we have to give up the ranch?”

“I know. I used to worry about that, too. He was a funny guy. With Magnus, you never knew.” He sipped meditatively at his coffee, thoughts of retinal scanning gone from his mind. “God, I wonder how Hedwig is going to react to this.”

“Why Hedwig in particular?”

“Well, you know Hedwig. She’s going to think this is bad karma.”

Malani laughed. “To Hedwig, what isn’t?”