The Presence

CHAPTER 5

Katharine was just putting the last suitcase on the shelf in her closet when she heard a horn honk and glanced out the window to see Rob Silver’s Explorer emerging from the eucalyptus grove into the clearing. Her eyes flicked to the clock on the nightstand, and she noted with satisfaction that Rob’s habit of perfect punctuality hadn’t changed since graduate school. Two o’clock was what he’d said, and two o’clock it was, right on the dot. She picked up the battered canvas backpack that had served as her field purse since her days in Africa and went out to the veranda just as he swung out of the Explorer’s cab.

“Let me guess,” he said, with a wide smile. “You just put the last of the suitcases away as I was driving in, right?”

“Okay, so we’re still the two most compulsive people we know.” Katharine laughed as she got into the Explorer. “Although I still prefer to think of it as perfect timing. Do I need to lock the house?”

Rob shook his head. “Not up here. Did you find the keys? They were on the kitchen counter, I think.”

“Got ’em,” Katharine replied. “Let’s go. I’m dying to get a look at this mysterious site of yours.”

Rob swung the car around in a wide U-turn, maneuvered it along the narrow track through the eucalyptus grove, and turned down the hill. “You’ll have a car this afternoon,” he told her as they came to Makawao a few minutes later and he turned right to drive out toward Haiku. “Actually, it’s pretty much like this one, just a little more beat up. But it’s free.”

Katharine’s brows arched. “A salary that’s twice as much as I usually get paid, travel expenses for me and my son, a house, and now a car. Who’s funding you? It sure isn’t the National Science Foundation!”

“You’re right,” Rob agreed. “It’s not the NSF. It’s a guy named Takeo Yoshihara. Ever heard of him?” Katharine shook her head. “His headquarters are in Tokyo, and he operates all over the world, but he spends a lot of his time here.”

“How’d you find him?” Katharine asked. “And is there another one just like him who’s interested in early man in Africa?”

“He found me,” Rob explained. “He’s interested in everything having to do with the Pacific Rim, including the native cultures. He’s got quite a setup, which you’ll see on the way to the site.”

They’d passed through the loose collection of buildings that formed the town of Haiku, and a few minutes later emerged onto the Hana Highway. Rob turned right. After a few miles the road narrowed severely, winding through a series of tight turns that hung perilously close to a straight drop into the sea one minute, then plunged deep into the rain forest the next. “This is the weather side of the island,” Rob explained. “The road’s like this for another thirty-five miles. In the rainy season there are waterfalls and streams in every ravine you go through.” He turned sharply off to the right, into a narrow lane that Katharine was certain she’d have missed entirely if she’d been driving herself. Paved only with two strips of concrete, the track wound through a dense forest of vine-covered trees, finally coming to a gate constructed of heavily patinated bronze and copper in bamboo forms that blended almost perfectly with the surrounding vegetation. The gate opened as the car approached, apparently of its own volition.

“All the cars that are authorized for entry carry beacons that activate the gate,” Rob explained in answer to Katharine’s unspoken question. When she turned to look back, the gate was already silently closing.

“What’s he afraid of?” she asked.

Rob smiled. “I have a feeling Takeo Yoshihara isn’t afraid of anything. He just likes his privacy. Believe me, he can afford it.”

Katharine settled back in her seat as the car made one more turn and emerged from the rain forest into a scene that nearly took her breath away, not only in its unexpectedness, but in its sheer beauty.

The area that spread before her covered perhaps five acres. It seemed as if nature itself had sculpted the landscape out of the forest, though Katharine knew that was impossible. Still, the basic contours had to have been there from the start. Takeo Yoshihara’s estate had been constructed on a broad terrace backed by a sheer face of fern-covered rocks, down which cascaded three separate waterfalls — bright silver ribbons that flowed from a ledge high above, filling the air with soft, babbling music as they tumbled into a pool below. In front of the pool was a lawn as perfectly kept as the fairways of the most exclusive golf course, an expanse of emerald interspersed with vividly colored beds of tropical flowers. Banks of towering red flowering ginger were counterbalanced by the most delicately colored stems of orchids Katharine had ever seen. There were rocks, too, great lava boulders, placed so artfully that for a moment Katharine was certain that nature herself must have laid them out. But as the Explorer moved along the gravel drive to which the twin concrete strips had now given way, she realized that she was seeing a Zen garden laid out on an enormous scale, for as the car passed among them, the rocks almost seemed to move, appearing and disappearing in an ever-changing pattern.

There were several buildings scattered around the perimeter of the huge garden, which she now realized formed a large courtyard. The buildings had an Oriental cast to them, but reflected the old Hawaiian culture as well. While the roofs were tiled in a green harmonious with the lawns and surrounding rain forest, she could easily imagine them thatched with palm fronds, and though the walls were covered with stucco, the huge supporting posts, exposed at every juncture, hinted at the ancient Polynesian boathouses from which the structures had taken their inspiration. As the car rolled to a stop in front of the largest building, a man stepped out onto the wide veranda that ran along the building’s entire length.

Katharine knew without being told that this was Rob’s benefactor, Takeo Yoshihara. He was tall and lean, and even before he strode down the two broad steps to meet her, his right hand outstretched in greeting, she sensed that she would find little of the rather stiff formality she’d come to expect in the few dealings she’d had with the Japanese over the years. Part of it, she knew, was the way he was dressed: a brightly flowered shirt, open at the throat, white cotton pants, and sandals.

“Dr. Sundquist!” Yoshihara’s voice was as warm and friendly as the grip that closed on her hand as he stuck his own hand through the open window of the Explorer. He grinned as he added two more words: “I presume?”

Yoshihara’s smile made up for the weakness of a joke Katharine had heard so many times before that it had long ceased to elicit more than a polite chuckle from her. This afternoon, though, as her eyes swept the dense rain forest that protected Takeo Yoshihara’s estate from the outside world, she found herself breaking into a genuine smile. “Finally uttered in the proper surroundings,” she offered. “And I suspect I’d be as lost as Livingston if I ever ventured very far into that forest.”

“Why do I doubt that?” Yoshihara asked. “Could it be because Rob tells me you’re one of the best field people he’s ever met?”

Katharine saw no point in mentioning that she and Rob had barely seen each other for twenty years. “I hope I don’t disappoint!”

Yoshihara stepped back from the Explorer. “I’m sure you won’t. And I shall be very interested in hearing what you think of our little discovery.”

After maneuvering the Explorer another mile along a pair of ruts so rough that they tested even the four-wheel-drive vehicle’s toughness, Rob pulled to a stop in a second clearing in the rain forest. This one, though, bore no resemblance to the one they’d just left. Here there were no traces of manicured lawns, artfully arranged rocks, perfectly planted gardens, or beautifully designed buildings, but the scene that presented itself to Katharine was far more familiar:

There were a couple of large tents, little more than tarpaulins strung between trees, with additional sheets of canvas lashed to their edges to form makeshift walls that could be folded back whenever the weather was good enough. This afternoon, with the sky having turned leaden with the threat of a tropical shower, most of the walls had already been lowered, though in the wide gaps between the hanging canvases, Katharine could easily see the same kind of plank-and-sawhorse worktables that she herself had used so often. The clearing itself looked newly created, dotted with fresh-cut stumps of trees. At its edges there were piles of cuttings that were just beginning to rot, and on the opposite side of the clearing from where Rob had just parked the Explorer a shirtless man was hacking away at the undergrowth with a vicious-looking machete. A few yards to the man’s left Katharine spotted what looked like a trailhead. “Does that lead to the site?”

Rob nodded. “From here, we walk. It’s about another two hundred yards farther, but there’s no way to get a headquarters any closer to the actual dig.”

“Before we go up, may I take a look at what you’ve found so far?”

“Absolutely.” He led her into one of the tents, where two large tables had been set up. One of them was still empty, and the other displayed only a dozen artifacts, consisting of little more than roughly worked pieces of lava.

“How long have you been working here?” Katharine asked, picking up a smoothly worn oblong object that looked no different from hundreds of other primitive grinding stones she’d seen.

“Two months,” Rob told her. “And I’ve been pretty much on hold since you agreed to come. Been spending most of my time in a village out past Hana.”

Katharine picked up another of the objects, turned it over, and again saw nothing particularly unusual about it. “Let’s go up and see what you’ve got.”

The path leading up to the site was steep and rocky. “How’d you ever find it in the first place?” Katharine asked as she stepped over a rotting log and tested the solidity of the ground on the other side before she shifted her full weight to it.

“I didn’t. One of Yoshihara’s gardeners was looking for a particular kind of fern up here, and he found one of the artifacts you saw back in the tent. Even after he brought me up, it took us a week before we were really sure we’d found something.”

Fifty yards farther on they came into yet another clearing. This one, though very small, had been carved meticulously out of the rain forest, and Katharine could tell at a glance that the crew who had cleared it had been careful to disturb nothing on the floor of the forest. Except that the site wasn’t actually on the floor of the forest at all, but on a ledge high up in one of the myriad tiny ravines that scarred this side of the mountain. A few yards farther up Katharine could hear the sound of a waterfall cascading into a pool — the alluring cascade in Rob’s photos, she decided. The stream that drained the pool twisted through the bottom of the ravine.

“There was a vent up here, back when Haleakala was active,” Rob explained. “Most of the ravines in this area are the result of erosion, but this one’s different. It seems to have been formed by the volcano itself.” He pointed to some yellowish deposits on an overhanging rock. “You can see the sulfur, which wouldn’t be here if it had been formed by erosion.”

Katharine moved closer. “You can still smell it! Are you sure the vent isn’t active?”

“This is the year they declare Haleakala extinct,” he told her. “There hasn’t been any activity for two hundred years.”

“Two hundred years is nothing, geologically speaking,” Katharine reminded him.

“A nanosecond on an archaeologist’s clock. But if the volcano boys say it’s extinct, who am I to argue?”

Shrugging, Katharine shifted her attention to a rough circle of stones. It had not yet been completely uncovered, but even half buried, it was clear the rocks formed a fire pit. “You’re going to want to be careful excavating that,” she warned Rob. “You should be able to get some very datable material out of it.”

“What do you mean, ‘I should be careful’?” Rob asked. “I specialize in architecture, remember? Polynesian architecture.” His glance scraped the rough rocks. “And I don’t call this architecture. I call this a campsite.” He smiled, his eyes taking on their mischievous twinkle. “Which is why I called you, and why I am paying you a king’s ransom. Time to get out your little picks and brushes, Kath.” His smile broadened into a wide grin. “And be careful as you excavate it,” he added. “Someone told me there might be some very datable material in it. But the real reason you’re here is this,” he said, his tone serious now, as he stooped down to peel back a sheet of plastic that had been spread over an area a few yards from the fire pit.

Katharine exhaled sharply.

Bones.

No more deeply excavated than the fire pit, they barely showed above the surface, but even what little earth had been peeled away revealed what Katharine instantly recognized as the occipital area of a skull and part of a jaw. When she dropped down to her hands and knees to explore the bones with a slender dental pick she fished out of her backpack, Rob crouched down next to her.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Katharine, already concentrating on the nearly buried bones, hardly heard him, and several seconds passed before she answered his question.

Seconds during which a strange feeling gripped her.

Though she had no clear idea why, and though she could barely see them yet, she was certain that there was something wrong with these bones.

Something very wrong.