Where there's a will

THREE

“Billie? Hi, it’s Norma. Guess where I am right this minute. I’m sitting on the plane in Honolulu. Yes, I am…”

What was this irresistible impulse, Gideon mused, sitting six or seven rows in front of the speaker, that compelled people to flip open their cell phones the second they got on a plane or train, and inform someone, somewhere, that they had just gotten on a plane or train? And what was it that then turned ordinary, perfectly-normal-voiced men and women into people who could be heard-who couldn’t be ignored-from six or seven rows away?

Ah, well, these were mysteries best left for another day. Right now, he didn’t intend to let anything bother him during the brief flight to the Big Island. He was relaxed, even a bit sleepy, he was looking forward to the next few days, and he was, frankly, a little hung over-enough to want to do nothing but vegetate for the next forty-five minutes, looking down on blue water and lush green islands, and maybe catching a doze or two.

At a large-boned, well-put-together 6’1” he was cramped in the window seat, but he was used to that, and in a flight this short it wasn’t going to bother him. It’d be nice, though, if the aisle seat beside him remained empty. Now there was another mystery for you: Why did the seat next to you so often remain appealingly vacant until the last minute, so that you got your hopes up, only to have a sweating, panting 250-pounder come jogging down the aisle just as the door closed and the jet-way swung aside? He sighed. How the gods loved to toy with our emotions.

Gideon Paul Oliver, Professor of Physical Anthropology at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus, was, in general, feeling pretty good. He was coming from the annual meeting of WAFA, the Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists, held this year at the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Field in Honolulu. He’d caught up on things, presented a paper on blunt-force post-cranial trauma, contributed an oddball item or two to the guess-what-happened-to- this quiz (a much-pitted cervical vertebra that had been through the digestive system of a cougar; a scapula that had been perforated by a pneumatic riveter), and renewed some friendships. His only mistake, and it wasn’t much of a mistake, had been the extra couple of beers at the annual pizza party last night.

He was on his way now, or would be when the 717 took off, to Kona Airport on the island of Hawaii, some 125 miles to the south. He’d been to Kona before, and to Hilo on the opposite coast as well, but he’d never spent any time in the northern uplands of the Big Island, other than to drive through them on his way from one coast to the other. He’d also never spent any time on a working cattle ranch. Now he’d be doing both, thanks to John Lau.

John, a special agent at the FBI’s Seattle office, wasn’t quite Gideon’s oldest friend, but he was the closest. A big, hearty, resilient man with whom Gideon had worked on several cases, he had once saved Gideon’s life on a flowered hillside above Germany’s Rheingau. Gideon had returned the favor a few years later in Normandy, on the treacherous tidal flats of Mont St. Michel. As if that weren’t enough, the two men had simply clicked from the beginning, and now Gideon and his wife Julie, and John and his wife Marti, were a frequent foursome for dinner in the city, at a Mariner game at Safeco Field, or on a hike in the Olympics.

John was a native Hawaiian, born to a Tahitian-Chinese mother and a Hawaiian father, and though he had lived on the mainland for almost twenty years the lilt of the islands was still in his speech and in his laugh. Once every couple of years he and Marti went to stay with his relatives near Papeete and in Hilo, and when he realized that this year’s family visit coincided with Gideon’s trip to Honolulu for the anthropological meetings, he had suggested that Gideon stay on in the islands. He could hop a plane to the Big Island and spend a week or so in the clean, fresh air of the Little Hoaloha cattle ranch, a sprawling, eleven-thousand-acre spread owned by his old college friend Axel Torkelsson. It had been Axel himself who had extended the invitation, and he’d generously included Julie in it, which naturally cinched it once she’d heard about it. Julie, a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park headquarters in Port Angeles, was an enthusiastic horsewoman, and the prospect of a vacation spent cantering over open rangeland on well-trained horses was too much for her to resist. Especially in Hawaii. She would be arriving in a couple of days for a week’s stay before they all headed back the following Friday.

And that was something Gideon was very much looking forward to as well. Even after seven years of marriage, the last four days had seemed like a long, long time to be away from her.

As expected, the Law of Late-Arriving Seatmates was in full force. Five seconds before the door was pulled shut, a flushed, flustered-looking woman came trotting down the aisle, hauling a wheeled carry-on and juggling three plastic ABC Store plastic bags and a hefty purse. She wasn’t sweating and she wasn’t a 250-pounder, but you could see from the look of her that she was something worse: an affable, inquisitive chatterer. So he was not to have his forty-five minutes of peace after all. With an inward sigh and an outward smile he got up to help her get her carry-on into the overhead rack, and then to try to stuff the rest in after it.

“Just push’em in,” she said cheerfully. “It’s just junk.”

Once she sat down beside him and strapped herself in, she looked appraisingly at him for a few seconds, then apparently decided that the hard-backed book she’d brought with her would be more entertaining. She opened it to the book-mark, and was quickly, deeply absorbed. Gideon caught a glimpse of the title: Making Compost in Fourteen Days.

It made him laugh. He propped a pillow against the window, leaned his head on it, and was asleep, still chuckling, before the plane left the runway.

Among the few contributions that Hawaiian has made to the language of science are the words for two common types of volcanic lava: pahoehoe and a’a. On the Big Island of Hawaii, pahoehoe predominates, familiar to anyone who has ever watched a television documentary on the unending eruptions of Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano, in the south of the island. The word means “like ropes,” but it could just as well mean “like giant licorice twists”; great, black loops and coils of ropey lava cover Kilauea’s flanks and extend all the way to the sea’s edge in the southeast, not so very far below Hilo town. This pahoehoe form results when red-hot, flowing lava slows and stops gradually as it cools and becomes more viscous, so that its original, rounded, curving shapes are preserved in the newly formed rock. The effect of standing in a field of pahoehoe is grand and somber; one feels not quite secure in this vast, tarry, black world. It’s all too easy to visualize the petrified black landscape as the boiling, subterranean, liquid rock it was not so long ago, and one is always looking over one’s shoulder for the next eruption.

But in the northwest, above Kona, the effect is more desolate than grand, more drab than somber. Here, the lava is a’a, which is lava that flowed more quickly and cooled more suddenly, cracking and splitting into great fields of dull, brown basaltic “clinkers”-spiny, jagged chunks of honeycombed volcanic rock, mostly not much bigger than a fist. The Hawaiians say with a straight face that it is called a’a because that’s the sound people make when they walk on it with bare feet. There is nothing pretty or inspiring about a field of a’a, and driving northward from Kona International Airport on the Queen Kaahumanu Highway, for the first fifteen miles at any rate, is pretty much like driving through fifteen miles of scorched rubble, its barrenness emphasized rather than relieved by the sparkling blue sea a couple of miles to the east and the fresh green slope of Mauna Kea in the west.

“Isn’t this great?” John enthused from behind the wheel of the dusty, non-air-conditioned pickup truck he’d borrowed from the ranch. “I love this part of the island!”

“It’s… different,” Gideon said. He knew that his friend wasn’t joking. John had been born and had grown up in Hilo, the rainiest city in the United States and one of the chillier places in Hawaii, and it had left him with an abiding love of hot, dry weather, the hotter and drier the better. Although not a complainer by nature, he frequently bemoaned the evil turn of fate that had gotten him assigned to Seattle, of all places. He was just waiting-so he said-for the Bureau to open a regional office in Yuma or Needles, before he applied for a transfer.

Gideon pointed toward the gently sloping mountains twenty miles ahead, where the landscape gradually turned to bright, crisp green with the change in elevation. “Is that where we’re headed?” he asked hopefully.

“Yeah, the ranch is up there, on those slopes. We’re probably looking at it right now. I know you can see the coast when you’re on it, looking down. You’ll love it, Doc. Fog every morning, lots of rain-mist, anyway-cold. You need a jacket two days out of three. Just your kind of place. Uck.”

“Sounds great.” Gideon had been raised in sun-drenched Los Angeles. Unlike John, he had come to love the pearly, cool days of the Pacific Northwest. And Honolulu had been not only hot but miserably muggy. Cool mist sounded wonderful.

“So when’s Julie coming in, Doc?”

John had been calling him “Doc” from the first day he’d known him. When Gideon had suggested “Gideon” instead, John had shaken his head. “Sounds like I’m talking to someone in the Bible.” He had offered “Gid” instead, but Gideon had promptly rejected that, and it had been “Doc” ever since. They were both long-comfortable with it by now.

“One-fifteen, the day after tomorrow. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Nah, it’s only a forty-minute trip down from the ranch. No sweat. We can come down and meet her together. Or you can drive yourself if you want. The pickup’s ours to use while we’re here.”

“Great. And what about Marti? Is she already up there?”

“No, she’s not going to make it. She flew home yesterday, from Hilo. Staff emergency at the hospital. Two people down with the flu.”

“Ah, that’s too bad.”

John hunched his shoulders. “Yeah, but aside from being bummed out about missing time with you and Julie, she’s not too disappointed. The truth is, she doesn’t get along with the Torkelssons too well.”

“You’re kidding me. I always thought Marti got along with everybody.”

“It’s nothing serious. She just gets a little tense when she’s around these people. I mean, they eat beefsteak five times a week.”

Gideon nodded his understanding. “Ah.”

John’s wife was a nutritionist at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, where she enthusiastically invented saltless, fatless, sugarless, meatless recipes for her captive clientele. Happily for her marriage to John, who was an enthusiastic trencherman and an undiscriminating omnivore, she didn’t enjoy the hands-on process of cooking, so they ate out most evenings.

“It’s not that they eat the stuff, you understand,” John said, “it’s that they’re so goddamn healthy. That’s what bugs her. It’s against her principles.”

“I understand completely,” Gideon said. “Uh, John, look. If you’d rather be home with Marti, if you’re staying on for our sake, we could just-”

“Forget it,” John said at once. “I’d rather be here. She invited her sister and her meathead of a husband to house-sit while we were gone, and they’re staying on the rest of the week even though she’s home early. You know me, I get along with most people-”

“That’s true,” Gideon said.

“But Meathead drives me up the wall. It’s not just what he says, it’s the way he says it. This little pinchy smile, like he knows so much more than you… It’s… I don’t know, it’s a chemical thing. Anyway, forget about getting rid of me. I’m not going home till the coast is clear. Understood?”

“Understood.”

They rode in easy silence for a while, with the windows rolled down. The highway ran, straight and level, paralleling the coast for twenty-five miles, and then turned inland to begin climbing the long, steady incline that was the southwestern flank of the Kohala mountain range. The natural landscape was still brown and scrubby at best, but the temperature soon dropped by a few degrees; the air became crisper and less humid, and Gideon breathed more freely. On his side, John rolled up the window.

“John, tell me something about the ranch. How does your friend Axel come to be running a cattle ranch on the island of Hawaii?”

“Oh, ranching’s been big business up there in the north forever. There’ve been cattle here since 1793. It all started way back, with Vancouver-”

“No, I know all about Vancouver and his gift of cattle to Kamehameha I, and how they turned wild, and how John Palmer Parker arrived and started up his ranch with a land grant from Kamehameha III in the 1830s, and all that. What I meant-”

John sighed. “Jesus, Doc, you can really be irritating sometimes, you know that? I know you’re a professor and all, so you can’t help it, but it’d be nice if once in a while there was something you didn’t know more about than anybody else. Could you try that sometime? Just as a change of pace?”

“Look, the fact is, I didn’t know anything about it before, but once I knew I was coming up here, naturally I took a little time and read up on it. I read Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery, Dawes’ history of the islands, Brennan’s books on the early Parker ranch-”

“Naturally.” John was shaking his head. “You’re the only guy I know who treats a vacation like a Ph. D. research project. Pathetic.”

“Well, it was interesting,” Gideon said defensively. “And it wasn’t as if I read every word. I was just skimming.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Anyway, I was really asking about your friend. Axel Torkelsson doesn’t exactly sound like the name of a guy who runs a cattle ranch in Hawaii. How did that come about?”

“He inherited it from his uncle a few years ago. Magnus Torkelsson. There were nieces and nephews; they all got a piece of the old ranch from old Magnus.”

Gideon laughed. “Okay, then, let me rephrase the question. How does a guy named Magnus Torkelsson come to be running a big cattle ranch in Hawaii?”

“Well, actually, that’s a long story,” John said. “But something new just came up on it-”

“Go ahead and tell me the long story. I’m at your mercy, and I don’t have anything else to do.”

In the early fifties, John told him, Magnus Torkelsson, along with his equally adventurous brothers Torkel and Andreas, had jumped ship off Kona, from a Swedish freighter that was picking up a shipment of beef cattle from the Parker Ranch, which was then the only cattle ranch of any size in Hawaii. Being quick learners, knowing a good thing when they saw it, and taking an immediate liking to the rolling Kohala hills, which reminded them of the Smaland highlands of their childhood, they used the nest egg they’d been building up to buy two hundred cattle from the Parkers and eight hundred acres from nearby landowners. In their thirties at the time, they called their ranch Hoaloha-“Beloved Friend” in Hawaiian-and their combination of hard work, dedication, and penny-pinching good sense turned it into a money-making proposition after relatively few years. By the time they died, the Hoaloha encompassed over thirty thousand acres and ran a herd of fifteen thousand cattle, mostly Herefords, but also Holsteins, Durhams, Charolais, even a few Angus and Brahmas “Well, see, there’s something you know more about than I do,” Gideon said. “If you asked me ten seconds ago to name five breeds of cattle, I don’t think I could have done it. I’m not sure I could do it now.”

“Well, remember,” John said, pleased, “I roomed with Axel at college and he used to talk about this stuff a lot. And I still see him every few years. And then I spent a couple of summer vacations working on the ranch.”

“No, I didn’t know that. So you must know quite a bit about ranching, then.”

“Well, I wouldn’t… that is, I’m not any kind of… well, yeah.” And then, as he often did with little or no reason, he burst into laughter. John had a wonderfully infectious laugh that crinkled up the skin around his eyes, made his eyes themselves gleam, and rarely failed to make Gideon laugh along with him, as he did now.

“They brought over their sister Dagmar a couple of years after they got here,” John went on, “and all four of them worked like dogs to make the ranch go. Andreas, the oldest one, he died before I met any of them, but I got to know old Torkel and Magnus and the rest of them pretty well. Real well, in fact.”

They had climbed to two thousand feet-never a switchback, just one long, steady rise along the flank of the range-and while John nodded to himself, remembering, Gideon gratefully took in the prospect around them. The afternoon shadows had lengthened, adding texture and depth to the rolling countryside. Trees were still sparse, but the duns and ochres of the lowlands had given way to green, healthy pasturelands. The temperature had gotten more comfortable still, and there were veils of mist in some of the hollows and around some of the peaks-if you could call these lovely, rounded, hummocky rises “peaks.” Over his right shoulder, he could look back down the slope and see the coastline all the way to Kona, as John had said. The whole scene was very beautiful. It surprised him that he’d zipped through it a few years ago, hardly noticing it.

John surfaced and went on. “The two brothers were kind of crotchety by then. You know, two old bachelors, living in the same house together with their old-maid sister, always carping at each other; not real easy to get along with, but they loved the ranch, they ran a tight ship-Jesus, did they-and somehow they kept it all together, until…”

He was still smiling, remembering days long past, but now he sobered. The smile faded. “Until Torkel got murdered-”

Gideon stared at him. “Murdered?”

“-and Magnus disappeared.”

“He disappeared? ”

“Took off into the night in the ranch plane, never to be heard from again.”

“You mean they never found out what happened to him?”

“Not until just this week, as a matter of fact. Tuesday. A couple of skin-divers found the plane. Axel was telling me about it. It crashed in the lagoon of some rinky-dink island in the Pacific. They think he never got where he was going, that it went down the night he left.”

“Was there anything in it? Any remains, I mean?”

John nodded. “Yeah, some bones, apparently.”

“Are the Torkelssons having them brought back?”

“I don’t know. They’re gonna talk about it today-they get together for dinner once a month or so to hassle out any problems-and figure out what they want to do. Why, you want to volunteer your services?”

“Sure, if they want someone to look the bones over, see if maybe there’s something to confirm it really is Magnus. You know people appreciate that kind of closure.”

“They do, yeah, but my impression is they just want to put it all behind them. My guess is that if they bring the remains back they’ll just want to bury them. That’ll be all the closure they need.”

“Huh. Well, go on back to the story. What was it all about? Did Magnus kill his brother? Is that why he ran?”

“No, no, no. I wasn’t around anymore by then, but from everything anybody knows, it was some kind of vengeance thing… you know, retribution, payback.”

“For what?”

John shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. All they know is somebody shot Torkel to death and burned down the main ranch building. They tried to get Magnus too, but he managed to get away, make it to the airport, and take off. That’s it.”

“And nobody knows who did it?”

“Nope. There were plenty of candidates, more than they knew what to do with. See, these old guys weren’t that easy to get along with, and they drove a hard bargain besides. Shrewd, you know? There were a lot of people with grudges. Lemme see… oh, there was a neighboring ranch, part of a consortium, that wanted right-of-way access for a water line. When Torkel and Magnus said no way, the place went bust, wound up having to sell for next to nothing. And who do you think bought it? The Torkelssons, of course, who immediately laid in a water pipeline.”

“That would have gone down hard,” Gideon said.

“You’re not kidding. And then there were some kind of famous cattle negotiations in Honolulu, where they supposedly aced out one of the big Kauai ranching syndicates. There were threats against them on record, there was even-”

“But nobody was ever convicted?”

“Nobody was ever indicted. The cops never even brought charges. There just wasn’t any evidence, Doc. Nothing to tie anybody to it. Remember, they burned the place down. That doesn’t make the job any easier.”

Gideon leaned back in his seat and thought it over. “John,” he said with a shake of his head, “I have to say…”

John glanced at him. “What?”

“Well, you have a case where one brother is murdered and the other one takes off. You have to wonder-”

“You have to wonder if Magnus didn’t kill Torkel.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Sure, and naturally that was where the cops looked first, but that angle petered out inside of a couple of days. For one thing, the autopsy on Torkel showed that they did him in classic gangland execution style. Two shooters, the whole bit. This wasn’t just one ticked-off old geezer killing his geezer brother.”

“You mean, hired killers.”

“Exactly. A professional hit all the way, very smooth.”

“But why couldn’t Magnus have been the one who hired them?”

“No way. He was too cheap.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, what kind of sense does it make? If he wanted to have his brother killed, he’d have had it done when he wasn’t around, when he had some kind of alibi, over in Honolulu or something, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s a point,” Gideon said. “He sure wouldn’t have done it this way, putting himself right in the middle of it.”

“Another thing, too,” John pointed out. “No motive. None at all. Also, if he arranged for a couple of hitmen to do it, why would he run? No, he’s not the one who killed his brother.”

“Okay, that I can buy, but if these killers were after him, why didn’t he just go to the police for help? Why leave everything-his family, his ranch-and run for his life?”

“Well, all I can tell you is, that’s what people do when hitmen are on their tail. And between you and me, it’s a pretty good idea. Besides, the Waimea PD would be in way over their heads on something like this. They probably get, like, one homicide every ten years, and then it’s just some out-of-his-skull meth-head.”

“Then why not go to the state police in Honolulu? Or the FBI?”

“Look, people do funny things when they’re scared; you know that. Anyway, that was the last time anybody ever saw him. Or heard anything about him, until this week.”

They had reached the outskirts of Waimea now, a pretty little 1950s Western town with feed and grain stores, and stores that sold farm equipment, and rugged-looking men in Stetsons, and even a little white church with a wooden belfry. The only thing that told you you weren’t in Kansas or South Dakota were the tropical red and blue tin roofs. That and the impossibly lush green hills in which the town nestled.

“Let’s stop for a bite,” John said. “You hungry?”

“Sure,” said Gideon, whose salivary glands started working at the mention of food. “I guess I forgot about lunch.”

“ Forgot about lunch!” John said incredulously. “Jesus, you’re worse than I thought.”

They turned into Opelo Plaza, a neatly maintained corner strip mall on the main street, and pulled up before Aioli’s, a simple, white frame building with blue awnings on either side of the screen door and a giant painted garlic clove above it.

“I admit, it looks kind of like a health food place-but it’s good,” John explained.

They ordered sandwiches at the counter-grilled chicken and avocado for Gideon, grilled mahi-mahi for John-and sat in rattan chairs at a bare table under slowly turning ceiling fans. Everything was spotless. The red glazed tile floor looked as if it had been cleaned thirty seconds ago. The clientele was about fifty-fifty native-Hawaiian and Haole.

While they ate, John went on with the story. Once the family had gotten over its shock at the loss of its patriarch-brothers, another kind of shock took over. They realized that the future of the wealthy ranch and its holdings was now on hold. Because the two men had reciprocal mutual-beneficiary wills, in which the brothers left virtually everything to each other, it was only when the last living brother died that the inheritance could pass on to the next generation. So, for the seven years it took for the Third Circuit Court to formally conclude that Magnus was really dead and gone, the ranch was managed under receivership and the bulk of the Hoaloha fortune remained in limbo, while the would-be inheritors chafed. All except Dagmar, who got an identical lion’s share of the liquid assets under both wills, and who soon pulled up stakes and retired to the seclusion and beauty of Hulopo’e Beach Estates on the Kohala Coast.

But the seven years finally came to an end. Three years ago Magnus had been declared legally dead and his will had gone through probate and been executed. For all intents and purposes the great Hoaloha Ranch no longer existed. The thirty-thousand-acre property was cut up and divided between the brothers’ nephews and nieces. Even after selling off part of their assets-cattle, art works-to pay the death taxes, each of them wound up with a good-sized chunk of land.

“Wait a minute,” Gideon said. “These would have been Andreas’s kids? The brother that died before? And your friend Axel was one of them?”

“Right. Axel and his brother and his two sisters. Axel’s the only one who’s running his property as a ranch.”

“The Little Hoaloha.”

“Yup, if you can call eleven thousand acres little. But the rest of them all had different ideas. You interested enough to know the details, or am I boring you?”

“No, you’re not boring me. I’ll let you know when you are.”

“Well, there’s Inge, Axel’s sister. She turned hers into a yuppie dude ranch, and from what I hear it’s doing okay. Then there’s his sister, Hedwig. She… what?”

“You rolled your eyes when you said ‘Hedwig.’ I wondered what that meant.”

“I did? Ah, Hedwig’s all right, I guess, if you can stand… well, you’ll see. Anyway, she runs hers as a wellness center.”

“She’s a doctor?”

“Um… no.”

“A therapist?”

“Um… no, I wouldn’t say that. She’s into, like, karmic power massage, and, um, past-life regression, and-”

“Okay, I get the picture,” Gideon said, charitably resisting the urge to roll his own eyes. “And then there’s one more, right?”

“Felix. He’s a lawyer. He lives in Honolulu.”

“He didn’t inherit a piece of the ranch?”

“Oh, yeah, he got the smallest piece… only a couple of hundred acres, with no buildings, no water, no decent grazing land, nothing like that-but it includes a quarter-mile of prime, white-sand oceanfront up above Kawaihae. It’s probably worth more than all the rest put together, and he’s selling it to some Swiss chain that develops these super-upscale communities. Felix’s pretty sharp about that kind of thing-he’s a land-use attorney-and he’s gonna be one rich Torkelsson.”

“Interesting family,” Gideon said. “Unusual.”

“And you’re gonna meet every last one of them in a few hours.”

“I am?”

“Yup. We’re invited to dinner.”

“That’s nice of them, but-I don’t know, didn’t you say they’d be talking about what to do about Magnus’s remains? I’d be a complete outsider at something like that. Maybe I could just-”

“Don’t worry about it. They meet once a month anyway to hassle out any problems, and they get that stuff out of the way early. By the time we show up, they’ll have their family matters settled and everybody’ll be pretty well into the schnapps. You’ll enjoy it, you’ll see. Anything you ever heard about these ‘dour’ Swedes, forget it. And you wouldn’t want to miss the dinner. Best steaks you ever had; from prime ranch cattle.”

Leaving Aioli’s, they headed back east and John turned the truck north on Highway 250, at the edge of town. They were soon back in open country and climbing again. Now occasional straggling lines of chestnut-brown cattle, heads lowered to the grass, could be seen.

“Herefords,” John said. “You can always tell from the white faces. In case you wanted to know. If they were Jerseys they’d be brown all over.”

“Thank you, I always wondered about that. So you said tonight’s steaks would be from ranch cattle. Dinner’s at the ranch, then? At Axel’s?”

“No. That’s where we’re staying, but the family dinners are always at Inge’s-at the dude ranch. She closes it to paying customers for the day. See, Inge and Hedwig are the only ones with professional cooks-because of their businesses-and naturally nobody wants to have it at Hedwig’s, so it’s always at Inge’s. Felix flies in from Honolulu, Dagmar hires a limo to drive her up from the coast, and-here we are. This is Axel’s and Malani’s place. Home for the next week. Open the gate, would you?”

Gideon jumped out, pulled open the unlocked swinging gate in the barbed wire fence, and closed it once the truck was through. The only indication of where they were were the neatly stenciled words on the mailbox mounted on the gatepost: Torkelsson. Mile 12.2, Kohala Mtn. Road. Once he was back in, John followed a dirt track between the hills toward a rambling, much-weathered, white frame house a quarter-mile off, with porches all around and six or seven smaller outbuildings trailing away to the rear.

“It’s one of the old section managers’ houses,” John said. “They built them in separate units back then: cook house, bath house, laundry house, bunk house-I spent a few nights in the old bunk house myself. Murder going out to the privy on a cold night.”

Gideon frowned. “And we’re staying… where?”

“Don’t worry, we’re in the main house. Indoor plumbing.” He laughed. “Jeez, Doc, what a weenie you are. I always thought anthropologists slept out on rocks when they had to, and ate bugs and snakes. Till I met you.”

“I happen to love eating bugs and snakes. I was thinking of Julie.”

“Yeah, right.” John pulled the car into the dusty parking area beside the porch and turned off the ignition. “Okay, let’s go find’em. Knowing Axel, he’ll be right where I left him.”

The interior of the house was just what the exterior suggested: roomy, worn, simply built of wooden planks in serious need of re-painting, simply furnished with wood-frame furniture, and filled with the dusty, unidentifiable smells of old, well-lived-in houses. The living room had a massive, soot-blackened lava-stone fireplace topped by a mantel jammed with antique brown and blue bottles, dusty glass fishing floats, oddly shaped pebbles, and other knickknacks that must once have meant something to someone. The plank walls had yellowing pictures of Swedish and Hawaiian royalty on them-mostly unframed, cut from newspapers and books, and held up with tacks-along with fading family photographs and a couple of old school pennants: the University of Hawaii and the University of California-Davis. This was a room-a house-that had never been “decorated.” It had grown-or, better, evolved -by accretion, by slow accumulation. All the same, it looked right for the house of a rancher; an honest, straightforward kind of place, utterly without pretensions.

John led the way into the white-painted kitchen, where they found Axel and his wife Malani at a scarred table in somber consultation over a dog-eared account book. Two half-filled mugs of coffee were beside them, the cream congealing at the surface. A difference of opinion hung in the air: Malani was in the process of shaking her head “no,” while Axel, with his finger on one of the columns, was making an earnest point, but when they came in he jumped up.

“The romance of modern ranching,” he said with an embarrassed grin. “Now you know the truth. It’s all about number-crunching. I haven’t been out on the range lassoing cattle for almost two hours now.”

Indeed, for a cattleman, Axel Torkelsson looked as if he didn’t get out much. He was somewhat puffily built to begin with, and a bookish stoop, a concave chest, and a pair of mild, watery, pale eyes behind black-rimmed, 1970s-style glasses did away with any intimation of the open range. Add to that a worried, slightly dazed expression that suggested he was always trying to remind himself not to forget something, and he seemed as if he would have been more at home with a green eyeshade and arm-garters than in a ten-gallon hat.

John made the introductions. Gideon was warmly received and told that he and Julie were to consider the house, and indeed, the ranch, as their own. When Gideon had thanked them and expressed some interest in, and even some knowledge of, the history of cattle-ranching in Hawaii, Axel’s wrinkled brow smoothed. His pinched face seemed to fill out.

“Actually, ranching is a totally different affair from what it was ten or twenty years ago-back when John was our number-one hand.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” John said.

Axel clapped John shyly on the shoulder and went on speaking to Gideon. “Of course, the paniolos -that’s what we call the cowboys here; it comes from the word espanol, because the first ones came from Mexico, but you probably already knew that-anyway, they still use lassoes, and they brand and castrate and all the rest, but nowadays it’s really about devising and maintaining a viable system of intensive range management because, if you think about it, a cattle ranch is first and foremost a grass farm. Today’s cattle-rancher has to understand that if he’s going to survive.”

“I never thought about it before,” Gideon said, “but I can see how that would be.”

Encouraged, Axel plowed ahead, his weak eyes blinking enthusiastically away. “See, you can’t just depend on the natural range grasses if you want to compete. You have to sow. But what do you sow? That’s the big question. Right now, I have experimental plots going of Natal red top, brome, cocksfoot… well, you name it. And then besides that, intensive range management means a whole lot of things they never heard of in the old days: symbiotic seeding, selective brush control, and, above all, above everything else, a strategy of long-range water-resource development and conservation. And today’s-”

John was laughing. “I knew you guys would get along. You both talk in lectures.”

“I most certainly do not,” said Axel.

“You most certainly do,” Malani said, “but it’s hard to tell with Gideon. You haven’t given him the chance.”

“Come on, honey, he said he was interested-”

“I am interested-”

“May I make a suggestion?” she said. “It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t you show our guest his room and let him freshen up, and then get some horses and take him out and show him around the ranch. Take Johnny, too. Wouldn’t you like that, Gideon?”

Malani, a porcelain-doll-faced Hawaiian woman a few years older than her husband, had taught at the Kamehameha School on Oahu before she married Axel, and she still had something of the resolutely patient schoolmarm in her speech: a natural bossiness moderated by a precise, sugary, sing-song trill, as if she were explaining things to a not-particularly-swift class of fourth-graders, or maybe to a hard-of-hearing, not-quite-with-it group of oldsters. Heard occasionally, it was no doubt pleasant rather than otherwise, but Gideon wouldn’t have wanted to live with it day in and day out.

“I’d love it, Malani,” he said dutifully.

“So would I,” Axel said, “but I’m due at Inge’s at four-thirty. See,” he said to Gideon, “they just found my uncle’s bones in-”

“I told him all about it, Axel.”

“Oh, fine. Anyway, the thing is, there isn’t time to saddle up the horses and-”

“Then don’t take the horses,” Malani said. “At least you can walk up along the side of Pu’u Nui. You can see half the ranch from there. A beautiful view.”

“But what about the accounts?” Axel asked her, looking longingly at the columns of figures.

“I can take care of the accounts, sweetie. Go. You can use some fresh air.”

“Well, but-”

“Go,” she said, hustling him away from the table with a fluttering of hands, as if she were scattering a flock of pigeons. “Go-go-go-go-go.”