Where there's a will

FIVE

The wood-branch lettering above the entrance in the split-rail fence said “Kohala Trails Adventure Ranch,” and just inside, where a couple of dirt roads intersected, there was a post with two handpainted signs: a “Stop” sign-or rather, a “Whoa” sign-and one below it that said “Howdy, Podnuh. Horseback Riding Adventure, Thisaway. Ranch House, Thataway.”

They turned Thataway, toward a white frame house that looked like a bigger, better-kept version of Axel’s and Malani’s. “John,” Gideon said, “when we were driving up from the airport, you said that ‘naturally’ nobody wanted to have the dinners at Hedwig’s. Why is that? Why ‘naturally’?”

“Well, for one thing, the Wellness Center menu is strictly vegetarian, and just a little weird besides. But mainly because it wouldn’t be the same if Auntie Dagmar wasn’t there, and Auntie Dagmar won’t go to Hedwig’s.”

“Uh… Auntie Dagmar?” He had been drifting a little during the short drive from Axel’s place, lulled by the gentle rises and falls of the road, the fragrant air, and the long, long views down to the slowly darkening sea.

“Dagmar,” John said. “Torkel’s and Magnus’s sister. Remember? She’s eighty-something now.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Pay attention, now.”

“Sorry, I’m doing my best. So, is there a family feud? Between Auntie Dagmar and Hedwig?”

“Nah, nothing like that. It’s just that Auntie Dagmar doesn’t go anyplace where they won’t let her drink her schnapps and smoke her cheroots, and smoking and booze are verboten at the Hui Ho’olana. Just like meat. They mess up the karma.”

Gideon sat up a little straighter and peered at John. “John, you wouldn’t be pulling my leg just a little, would you?”

John laughed. “See for yourself, buddy.”

At forty or so, Inge Torkelsson, the proprietor of the Kohala Trails Adventure Ranch, was a rangy, wind-seared woman, as sinewy and tough as a stick of beef jerky, with a small, active head, short, graying blonde hair, lean hips, and little in the way of breasts. In her jeans and checked cowboy shirt, and with her swaggery, slightly straddle-legged walk, anyone seeing her from behind would have taken her for a man; a cowboy. Given a few yards’ distance, most would have thought so from the front as well.

Taking Gideon by the arm with a grip like a barroom bouncer’s, she heartily dragged him around the handsomely rustic living room-deer-antler chandeliers, woven floor mats, heavy, polished, matching koa wood furniture, paintings of Hawaiian queens and Swedish kings (unlike those in Axel’s house, these were framed originals, neatly hung; the whole place was like a sanitized, coordinated, updated version of Axel’s house)-to introduce him to the others. There were six of them all together: the five blood-related Torkelssons-siblings Axel, Felix, Hedwig, and Inge, plus Auntie Dagmar-and Inge’s Hawaiian husband, Keoni, who had arrived only seconds before John and Gideon. Obviously, they had been told about Gideon, because several of them made some small witticisms about bones or skeletons, which he took in the amiable spirit in which they’d been intended.

Inasmuch as Hedwig was the last person he was introduced to before Inge was called to the telephone, Gideon was left pretty much in her clutches. Hedwig, knowing he was an anthropologist, had expressed open-mouthed astonishment at learning that he was unfamiliar with the differences between Celtic and Druidic shamanism (“I’m not quite up to the minute on that,” he had admitted) and was doing her best to repair this sad hole in his scholarship, gesturing where necessary with a glass of frothy pink liquid that looked to Gideon like Pepto-Bismol over ice. A large, flowing woman with cropped blonde hair, and wearing a large, flowing, purple-flowered muu-muu, Hedwig had a tendency to overwhelm. Partly, this was because she had a disconcerting way of standing too close when conversing, in addition to which she favored an incredibly potent jasmine scent. As a result, they had done a sort of tango across the floor, with Gideon slowly backing up, and Hedwig relentlessly tracking, until he ran out of room, bumping his hip against a table holding appetizers and drinks.

“Well, this has really been fascinating, Hedwig,” he said brightly, leaping in at one of the infrequent pauses. “I guess I’ll get myself a drink now-”

“Gideon-oh, my God!” she exclaimed delightedly. “You have an aura!”

“Pardon?”

“An aura!” Hedwig repeated, leaning even closer to sniff at him, to peer at his ears, his shoulders, the top of his head, drowning him in jasmine. “And not your everyday, low-level bodily kind, either.” More sniffs. “It’s wonderful! A high-frequency UV thing, a real astral-plane consciousness-level entity. It’s very visible. I could help you learn to see it in no time. There’s a… let me see… a tall, white-bearded man with one blue eye and one gray eye who looks after you. Hasn’t anyone ever told you? Surely you’ve felt him?”

Gideon was practically bent backward over the table. “Well, actually, Hedwig, I can’t say that-”

“My friends call me Kuho-ono-enuka-ilimoku, Gideon. It’s my past-life vision name.”

“Uh… past-life vision name?” he said and bit his tongue, but he was saved by the appearance of Auntie Dagmar, a diminutive, erect, elderly woman with a well-tended but slightly askew black wig and piercing, intelligent gray eyes in a lean, Swedish face. In one hand was an unlit black cigarillo; in the other a cordial glass of amber-colored liquor. Her clothes looked expensive: a plum-colored pant-suit, silk blouse, and turquoise earrings in the form of tortoises. Around her neck was a carelessly knotted blue Hermes silk scarf with small white stars. (Gideon knew it was a Hermes because she had put it on inside out and the label showed, which merely added to her queenly air, as if she were above the need to dress in front of a mirror.)

“And what exactly is wrong with ‘Hedwig’?” she demanded. “It was good enough for your grandmother.” Gideon heard the gliding, lilting vowel-sounds of Swedish in her speech. “It was the name of royalty.”

“So you’ve told me, Auntie Dagmar,” Hedwig said with her too-bright smile. “Three or four hundred times. But the fact is, I don’t like it because it sounds like ‘earwig.’”

“That’s ridiculous, and you know you just say it to annoy me.”

“Besides which, it’s too hard to pronounce. It’s very tiring when everyone asks if the “w” is pronounced wuh or vuh. ”

“Oh, I see. But ‘Kuku-ono-mono-eenyweeny,’ that’s easy to pronounce.”

Hedwig threw Gideon a “see what I have to put up with?” look and changed the subject, grimacing at Dagmar’s glass and cigar. “You have to be more careful at your age, Auntie Dagmar,” she said lightly. “I keep telling you. You’re getting on now. You’re not the woman you were.”

“No, and I never was.” She turned to Gideon. “Young man, can you light this damn thing for me? There are matches on the table over there.”

“Of course,” Gideon said.

Hedwig shook her head. “Darling Auntie, I hope you don’t expect me to stand here and watch you kill yourself right in front of me.”

“You mean you’re going to pester someone else? Excellent!” said Dagmar. “Thank the Lord for small mercies. Goodbye and good luck to you.”

As Gideon held the match to her cigarillo, she spoke around it. “In my opinion, a woman of forty-five-a sedentary, morbidly obese woman with some very peculiar ideas, if you’ll forgive my saying so-has no business telling an active, perfectly healthy person of eighty-one how to live her life, would you agree?”

“Yes, I would, Miss Torkelsson,” Gideon said truthfully.

“Oh, for God’s sake, call me Auntie Dagmar. Are we related?”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s all right, you call me Auntie Dagmar anyway.” Exhaling a lungful of blue smoke, she patted him absently on the shoulder. “Will you excuse me? I just thought of something else to irritate my niece about.”

Across the room, Felix Torkelsson banged a spoon against a glass for attention. “Six-thirty, everybody!”

Felix, the lawyer-brother who had flown in from Honolulu for the occasion, was a ruddy, outgoing teddy bear of a man with twinkling eyes, round cheeks, and a short, neatly clipped pepper-and-salt beard. Given a few more years, he would be everyone’s choice to play Santa Claus, if he wasn’t already. His normal speaking voice was a penetrating drawl with a wry, nasal touch of W. C. Fields in it, and when he raised it a few notches, no one inside of a hundred yards could escape hearing it. Nevertheless, he repeated himself with another honk. “Six-thirty, fellow Torkelssons and friends. Lift your glasses. Time for… The Toast!”

“Malani’s not here yet,” Axel called.

“Too bad,” said Felix, “but we must always remember what Magnus said.” He scowled ferociously, ran his tongue in and out between his teeth, and spoke with a deep, melodious Swedish accent. “In this house we enjoy our cocktails at six-thirty- one cocktail-and dine promptly at seven. This does not mean seven-oh-one.”

There was obviously a funny story connected with this because they all laughed appreciatively, and it started them on a round of Magnus-quotations.

“You are never going to get much of anything done unless you go ahead and do it before you are ready,” Inge contributed with the same slow Swedish lilt.

“No farmer ever plowed a field by turning it over in his mind,” Hedwig said.

More happy laughter. Felix raised his glass. “To Uncle Magnus and Uncle Torkel, may they forever be riding their faithful old Palominos over pastures rich and green!”

“To Uncle Magnus! To Uncle Torkel!” they echoed, including Gideon, who was now on his second Scotch-and-soda.

Everyone turned expectantly to Auntie Dagmar, who lifted her glass of aquavit and, pink-cheeked, delivered a long toast in Swedish.

This pleased everybody, and they fell into fond stories about the two brothers. Even John had one: about how he was a few minutes late the very first day he reported to work at the ranch, and Magnus, who had ridden in on a sweating horse to meet him and then had to wait for him, had told him to go find another job, firing him on the spot and riding back off onto the range. It had been Torkel who had intervened and given him another chance.

“He was always the soft-headed one, Torkel,” Dagmar agreed. “The romantic in the family.”

“I think you mean soft- hearted, ” Felix said, shouting with laughter.

Dagmar’s icy gray eyes impaled him. “That is what I said.”

Malani made her entrance in the amused silence that followed this. “So what’s the latest on Magnus?” she asked into the vacuum.

“The good news is, he’s dead for sure!” said Keoni Nakoa, Inge’s husband. “That’s why everybody looks so cheerful. The inheritances are safe!”

This prompted snorts of umbrage and disgust, which didn’t seem to bother him. Keoni was clearly nobody’s favorite. A big, handsome Hawaiian, but now running to fat, he looked something like John-the same thick black hair, big frame, and flat, Asiatic cheek bones-but he was smoother, slicker, without John’s rough edges, and with something of the lounge lizard about him; a kind of Hawaiian Dean Martin. Dressed totally in black-T-shirt, jeans, boots-he carried himself with a somewhat heavily-laid-on air of insouciance, as if he couldn’t help but be amused by the shenanigans of this droll gang of Haoles he’d so improbably gotten himself entangled with.

His initial greeting to Gideon, delivered with a heavy, affected Hawaiian inflection, had been, “What’s happenin’, brudda? If you lookin’ for skeletons in da closet, you come to da right place.”

According to John, Keoni had been an accountant for the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea when he married into the Torkelssons. Now, no longer needing to work for a living, he managed the books for the dude ranch and ran occasional errands around the place, and he had too much time on his hands. There were rumors of affairs with female clients. His marriage to Inge was believed to be on shaky ground.

“I meant,” Malani said to the others, “are you going to have the remains brought back?”

“Yes, child,” Dagmar said. “It would be a sin to leave him out there like that, so far away.” She spoke without visible emotion, almost harshly. “Besides, bringing him home would be… it would. ..” She searched for the words she wanted. “It would end the story. Fini, ” she said, and made a little motion with her hands, the way an orchestra conductor might conclude a quiet chamber piece. “So.”

Gideon nodded to himself. It was something he had seen often in families with a long-missing, presumed-dead member. The deep, deep need to heal over the wound for good, to finally put the past behind. The need for closure.

“He should be laid to rest on the ranch,” Dagmar continued, “if you and Axel will let us use a site on the Little Hoaloha.”

“Of course,” Axel and Malani said together.

“Shouldn’t take up too much space,” Keoni observed.

“Just a few old bones.” Talk about a tin ear, Gideon thought.

Felix turned pointedly away from Keoni and spoke to Gideon: “This is your field. How much would be left after eight years?”

“Oh, please, let’s not get all grisly,” Hedwig said.

“No, I’m interested.”

“I am, too,” Inge said.

“If the plane has been in the lagoon for eight years,” Gideon said a little uncomfortably, “there won’t be anything like a skeleton left-an articulated skeleton. And with a window knocked out, the chances are there won’t be much in the way of bones at all. Only whatever the fish and crabs couldn’t haul away.” A skull was the most likely possibility, since few sea creatures could get their jaws or claws around a skull. But even that was doubtful after eight years. Marine environments were not kind to organic remains.

Dagmar looked at him with prim distaste. “Thank you for explaining that, young man.”

“What salvage company are you using?” Malani asked Felix.

“I don’t know yet, honey. I’ll ask around when I get back home. There are several of them in Honolulu.”

“That’s hardly necessary. There’s a marine salvage company right here on the island, in Kona-Ocean Quest,” Malani told him. “They’re clients of mine.” For the last few years, John had told Gideon earlier, she had been running a website-design consulting business from home.

“Thanks, Malani, but I think we want something just a little more professional than one of your Kona-coast outfits with two kids and a dinghy,” Felix said with a tolerant smile. “Now, then-”

“Oh, now, Felix, they’re hardly two kids and a dinghy,” Malani warbled at him in full grade-school-teacher mode. “Ocean Quest has eight divers, they have their very own Cessna 310, and they have two salvage tugs under contract. Their specialty is rapid-response deployment. In the last fiscal year alone they did contract work for the State of Hawaii, for Blue Star Shipping, for the government of the Tuamotos, and for the Army Corps of Engineers. They handle all regional small towing and salvage work for two different marine insurance companies-”

“What is the woman doing, reading or something?” Felix said, laughing. He threw up his hands. “Okay, okay, you win. I don’t know what I was thinking of to doubt you. Madame, we leave it in your ever-capable hands.”

“I’ll call them now,” Malani said, rising.

“At seven o’clock at night?” Hedwig asked.

“These are not the most formal people in the world. They won’t mind.”

“The salad’s on the table,” Inge said as Malani left. “We might as well start before the flies find it.”

Over a simple but wonderfully fresh lettuce-and-tomato salad, the conversation turned to everyday topics.

“Axel,” Inge said, “one of your calves got onto my property again this morning. You’re going to have to do something about that fencing.”

“Sorry about that, Inge. Did it scare any of your Indonesians?”

“Worse than that,” Inge told him. This was a young bull that had somehow found its way to the dude ranch petting farm, had managed to get in, and had tried to mount one of the female calves, traumatizing not only the calf but a school group from Hilo who witnessed the whole thing.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Hedwig said, “it’s as good a way as any for them to learn about sex.”

“This wasn’t sex, it was rape.”

“Inge,” Axel said in the midst of general laughter, “he isn’t capable of rape. He’s been castrated.”

“Well, he sure didn’t seem to know it. Maybe you should tell them when you castrate them.”

“Do you suppose we might change the subject?” Dagmar interjected with a shake of her head. “I’m trying to eat my dinner. Felix, when exactly can we expect to see your land turned into Happy Harbor Estates?”

“Now, Auntie, you know they haven’t decided on what the name’s going to be,” Felix said patiently. “And I promise you, it’ll be very nice when it’s finished. They’re preserving the landscape as much as possible. They have a great deal of respect for the land.”

“Tell us another one,” Dagmar said.

“It’s not a joke, you’ll see. And as to when, they’re hoping to start in the fall, but the Environmental Quality Control Board is still haggling over the impact statement.”

“Hey,” Keoni said. “How many Haoles does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“I have no idea,” Felix said with an air of stolid resignation. “How many Haoles does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“Six. One to call the electrician, and five to write the environmental impact report.”

John laughed, Gideon smiled, and the Torkelssons glowered.

“You like that?” Keoni said. “Okay, how does a Haole show his racial tolerance?”

Before anyone could reply, Malani came in, taking the seat that had been kept for her next to Axel, across from Gideon and John. “All right, it’s tentatively arranged. They gave me a price, and if I get back to them within the hour, they can do it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” Felix exclaimed. “I see what you mean about rapid response.”

“Yes, well, you see, since the plane is only in a few feet of water, and since all we want are the remains, and not the plane itself, they say it won’t take a great deal of work or much in the way of equipment. And if they leave first thing in the morning, they ought to finish up and be back by the end of the day.”

“Wait a minute, now,” said Axel. “How in the heck are they going to land a Cessna 310 on Maravovo, let alone take off again? Is there a nice, big, two-thousand-foot landing strip on this deserted atoll? That’s what it would take. Fifteen hundred feet at the absolute minimum.” As the only person with flying experience in the room, Axel’s word carried weight. He had learned to fly fifteen years or so ago, briefly serving as the ranch pilot before discovering that, as much as he enjoyed the navigational calculations, he didn’t much like flying itself. “I think maybe Felix is right, sweetheart; we’d better find an outfit in Honolulu.”

But this Cessna, Malani triumphantly explained, didn’t require any landing strip at all. It had been converted to a float plane. It could land in the lagoon.

“Really? I didn’t know there was anybody on the Big Island who could do that kind of work.”

“They did it themselves,” Malani explained. “They also serve as their own pilots, which saves considerably on the cost.”

“Oh, brudda,” Keoni said, “I’m just glad nobody’s asking me to fly in it.”

Undeterred, Malani went on, meticulously referring to the neat, columnar notes-she wrote in tiny uppercase letters-that she had made on a note pad. “The Cessna’s cruising speed is about two hundred miles an hour, so to be on the safe side they’re allowing a total of five hours for the eight-hundred-mile round trip, plus an hour for landings and takeoffs, and five hours for the work itself. Eleven hours altogether.”

At this point, the grilled steaks, brought in by a perspiring, aproned cook, drew everyone’s attention. There were no inquiries as to rare, medium, or well-done; the perfectly charred, two-inch-thick tenderloins were simply plopped onto the plates (all except Hedwig’s) with a simple accompaniment of spinach and baked potato that was served in bowls, family style. No steak sauce, ketchup, or mustard; the only condiments on the table were salt and pepper. Gideon was surprised to see that the steaks were all medium-well-done, a barely pink-tinged brown at the center, and said as much to Axel.

“Oh, yeah,” Axel said. “You won’t find too many ranchers who like their steaks rare.” He wrinkled his nose. “Smells too much like cow.”

“You don’t suppose,” said Hedwig, digging into the plate of couscous, kohlrabi, and gingered squash that the cook had plopped in front of her with undisguised contempt, “that might be because it is cow? And am I the only one able to see that the very fact that you try to hide it from yourselves proves my point? You prefer to avoid dealing with your own innate self-knowledge of the ethical consequences, to say nothing of the karmic consequences, of eating our brothers and cousins; things with faces, things with mothers. I know I’ve probably said it before-”

“ ‘Probably’?” Dagmar said loudly. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“-but it’s impossible to reach any kind of higher consciousness-”

“Oh, put a cork in it, Hedwig,” Felix shouted amiably, his jaws grinding audibly away on flesh and fat.

“Cannibals,” sighed Hedwig. “Surrounded on all sides by ravening carnivores.”

“You can thank ravening carnivores for everything you have,” Dagmar said, chewing.

“Actually, I’d have thought Marti would get along pretty well with Hedwig,” Gideon whispered to John.

“Actually, she does.”

Over coffee and a dessert of baked apples and cream, Malani gave them the rest of the details: Ocean Quest’s plane was loaded with equipment and ready to go, but it was currently hangared at the Honolulu airport, where it had just gotten a new paint job. In the morning they would put two of their salvage divers, who would double as the Cessna pilot and co-pilot, on the first Aloha inter-island flight from Kona to Honolulu, where they would pick up the Cessna and take off for Maravovo, hoping to touch down in the lagoon by nine or ten A.M. They would expect to finish up by two in the afternoon at the latest and be back in Honolulu with the remains in time for one of the commercial evening flights to Kona. The estimated fee would be $16,000. “They think that’s a maximum. It’ll probably be less.”

Keoni pretended to choke on a chunk of baked apple. “Sixteen thousand dollars for one day’s work? And I thought Felix was the expert on screwing his clients.”

“Damn it, Keoni,” Felix said, “if that’s supposed to be humorous-”

“The largest single cost is the plane,” Malani cut in. “Nine hundred dollars an hour flight time and three hundred dollars an hour wait time. Add that to the divers’ hourly rate of five hundred dollars, the air fare to and from Honolulu-”

“Still-” Keoni said.

“I don’t want to argue about it,” Dagmar said. “I’m sure they’re not overcharging us. You go ahead and tell them to do it, my dear.”

“Don’t forget about getting permission from the Kiribati government,” John said.

“They say they’ll take care of all that,” Malani said. “They’ve dealt with the Kiribatis before.”

“They’ll need to file a flight plan,” Axel said. “They’ll have to-”

“They know all about that; they’ll get started as soon as I call back.” She paused, chewing on her lip for a moment. “Oh, there is one other thing. They’ve never recovered human bones before, and they’re nervous about how they’re supposed to handle them, and even how to recognize them. So you can imagine how excited they got when I told them that we had the world-famous Skeleton Detective himself staying with us”-she turned a brilliant smile on Gideon and actually batted her eyelashes-“and he just might be willing to…” With a teacherly motion of her hand she encouraged him to finish the sentence for her.

“Go with them?” Gideon said. “I’d… be happy to help out any way I can.” He’d been on the narrow edge of exclaiming “I’d love to!”, which would hardly have been appropriate in the circumstances, but the fact was that he’d been hoping they’d ask him ever since John had told him about the find.

What he had told Axel about being interested in cattle-ranching was true enough, but when it came to real, gut-level interest, cows didn’t hold a candle to bones. For Gideon, as for every other forensic anthropologist he knew, the skeleton was a source of inexhaustible fascination, and to sit down with the bony remains of some anonymous, long-dead human being was to accept a challenge: What could be told from them about the person’s life, the person’s death? About who and what the person had been, had looked like? The skeletal system, the part of us that was left after everything else had rotted away, retained, for the knowing eye, an exhaustive and indelible record of the habits, diet, health, injuries, and activities of an individual’s life.

What could be determined, of course, depended on how much skeletal material was left, which bones they happened to be, what their condition was, and a host of other things. But there was always something to be learned, some connection to be made with a human being no longer living, a being whose future was gone, but whose past could still be brought back, at least a little. The forensic anthropologist, one of Gideon’s teachers had liked to say, was the last one to speak for the dead.

“Oh, I’m sure Gideon has other things to do than-” Hedwig began.

“No, I’d like to,” he quickly interrupted.

“Well, that’s just great, Gideon,” Felix said. “Thank you. We’ll pay your usual fee, of course. That goes without-”

“ I’ll pay his usual fee,” Dagmar said.

Gideon waved them off. “No, no, no. Thank you, but it’s a pleasure to repay you all for your hospitality.” He hesitated. “There is something you need to know, though.” He wasn’t eager to throw a monkey wrench into the closure machinery, but in good conscience he couldn’t let it pass. “At this point, unless I missed something, you don’t really have any way of knowing for sure whose bones are in that plane. You’re assuming it crashed the night he left and that it’s been there ever since, but for all anybody knows it might have gone down months or years later. The plane’s ownership might have changed hands.”

“Uh-uh,” Inge said. “According to the police, the plane was never registered to anyone else. Hoaloha Ranch is still the last recorded owner.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean a lot,” said John. “Trust me, planes can change hands without paperwork. Doc’s right, it’s most probably him, but it could be anybody.”

That made for a few wrinkled brows, until John spoke again. “Doc, couldn’t you tell from the bones whether it was him or not?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that,” Gideon said, addressing everyone. “But depending on what there is, I could probably narrow it down some. With a little luck, I might be able to determine the sex, age, race, and maybe the approximate height. That’d help.” With a little luck-and the right bones-he could very likely come up with a lot more than that, but he didn’t like to promise more than he could deliver.

“But you have to remember, exclusion is a lot easier than positive identification,” he went on. “That is, say the bones are those of an elderly white male of such and such a height-”

“My brother was not ‘elderly,’” Dagmar said crossly. “He was an extremely vigorous man, not yet out of his seventies.”

“-a white male in his seventies of such and such a height,” he amended, “then we’d know that they could be Magnus’s, and we could reasonably conclude they probably are, given that it’s the ranch airplane and no one’s seen it or him since he flew off in it. But if we were to find the bones of a female, say, then we’d know with a hundred percent certainty that it couldn’t be him.”

“Well, of course not,” Dagmar said. “ I could have told you that.”

Axel had found an atlas somewhere and brought it, open, to the table. It took him a while to locate Maravovo Atoll. “This place is absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Where the heck were they trying to get to?”

“‘They’?” Gideon said. “He wasn’t alone?”

“No, there was a pilot,” said Inge. “Magnus didn’t know how to fly.”

“Lydia What’s-Her-Name,” Dagmar said.

“No,” Inge said, frowning. “It wasn’t ‘Lydia’…”

“Could they have been trying to get to Tarabao Island?” Malani asked. She had gotten up to lean over her husband so she could see the map. “Or Beckman Atoll? Maravovo is between them.”

Axel studied the map and fingered his chin. “Maybe, but it’s an awfully long way from either one.”

“They were a long way from anything,” said Malani. “Wherever they were headed, they must have gotten good and lost.”

“Well, frankly, I can’t say I’m bowled over,” Hedwig said. “Lydia wasn’t really much of a pilot.”

“Wasn’t much of anything,” Dagmar grumbled. “Should never have hired her.”

“Claudia, that was her name,” said Inge. “Claudia Albert. Oh, she wasn’t really a bad person, Auntie Dagmar. She’d had it hard growing up-”

“And how do you think I had it?” Dagmar said heatedly.

“Or Magnus, or Torkel, or your father? But we didn’t turn to drugs, we didn’t get in trouble with the police, we just worked for a better life, not like that big lummox of a Claudia-Lydia. And we got it, we got a better life for ourselves, and now you have it. We didn’t have to run off to the psychologist because we had some imaginary eating disorder… anorexia-”

“Actually, it was bulimia, and it’s not really imaginary,” Hedwig said, “although there is a psycho-spiritual component. No that I ever thought mainstream psychologists would do her any good. Remember, I offered her a place free of charge in the Self-Evolvement Wellness Seminar, but she-”

“It wasn’t free,” Dagmar pointed out. “Torkel was going to pay for it.” She relit her dead cigarillo, making a show of it.

“Well, yes, technically,” Hedwig mumbled, “but only to cover the cost of food and refresh-”

“Gideon, let me ask you something,” Inge said. “Or maybe this is a question for you, John. Isn’t it possible that there might be some identifiable personal belongings still in the plane, even after all this time? A watch, a ring, maybe even a driver’s license or something? Wouldn’t that settle the question of who it is?”

“I would think so,” said Gideon. “Paper wouldn’t last, but plastic might. Metal would.”

“Doc, how about I go along with you, if that’s okay?” John said. “Maybe I could help.”

“Sure,” Gideon said, pleased. “I’d appreciate the company.”

“Listen, you two,” said Felix, “you’ll be bushed by the time you get back to Honolulu from there. I don’t think you should have to get on another plane to come here. Let me put you both up for the night in Waikiki. Someplace nice. You can have a good dinner, get a good night’s sleep, catch a plane back to Kona the next day.”

“I appreciate that, Felix,” Gideon said, “but it’s not necessary, we can-”

“Hey, speak for yourself, Doc,” John cut in. “It’d be nice-”

Felix talked-shouted-right on through them. “My condo doesn’t have a guest room, unfortunately, but I can book you a room at the Royal Hawaiian. It’s just a few blocks from where I live. You like the Royal Hawaiian, don’t you? Of course you do, who wouldn’t?”

“Yes, sure,” Gideon said, “but my wife is coming here to the Big Island the next day-”

“Not till one-fifteen,” John said. We’ll be back in Kona ourselves before that, and we can meet her plane. Better yet, we can catch her at the airport in Honolulu and fly the last leg in with her.”

“Well-” Gideon began.

“Oh, let him do it for you, for God’s sake,” Auntie Dagmar said. “He can afford it.”

Felix whacked the table with a paw-like hand. “It’s settled then. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll look forward to dinner with the two of you in Waikiki tomorrow night.”

“Fabulous,” said John.

“Thanks, Felix,” Gideon said, having run out of arguments. “It’s nice of you.”

“And now,” commanded Felix, “I think we ought to let these two fellows get some rest. They’ll have to be up early tomorrow. First flight is five-fifteen.”

“Five-fifteen!” whispered John, horrified. He was not an early riser.

“That’s right,” Inge said. “Sad but true. If you two want to get through security and make the plane, you’d better be on your way to the airport by four A.M. At the latest.”

“Four… A.M.!” John could barely get the words out, but he stuck gamely, stalwartly, to his guns.

His chin came up.

He’d said he would go, and he would go.