by Aaron Elkins
It took a long time for it to sink in the warm, shallow lagoon, and when it did the strut of its nose wheel collapsed, so that the plane tipped gently forward onto its nose cone, only the tail still breaking the surface. The landing lights remained on for a while, outlining the plane’s dark, broken silhouette and making a lovely, luminescent fairy ring of turquoise and white in the black, still waters. Then they blinked out.
TWO
June 8, 2004, Hulopo’e Beach Estates,
North Kohala Coast, Big Island of Hawaii
AT eighty-two, Dagmar Torkelsson was less inclined to melancholy than many people with half her years. She rarely dwelt on old regrets or might-have-beens, or on the losses, physical and emotional, that came with age. But on this particular afternoon, seated on the memorial bench that she herself had purchased for the community’s cliff walk in the name of her long-dead brothers Torkel, Magnus, and Andreas, her thoughts were of the past; of Torkel and Magnus in particular.
The path, as usual, was deserted despite the twelve sumptuous homes in the walled, gated community. Few of the residents did much walking there, which was fine with Dagmar as long as a portion of their homeowner dues continued to go for upkeep. The existence of this lovely path had been the final selling point that had convinced her to purchase there, despite the obscene price (which she could certainly afford, but which offended her sensibilities all the same). Hugging the rims of rocky, surf-splashed coves where green sea turtles could often be seen just below the surface of the water, it wound for a quarter-mile, mostly out of sight of the homes. In all the years she had lived there, she could count on the fingers of her two hands the days she had failed to stroll it, even when her arthritis required a cane or sometimes—hateful, clumsy thing—a walker.
She had had the bench placed at the cliff walk’s highest, prettiest spot, a few feet off the path, at the tip of a little promontory that overlooked what she thought of as her own private cove twenty feet below. There she knew the resident sea turtles by sight and had given them names of old friends they reminded her of, regardless of the fact that she didn’t know and didn’t want to know how to tell the males from the females. Most days would find her seated here at four-fifteen, forty-five minutes before her dinner was delivered. For three quarters of an hour she would contentedly smoke her two pre-prandial cigarillos, sip her pre-prandial schnapps from the worked silver cap of the antique flask that had come with her from Sweden such a long time ago, and delicately toss canned sardines in tomato sauce to the turtles, using a linen napkin to wipe her fingers between tosses. She had decided that they preferred the tomato sauce variety to those that came in oil when she concluded that the strange grunts they sometimes uttered were expressions of appreciation. Dessert, as always, would be pieces of cinnamon bun left over from her breakfast.
Usually, her mind was pleasantly empty of all but her surroundings when she sat here; the ever-present warm breeze, the murmuring of the ocean, the rustling of the palm fronds, the salt air. When anything approaching a complete thought crossed her mind, it was likely to be of her own dinner to come. As a resident of Hulopo’e Beach Estates she had a membership at the posh Mauna Kai Resort a few hundred yards up the coast; and while the tennis and golf privileges didn’t do her much good, she took full advantage of the access to their maid services, their kitchens, and their catering. Her home was cleaned by Mauna Kai staff every other week, and her dinners came from their menu at least four times a week; six or seven, if you counted leftovers. The good-looking young waiter with the black, bedroom eyes would put the meal on her dining-terrace table, then politely come and get her, proffering his arm to be leaned on. It was all very nice.
Tonight it would be rack of lamb crusted with macadamia nuts, with tiramisu for dessert. Ordinarily, that would be enough to occupy whatever stray thoughts she happened to have, but not this afternoon. Her mind, for reasons she didn’t know, was on the past, the distant past of the 1950s and 1960s. On how hard those early years on the ranch had been; on how the four of them had worked to make something of it. There had been few days on which her brothers had not come home at night stinking of sweat, cattle, and horses, so drawn and fatigued they could barely speak, and sometimes so tired they couldn’t eat but would fall into bed in their clothes. And Dagmar herself had not only worked right out on the range with them when they needed her, but had fed them, and kept the house spotless, to say nothing of keeping up their often-sagging spirits.
Later, when they’d turned the corner and the Hoaloha Ranch was on its way to becoming a profitable enterprise, she hadn’t had to work on the range anymore, but for almost five years she’d cooked three big meals a day for twenty-five hungry cowboys and ranch workers and had done it all by herself, including the shopping and clean-up. Once, she’d kept count of the number of dishes and implements she’d had to wash in a typical week. It had come to 1,050 cups and glasses, 1,323 dishes, 1,890 utensils, and 126 pots and pans. And that was before automatic dishwashers. It seemed unthinkable to her now.
In addition to all that, she’d managed the accounts and supervised the payroll, no easy tasks during the lean years, when staying one step ahead of their creditors had been honed to a fine art, and the cash flow was so negative that one week out of four, on average, there was no money to pay the men.
She and her brothers had juggled and planned and gone without in anticipation of the time when the grueling work would pay off and the ever-expanding ranch would be carrying its own weight and more or less running itself. The brothers would then be real managers—managers on horseback—not glorified laborers. They would all get out of the miserable shack in which they lived and build a big, rambling ranch house for themselves—already they knew they would call it the Big House, as in those Westerns—where Dagmar would supervise the kitchen and household help instead of being it.
That time had eventually come, although Andreas had not lived to see it, but with human nature being what it was, it had failed to bring perfect happiness. Though none of them would admit it, they had missed the exhilaration of building something from nothing. Maintaining a cattle empire was pale stuff compared to carving one out. Dagmar, plagued by arthritis in her worn-out joints by then, had begun to dream of the days when the ranch was behind her and she could move down the mountain to the warmer, sunnier coast as a woman of leisure. And to be perfectly honest, she couldn’t wait for a house of her own, away from the two meddling, quarrelsome old men she had lived with almost her entire adult life. For peace.
And now she had that, too; she’d had it for almost ten years. Yet here she sat in her gated enclave for the wealthy, in what was surely one of the most beautiful spots in the world, holding a forgotten sardine in her left hand and dreaming, with a faint, wry smile on her face, of the laughter, the irritations, the lively arguments, and the many little trials of life with her brothers. Be careful what you wish for, she thought.
Had it truly been ten years since the terrible night she’d lost them both? In one way, the killing, the fire, and her surviving brother’s escape (if he did escape) seemed as vivid as if they had been a week ago; in another, it all seemed as if it had happened to another person, in another lifetime.
She was in the midst of these pointless, dismal thoughts when the sound of footsteps on the gravel path behind her brought her back to the present. Someone was rounding the curve that led to the cove. She threw the sardine, wiped her fingers, and quickly picked up the jet-black wig on the bench beside her. It had been taken off, as it usually was here, so that she could enjoy the breeze flowing through her scant gray hair. She had barely gotten it back on her head when the waiter from the Mauna Kai who usually brought her dinner came smiling into sight.
Could it be five o’clock already? Had she dozed without knowing it? The thought that she might turn into one of those drooling oldsters who couldn’t stay awake in public was a source of terror to her. She would end it all before it came to that. But no, when she turned to greet her visitor, he held an en
velope that he held politely out to her. “It’s an e-mail for you, ma’am.”
Inasmuch as she refused to have a computer in the house, Dagmar had an arrangement with the Mauna Kai (one of many expensive but life-easing arrangements with the Mauna Kai) in which they kept an e-mail account for her. They would bring her any messages received and would send off whatever she might dictate in response.
“Thank you, Steven,” she said with a final, subtle adjustment of her wig from behind.
“I’m Faustino, Mrs. Torkelsson,” he said.
“Yes, of course. Faustino,” she said. “Now let me read this.”
From: Inge
To: Felix; Axel; Hedwig; Aunt Dagmar
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2004 2:17 PM
Subject: Amazing Development
Hold on to your socks for this one!
I just got off the phone with an Officer Pacheco of the Waimea Police Department.
The Grumman has been found! After ten years! A couple of skin divers spotted it in a few feet of water in a lagoon on some uninhabited, Godforsaken island 400 miles from here, and Officer Pacheco wants to know what we want to do about it.
The thing is, they saw some human bones in the cockpit! Can you imagine?
I told Pacheco I’d get back to him in a couple of days. I don’t think this is going to turn into a big deal, but I’m sure everyone will agree we’d better talk about it when we get together on Thursday—not at dinner, though, because John is coming with his friend at six. Suppose we meet here at four and we can talk it through. The last of my customers will be gone by then.
I should know more by the time I see you.
“Oh, dear,” Dagmar murmured, with an illogical but deeply felt sense that she had made this happen, that this unwelcome message from her niece wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t been maundering on about Torkel and Magnus, and about that appalling night. What would this mean? God forbid that the whole affair was going to be ripped open and reexposed like an ill-healed scar. Did she have the strength to go through it again? She was an old woman now. It would kill her.
She reread the message, this time with growing irritation. How flippant they were, this new generation, how little respect, how little appreciation, they had for the old people, the ones who had thanklessly slaved their lives away to build something for them. Silently, she shook her head. Hold on to your socks—as if this were an amusing bit of trivia to be passed on. Oh, it wasn’t that she didn’t love them—they were all she had—but they were almost like strangers to her now, this gaggle of nephews and nieces; members of a different species. They talked too fast, laughed too much—
Faustino cleared his throat. “Would you like to send a reply, Mrs. Torkelsson?”
“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 a
bout 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?”
She went back to scanning the junk mail. “Here’s one for you,” she said. “Are you interested in having your john-son enlarged?”
That did bring a smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”
Malani thought for a moment. “Couldn’t hurt,” she said.
FOR some people, their roles in life—the personas they henceforth occupy, not always full-heartedly—are thrust upon them as children, as often as not by some casual or inadvertent happening. For Axel, the groundwork was laid when he was eight: a combination of protruding, weak eyes, bookish interests, and an oddly grown-up vocabulary, oddly delivered. The Torkelsson adults began to refer to him affectionately as “the little man,” and then, almost inevitably, as “the little professor.” And with that, the wheels of his life had been set in their ruts. Axel was, and would always be, the deep thinker in the family, the impractical far-reaching visionary who couldn’t see what was six inches in front of his eyes.
For his sister Hedwig, the crucial moment had come a few years later. Like Axel, she was a reader, voracious and wide-ranging in her choice of books, and one day, one of the stack she’d brought home from the library in Hilo had been Astral Travel for Beginners: The Linga-Sharira Pathway to Experiencing Other Realms of Existence. Her response to being teased about it at lunch a few days later had been to rise from the table, to dramatically quote the book’s epigram: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and to stalk majestically from the room. She had been thirteen.
