Where There's a Will

by Aaron Elkins

  John laughed. “All right, you convinced me.” He sobered. “But how the heck do we tell Axel and Malani? That’ll be a little awkward.”

  “That’s women’s work,” Julie said. “It takes a sensitive hand. You leave it to me. I’ll square it with Malani after dinner tonight, and we can leave tomorrow. I guarantee: no hurt feelings.”

  As if on cue, Malani came out with a tray of crackers and mixed cheeses. “I thought I heard your voices,” she said cheerfully. “Good, let’s plan dinner.” She set the tray down and took a chair. “I want us all to get away from the ranch and go into town for a meal for a change. I don’t know about you, but if I have to look one more overdone steak in the eye, I . . . will . . . barf.”

  “How about pizza?” John suggested hopefully. “We passed a Domino’s in Waimea.”

  “We’ll eat Chinese,” Malani went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I know a place.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” John said.

  “And now,” Malani said, putting a hand to her forehead and pretending to peer up at something through the surrounding tree branches, “the sun is over the yardarm. Who wants a glass of wine?”

  In the kitchen, she got a bottle of Chardonnay out of the refrigerator and put it on the counter. Gideon, with the corkscrew in his hand, suddenly recalled something. “Malani, remember that box you couldn’t find the other day?”

  She looked up from setting out four big wine glasses. “Box?”

  “Yes, with the effects from the plane. You said it’d been on the counter, but—”

  “Oh, that’s right, the one . . . well, I forgot to ask.” She put her head in the doorway to the living room. “Kilia!”

  Kilia—short, fat, and energetic—trotted into the dining room with a cleaning cloth in her hand. “Yes, missus?”

  “Kilia, remember the box those young men brought the other day? With the cup and that little ceramic map—”

  “Sure, missus.”

  “Did you put it away somewhere?”

  “No, ma’am!” Kilia declared with a shudder. “That box and the one with the skeleton bones—I wouldn’t touch them things.”

  “Thank you, Kilia. Well, not to worry,” she said to Gideon. “It’ll show up.”

  AUNTIE Dagmar was getting old.

  The thought hit Inge like a blow when she peeked through the open doorway of Dagmar’s room at Kona Hospital. She had certainly seemed depressed for a couple of days, but this was different. She was old. Old, and shrunken, and . . . frail. The ageing and shrinking had been going on for a long time but the frail was something new. So even Dagmar was not indestructible, she thought with a tiny, unanticipated catch in her throat; even Dagmar, who had seemingly been here since the beginning of time, was not permanent in this world.

  The old woman was sitting hunched on the side of her bed, fully dressed in a black pant-suit, legs hanging down with her feet not reaching the floor, holding onto a small, blue, hard-sided suitcase that was set upright beside her. She’d put on lipstick and rouge for once, and her jet-black wig was actually on straight, but with her white, papery skin the effect was somewhere between clownish and ghoulish. She was like an ancient, wizened child—an unwanted wartime orphan—dumped in some deserted train station with her pathetic belongings, and waiting pitifully, hopelessly, for someone to come and get her.

  “It’s about time,” she snapped when she saw Inge. “Rush, rush, rush, so I’m ready to be picked up, then wait, wait, wait. They didn’t even give me a breakfast. Help me down from here. I don’t suppose you thought to bring any schnapps?”

  Inge smiled. That’s what she got for getting sentimental about Auntie Dagmar. “Never mind the schnapps, Auntie. It’s eight o’clock in the morning. We have a problem, a big problem.”

  “I hate problems,” Dagmar said.

  “Don’t worry, I have it all worked out.” She took Dagmar by one elbow—her arm was like a dried twig—and helped her down with the aid of a stepstool. “We just need to talk it over. Let’s go somewhere and get something to eat.”

  “Now you’re talking. Island Lava Java? Cinnamon rolls?”

  “Anything you want. But I don’t think they have schnapps.”

  DAGMAR cut her cinnamon roll precisely in half and lathered one portion with the extra butter she’d ordered, but didn’t raise it to her mouth. Her coffee had been likewise creamed and sugared while Inge spoke, but otherwise untouched. She stared out at the tourists exploring Ali’i Drive, and at the sea wall on the other side of the street, and at Kailua Bay beyond. A white Norwegian Line cruise ship lay anchored a few hundred yards offshore and Kona was swarming with curious, tentative sixty- and seventy-year-olds in tank tops, flip-flops, and sunglasses. Even from their table, Inge could smell the sunscreen.

  “No,” Dagmar said.

  Inge stared at her. “No? No, what?”

  “No, everything. I’m not going to sit there with people pulling me this way and that way, telling me what to be careful about and how to act and what to say when I talk to John, and what not to say. And I’m not talking to John either.”

  Inge sighed. It was Dagmar’s nature to be recalcitrant; there was no point in becoming impatient. “It won’t be like that, Auntie,” she said kindly. “We can just come up with a few guidelines—topics to steer clear of—”

  “It will be like that. Felix will order me to say this, you’ll order me to say that, Hedwig will lecture me on karma.” She picked up the piece of cinnamon roll only to put it down again. “No,” she said again, more firmly still. “I can’t remember what I told the police before, it was so long ago. They have a record of it. I’m bound to contradict myself. John would catch me. Isn’t he a detective or something now?”

  “He’s an FBI agent.”

  “Well, he used to be a detective.”

  “He used to be a policeman in Honolulu—”

  “Don’t keep changing the subject. That’s a bad habit you have. The point is, I can’t go through any more of that, where they harp on every word I said before. Impossible.”

  “But what do you suggest, Auntie? You can’t avoid seeing him tomorrow.”

  “I most certainly can.”

  “How?”

  “By going to see this Sergeant what’s-his-name and telling him the truth today.”

  Inge was stunned. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. “But if you tell him the whole truth—”

  “I didn’t say the whole truth, I said the truth.”

  Confused, Inge jerked her head. “I don’t—”

  Dagmar grasped her wrist. “Inge, think about what you just told me. What do they know? They know that Torkel changed identities with Magnus. What do they suspect? They suspect that I—that we—were aware of it and lied to protect him.”

  “No, they also think we lied to protect our inheritances. Well, not you, because you got the same under both wills, but—”

  “Yes, all right. So, do you think they’ll simply drop it now? It’s only a question of time until they ferret out what really happened. Isn’t it better to come out with it voluntarily, than to be caught in one lie after another, like rats in a trap?”

  “But you’re not saying you’d tell them . . . ?”

  “Everything? Of course not. I may be getting a bit senile, but I’m not crazy yet.”

  “I see,” Inge said reflectively. It just could be that Dagmar had the right idea. The old lady might be getting frail, but not in the head. Still, there were problems. She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Auntie, there may be criminal charges involved. And . . . what about our inheritances? We could lose them.”

  “Pooh, I don’t believe that for a minute. Not after so much time. There are statutes about such things. Felix can straighten out any problems.”

  That was what Inge believed, too, but it was good to hear Dagmar say it. “But how will it look?”

  “It will look as if everything possible was done to protect my dear brother and your dear uncle from
the vicious assassins that threatened his life, even if the law did happen to be slightly violated in a technical sense. People will understand.”

  Not so technical, Inge thought, and yet, the more Dagmar talked, the more convinced she became that this was the best course. People would understand. “The rest of the family, though—they might not like it,” she said. “This affects all of us.”

  “Then they’ll have to lump it, won’t they?” Dagmar said cheerfully. Sensing Inge’s incipient agreement and satisfied with the way the conversation was going, she finally took a bite of the roll, smacked her lips, and licked butter from her fingers. “Now, Inge, dear, I imagine you’d like to argue with me about it for a while. Will fifteen minutes do? If it’s going to be longer, I’ll want another cup of coffee.”

  “I’m not going to argue,” Inge said, laughing. “You have my complete support. Would you like me to be with you, or do you want to see him alone?”

  “Suit yourself, dear,” Dagmar said. Her sharp gray eyes glinted happily from their parchmentlike folds of skin. She no longer looked frail. She was, as always, looking forward to stirring things up.

  FIFTEEN

  SERGEANT Fukida was in no mood to be trifled with. His annual mock-orange pollen allergy attack, late this year, had finally caught up with him as he’d gotten home from work the previous day, smiting him with itchy, runny eyes, headache, sinus congestion, achy joints, and all-around misery. With Chiyoko staying at their daughter’s on Oahu overnight, he’d had to fend for himself, which meant not only an absence of much-needed wifely care and sympathy, but a pathetic, solitary dinner of scrambled eggs over rice, representing the extreme limit of his culinary virtuosity. He’d taken a couple of allergy tablets at eight and gone to bed, another two at midnight, and two more at three A.M. when a stuffed nose had strangled him out of sleep. He’d awakened to the alarm at seven with a vicious antihistamine hangover and nasal passages that felt as if they’d been cleaned out with a paint-scraper.

  Headachy, dull-brained, and generally mad at the world, he’d driven to work on a breakfast of microwave-warmed, leftover scrambled eggs and rice and three cups of tea. His plan was to tell Sarah, “No visitors, no phone calls,” to barricade himself in his cubicle, and to spend the day on paperwork, of which he had plenty to catch up on, sleeping through lunch, if at all possible. This was not a day on which he should be expected to deal with living, speaking human beings. Fortunately, there were no appointments or meetings on his calendar.

  His plan did not work.

  “Morning, Sarge, couple of ladies waiting in there to see you,” was Sarah’s gratingly cheery greeting. “They were sitting in the lobby when I got here.”

  He stifled a groan. “To see me in particular, or anybody?” he asked, but without any real hope.

  “Sorry,” Sarah said with a grin. “To see you. I checked with the lieutenant, and he said it’s you, all right.”

  “You know what it’s about?”

  “The Torkelsson thing.”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have come to work,” he said bitterly. “My head is in no condition to deal with the Torkelsson thing.”

  “Do you want me to—”

  “No,” he said, drawing himself up and looking for the first time into the opening to his cubicle. He could just see a pair of black-pant-clad legs, the feet of which barely touched the floor. “I’ll deal with it.”

  “Brave sergeant,” Sarah said. “Good sergeant.”

  HE disliked them right off the bat. The old woman sat as if she owned the place, barely turning her head to cast a beady, disapproving eye on him as he entered his own office. The younger one, in jeans and Western shirt, sprawled in his other visitor’s chair like a man, legs akimbo, one booted ankle on the other knee. He didn’t much care for that either.

  “We’ve been waiting some time,” the old woman told him.

  Tough. He squeezed around the desk, took his seat, and looked at them inquiringly, his expression neutral.

  “I am Dagmar Torkelsson,” the old lady said. “This is my niece, Inge Torkelsson Nakoa. Do you know who we are?”

  “Yes. What can I do for you?”

  “You are familiar with the Torkelsson matter of some years ago?”

  Fukida nodded.

  “Excellent. We are here to correct certain misapprehensions that the police may have in regard to those events.”

  You are here, Fukida thought, because Lau and Oliver had gone about their “discreet” inquiries like a couple of bulls in a china shop, rattling the teeth of the entire Torkelsson establishment. They were now aware that the lies they had told ten years ago had caught up with them, and unless he was mistaken he was about to hear some bogus, newly concocted version of events that would supposedly explain away the old contradictions and ambiguities. A little more fancy dancing by the doyenne of the clan to once again boggle the minds of the credible, gullible, Hawaii County PD. Well, let’em try. Irritable as he was, he was genuinely curious to see what they’d come up with. His headache, he found, had receded. He rearranged himself more comfortably in his chair and pulled a pad and pen to within easy reach.

  “Misapprehensions?” he said.

  The niece, Inge, spoke for the first time, doing her best to look helpful and remorseful. “You see, we weren’t entirely truthful before.”

  No! Really? he thought but didn’t say. “In what way would that be, Mrs. Nakoa?”

  After the briefest of glances between the two women, it was Dagmar who picked up the ball. “The fact is that we—all of us—have been aware from the beginning that the body in the hay barn was not that of my brother Torkel.”

  He tried not to show his surprise, but an outright, unforced admission of this central, critical fact was not what he’d been expecting. What game were they playing? He felt himself suddenly off-balance. His headache stabbed at him again. “You were—?”

  “Young man,” Dagmar said harshly, “will you kindly stop that wiggling? It makes it difficult to concentrate.”

  “Wiggling?”

  She made a series of irritated gestures toward the ballpoint pen that he was inarguably clicking open and shut, toward his tapping foot, toward the base of his chair, which creaked with every little bobbing movement of his body. Angrily, he made himself be still, but who the hell did this old—

  It was time, he decided, to retake the initiative. “Do you also happen to be aware of who chopped off two of his toes to make us think he was Torkel?” he asked brutally.

  “Yes,” Inge responded. “That was me.”

  “THAT was you,” Fukida repeated stupidly, mostly because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Was he supposed to believe her? What were these two up to? Damn those allergy pills; the inside of his skull felt as if it were crammed with cotton balls.

  “Uh-huh,” he went on. “You cut off the toes. And what did you use to do that?”

  She replied without hesitation. “I used a Swiss garlic-chopper, a sort of tiny little cleaver. And a paperweight—it was the business end of an old branding iron—as a mallet, to drive it through.” She held an imaginary handle in one hand, pretending to tap it with an object in her other hand.

  It has to be true, Fukida thought. Who could make up something like that? A Swiss garlic-chopper, for Christ’s sake.

  “I think we better get this on the record,” he said. “Let’s go someplace a little more comfortable.”

  HAPPILY unaware of what had been unfolding at the police department, Julie, Gideon, and John spent Monday morning acting on their decision of the day before. As Julie had promised, the previous evening she had extricated them from their awkward position at Axel’s and Malani’s without seriously raising anybody’s hackles. And early today they had checked in at the Waikoloa Outrigger, left their bags with the concierge, and breakfasted at the pool-side grill with a guilty but welcome sense of freedom. Then they had rented a Ford Taurus and driven down the South Kona coast to visit a few of John’s favorite places: the hidden-away
black sand beach at Ho’okena, the Captain Cook Monument at Kealakekua Bay, the evocative and beautiful Pu’ohunua O Honaunau—the Place of Refuge Historical Park, a city of stone where ancients who had broken laws against gods or kings (who were much the same) could find sanctuary and avoid the all-too-frequent death sentences of the old days.

  In the town of Captain Cook, they stopped at a farmers cooperative to watch the processing of macadamia nuts and pick up a few gifts to take home. Never once had the words “Torkel,” “Magnus,” “toes,” or “ring” come up.

  On the way back, at Gideon’s urging, they stopped in Kona to visit a place that even John didn’t know about: a lovingly restored Hawaiian compound on a grassy tongue of land on the grounds of the King Kamehameha Hotel. From an anthropological point of view, Gideon told them, this was perhaps the most important site in Hawaii, the Ahu’ena Heiau, where the kind of event beloved of anthropologists had taken place over a century earlier; that rarest of occasions on which an entire society had changed literally overnight. It was here, in the largest and most impressive of the thatched structures, that Liholiho, son of Kamehameha, had sat down to dine in the company of women, thereby turning convention on its head and ending with one stroke a long-standing, strictly enforced tabu, and—eventually—totally changing the relationship of men and women in Hawaii. Gideon wandered about, enchanted: This would have been the lele, where subjects left gifts. Look, this must have been the oracle tower, this must have been . . . Julie and John trailed patiently along among the buildings and carved statues, making respectful noises until Gideon had his fill.

  At a little before one, they were leaving the hotel’s parking lot, looking for a likely place to have lunch, when John, sprawled sidewise in the Taurus’s back seat and reading something that he’d brought along with him from the ranch, let out a yell.

  “What?” He sat straight up and excitedly read aloud from the sheets of paper in his hand. “‘Among the interesting circumstances associated with them was the presence of a cartridge case partially embedded in the intervertebral fibro . . . fibrocartilage separating T8 and ...’” He shook the papers and practically moaned. “Doc, Doc, how could you not tell me about this?”