Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

There were a few crumbs left on the liner of the pastry basket and without knowing it she lifted them to her mouth with a moistened finger. She had lit a cigarillo earlier but had let it go out after one puff; her throat was too tight and raw to smoke. A few more tipples would take care of that.

When she heard a footstep on the gravel path behind her she instinctively reached for her wig, but then changed her mind. The hell with it, it was far too early for the good-looking kid with her dinner, and who else did she need to put on any pretenses for? She was eighty-two years old, she had a right to be going bald if she wanted to. If whoever it was didn’t like it, that was too bad for him, he could just keep going.

So deeply was she mired in resentment and recrimination that his presence didn’t register again until she sensed it just behind her. Her neck prickled. He was standing too close. She didn’t like that, didn’t like anyone looking right down at the top of her scalp. She should have slipped the wig on, damn it.

He was so close now that she felt his belt buckle brush against the back of her head. Repulsed, she pulled angrily to one side to get away from him. “Now see here-”

But when his hand clamped on her shoulder from behind like some terrible talon, the air went out of her, as much from astonishment as pain. What… what…

Too quickly for her to absorb, his other hand closed on her wrist, and she was somehow no longer in contact with the earth, but flopping wildly in the air, dropping like a stone toward the sharp, black rocks that rimmed the cove. She goggled at them, and then at the cloudless blue sky as she tumbled, mouth open, eyes wide with incomprehension.

What… what…

The needle-sharp bisection of the North Kohala lowlands into parched lava fields and huge, lavish coastal resorts is stunning. On one side of the coast highway is a brown, dusty, lifeless plain of a’a lava. On the other is the lushest landscape that can be imagined: thick, soft grass, palm trees, frangipani, jacaranda, glorious masses of wonderfully fragrant blossoms-red, orange, white, purple. Two people could walk along the border, practically hand in hand, for miles, with one in a moist, green land of tropical plants, bright colors, and verdant lawns all the way, and the other never leaving a blasted, barren moonscape of jagged, dun-colored rocks.

Taking the turnoff for the Outrigger and the other Waikoloa area resorts, John, Julie, and Gideon turned abruptly from the latter into the former, heading down a broad, curving parkway lined with lush trees and redolent with every sweet smell of the tropics.

“I’ve been thinking…” Julie began.

“Uh-oh,” John said. He’d been in one of his funks ever since the session with Fukida, and this was as close as he’d come to a coherent sentence in a while. They’d picked up Julie, had a late lunch at the Greek restaurant, and headed back to the hotel, all without any notable input from him.

Gideon looked over his shoulder at him. “John, do you know that whenever anybody says, ‘I’ve been thinking,’ you say, ‘uh-oh’?”

“Not anybody. Mostly just you two.” He laughed and sat himself up straighter in the back seat, signs that he was ready to rejoin the world. As his funks went, it had been a long one.

“What have you been thinking, Julie?” Gideon asked.

“Well, you know how you keep wondering why they let you get involved with this thing in the first place? I think I know.”

That surprised him. “Why?”

“Well, who exactly asked you to go out to that atoll?”

“They all asked him,” John said.

“That’s right,” Gideon agreed.

“No, that’s not what you said when you first told me about it. You said Malani asked you.”

We did? Gideon thought.

“Umm…” said John, thinking.

“Yes, you did. You said she was the one that called the salvage company, and when she came back from talking to them, she said-”

“She said they didn’t know how to handle skeletons,” Gideon remembered, “and she volunteered me.”

“That’s right, and why wouldn’t she? From what Inge and Dagmar said, she didn’t know anything about the cover-up. She didn’t know there was anything to hide.”

“That’s a good point, but look, they all agreed to it, no objections. Why would they do that? Felix even put us up in Honolulu.”

“What choice did they have?” Julie countered. “Think about it. How would it have looked if they said no you couldn’t, after the salvage company said they wanted you and you said you would?”

“But how could they not have worried that I’d find out it was Torkel in that plane? You’d think they’d have come up with some excuse, any excuse, to keep me from-”

A snort of laughter came from the back seat. “They didn’t worry because you told them there was nothing to worry about.”

“ I told them?”

“You said-and I pretty much quote-that with any luck you could maybe tell the age, the sex, the race, and, um…”

“The approximate height,” Gideon supplied. “All of which would have fitted Magnus as much as it did Torkel. I think you’ve hit on it, Julie. Malani didn’t know she was putting her foot in it-”

“Or Torkel’s foot,” John said, throwing up his hands. “Sorry.”

“-but when she did, the others went along with it because they thought they were safe. Good thinking, Julie. That’d explain it.”

“Amazing,” John said. “She wasn’t even there and she remembers it better than we do.”

“Thank you,” Julie said happily. “Shall I go on?”

“There’s more?”

“Oh, yes. Who was it that got you to look at the autopsy report after you got back from the atoll?”

John and Gideon looked at each other in the rearview mirror. “Malani?” they both offered.

She nodded crisply. “Yes. And I was there for that one.”

“You’re right,” Gideon said, thinking back to the gathering on Axel’s porch. “Malani was the one who forced the issue… again.”

“That’s right, she was,” John said. “Malani’s like that. If she gets an idea in her head, she doesn’t hang back.”

“But this time the others did,” Gideon said. “Remember? Hedwig wanted to put me in a lotus leaf instead, and Axel didn’t want to stir things up, and Inge wanted to let him rest in peace-”

“But then the two of you convinced them they’d better have you do it, right?” Julie said. “So it was like the first time. How could they say no without making it obvious they were covering something up-even if they thought you might find out about the ring?”

“Ah, ah!” John exclaimed; he was completely back in form now. “But they didn’t think we were going to find out about the ring. The ring wasn’t in the autopsy report, it was in the case files! And as far as they knew, we weren’t going to be looking at the case files!”

Gideon slowly nodded. “It all makes sense.”

Julie tapped her mouth, covering a yawn of mock boredom. “Anything else I can help you boys with, you just let me know. Oh, look, here’s the Outrigger. Swimming pool, here I come. And I’m for another moratorium through tonight. Tomorrow is another day.”

“Me too,” Gideon said.

John raised his hand. “Count me in. Enough is enough.”

Faustino Parra arranged the place-setting the way the old lady liked it on windless days like this: on the round, glass-topped table at the foot of her terrace, with the Spanish-tile fountain behind her and the big blue Pacific spread out in front of her. He removed three of the four chairs-they made her feel lonely, she said-and opened the zipper of the thermal carton a couple of inches more so that her dinner wouldn’t continue to baste in its own juices. Oyster stew, grilled moonfish with black-olive polenta and shiitake mushrooms, and, in a separate cooler bag, a half-bottle of Sauvignon blanc and a macadamia-nut torte topped with currants, whipped cream, and toasted coconut for desert. For a woman who couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds, she could certainly put the stuff away, he thought respectfully. Not that a lot of it didn’t go to the turtles, of course.