Aaron Elkins: Where there's a will

“ 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 about 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.

From that moment on she was the family mystic, the Knower of Strange Things, a role she had embraced, first out of contrariness, and then, over the years, with a certain amount of conviction. Now, three decades later, she was the proprietor of one of the island’s many holistic retreats, the Hui Ho’olana Wellness Center for Spiritual Healing and Body-Centered Empowerment.

The Center was situated on the land she had inherited from her Uncle Magnus, a narrow strip ill-suited for cattle-raising but blessed with several restful groves of eucalyptus and pine, a small, tranquil lake, and the house that she had grown up in with her widowed father and her three siblings. It was smaller than either Axel’s or Inge’s inheritances, but spiritual healing hardly required great tracts of open rangeland. What it did require was an environment conducive to inward contemplation. In other words, peace and quiet.

The trouble was, Hui Ho’olana bordered her sister Inge’s property, which was neither peaceful nor quiet. Inge, too, had converted her inheritance into a money-making enterprise-the Kohala Trails Adventure Ranch, an upscale dude ranch that had become popular with junketing Far Eastern businessmen, due mostly to a lucrative arrangement with two Asian airlines. As a result, it was often filled with weekend cowboys from Indonesia or Thailand engaged in various kinds of loud and violent activities. Today, the Center’s afternoon self-affirmation session had been a shambles on account of the noise from one of Kohala Trails’ signature activities, ridiculous in the extreme: a quick-draw contest for which guests were issued cowboy hats, chaps, and holsters with pellet-shooting six-guns, with prizes going to the winners.

A steaming Hedwig had gone straight to her office to use the half-hour before cocktails (non-alcoholic) and hors d’oeuvres (vegan) to send a furious e-mail to Inge, complaining about the disruption. It was the second time this month, and she was damned tired of it. When she opened up her Outlook Express, however, she found the new message from Inge awaiting her. She read it with a steadily sinking heart. Her anger faded. Problems of noise and disruption sank to a distant second place.

“Whoa,” she murmured. “This is really bad karma.”

Felix Adolphus Torkelsson was the only one of the current crop of Torkelsson siblings who had chosen not to live on the land his uncle Magnus had left him. His first semester at the University of Hawaii, during which he’d roomed with three footloose and free-thinking bachelor friends, had convinced him that the peace and simplicity of rural life weren’t for him. When he’d finished his law degree he’d settled in Honolulu’s modest Palolo Valley neighborhood while he repaid his loans, passed the bar (on his second try), and worked his way up through a couple of law firms. But soon after he’d been made partner at what was now Gergen, Dugan, Torkelsson, and Karsch (“Like the sound of a huge rank of giant toilets flushing at almost, but not quite, the same time,” was the in-house joke), he’d bought his dream condominium on Kalakaua Avenue, a twenty-fourth-floor corner unit looking northeast over the grand hotels and white-sand beaches.

Felix was a robust man given to loud speech and expansive gestures. His reaction to reading the print-out of Inge’s e-mail (he didn’t like reading computer screens; all of his e-mail was automatically printed out) was to utter a not-so-muffled oath and to fling the sheet of paper ceilingward. Or rather skyward, inasmuch as he was sitting on the balcony of his condo. A man of quick reactions despite his size, he managed to jump to his feet and snatch it out of the air before it drifted over the edge and got away. Then he sat down again with the end-of-a-good-day’s-work double martini he had mixed for himself and reread it, his open, cheerful face slowly darkening.