Aaron Elkins: Where there's a will

“Let’s stop for a bite,” John said. “You hungry?”

“Sure,” said Gideon, whose salivary glands started working at the mention of food. “I guess I forgot about lunch.”

“ Forgot about lunch!” John said incredulously. “Jesus, you’re worse than I thought.”

They turned into Opelo Plaza, a neatly maintained corner strip mall on the main street, and pulled up before Aioli’s, a simple, white frame building with blue awnings on either side of the screen door and a giant painted garlic clove above it.

“I admit, it looks kind of like a health food place-but it’s good,” John explained.

They ordered sandwiches at the counter-grilled chicken and avocado for Gideon, grilled mahi-mahi for John-and sat in rattan chairs at a bare table under slowly turning ceiling fans. Everything was spotless. The red glazed tile floor looked as if it had been cleaned thirty seconds ago. The clientele was about fifty-fifty native-Hawaiian and Haole.

While they ate, John went on with the story. Once the family had gotten over its shock at the loss of its patriarch-brothers, another kind of shock took over. They realized that the future of the wealthy ranch and its holdings was now on hold. Because the two men had reciprocal mutual-beneficiary wills, in which the brothers left virtually everything to each other, it was only when the last living brother died that the inheritance could pass on to the next generation. So, for the seven years it took for the Third Circuit Court to formally conclude that Magnus was really dead and gone, the ranch was managed under receivership and the bulk of the Hoaloha fortune remained in limbo, while the would-be inheritors chafed. All except Dagmar, who got an identical lion’s share of the liquid assets under both wills, and who soon pulled up stakes and retired to the seclusion and beauty of Hulopo’e Beach Estates on the Kohala Coast.

But the seven years finally came to an end. Three years ago Magnus had been declared legally dead and his will had gone through probate and been executed. For all intents and purposes the great Hoaloha Ranch no longer existed. The thirty-thousand-acre property was cut up and divided between the brothers’ nephews and nieces. Even after selling off part of their assets-cattle, art works-to pay the death taxes, each of them wound up with a good-sized chunk of land.

“Wait a minute,” Gideon said. “These would have been Andreas’s kids? The brother that died before? And your friend Axel was one of them?”

“Right. Axel and his brother and his two sisters. Axel’s the only one who’s running his property as a ranch.”

“The Little Hoaloha.”

“Yup, if you can call eleven thousand acres little. But the rest of them all had different ideas. You interested enough to know the details, or am I boring you?”

“No, you’re not boring me. I’ll let you know when you are.”

“Well, there’s Inge, Axel’s sister. She turned hers into a yuppie dude ranch, and from what I hear it’s doing okay. Then there’s his sister, Hedwig. She… what?”

“You rolled your eyes when you said ‘Hedwig.’ I wondered what that meant.”

“I did? Ah, Hedwig’s all right, I guess, if you can stand… well, you’ll see. Anyway, she runs hers as a wellness center.”

“She’s a doctor?”

“Um… no.”

“A therapist?”

“Um… no, I wouldn’t say that. She’s into, like, karmic power massage, and, um, past-life regression, and-”

“Okay, I get the picture,” Gideon said, charitably resisting the urge to roll his own eyes. “And then there’s one more, right?”

“Felix. He’s a lawyer. He lives in Honolulu.”

“He didn’t inherit a piece of the ranch?”

“Oh, yeah, he got the smallest piece… only a couple of hundred acres, with no buildings, no water, no decent grazing land, nothing like that-but it includes a quarter-mile of prime, white-sand oceanfront up above Kawaihae. It’s probably worth more than all the rest put together, and he’s selling it to some Swiss chain that develops these super-upscale communities. Felix’s pretty sharp about that kind of thing-he’s a land-use attorney-and he’s gonna be one rich Torkelsson.”

“Interesting family,” Gideon said. “Unusual.”

“And you’re gonna meet every last one of them in a few hours.”

“I am?”

“Yup. We’re invited to dinner.”

“That’s nice of them, but-I don’t know, didn’t you say they’d be talking about what to do about Magnus’s remains? I’d be a complete outsider at something like that. Maybe I could just-”

“Don’t worry about it. They meet once a month anyway to hassle out any problems, and they get that stuff out of the way early. By the time we show up, they’ll have their family matters settled and everybody’ll be pretty well into the schnapps. You’ll enjoy it, you’ll see. Anything you ever heard about these ‘dour’ Swedes, forget it. And you wouldn’t want to miss the dinner. Best steaks you ever had; from prime ranch cattle.”

Leaving Aioli’s, they headed back east and John turned the truck north on Highway 250, at the edge of town. They were soon back in open country and climbing again. Now occasional straggling lines of chestnut-brown cattle, heads lowered to the grass, could be seen.

“Herefords,” John said. “You can always tell from the white faces. In case you wanted to know. If they were Jerseys they’d be brown all over.”

“Thank you, I always wondered about that. So you said tonight’s steaks would be from ranch cattle. Dinner’s at the ranch, then? At Axel’s?”

“No. That’s where we’re staying, but the family dinners are always at Inge’s-at the dude ranch. She closes it to paying customers for the day. See, Inge and Hedwig are the only ones with professional cooks-because of their businesses-and naturally nobody wants to have it at Hedwig’s, so it’s always at Inge’s. Felix flies in from Honolulu, Dagmar hires a limo to drive her up from the coast, and-here we are. This is Axel’s and Malani’s place. Home for the next week. Open the gate, would you?”

Gideon jumped out, pulled open the unlocked swinging gate in the barbed wire fence, and closed it once the truck was through. The only indication of where they were were the neatly stenciled words on the mailbox mounted on the gatepost: Torkelsson. Mile 12.2, Kohala Mtn. Road. Once he was back in, John followed a dirt track between the hills toward a rambling, much-weathered, white frame house a quarter-mile off, with porches all around and six or seven smaller outbuildings trailing away to the rear.

“It’s one of the old section managers’ houses,” John said. “They built them in separate units back then: cook house, bath house, laundry house, bunk house-I spent a few nights in the old bunk house myself. Murder going out to the privy on a cold night.”

Gideon frowned. “And we’re staying… where?”

“Don’t worry, we’re in the main house. Indoor plumbing.” He laughed. “Jeez, Doc, what a weenie you are. I always thought anthropologists slept out on rocks when they had to, and ate bugs and snakes. Till I met you.”

“I happen to love eating bugs and snakes. I was thinking of Julie.”

“Yeah, right.” John pulled the car into the dusty parking area beside the porch and turned off the ignition. “Okay, let’s go find’em. Knowing Axel, he’ll be right where I left him.”

The interior of the house was just what the exterior suggested: roomy, worn, simply built of wooden planks in serious need of re-painting, simply furnished with wood-frame furniture, and filled with the dusty, unidentifiable smells of old, well-lived-in houses. The living room had a massive, soot-blackened lava-stone fireplace topped by a mantel jammed with antique brown and blue bottles, dusty glass fishing floats, oddly shaped pebbles, and other knickknacks that must once have meant something to someone. The plank walls had yellowing pictures of Swedish and Hawaiian royalty on them-mostly unframed, cut from newspapers and books, and held up with tacks-along with fading family photographs and a couple of old school pennants: the University of Hawaii and the University of California-Davis. This was a room-a house-that had never been “decorated.” It had grown-or, better, evolved -by accretion, by slow accumulation. All the same, it looked right for the house of a rancher; an honest, straightforward kind of place, utterly without pretensions.