Aaron Elkins: Twenty blue devils

Oh, sure, that made a lot of sense. Pele's miffed because this sweet young thing made off with an ounce and a half of lava, so she dumps two feet of rain on her father's cabbages and rutabagas, and on everybody else's rutabagas too.

We didn't realize it then, but that was only the start of our troubles. At harvest time, the pulper brake down and one of the workers got his hand caught in the gears while he was trying to fix it, and he had to be rushed to the hospital in Papeete but he…

Brenda frowned. Pulper? Papeete? She turned abruptly to the last page of the letter, to the signature.

"I don't believe it,” she said aloud. “Therese."

Mrs. Laney glanced up from the triple-taped container she had been trying unsuccessfully to breach.

Brenda raised the letter. “Unbelievable. This is from my cousin."

Mrs. Laney's plucked eyebrows rose. Her half-moon glasses slid farther down her nose. “Really? Your own personal cousin?"

Yes her own personal cousin. Therese, whose mother was Aunt Celine, Brenda's mother's older sister. Therese, whose father, the bigger-than-life, transplanted American Nick Druett, owned not a cabbage farm but a thriving Tahitian coffee plantation, two thousand prosperous acres carved out of the jungly flanks of Mt. Iviroa, twenty-five miles south of Papeete and three thousand miles southeast of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Brenda bent to the letter again.

…but he lost two fingers anyway and had to be made a supervisor. Next, the new drying furnace started a fire and ruined 75 bags of beans that we were processing for the other farmers, and we had to pay them thousands of dollars as a result. Then the brand-new sorting machine broke down three times this year alone, and even though there was a warranty it took at least two weeks to get it fixed every time, which meant we had to hire a whole lot of extra people to do the work. And I can't tell you how many times the computers have acted funny. My husband says it's like there's a ghost in the system.

Most scary of all, my husband (his name is Brian Scott) has almost been killed two times. Once, the wall of the new drying shed blew down in a windstorm and the roof fell in right where he had just been standing, but luckily it missed him. Another time, the jeep he was riding in went off a steep road and my husband broke his arm in two places and the man who was riding with him lost two teeth, but they could just as easily have been killed because the jeep turned over when it went down the mountainside.

Please, mother Pele, we meant no harm. Please forgive our ignorance. I am returning these stones so that they can be placed in the volcano where they belong, and our lives can return to normal.

Sincerely,

Therese Druett Scott

Cripes. Brenda sat back with pursed lips and let out a thoughtful breath. Therese, whose gifts lay more in the direction of a sweet-tempered disposition than an abundance of brains, might have things a little scrambled, but she was apparently right about one thing: something was amiss at the Paradise Coffee plantation.

She rose thoughtfully and headed for the door.

Mrs. Laney, who had been eagerly awaiting more information, was indignant. “And that's all you're going to tell me? That it's from your cousin?"

"What?” Brenda was already in the hallway, re-reading the letter as she walked. “Oh…I need to make a phone call, Ruby…"

"I don't understand,” Therese said in that soft, appealingly hesitant voice of hers. “How do you know about my letter?"

"It came right to me,” Brenda said. “I'm the one who opens them."

"But-aren't you in California, at Kings Canyon?"

"Not anymore. Therese, I'm here at Hawaii Volcanoes. I've been trying to get back here for years. I've been here since March."

"Oh,” Therese said. “Nobody told me."

There was nothing surprising about that. The two branches of the family were not in frequent contact. Brenda was a Lau by birth, her father a native Hawaiian, her mother a Tahitian-born Chinese who had moved to Hilo in 1950 to marry Brenda's father. Therese was a Druett, half-Chinese, half-American. Her mother-Brenda's aunt Celine-had been a famous beauty who had been swept off her feet by Nick Druett, the swashbuckling young American newly come to the South Seas to make his fortune, which he very soon did. They had had a daughter, Maggie, not long after they married (well, before they married, but nobody talked about that); then, ten years later, as something of a surprise, along had come the beautiful Therese, now twenty-eight.

Living as they did in two different hemispheres, the Laus and the Druetts didn't see each other often, but there was affection between them, and Brenda was particularly fond of Therese, eight years her junior. Therese had never quite taken up life in the real world, but she was warmhearted and without guile. What you saw on the surface was all there was underneath.

"Therese, I had no idea these things were going on at the plantation."

"No, well, you know my father. He doesn't like to advertise things. Brenda-will those stones really go back into the volcano? I mean, I know you think it's silly but…"

Brenda opened her hand to look at the two glassy pebbles, black and shining on her palm. “Yes, honey, I'll see to it personally.” She would too. On tomorrow morning's routine drive around the caldera she'd stop at the rim of Halemaumau Crater, Pele's private volcano, and drop them over the edge. And hope her boss wasn't anywhere around to see.

"It's not that I really believe in the curse,” Therese said unconvincingly, “but I just didn't know what else to do. I mean, I know that it's just a myth, but I didn't think it could hurt."

"Of course not,” Brenda said gently. “Therese, what does Brian think about all this?” Brian, Therese's husband, was the plantation's operations manager.

"He just shrugs it off. You know how he is. He says these things just happen on their own sometimes."

"Well, they do,” Brenda said. They did too, but this time she thought there might be more to it. “Um, is Brian around? It'd be nice to say hello."

"No, he's off communing with nature on Raiatea,” Therese said with no sign of irony, then added a small tinkling laugh: “I would have gone too, but of course I had to stay home with Claudine and Claudette."

Every year Brian spent a week or ten days roughing it at a favorite camping spot on the mountainous, barely populated island of Raiatea, a hundred miles from Tahiti, possibly the only man in history who considered Tahiti a place to get away from. He'd convinced Therese to come with him once-her first camping experience-and the much-pampered young woman had been appalled at the lack of comfort, hygiene, and amenities that went along with it She'd also been bored stiff, not that she'd admit any of it to her adored Brian. So when the twins came along later she'd used them as a heaven-sent excuse to stay at home while he continued to make his annual pilgrimage alone. She hated being apart from him, she'd told Brenda once, but anything was better than going ten days without a hot shower and doing your business in a hole in the ground.

"I almost forgot,” Brenda said. “Congratulations. I didn't know that you and Brian had gotten married."

"Married?” Therese said vaguely. “No, we're not married, we're-well, the same as ever. You know."

"But your letter said he was your husband. You signed it Therese Scott."

"Oh.” There was a moment's hesitation, and Brenda would have bet she was blushing. “I just thought Pele would think of me as a more sincere person if I was married."

"This is nothing to concern you, Brenda,” Nelson Lau said. “We can take care of it here in Tahiti, thank you."