Bet Your Bones (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine

Dinah needed to be alone. She needed quiet and anonymity. She probably needed to share the information she’d gleaned today with Langford and Fujita, but the sum of what she’d gleaned only added up to confusion. Passing the turnoff to Jon’s Wahilani, she turned into the entrance to Volcanoes National Park.

As the brochure handed out at the entrance gate explained, Kilauea is merely a four thousand foot bump on the southeast flank of Mauna Loa, which rises some thirty thousand feet from the ocean floor. Mauna Loa, or Long Mountain in the Hawaiian language, is a “shield” volcano, one of five that make up the Big Island of Hawaii. Shield volcanoes have gentler slopes than cone-shaped stratovolcanoes and their eruptions tend to be less explosive. In fact, Mauna Loa doesn’t look all that tall in comparison to the surrounding terrain, but at sixty miles long and thirty miles wide, it is the largest volcano on earth by volume and area and it comprises fully half the area of the island.

Kilauea, though it’s only a bump, is considered a separate volcano. It has its own plumbing system through which magma percolates up from deep inside the earth and it has a coterie of seismologists and volcanologists and geophysicists who study its every hiccup from their state-of-the-art Observatory on the rim of the caldera. Because Volcano Village sits at roughly the same elevation as the summit, there’s little or no ascending.

Dinah parked at the Visitor’s Center and walked to the caldera overlook. A cloud of gray volcanic gases, which the brochure called vog, rose from the hellish depths of Halemaumau crater and boiled across the landscape toward the other side of the island. It looked as if a dirty eraser had rubbed across the blue sky. This was Pele’s stomping ground. To the Hawaiians, she encompassed all things volcanic—steam, lava, noxious vog, eruptions—and the caldera below afforded an amazing view of the first three.

Was this where the wedding was to have taken place? She hugged herself to keep from shaking. It was impossible not to visualize Raif’s flesh roasting beside a stream of liquid fire. The police hadn’t said, but she assumed that even a few minutes at two thousand degrees Farenheit would make it impossible for the coroner to determine whether he’d been shot before or after he fell into the lava. She prayed that the bullet came first, then remembered that she was praying at the altar of the goddess who’d immolated him. She thought, too, about the archaeologist, Patrick Varian. Steve’s idea that the two deaths were a coincidence was beginning to bear out. If Raif was killed because he gambled with the wrong guy or blackmailed the wrong guy or screwed the wrong woman, there could be no link to Varian.

She had to think about something else for a while or she’d go bats. It was only a little after five. The sun was still bright and hot. Maybe she could walk off this turmoil, or at least avoid worsening it for a while. She reviewed the park map. Crater Rim Trail was closed due to dangerous amounts of sulfur dioxide gas, but the Kilauea Iki Trail was deemed safe enough for the casual tourist in sneakers provided that one “take care at cliff edges and cracks.” That was one warning she definitely would heed. She bought a bottle of water at the Visitor Center, drove to the trailhead, and began walking.

Kilauea Iki, like Halemaumau, was a smaller, circular crater inside the much larger caldera. The descent to the hardened lava floor of the crater followed a series of switchbacks through a lush rain forest. Except for the birds, she had the trail all to herself. The view of the crater floor below was obscured by trees and overhanging foliage. Strange plants and ferns abounded. Where the sun knifed through the thick canopy, puffs of vapor wisped off the leaves. The moist, earthy smells conveyed an almost primordial sense. She felt as if she were breathing the same molecules that the first Hawaiians had breathed. The same molecules that Captain Cook had breathed when he dropped anchor off the Kona Coast in 1779. The molecules he breathed before the natives deduced that he wasn’t the reincarnation of Lono after all and killed him.

For all its beauty, Hawaii did not lack for violence. And Pele seemed to go especially hard on lovers. Dinah recalled a myth about Pele falling in love with a handsome chief named Lohi’au on the island of Kaui. But being a goddess carried responsibilities and she was obliged to return to Hawaii to churn out more lava and make more land. She promised Lohi’au that she’d send for him as soon as possible. True to her word, she asked her most trusted sibling, Hi’iaka, to go and ferry him back to Hawaii. Hi’iaka agreed, asking only that while she was away, Pele protect a grove of pandanus trees that she treasured. Pele promised and Hi’iaka set out for Kaui. But by the time she arrived, poor lovelorn Lohi’au had hanged himself.

Hi’iaka revived him and enticed his errant soul back into his body, but when he woke up and saw her sweet face, he did an emotional one-eighty and declared his love for her instead of Pele. Hi’iaka rebuffed him and dragged him back toward Hawaii. But as they drew near, Hi’iaka spotted a wildfire devouring the trees Pele had promised to protect. Enraged, Hi’iaka pasted a long, retaliatory kiss on Lohi’au’s fickle lips in full view of her pyromaniac sister. But hell hath no fury like Pele when she’s scorned. She flooded the mountain with fire and incinerated her faithless lover.

Apparently, it was no accident that the Hawaiian word for “love” also meant “good-bye” and “alas.” Aloha had its dark side and Dinah couldn’t seem to say aloha to thoughts of murder.

The forest ended abruptly and the bleak, black expanse of the crater floor opened out in front of her like Hell’s foyer. There were several groups of hikers. Some gathered around numbered cairns, which marked the trail, to peruse the correspondingly numbered descriptions in their guide brochure. Some snapped pictures. Some explored the off-trail sights—cinder cones and steam vents and weird rocky depressions.

Dinah had no desire to explore this charred and eerie landscape, the aftermath of a flood of Pele’s fire. She was about to turn around and start back up the hill when she clocked Eleanor Kalolo in a red-striped muumuu like a carnival tent. Eleanor stood under a flowery parasol minutely examining the single flame-red blossom on a lone, incongruous tree. As Dinah and any number of tourists watched, she pulled a pair of shears out of her pocket and, indifferent both to federal law and Pele’s wrath, snipped off the blossom.

Dinah walked about a hundred yards across the lava to speak to her. “Hello, Eleanor.”

She looked up with a testy expression. But when she saw who it was, her expression changed to one of benevolence, more or less. “You come wid me. Time we talk story.” She took Dinah’s arm and leaned heavily against her. “You help me back up the mountain. I haven’t walked this far in a long time. When Leilani and I were little, our father brought us down here and we cooked a chicken in the hot lava. It was against the law, of course. Haole law.”

Dinah supported Eleanor’s unsteady bulk as best she could. “Did you hear about Raif Reid’s murder yesterday?”

“Of course, I heard. He was my niece’s husband.” She handed Dinah the red blossom she’d picked. “It’s called an ohia. It’s one of the first to grow in lava. It was named for a handsome warrior Pele wanted to marry, only he fell in love with another woman, Lehua. Pele punished Ohia by…”

“Incineration,” supplied Dinah. “That seems to be Pele’s modus operandi.” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice. She was losing her taste for Pele myths.

Eleanor glowered as if to say, pearls-before-swine. “Pele punished him by turning him into a tree. But the other gods felt sorry for Lehua. They turned her into the red flower that grows on the tree so that the two lovers could always be together.”

Talking story was apparently not the same as talking turkey or, if it was, Eleanor must enjoy having the story gouged out of her. “What do you know about Raif’s sins, Eleanor?”

“He cheated.”

“I know he cheated on Lyssa. Did he cheat at cards, too?”

“Cheat at one thing, cheat at everything. He was kolohe when he played cards and moekolohe when he slept with other women. He was scum.”

Dinah was surprised by her vehemence. She wouldn’t have thought that Eleanor cared one way or the other about Raif’s transgressions. “Did Jon tell you about Raif’s kolohe ways or was it Lyssa?”

“I talk to my nephew sometimes. Lyssa hasn’t talked to me since she married that bum. She’s my niece, my own blood, and I love her. But she’s vain and willful like her mother. She didn’t care that her husband was a parasite. All she saw was his handsome face and his hiluhilu friends.”

“What do you mean Raif was a parasite?”

“It’s just a word. It’s what Jon called him.”

“Do you have any idea who killed him? Besides Pele, I mean.”

Eleanor stumped along in silence for a minute. The only sounds were her whistling breath and the scuffing of her ankle-high brogans across the lava. When she deigned to answer, her words were dipped in acid. “Xander Garst kill ‘im. ‘Apaka, kolohe, ho’opunipuni. It’s his hala dat brings po’ino to both his children. What goes around comes around.”

Dinah’s temper flared. “Stop it. Stop toggling in and out of pidgin and Hawaiian and stop your mysterious hints about Xander’s crimes and misdemeanors and hala huna whatever. Either spit out your criticism in the language I speak and tell me what this Pash thing is about or put a sock in it.”

“Kaii. Boddah you I talk stink ‘bout Garst, eh? Boddah you I talk pidgin and Hawaiian? If there were any justice in this world, Garst would be dead instead of my sister and you’d be deferring to me, speaking my language in my homeland.”

They had reached the trail leading up through the forest and back to the road. Eleanor let go of Dinah’s arm and sat down heavily on a boulder. She closed her parasol and blotted the sweat off her forehead. “I feel junk.”

With a mixture of concern and contrition, Dinah offered her her water bottle.

She took it and drank. When she was finished, she screwed the top back on the bottle and handed it back. “Mo bettah. Mahalo.” With the thank you, her voice softened, as if she were feeling a little contrite, herself, and she reverted to standard English. “I don’t wish Garst dead. I want him to lose his money on Uwahi, I want him to lose his good name, and I want your friend to see that he is a liar and a fraud and save herself. He killed my sister.”

“How could he have killed your sister? He was in California when she died. Did something happen there that made her want to kill herself?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Garst was unfaithful to her.”

“How do you know that? How did she know that?”

“Somebody called her from the convention, somebody who’d seen him carrying on with a woman. Leilani was furious. She cried all the time she tried to talk to me.”

That phone call again, and yet more infidelity. Louis Sykes had been fooling around with another woman, too, or so went the gossip among the U.S.G.S. “oldtimers.” The earth sciences people must be a lusty bunch and a gossipy bunch. The blabbermouth who’d tipped off Leilani to her husband’s fling must have been shocked by her reaction. Shocked and guilt-ridden.

“It must have been one of Xander’s colleagues who called her. You never found out who it was?”

“No. She didn’t say.”

“What did you and Leilani argue about when she brought the children to your house the day she killed herself? Jon remembers you yelling and calling each other names.”

“We argued about what we always argued about. I told her she should stick to her own people, stop being embarrassed by her ancestors. I said raise your children like Hawaiians. They were born in Hawaii to a Hawaiian woman descended from royalty. There’s no blood quantum that makes Jon and Lyssa less Hawaiian. But she wanted them to be haole. She said the old ways are pau, finished, and that I wanted something that doesn’t exist anymore. She called me old, antique, kahiko. I was about your age.” She made a guttural noise in the back of her throat.

It took Dinah a few seconds to recognize the noise as a laugh. She felt obliged to say something consoling. “Leilani sang meles to the children. Jon seems proud of his Hawaiian ancestry. He seems in love with the land and the culture.”

Eleanor didn’t reply.

“Did you see Leilani again after you argued?”

“No. We had no reconciliation. No kala ‘ana.” She squinted up at Dinah, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. “Kala ‘ana is kala ‘ana. It means what it means. Hawaiian isn’t a code for something else. But I will tell you what it comes closest to meaning in English. To give kala ‘ana is to lift the burden of anger. It is forgiveness. I can never have my sister’s kala ‘ana now. I can never tell her that I loved her. Love her still. That’s what Garst took from me.”

“And you’re getting back at him by obstructing the sale of Uwahi?”

“Uwahi was salt in the wound. My family owned the land back when Garst married Leilani. It wasn’t a leasehold on trust lands. We owned it in fee simple. My father revered the land and wanted to protect it. He signed a conservation easement, a legal agreement that restricts future uses of the property regardless of who owns it. When he died, my mother was forced to sell the land, but we knew the land would be preserved because the restrictions still applied. They ran with the title. No building. But Garst had always coveted the place. He brokered a land swap between the owner of a much larger tract and the land trust charged with enforcing the easement. He and his lawyers gamed the system. The trust consented to lift the easement and Garst bought it. That’s when I turned to lawyers, myself.”

“What did you mean by Pash? What is it?”

“It’s a law. Public Access Shoreline Hawaii. The law grants us Hawaiians access to land that has cultural and religious uses. The bones of King Keawenui are buried under the lava at Uwahi. I pray there. I won’t let Garst defile it.”

“But the closing is tomorrow morning, Eleanor. You won’t be fighting Xander anymore. You’ll be fighting a Texan named Jarvis.”

“Kaiii! I know who he is.”

“Then why haven’t you gone directly to him with your claim?”