Hula Done It? (13 page)

I stared at the envelope, feeling a little unsettled. "I'll let you know after I get through reading." As she headed back toward the bar, I ripped open the envelope and began reading Duncan's handwritten note.

I read the note a second time, riveted by the part about Percy and Basil. Had they actually discovered something out by the Secret Falls besides Bud Lite cans? Nuts! Why hadn't I paid closer attention? But if the two Englishmen had found Griffin Ring's treasure, what had the Vikings found? And who was in possession of the original map? The Vikings, the Brits, or the cheerleaders?

I sagged against the sofa back, reading the note again and again. By the time I finished reading it a fifth time, I realized something else.

If Duncan knew I'd changed cabins, did that also mean he was responsible for the upgrade? But Duncan didn't have that kind of money, did he?
Uff da
. Was it possible that Duncan, not Etienne, was my benefactor?

I blinked stupidly.

Damn. I'd never even thought of that.

"S
o what's the good news?" a man in khaki shorts and an expensive Tommy Bahama flowered shirt asked as he stepped off the scales.

"Three hundred sixteen pounds," a female assistant behind the counter announced. "Honey, we're going to have to send you up in a bird all by yourself."

He laughed good-naturedly. "I ate a big breakfast. I'm usually a svelte hundred and seventy."

That morbidly obese passengers qualified to fly in their own private helicopter was a real shocker. But what shocked me even more was that Tommy Bahama actually made shirts in super-plus jumbo triple X sizes.

I was seated in the waiting area of the Kauai Helicopter Tours office, a vintage World - War - II - style building at the Lihue Airport, watching people weigh in for our flight. I'd never given it much thought before, but apparently one of the secrets of helicopter safety is the even distribution of weight in the passenger cabin. Hence, the scales and the weighing-in routine. I regarded the guy in the Tommy Bahama shirt as he lowered all five foot three inches of himself into the chair beside me and cringed when I felt the floor deflect beneath us.
Creeeeeak. Urrrrr. Sssssssss. Creeeeeak.
Oh, God. Was that the floor or his chair?

"This your first time up?" the guy asked me, as another vanload of people arrived.

I nodded. "You, too?"

"Yeah. They tell me these things have a lousy safety record, but I'm a real risk taker, so I figured, what the hell. I have no fear. No phobias, no nothing. In my book, fear is a complete waste of time. I can do it all. Needles. Snakes. The dentist. I mean, look at me. My doctor tells me I'm a walking time bomb, but he's not scaring me, either. Not one bit."

I watched a crowd of newcomers file through the door and sat up a little straighter when I saw a face I recognized.

"When your time's up, it's up," the guy droned on. "We're not gonna live forever. You can try all that health food crap, but it's not gonna prolong your life by one minute, so you might as well throw your money at a helicopter ride instead." He gave my bare knee a friendly pat with his huge, sweaty palm. "So, are you married? Good-looking girl like you, I'm thinking we might have a future together."

"Would you excuse me a moment? I'm meeting someone." I plucked his hand off my knee and scooted across the floor, sidling up to Shelly Valentine as if she were a long-lost friend. "I need you to save me," I said in a desperate whisper. "Will you pretend we're together so Jabba the Hutt will hit on someone else?" I bobbed my head in his direction.

Shelly looked beyond me, shivered a little, then gave me a huge hug. "I'm so happy to see you!" she said in a loud voice, then in an undertone close to my ear, "I'm glad to help. I figure I owe you one after the way Jen treated you yesterday."

We moved forward in the line, heading toward the scales.

"She's not with you today?"

"She decided to stay on the ship for an all-day spa treatment. Maybe they'll be able to extract cellulite, toxins, and that big mean streak of hers. Frankly, I don't see how Dori put up with her. She's so moody. Just because you're
in
pain doesn't mean you have to
be
one. No wonder she doesn't have any friends."

"I thought you were her friend."

"Me? Hah! Not in this lifetime."

"Then what were you doing on the kayak adventure together yesterday?"

She tossed her long, glossy dark hair behind her shoulder. "I didn't have anything better to do. She wanted help excavating something that was supposed to be buried near that waterfall, so I agreed. Jen and I are both archaeology majors; we've both had the same methods courses. Since I have another year of school to go, I figured I could use the practice."

"Isn't this a strange time of year to be on a cruise if you're in school?"

"I took the semester off. The course work got so intense, I needed to take a breather."

If she thought college was bad, wait until she hit real life.

"Step onto the scales there, honey," the woman behind the counter instructed Shelly. After we weighed in and filled out the necessary paperwork, we wandered into an adjoining room and sat down to await further instructions.

"Remember when you asked Jen and me yesterday where we got our map?" Shelly asked. "I don't know why Jen was being so secretive, but she wouldn't tell me where she got it, either. Isn't that weird? I don't know what the big deal was. It looked to me as if everyone had one."

I couldn't help entertaining a suspicion that unlike everyone else, Jennifer may have acquired her map from Dorian Smoker himself -- right before she pushed him overboard. "You mind if I ask where you and Jennifer went after you left Professor Smoker's lecture?"

Shelly's mouth angled in disgust. "I don't know where Jen went, but I went back to my cabin and had a good cry. I thought I was going to have Dori all to myself for ten days. I share him enough throughout the year. Then
bam!
Jennifer shows up. I was
so
disappointed."

She heaved a pathetic sigh. "I know women of my generation are supposed to be too liberated to get jealous, but...I guess I'm guilty of being way too sensitive. Don't tell Jen that I cried about it, okay? She'd only make some snide comment and laugh at me. I hate to admit it, but she's a lot more socially evolved than I am. She didn't even fall apart after she flunked that ethnographic methods course last semester, but she was really steamed. I mean, she had a job lined up and everything."

She had a job lined up? YES! I knew it! "So what kind of jobs are archaeology majors applying for these days?"

"The L. S. B. Leakey Foundation? Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania? They're beginning excavation on a new site on Bed One. That's the level where the strata dates back over a million years. She was supposed to be in charge of cataloging all the Pleistocene artifacts, but since she didn't graduate, they gave the position to someone else. She really blew that one."

A man's voice blared out over a loudspeaker, causing us both to jump. "When I call your name, please proceed across the street to the gate I assign you." He read off a litany of names, eventually announcing, "Emily Andrew, Shelly Valentine, and Carl Leather-man, gate nine."

We joined the exodus out the door and straggled across the street in uneven groupings, hiking toward our gates in the ankle-high grass that flanked a tall chain-link fence. Inside the barrier, a fleet of helicopters sat like chess pieces on slabs of pavement with yellow markings, the entire compound ringed by a field of scrubby bushes that swept toward a range of dark volcanic mountains. Shelly and I passed through the fence at gate nine and walked to the edge of the tarmac, eyeing the craft that was to be our home for the next hour. "Isn't it supposed to be...bigger?" she asked, aping the subject line of the SPAM that flooded my in-box these days.

I gave it a once over. "Without the tail and rotor blades, it's about the size of my VW bug, so it can probably hold at least fifteen college students. Six if they all want seats."

"When your time's up, it's up, right?" insisted a male voice behind us. "I heard these things have lousy safety records, but I don't care. I'm not afraid of anything. Walking under ladders. Confined spaces. Lightning. I can do it all."

I shot a horrified look at Shelly. She shot one back. I looked over my shoulder, my stomach sinking to my ankles at the sight of the guy in the Tommy Bahama shirt. NOOO! This was beyond cruel! This was criminal! Unconscionable. Unbelievable! Un...unconstional!

"Excuse me," I said to the woman whose ear he was chewing off. She wore an ID badge around her neck and was carrying an official looking clipboard. "I think there's been a terrible mistake. Doesn't he get his own helicopter?"

"Ladies, ladies, ladies," Carl continued, draping a flabby arm around each of our shoulders. "This is your lucky day. You get every mouthwatering inch of me all to yourselves."

In the next instant Shelly seized his wrist, spun beneath his arm, and in a quick, fluid motion, flipped him onto his back as if she were a short-order cook and he was Humpty Dumpty on his way to becoming a cheese omelette. The earth shook. Debris floated upward. "Don't touch me," she yelled into his stunned face, stabbing her forefinger at his nose. "Don't ever touch me! You got that?"

She brushed off her hands and stormed to the other end of the tarmac, swinging her arms to loosen her muscles and muttering to herself. I stared after her, speechless. Wow. The only other people I'd ever seen execute moves like that were the Terminator and Nana.

Reminder to myself: Don't get on Shelly Valentine's bad side.

I walked over to her. "That was pretty impressive," I said as she methodically cracked one knuckle after the other. "How'd you do it?"

She shrugged. "I signed up for a self-defense course at the university during my freshman year, and I keep taking refresher courses. Best thing I ever did. Not bad for an amateur, huh?"

Not bad for a professional, either.

"You!" the female official blasted, leveling her pen at the flattened carcass of Carl Leatherman. "Any more manhandling of the passengers, and you're outta here. You!" she called to Shelly. "The World Wrestling Alliance moves belong in the gym. Understand? Okay, Valentine and Andrew in the front seat. Leatherman in the back. No eating or smoking allowed. Enjoy your flight."

Subdued and grass-stained, Carl struggled onto his fat little feet, looking decidedly pouty. Ignoring us, he squeezed though the door of the copter and wedged himself into the back passenger compartment. Shelly and I strapped ourselves into the front seats. Our pilot climbed aboard next, a confident looking forty-year-old who, after introducing himself as Bogart, went to work with mute efficiency. He handed us protective headphones, checked his instruments, flipped some switches, powered up the rotor blades, and then, after a slow vertical liftoff, swooped into the air like a giant dragonfly off a lily pad.

We banked high to the left, my body vibrating from teeth to toenails, the whir of the rotor blades louder than New York jackhammers. My feet tingled with the sudden height, but I had to admit, the scenery unfolding before us was even more awesome than the sight of "60%
OFF
" stickers during Emer-hoff's semiannual shoe sale.

I dug my Canon Elph out of my shoulder bag and began snapping pictures. A deserted crescent of white sand beach, washed by blue-green water and nestled within a leafy swath of emerald green jungle. A lighthouse perched on the lip of a rugged headland. A narrow-mouthed bay with a long finger of rocks forming a breakwater around a local marina. Sailboats. Powerboats. And there was our cruise ship! I wondered if I could pick out my cabin from here. I gave Shelly a little poke to point it out, but she still looked pretty miffed about the Carl incident and in no mood to take pictures.

As we flew over what looked like a huge resort hotel, I heard static over my headphones, followed by a few strains of some classical overture, and the voice of James Earl Jones on a prerecorded tape. "Directly below you lies the Menehune Fishpond, a nine-hundred-foot mullet-raising pond reputed to have been built in one night by a race of small, hairy people who inhabited the island prior to the Polynesians."

I shot a picture of the pond, then glanced over my shoulder to see if Carl wanted me to move my head so he could get a picture, too. But Carl wasn't looking at the Menehune Fishpond. Carl looked too frightened for sightseeing. He was clinging white-knuckled to a safety strap, his eyes pinched so tightly, he'd need a crowbar to pry them open again. Even his lips were quivering -- or maybe he was mouthing a silent prayer. Huh. It seemed that after a lifetime of facing down needles, snakes, and dentists, he'd finally found something that scared the crap out of him.

More music played as we soared over razor-backed mountains with scrubby flanks and geometrically challenged fields in a patchwork quilt of pea green, celery green, moss green, and pistachio.

"The mile-long lane of trees you see in the distance is a stand of rough-bark swamp mahogany imported from Australia and planted by a local cattle rancher over one hundred and fifty years ago. It's known as the Tree Tunnel and it shades the country road leading into Poipu."

We swayed right and left and swooped off again toward the west, approaching terrain that was as fierce as it was uninhabitable. Towers of stone rose like the spires of a gothic cathedral, lacy with erosion, craggy with age. Water gushed through rock and cascaded over steep precipices, spilling into pools that looked peacock blue in the sun.

"To your right is the waterfall Steven Spielberg used in the opening shot of the movie
Jurassic Park,"
announced James Earl in his melodic baritone.

Angry gray ridges. Huge, inaccessible caves. Grassy plateaus. I snapped a picture of the waterfall for Jonathan and smiled to myself. My good deed for the day.

After a rousing interlude by Rachmaninoff, James Earl continued his travelogue. "Directly ahead of you is Waimea Canyon. Mark Twain once dubbed it the 'Grand Canyon of the Pacific.' Ten miles long, one and a half miles wide, thirty-six hundred feet deep, it borders the Alakai Swamp and is chiseled from red bedrock that eons of rain and sun have bleached to the color of an old clay pot."

Even in direct sunlight, the colors of the canyon were muted into soft earth tones. Pale peach. Light pink. Soft coral. Warm beige. Deep valleys. Rocky pinnacles. Impossible waterfalls. Rivers meandering toward the sea. With Rachmaninoff blasting in our ears, we hovered over one waterfall, dipped into a valley, banked high over a sharp crest, and charged like a Valkyrie toward the open sea. I checked behind me to see how Carl was faring.

On the upside, he didn't look so scared anymore. On the downside, he had the same "car sick" look my brother Steve used to get before he'd upchuck his lunch in the front seat of Dad's pickup. Gray skin. Moist brow. White lips. Uh-oh.

"Are you all right?" I yelled at him.

He clung silently to the safety strap, sweating, eyes still clamped shut. I was obviously failing in my attempt to penetrate the racket created by rotor blades, James Earl Jones, and Rachmaninoff.