THE DISCOVERY
Lu and Russi went toward Kawaihae. They took a golf cart to the far end of the course and set off on foot through the kiawe. It was almost lunchtime, and even with the sun blocked by clouds, heat shimmered off the lava. Not far away, jagged rocks crumbled into the sea. Small coves and inlets swirled with coral heads and crashing waves. When the water sucked out, you could see the red pencil urchins, bright like flowers. There wasn’t a hint of breeze. Thankfully, LSR had outfitted them with wide straw hats, canteens full of water and instructions to drink plenty or face sunstroke. Lu knew the drill.
“I don’t see Joni making it more than ten feet in this,” Russi said.
Before they’d left, Lu had kept expecting Joni to walk up with a towel in hand, flutter her eyelashes and say, “What’s all the fuss about?” But a bellman had gone door to door knocking, and the maids checked empty rooms. The hotel had been effectively combed.
Ten minutes in and they were drenched in sweat. Twenty minutes, Lu felt her mouth turning to cotton.
“Ouch! Dammit!” Russi yelled, hopping around on one foot and lifting his other to examine the bottom of his shoe. As expected, a kiawe branch was lodged in the sole. “I remember this stuff from Pearl days. My buddy nearly lost his foot to an infection he got while hiking out from his downed plane. The Japanese didn’t kill him, but a one-inch thorn almost did,” he said.
“Were you there during the attack?” she asked.
He didn’t answer immediately, pulling out the stick and whipping it away. “I was.”
“Were you up in the air?”
“Unfortunately, not.”
“I’d think it would be the other way around,” Lu said.
“Not when your friends are up there getting their tails shot up by the enemy. There’s no more helpless feeling in the world, I can promise you that.”
“I’m sorry, that must have been hard.”
“The worst. All of my flying in Hawai‘i was just training for the real thing. For me, that was at Guadalcanal and in the Solomons. And...well...” His voice trailed off.
Lu knew about the Solomons and Guadalcanal, everyone did. The numerous battles, countless dead. A few Pulitzer Prizes had come out of it, as well as the book and recent film, The Thin Red Line. “A lot of people talk about Midway as a defining moment in the war, but I’ve heard that Guadalcanal was just as important,” she said.
“It was the first time we were on the offensive, and boy, were we ever. You always hear about how tough the Japanese pilots were and how cunning. Course, they had their nutjobs, but that’s another story. Our guys had more heart and more balls by a long shot,” he said with conviction.
“I can’t believe you were actually there,” she said.
“You and me both, kid.”
She was hoping he’d say more, but he didn’t. He stood there, expectantly, waiting for her to keep walking. With the lava and ocean behind him, she realized it would make the perfect shot. Lu pulled up her camera and aimed it his way.
“Whoa,” he said, reaching out and pushing the lens away from his face.
She frowned. “What was that for?”
“I don’t do pictures.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t have my picture taken.”
“You come with a lot of rules and requirements, you know that?” she said, not even bothering to ask why.
“Yeah, well, I have my reasons.”
“Sometimes it’s good to reexamine your reasons. You may just find that they’re outdated and no longer serve a purpose.”
He marched past her and said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Soon, they reached an area where they could barely make out a trail. Toward the ocean was a steep drop, so they veered inland slightly. The clearest way was through the kiawe. With the taller trees, the air cooled. There was a desolate, stark beauty to the place. Lu felt it, and she sensed that Russi did, too, because he stopped complaining. Ten minutes later, they reached a tiny salt-and-pepper sand beach, not more than thirty feet wide.
Lu rushed down to splash some water on her face, and run her wet hands along the back of her neck and her arms. Russi hung back.
“You want some?” she asked.
“What do you think?” he said, taking off his hat.
She cupped some in her hands and walked up to him. He closed his eyes and let her splash it on his face. The moment felt oddly intimate. They drank hot water out of their canteens and discussed the next route to take. One trail, which was just a series of smooth stones, went close to the water, the other inland.
“Should we split up?” she asked.
“Nah, I don’t want to have to come rescue you, too. Let’s go up through the trees and come back along the water,” he said.
So they did. Lu led, Russi followed.
She tried another approach to get him talking. “Did you meet any women while you were stationed in Hawai‘i?”
He groaned. “I should have taken the low road.”
“I’m just curious. There were so many wartime romances, it’s a natural question.”
“Sure, I met a lot of fine ladies.”
“Anyone special?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. She was my buddy’s sister and she was the smartest person I ever knew, and the most down-to-earth. A real stunner.” Russi went silent for a bit, and she only heard the crunch of his boots on the lava. “We had a good time,” he said quietly.
“What was her name?” Lu asked.
“Izzy.”
“What happened? Why aren’t you still with her?”
“Sorry, kid, you’ve passed your allotted questions for the day,” he said.
“Oh, please. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to get some of this off your chest. Think of it as practice for telling your story,” she said, half turning and giving him a pleading look.
“There you go again. You ever hear the word finesse? It works wonders when you’re trying to get information out of people. Right now, let’s concentrate on our mission out here.” He stopped and looked around. “Do you even know where you’re going?”
“I do.”
Five minutes later, they were ducking through kiawe, going in circles. Sweat dripped off the tip of her nose.
“If Joni came out here, this same thing could have happened to her,” she said, then called out into the thicket. “Joni! Hello?”
Russi’s T-shirt was dripping wet and clung to his arms and chest. For an old guy, he sure kept himself in shape. “If this is some cockamamie plan to get me in the water, you may just succeed,” he said, fanning himself with the bottom half of his shirt.
They were all turned around, and Lu was mad at herself for letting this happen. She listened for the sound of the ocean and would have headed toward it, but a wall of gnarled trees stood in their way. Instead, they climbed down a small crack in the lava and followed it a ways until it ended at a large opening. By the time they reached it, Lu was covered in old spiderwebs.
Russi stopped. “What do we have here?” he said.
Lu stepped into the mouth of the cave and felt a burst of cooler air. “Lava tube. They’re all over the place on this island. Some go on for miles.”
The tunnel was almost high enough to stand in, and thirty or so yards in, the top had collapsed, creating a natural skylight.
“Joni, you in there, girl?” Russi called, his voice swallowed by rock.
The possibility of Joni making it into this off-the-beaten-path lava tube were almost nil, but something drew Lu in, anyway. “You wait here, I just want to walk to the skylight and look around.”
“What’s the point? Let’s get out of this godforsaken forest before we cook.”
“I’ll be fast.”
The bottom of the lava tube was mostly smooth, but she had to watch the top, where chunks of lava and root clusters hung down. The faint scent of animal poop filled the tunnel. Mongoose, probably. But there was another, older smell, one of decay and darkness. Goose bumps formed on her arms. As Lu neared the pool of light, her foot kicked something hollow. Definitely not a rock. At first she thought it was a coconut, but when she looked down, she saw the white.
She jumped back. “Oh my God!”
“What is it?” Russi yelled.
“Bones.”
Her first thought was pig, but the skull, which was what she kicked, looked round. Lu had seen enough wild-boar skulls to know that they were angular and more jaw than anything. Her uncle was a big hunter and helped eradicate them from the farm now and then. She also knew that there were Hawaiian burial caves in the area, but those had been closed up with rock to preserve their contents. Crouching down, her eyes adjusted enough to see the form of a skeleton splayed out around her.
“What kind of bones?” he asked.
“Human, possibly,” she said, moving carefully backward to avoid stepping on anything.
His voice grew louder. “Are we talking new bones or old bones?”
“Old. But how old it’s hard to tell.”
The next thing she knew, Russi was beside her. “You weren’t kidding, were you? Jesus. Is this one of those Hawaiian burial caves?”
“I doubt it. There would be other things in here with the bones. Like lauhala mats or wooden bowls or even canoes. And probably more skeletons.”
Russi shivered. “I got a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, like we don’t belong here. We oughta split. Now we have two mysteries on our hands.”
Lu walked over to the skylight and checked for a way beyond. But the rockfall blocked any chance of seeing what else might be there. “If there are more, Mother Nature has closed their tomb permanently. But this one doesn’t seem that old, does it?” she said.
“I’m no expert, but no, it doesn’t.”
There was something unnerving about standing in a dark cave with an unknown dead person. Lu looked around for signs of clothes or jewelry or other human artifacts, and then realized that under the pile of ribs there was a reddish piece of material. She stepped away.
“This is creepy—let’s go back,” she said.
“What about Joni?”
“You were right, I don’t think Joni would have made it ten steps off the golf course.”
They somehow managed to find their way out of the thicket, and Lu tied her bandanna on a kiawe tree. Every tree and rock on this stretch of coast looked the same, and she wanted to be sure they could find the cave again. They were quiet as they stayed close to the water’s edge on the way back to the hotel, Lu lost in thought about who the bones might have once been. What kind of person would be so far off the beaten path? Lost sailor? Fisherman?
When they passed the orange trees, near the Buddha statue, Russi picked one and peeled it in ten seconds flat, handing her a juicy piece of flesh. They found Mr. Rockefeller outside the Dining Pavilion talking to Mr. Buttonwood.
Russi leaned into Lu and spoke quietly. “Don’t mention anything about the skeleton until we have Rockefeller alone. We don’t want to get people worked up for no reason, and skeletons have that tendency.”
They approached the men. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Russi said. “I’m sorry to report that there was no sign of Miss Diaz up north. Any luck on this end?”
“One of our guys found a pair of women’s shoes on the rocks out toward the point. Stanley wasn’t sure but thinks they may belong to Joni. I’ve called in the police.”
Up until this moment, she’d been holding out hope that this was all just a big mistake. That surely Joni had taken off on a whim and would come strolling back from wherever she’d gone in time for a sunset cocktail and the green flash.
“Until we know for sure, let’s not jump to conclusions,” Rockefeller said.
Mr. Buttonwood excused himself, and when they told Mr. Rockefeller of their find, his face pinched up in concern. “We surveyed every square inch of this place before breaking ground. My team would have found a skeleton,” he said.
She doubted it was that new.
“It’s possible we were beyond the resort boundaries. We passed over an old rock wall, and got ourselves lost, which is the only reason we stumbled upon it,” Lu told him.
Rockefeller shook his head, looking out on the water. “One lost, another found. Not exactly what I had planned for the weekend.”
“We plan, God laughs,” Russi said.