‘What’s interesting and why I wanted to catch you this morning is that your expert was right. Two or three of those landscape photos were taken with a very high resolution camera. It either belonged to the US government or a movie maker, a film company. When are you coming back?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Well, have a drink on me somewhere on the island later this afternoon. Thanks again for your help with Drury.’ He sounded cautiously upbeat, adding, ‘We’re farther along than we were a day ago.’
Raveneau got back out of the car after hanging up with Coe. He double-checked the big rock across the highway below he was going to use as a landmark. He checked the house again. It sat on a notch cut into the long-falling slope. Someone must have driven a bulldozer up there and cut a flat pad to build the house on. He wouldn’t see much of the roof from the highway below. He would see the trees where the dirt track came up from and figured there were other ranch buildings down there also. He glanced at the coastline once more. None of the resorts in the distance to the south were in the photo.
Now he drove north toward Hawi. When he got there he picked up a text from Celeste, ‘Remember the Kona.’ She wanted him to pick up samples of a Kona coffee she couldn’t find in the Bay Area. Raveneau didn’t know when he was going to do that or how before flying out tomorrow.
He texted back after going into a little shop to get a coffee to-go. ‘Drinking Kona right now.’
He left Hawi and the road was one lane in either direction and then widened to two. The morning was warming and he could feel the change as he followed an old pickup in the slow lane. He studied the long upslope on his left and as he spotted the landmark rock ahead he slowed even more. Then he was past and knew he’d gone too far. After turning around he pulled over next to a local cop waiting for speeders. Raveneau showed his San Francisco homicide star and explained what he was looking for.
‘Look for aluminum gates,’ the officer said. ‘They open out. You have to close them for cattle and you need to go to the ranch house first. They don’t like people they don’t know on their property.’
‘I’ll introduce myself.’
Five minutes later he found the gates.
THIRTY-TWO
The gates were double-latched, but not locked, the No Trespassing signs impossible to miss. The gates swung across a cattle grate and against a barbed wire fence. Raveneau drove through then closed them again. The road climbed very steeply and he went left at the first fork. It continued the same steep rise before leveling and starting north across the slope and then rising over a lip to an unexpected flat area with a big ranch house and barn set back among a stand of trees.
The house was two-story, deep and long with a porch running down the front and a tall steep roof facing the ocean. A large screened lanai was on the far end and at the north end was the barn. Two vehicles, a yellow jeep open to the air and a brown late model Toyota pickup sat in front of the house. So somebody was home. He parked near the cars then went up the steps to the long porch and knocked on the front door.
After a minute he tried again, and when no one answered walked down the porch to the lanai. Presumptuous maybe, but this was Hawaii, and the people did seem more laidback. He figured it was warm enough that someone might be inside the screened room. But he didn’t see anyone.
He crossed to the barn. He opened a door and it was cool and dark inside. When he called hello no one answered and he returned to the house and slid one of his cards in between the front door and jamb. Then he figured he could justify driving the ranch roads looking for the owner so when he got back down to the last fork, instead of continuing down he turned on to a narrow broken asphalt road barely wider than his rental.
It was potholed. It wasn’t used much. Grass and plants grew from cracks. It doubled back in a hair pin turn, climbed steeply, and it struck Raveneau that he was yet to see a place to turn the car around. He reached a stand of trees and another fork, one that was a continuation of the road he was on, and the other just a faint track moving into the trees. He studied both and then got out the photo again. This looked like the right spot.
Follow this dirt track up, he thought. He climbed slowly up through the pines and after the car bottomed-out a couple of times he decided to walk from here. The dirt track was steep. He drew deep breaths but was even more confident when he saw the dirt track emerging in a straight line up from the trees. He climbed thinking the only way up here was in a four-wheel drive. Halfway up the last steep pitch he saw the blue rusted roof of the house.
When he reached the flat he caught his breath, and then looked across the ocean at Maui and understood why they built it here. He pulled his phone and took photos of the house and the site. On this end of the house was a palm tree and what had once been a gravel pad big enough for a vehicle to park and turn around. It was hot in the sun along the front of the house and shady as he walked around the back of the house past a palm tree at the corner. A rusted air conditioning unit sat on a concrete pad.
He looked through a dusty window into an empty room, saw sliding doors on the other side, a wood ceiling stained by leaks, flooring warped where water had gotten to it. It was nearly all glass along this face. Light fixtures hung on pendants and the name Eichler came to him, but he couldn’t remember whether Eichler was an architect or a builder or both. But it was that style.
Or it was once that style. No one had lived here in a long time, not Jim Frank, not anyone. He continued walking down the side looking in through the sliding doors anywhere he could. He worked his way around to the sun and the front facing the ocean, and rattled a locked sliding door remembering Ryan Candel tapping the blue-painted metal roof in the photo and saying,
‘This is my dad’s house. I don’t know where it is, but that’s the house my mom said was his and she called it paradise. She said she could live the rest of her life there. When I was little she used to say, we’ll get there someday, and when I got old enough to realize that was never going to happen, I mean, I was probably thirteen by then, but she was that good in making you believe in stuff. When I finally realized it I yelled at her, don’t ever show me that picture again. I can still remember how shocked she was and how she still tried to smile. If I could take something back, it would be that. I don’t even know where it came from in me that night. It just kind of exploded out of me. My mom needed to believe. That’s how she got by and I ruined that for her.’
Raveneau saw furniture. He saw a stack of papers, yellowed and sitting on a kitchen counter. He returned to the back and debated several minutes before putting some muscle into lifting one of the old sliding doors off its track. He picked it up, lifted it out, and set it carefully against the wall as the house exhaled the stale air from inside.
He didn’t step inside yet. He walked back along the side of the house to the parking area and looked down the track to the trees and his car shadowed there. If he discovered a document what was he going to do with it? He didn’t have a search warrant. It was breaking and entering no matter how gently he put the sliding door back on its track when he finished.
But then he wasn’t going to be here tomorrow and the house had clearly been empty for a long time. The house looked abandoned. He walked back and stepped inside. The living room had one piece of furniture, a side table that was empty except for four or five bamboo place mats. The smallest of three bedrooms held no furniture. The next bedroom had a chair and a nightstand, and a headboard but no other part of the bed. The third bedroom had a dresser with drawers that didn’t operate well. Closets were empty. Some pots in the kitchen but no utensils or appliances left other than an oven. He found some papers inside the oven and went through those and learned nothing although he did find a folded yellowed bit of newspaper with the date May 21, 2003.