The plane cart-wheeled, its forward momentum carrying it through the air for half a revolution, so that for one long, strange, dizzy second they were looking straight down into the floodlit water, tumbling tail-first. Claudia’s ear was warm and wet with blood. She had hit her head on something but had never felt it. Helplessly suspended upside down in her harness, seemingly suspended in time and space, she saw the tow bar and a pair of sunglasses on a lanyard float past the windshield, caught in the glare of the landing lights.
Like in The Wizard of Oz, she thought dazedly, when Dorothy was inside the tornado and things were whizzing all around her…
No, no, it’s only the baggage locker that’s popped open, she told herself. It was her last coherent thought. When the left wing hit the water the fourth time, there was a terrible rending of metal, and the plane bounced once more, hung heavily in the air for another endless moment, and flopped with a terrific, bursting impact onto its belly. Claudia never heard Torkelsson’s cut-off scream.
In silence, the mortally wounded airplane lay on the surface, its cabin filling with water, its occupants slumped forward in their harnesses, unmoving.
It took a long time for it to sink in the warm, shallow lagoon, and when it did the strut of its nose wheel collapsed, so that the plane tipped gently forward onto its nose cone, only the tail still breaking the surface. The landing lights remained on for a while, outlining the plane’s dark, broken silhouette and making a lovely, luminescent fairy ring of turquoise and white in the black, still waters. Then they blinked out.
TWO
June 8, 2004, Hulopo’e Beach Estates,
North Kohala Coast, Big Island of Hawaii
At eighty-two, Dagmar Torkelsson was less inclined to melancholy than many people with half her years. She rarely dwelt on old regrets or might-have-beens, or on the losses, physical and emotional, that came with age. But on this particular afternoon, seated on the memorial bench that she herself had purchased for the community’s cliff walk in the name of her long-dead brothers Torkel, Magnus, and Andreas, her thoughts were of the past; of Torkel and Magnus in particular.
The path, as usual, was deserted despite the twelve sumptuous homes in the walled, gated community. Few of the residents did much walking there, which was fine with Dagmar as long as a portion of their homeowner dues continued to go for upkeep. The existence of this lovely path had been the final selling point that had convinced her to purchase there, despite the obscene price (which she could certainly afford, but which offended her sensibilities all the same). Hugging the rims of rocky, surf-splashed coves where green sea turtles could often be seen just below the surface of the water, it wound for a quarter-mile, mostly out of sight of the homes. In all the years she had lived there, she could count on the fingers of her two hands the days she had failed to stroll it, even when her arthritis required a cane or sometimes-hateful, clumsy thing-a walker.
She had had the bench placed at the cliff walk’s highest, prettiest spot, a few feet off the path, at the tip of a little promontory that overlooked what she thought of as her own private cove twenty feet below. There she knew the resident sea turtles by sight and had given them names of old friends they reminded her of, regardless of the fact that she didn’t know and didn’t want to know how to tell the males from the females. Most days would find her seated here at four-fifteen, forty-five minutes before her dinner was delivered. For three quarters of an hour she would contentedly smoke her two pre-prandial cigarillos, sip her pre-prandial schnapps from the worked silver cap of the antique flask that had come with her from Sweden such a long time ago, and delicately toss canned sardines in tomato sauce to the turtles, using a linen napkin to wipe her fingers between tosses. She had decided that they preferred the tomato sauce variety to those that came in oil when she concluded that the strange grunts they sometimes uttered were expressions of appreciation. Dessert, as always, would be pieces of cinnamon bun left over from her breakfast.
Usually, her mind was pleasantly empty of all but her surroundings when she sat here; the ever-present warm breeze, the murmuring of the ocean, the rustling of the palm fronds, the salt air. When anything approaching a complete thought crossed her mind, it was likely to be of her own dinner to come. As a resident of Hulopo’e Beach Estates she had a membership at the posh Mauna Kai Resort a few hundred yards up the coast; and while the tennis and golf privileges didn’t do her much good, she took full advantage of the access to their maid services, their kitchens, and their catering. Her home was cleaned by Mauna Kai staff every other week, and her dinners came from their menu at least four times a week; six or seven, if you counted leftovers. The good-looking young waiter with the black, bedroom eyes would put the meal on her dining-terrace table, then politely come and get her, proffering his arm to be leaned on. It was all very nice.
Tonight it would be rack of lamb crusted with macadamia nuts, with tiramisu for dessert. Ordinarily, that would be enough to occupy whatever stray thoughts she happened to have, but not this afternoon. Her mind, for reasons she didn’t know, was on the past, the distant past of the 1950s and 1960s. On how hard those early years on the ranch had been; on how the four of them had worked to make something of it. There had been few days on which her brothers had not come home at night stinking of sweat, cattle, and horses, so drawn and fatigued they could barely speak, and sometimes so tired they couldn’t eat but would fall into bed in their clothes. And Dagmar herself had not only worked right out on the range with them when they needed her, but had fed them, and kept the house spotless, to say nothing of keeping up their often-sagging spirits.
Later, when they’d turned the corner and the Hoaloha Ranch was on its way to becoming a profitable enterprise, she hadn’t had to work on the range anymore, but for almost five years she’d cooked three big meals a day for twenty-five hungry cowboys and ranch workers and had done it all by herself, including the shopping and clean-up. Once, she’d kept count of the number of dishes and implements she’d had to wash in a typical week. It had come to 1,050 cups and glasses, 1,323 dishes, 1,890 utensils, and 126 pots and pans. And that was before automatic dishwashers. It seemed unthinkable to her now.
In addition to all that, she’d managed the accounts and supervised the payroll, no easy tasks during the lean years, when staying one step ahead of their creditors had been honed to a fine art, and the cash flow was so negative that one week out of four, on average, there was no money to pay the men.
She and her brothers had juggled and planned and gone without in anticipation of the time when the grueling work would pay off and the ever-expanding ranch would be carrying its own weight and more or less running itself. The brothers would then be real managers-managers on horseback-not glorified laborers. They would all get out of the miserable shack in which they lived and build a big, rambling ranch house for themselves-already they knew they would call it the Big House, as in those Westerns-where Dagmar would supervise the kitchen and household help instead of being it.
That time had eventually come, although Andreas had not lived to see it, but with human nature being what it was, it had failed to bring perfect happiness. Though none of them would admit it, they had missed the exhilaration of building something from nothing. Maintaining a cattle empire was pale stuff compared to carving one out. Dagmar, plagued by arthritis in her worn-out joints by then, had begun to dream of the days when the ranch was behind her and she could move down the mountain to the warmer, sunnier coast as a woman of leisure. And to be perfectly honest, she couldn’t wait for a house of her own, away from the two meddling, quarrelsome old men she had lived with almost her entire adult life. For peace.