Hawaiian Crosswinds Page 28

  Rafe didn’t want to take a chance and excuse a stolen journal, only to find out one day in the future that a medical researcher named Herald Hartley had stepped over the line and become responsible for another death or disablement through some bizarre error.

  At times Hartley had come across as having a tender conscience—such as when he disappointed Dr. Jerome, or shamed himself in stealing the journal. Rafe, however, remembered what Eden had told him yesterday about his hardness of heart. She had read Hartley correctly.

  Dr. Jerome, standing behind Hartley, turned his head in Rafe’s direction and caught his gaze. Jerome, his face drawn, gave a sober nod to Rafe. He then slipped out of his office and went to send a message to Marshal Harper.

  Rafe turned his back and looked out the window.

  The interpretation of the law in Hartley’s situation was not Rafe’s to decide. He had what he needed to know about Hartley, and as far as he was concerned, he was through with the matter. Dr. Jerome had already told him he wouldn’t be going to Molokai as his assistant. Rafe could leave Honolulu with a certain amount of satisfaction and peace that Eden would not be in danger from a man who had his integrity as scrambled as his morning eggs.

  He looked at the time. As soon as the marshal arrived he was going back to the hotel.

  When he saw the marshal alight from a buggy, Rafe left Hartley sitting in the chair, his head still in his hands.

  Outside, the sun beat down, and the harbor waters glittered. Rafe explained the issue of the journal. Dr. Jerome was innocent of any knowledge of it having been taken from Dr. Chen’s Chinatown house in San Francisco.

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Harper said, pushing his hat back from his forehead and biting on the end of his stogie.

  “Queen Liliuokalani is likely to approve Dr. Derrington’s clinic for the leper colony,” Rafe told him. “Try and keep this journal business out of the newspapers, will you?”

  “No reason for any mention of it, seems to me, Easton. Say—” he cracked a smile. “You wouldn’t want to come to work as a detective for the department, would you?”

  Rafe smiled. “Only in my spare time, Marshal. Besides, I’m off to San Francisco soon. The work isn’t finished yet.”

  The marshal grew grave. “Townsend, is it? Well, you be careful, Easton. I’ve had a few street chasers with that fellow when he was younger. Always a wild one. Nothing like the rest of the family. The seed of Cain, that’s what those kind are called. As for Hartley, I’ll need to contact San Francisco about the Dr. Chen case. I don’t know that much about it. But Hartley doesn’t seem like a murderer to me.”

  Rafe then went on to tell him briefly about the Chen situation as he knew of it. “Dr. Jerome can better answer the medical questions. Here’s what I’ve been told:

  “There was a postmortem soon after Chen was found dead in his Chinatown residence. A ruling followed of accidental death by a self-inflicted overdose of research drugs. Chen was known to be researching. Here’s where the San Francisco police may be wrong: they claim he has no family in the US and there is no certain whereabouts of relatives he corresponded with in Shanghai. But Hartley is certain the kingpin you’re trying to locate for questioning is his cousin. He saw him leave Chen’s residence not later than twenty minutes after his death.”

  Marshal Harper was scribbling down notes. “Any talk of a will, legal paper granting the right of personal research papers to Dr. Jerome Derrington, or to the research department at Kalihi Hospital?”

  “Good point. I wonder. That would surely help to solve the issue.”

  “I’ll check on it. There probably wasn’t any mention in the police file, nor evidence that he entrusted a journal to Herald Hartley for Dr. Derrington.”

  “I think Hartley is right when he says you need look no further for the murderer than the opium kingpin. The same tyrant who gave the order to assassinate Sen Fong. Hartley saw Sen Fong outside Dr. Chen’s house. The kingpin was coming out the front door. They were cousins. Perhaps bitter enemies.”

  “I’ll look into it, Easton. And I’ll wire the San Francisco police chief tonight. I think we can get through. Well, good hunting on your trip to the mainland. Keep in touch. I’d like to know what happens.”

  “I will. If you need me I’ll be at the Royal Hawaiian tonight.”

  Rafe left Kakaako and returned to his suite. He drew out his baggage and stashed the manifesto inside until tomorrow when he would attend the meeting of the Reform Party in the Legislature. It would be excellent news for old Hunnewell to learn his work had been unexpectedly discovered on the eve of their departure to San Francisco. Rafe would omit elaborating on the details. By the time the Reform Party meeting was over in the cloakroom at Aliiolani Hale, Dr. Jerome would already be across the street at Iolani Palace receiving permission from the queen to build his research clinic. Little could go awry now—he hoped. At least there would be no scandal to tarnish Jerome’s Christian reputation. And in that, God would be honored. That was the all-important issue at stake in Rafe’s mind.

  He packed the clothing he expected to use on the voyage to the mainland. He also included the medicine bottle Great-aunt Nora had entrusted to him to take to the San Francisco authorities. When he’d finished packing, he took a bath and changed his clothes.

  He would put all this aside until tomorrow. He looked at the time. He would have liked to return to Hanalei for the night for a final oversee of the plantation under Keno’s care before the long stay in San Francisco, but there wasn’t time.

  Keno … he was over at Hawaiiana. I’d better talk to him this afternoon. There’s the Oliver situation to tell him about, and Ainsworth’s land offer to settle.

  Afterward, a simple and quiet evening with Ambrose and Noelani was just what he wanted leading up to tomorrow. The one thing missing was Eden, but he would see her tomorrow evening for dinner here at the hotel. Her rich green eyes came before him, the lush feel of her hair in his fingers, the soft, warm lips—one day she would be all his.

  Irritated by the thought of the long delay till that day, he left the hotel and went in search of his equally deprived and irritated cohort, Keno. At least the news he had was good where Candace was concerned. Oliver was a British spy. Not a likely candidate to sit opposite Candace at the dinner table each evening at Kea Lani while listening to Ainsworth lecturing on the merits of annexation of Hawaii to the US.

  Rafe smiled. Keno was going to have some ammunition that could win back Candace.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  The Letter

  Rafe felt an agonizing headache coming on. He was lounging in a chair in the large screened room at Hawaiiana, furnished with magnificent native woods and green with potted ferns. Through a narrowed gaze he watched Keno striding back and forth across the polished floor, his heels making clicking sounds like a tap dancer.

  Rafe shut his eyes, fingers on his forehead, and groaned. “Will you stop that? It’s driving me nuts.”

  “Stop what?” Keno asked. “I’ve got to think.”

  “So do I. That’s the trouble.” Rafe pushed himself up off the chair. “Okay, Keno, enough prancing about. You know what to write her. You’re anything but tongue-tied. Now get the letter written and I’ll see that she receives it today.”

  Keno ran his nervous fingers through his hair. “Imagine the nerve of Mr. Derrington. Trying to buy me off like that. And thinking he could use you as the third party. Why, didn’t it even enter his mind what something like that could do to our friendship?”

  “It would have convinced you. That’s what mattered to him.” Rafe poured himself a cup of coffee. He looked at the time. “I’ve got to leave for Iolani in an hour. Dr. Jerome is meeting with the queen. Hartley will be with him.”

  Keno frowned to himself. “Ainsworth was right about using you as the third party—it would have convinced me all right. Say—” Keno looked at him almost meekly. “Were you serious about making a way for me to buy into Hawaiiana?”

  “You’ve known me sin
ce we were around ten years old. What do you think? It’s past overdue, actually.”

  “Yeah sure, I knew you meant it, pal. But it’s just too generous.”

  “No. You and Candace need to start off right. We don’t want her money to start your successful plantation. This has got to be your endeavor. And we don’t want Hunnewell money either—though, if later on, Hunnewell wants to do you justice as his younger brother’s son, I’d accept it. It’s not charity, you know; you deserve it as much as Oliver.”

  “He won’t offer me anything.”

  “One never knows. He’s a decent man, though not discerning at times. I was going to talk to him on the steamer.”

  “Well, he’s better than Oliver.”

  Rafe kept from smiling. “And now, the love letter to Candace. Let’s see … ah! Tell her you’re going to have your own plantation as soon as Parker Judson draws the contract up in San Francisco—”

  “What if he refuses to cooperate?”

  “He won’t. Tell her you’ve won half of Hawaiiana by the sweat of your brow. Just the way a man ought to make his success, not because you were born a Hunnewell. Tell her your sons—which are bound to be many—will grow up to be men to carry on the work the that both of you will create together. Your sons—”

  “Wait, pal. She’ll ask what’s wrong with daughters. I know her. She’ll favor girls.”

  “All right. Our daughters won’t be like Oliver, either.”

  “She wouldn’t expect our daughters to be like Oliver.”

  “Just write the letter.”

  Keno went to the writing desk and looked back at Rafe. Rafe had leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He looked tired. He had a right to be. If he hadn’t chased this mystery down for the last week, where would any of them be now?

  Keno picked up the pen and gritted his teeth as he wrote.

  Rafe came to see me today and told me everything. Eden talked to Ambrose and decided it was all right to break a vow if the vow was based on a false premise. So she explained to Rafe what happened at Koko Head between you and your grandfather.

  I wouldn’t accept land from your grandfather under these circumstances. He knows that, so he tried to use Rafe as a third party to keep his actions in the shadows. I’ll earn my own success and land, or I won’t have any. But I will get my own plantation. Rafe and I made an agreement before we left for French Guiana—maybe you remember? As soon as Hawaiiana became successful Rafe and I would start the next plantation and this one would be mine and yours. At the time you were happy about it. I believed you.

  Tears sprang to Candace’s eyes. Could she ever forget that night when he told her he was taking to sea with Rafe? And that it was to earn his own plantation? Their own plantation. Of course she remembered.

  Candace wiped her eyes. She sat in her room with the letter on her lap. It had arrived only minutes ago, brought by a smiling Hawaiian boy of around twelve who worked for Rafe Easton. She had seen the boy before, on both Hawaiiana and Hanalei.

  Candace read on—

  Now I know why you walked away and told your grandfather you’d marry Oliver. You thought you were doing it for my benefit, also to protect my future in Hawaii. Even so, how could you believe I could be happy without you? That land would satisfy me? It is you in my arms I want. I’ve loved you for years. I’d rather have you than all of Hawaii at my feet.

  Candace’s heart thumped faster. Keno … my darling Keno.

  So Oliver is a British spy. Well, I have the perfect solution to our problem. Either he gets on the steamer with Mr. Hunnewell for the mainland, or I’m going to have a talk with his father. Oliver doesn’t know this, but I remember having seen him in the garden that evening. He was in the bushes by the gate. Now that Silas has told Rafe that it was Oliver who knocked Zach unconscious, and tried to steal the political papers from the Reform Party, I can bear witness against the turncoat. So he’d sell out his father, Hawaii, and the good old USA? Well! Let him go live in London!

  Rafe has stated that both he and Silas will be witnesses against Oliver if he doesn’t board the steamer for San Francisco. I’m going to have the pleasure of telling him so.

  Oh no, she thought, with an idea that she should do something about it. This could end in something far worse than the Hunnewell garden fiasco. I must do something, but what?

  My precious Candace, I want to see you. If you love me come down to the beach around five o’clock. Don’t disappoint me.

  K.

  Candace folded the sheet of paper and walked over to the writing desk. Her hands were cold and damp. She picked up the pen, and straightening her shoulders with determination she wrote.

  Dear Oliver,

  I must see you at once. It’s urgent. Come to Kea Lani. I’ll be expecting you.

  Candace.

  With that, she called for Luna, the messenger boy who worked at Kea Lani, and sent him with her letter to Hunnewell’s beach house.

  Candace looked through the front window. Was Oliver coming or not? She watched anxiously. A few minutes later Oliver drove up in a small buggy. She glanced over her shoulder toward the stairway. Grandfather Ainsworth would be down soon for his late afternoon coffee before the dinner hour.

  Earlier, she’d thought the family would be away in Honolulu when Oliver arrived, since Great-aunt Nora and even Zachary had gone with Uncle Jerome to Queen Liliuokalani at Iolani Palace. Eden must have departed earlier for Kalihi, where she would later join them at Iolani. At any rate, by now the meeting should be over and the long-sought-for clinic approved; its likelihood of being turned down by the queen was small. Uncle Jerome had Great-aunt Nora’s loyal friendship and support of the queen to be grateful for. Without Nora, the audience at Iolani Palace would still be on the list of delayed items. By now Uncle Jerome and Herald Hartley should be making immediate plans to depart for Molokai, Eden with them.

  Also, Rafe would board the steamer on Sunday to the mainland to try to locate Townsend. Grandfather Ainsworth was going, and also Zachary.

  The family dealings would certainly be altered at Kea Lani after tomorrow with the absence of so many. If it hadn’t been for the discussion she’d overheard between Oliver and the British agent, her life too would have been forever changed. Her grandfather had wanted the engagement and public ceremony to take place tonight, before he departed Honolulu.

  Candace slipped out the front door, closing it quietly.

  The late afternoon was pleasant. The aquamarine sky appeared windswept, the low tides rolling gently inward across warm, white sand.

  Her gaze centered on Oliver, but her heart was for Keno.

  Oliver’s golden brown coloring contrasted with his unusually dark suit, along with a white ruffled shirt front and a derby hat. She disliked his pencil mustache that was artfully waxed, at the height of city fashion. She descended the front steps and swiftly walked to meet him as he stepped down from his fine buggy with leather seats.

  “Well, this is an enthusiastic greeting,” he boasted. “My dear Candace, how lovely you look today.”

  “We must talk. Let’s walk toward the beach, shall we?”

  Oliver looked down at his boots, polished to a meticulous shine.

  “Why not take a pleasant jaunt in the buggy?”

  “I’d rather not, Oliver. If not the beach, then let’s walk on the path toward the road. I feel restless and wish some exercise before dinner.”

  The veneer of a smile showed on his wide mouth. “You don’t plan to meet someone on the road, do you?”

  “Now why would you think so? Such mistrust in the woman you’ve agreed to make your wife.”

  He laughed lightly, looked up at the hot sun burning in the sky, and as they set out he noticed she carried no umbrella. “Even young ladies in San Francisco, with all its summer fog, carry pretty umbrellas, my dear. Shouldn’t you go back for one if you insist on walking the road—an unpleasant place to be walking, actually, don’t you think?”

  “No. If I’d thought it unpleasan
t, Oliver, I wouldn’t have suggested it. Would I?”

  He was becoming irritated with her. She deliberately tightened her mouth and looked cross. “I was born and raised in the tropics, unlike you. Umbrellas are fashionable in the city, I suppose, but I like the Honolulu weather.” Actually, she used umbrellas almost every time she went out. “You’re more of a city slicker than you are a true Hawaiian,” she said, and drew her brows together. “Do you think you’ll ever adjust to beach sand in your shoes and loose shirts, even shirts unbuttoned at the neck?”

  “My dear Candace. I’m a Hunnewell, am I not? Naturally I’m a Hawaiian.”

  “Oh. There is some word drifting about that you’re quite English.”

  His caramelized brown eyes swerved to capture her gaze. The intensity of that look sought for any meaning that might undermine his charade.

  “Well, Keno is a Hunnewell too,” she said. “Did you know?”

  His smile vanished. A hardness came to his features, and a slight lift of his head.

  “Where did you hear such rubbish?”

  “I think we should make certain that your father grants Keno his right to a satisfying Hunnewell inheritance, don’t you? Something to make up for the disrespectful way your family has treated him since he was born. After all, your father simply must know his younger brother Philip produced a child by Noelani’s younger sister.”

  Candace was walking quickly along the pathway to the road that ran in front of Kea Lani, leading toward the mission church and Hawaiiana—not that she intended to go there! She glanced at Oliver to see his reaction to her blunt words. Was she going too far to goad him out of his façade?

  As she expected, his mouth was tightly sealed; a ruddy bloom flared under his high cheekbones. He stalked along beside her, his arms swinging.

  “Don’t you think so?” she repeated, trying to force an answer from him that he did not want to give. “I mean, Keno P. Hunnewell is your half-brother. A little money flowing his way like a bubbling little brook is the just thing for your father to do.”