Hawaiian Crosswinds Page 9

  “Certain,” Zachary stated coolly. “I just told you so.”

  Zach’s certainty had been proven wrong before. He’d been certain some two months ago that it was Silas who’d secretly entered Great-aunt Nora’s house on Koko Head to steal the manuscript she was writing on the Derrington family’s beginnings in the Islands. The man, it turned out, was not Silas, but Townsend. Rafe decided it was pointless to argue with him about it now.

  “All right. So Silas stood outside the hospital. Then what?”

  “Maybe five minutes later out walks my uncle.”

  “Dr. Jerome Derrington, right?”

  “Of course!”

  “Just want the facts straight. Go on.”

  “I would if you wouldn’t keep harassing me!”

  “Here, have some more coffee.” Rafe poured, trying not to scowl.

  “So out walks Uncle Jerome.”

  “Was Jerome alone?” Rafe asked smoothly.

  “No.”

  Rafe’s gaze shot to Zachary’s.

  “Another man was with Jerome, a medical colleague, I think, though I can’t say for sure.

  “At first, I just thought Uncle Jerome was going home to Kea Lani, that he was merely walking out with a colleague. Then they’d separate and go their own way. It was about the usual time he leaves his research and returns to the plantation. So I took it for granted Silas had come to meet him and they’d go home together in the family coach.”

  “Did you see the Derrington coach?”

  “No, but I thought it might be parked down the road. The idea is, that isn’t what happened.” Zachary quickly gulped his coffee. He was getting excited again.

  “Instead, Silas moved back behind the palm trees. He didn’t want to be seen.”

  Rafe thought back to the Annexation Club meeting at Hunnewell’s. Silas had arrived with Ainsworth, but there’d been definite gaps of time when he could have slipped away and walked to Kalihi Hospital where Zachary believed he saw him. Perhaps Silas even had time to visit the gambling den at Rat Alley, though that would be more difficult. His return to Hunnewell’s would easily go unnoticed, especially during the cookout meal they’d had on the beach, when the men were coming and going from the house to the cook-pit near the shore.

  Rafe remembered that someone else had been late in arriving, in fact, very late, and that was Oliver. His father had become irritated.

  “So Uncle Jerome comes down the hospital steps, and off he goes walking quickly. But not alone. The medical colleague is with him. They take off at a brisk walk for the houses near Waikiki. Then Jerome is not returning to Kea Lani yet, I thought. He’s just out for a stroll with his friend. I would have forgotten the matter and gone my way except for Silas.”

  “He follows his uncle?”

  “Yes, and he didn’t call out for him to wait, either, so he might join him in the stroll. He trailed him, not wanting to be seen. My hackles were up by then. I wondered why, so I went after the three of them, making sure they didn’t hear me following.”

  Zachary stopped and scowled. “I know what you’re going to say, that I shouldn’t have been following my uncle and Silas like that.”

  Rafe was not thinking that at all. He was wishing he had been there to gather the facts for himself.

  “Keep in mind it was Silas I was watching, not Uncle Jerome,” Zachary said stiffly.

  “You don’t need to make excuses. Just go on, Zach.”

  “All right. Next thing I realize we’ve walked to the Hunnewell beach house. There’s a thick wall of trees that line the wrought-iron fence, as you probably know. A man comes out from those trees. By now it’s dark. Still, I see he’s Oriental, Chinese, dressed in some fancy garment that may have been silk.”

  Rafe was now intently listening. “The Oriental was alone?”

  “Yes, but off down the road I glimpsed several other men standing by a hackney. I may be fevered, but I’d insist they had swords!”

  Silk and swords. The two together told Rafe the Chinaman was no ordinary sugarcane worker, or vegetable seller hawking his wares on the Honolulu streets, not even a proprietor of a gambling den in Rat Alley, though he likely had come from there.

  “Jerome and this silken Oriental stand and talk in low tones for a good ten minutes.”

  “Where was Silas during this time?”

  “Well, that’s just it, he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I lost sight of him as we neared Hunnewell’s house. He must have gone through the gate into the garden, or through some other little opening in the wall. I never saw him again.”

  “But Dr. Jerome was just ahead, and so was the medical colleague, and the Chinaman. The three of them were standing near the trees. Is that still correct?”

  “Sure! The three of them were standing and talking, or arguing.”

  “Then one of them would have seen Silas enter through the gate into the garden.”

  Zachary scowled. “Silas could have stepped behind some bushes, just as I did when approaching, then entered through a small opening. But I think he went through the gate, because that’s where I was clobbered. Just as I entered a few minutes later. He was hiding there in the shadows waiting for me.”

  “Wait, Zach. Get back to Dr. Jerome. So Silas wasn’t in view after Jerome and his colleague met up with the Chinese man.”

  “No!”

  “You couldn’t pick up anything they said, not even a word, a name?”

  “It’s windy tonight and those palm fronds were moving and shaking just as they are now. Nor could I get as close as I would have liked.”

  “Anything stand out about this Chinese fellow except his guards and garb?”

  Zachary rubbed his forehead. “Nothing.”

  “Ever seen him near the gambling joint you mentioned?”

  Zachary rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Never.”

  Rafe moved about. “What about near one of those Chinese lending shops, a bank?”

  Zachary hesitated. He drew his brows together. “Well …”

  Rafe came back and looked down at him. “Yes?”

  “There was one of those lending shops on the same street as the gambling den … wait! … but, no …” He shook his head and winced. “No, I don’t remember seeing him there. One thing for sure, he couldn’t have been a cane worker in those clothes. He was nothing like the old man you have on Hanalei.”

  “Ling Li. All right, go on.”

  “There isn’t much more. They talked, and I got the impression, though I couldn’t hear anything, that the Chinese man was angry.” “All three men were angry?”

  “I had the impression Jerome and the colleague were entreating him. Then the Chinese man turned toward the waiting hackney, and the guards assisted him.”

  Rafe walked over to the large window and looked below to the darkened street. A few people were still moving about bucking the wind, but for the most part they had scattered like sheep, the shops closed and boarded up.

  The first raindrops fell slowly, followed by a blinding flash of light across the sky, then a deep grumble of thunder. The rain squall broke into a deafening torrent, whipping and lashing the window. Rafe thought of the worst storm he’d ever experienced. It was on the Minoa in the Caribbean. A few times he’d thought the creaking ship was either going to sink or break up in the mountain-sized swells.

  Rafe thought of his favorite Psalm 29, the voice of the Lord in and over the storm, both natural, and the spiritual upheavals of the world, nations, and individuals. He’d memorized it years ago, and he found his mind wandering through his favorite lines.

  The voice of the Lord is upon the waters:

  the God of glory thundereth. …

  The voice of the Lord is powerful;

  the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. …

  The Lord sitteth upon the flood;

  yea, the Lord sitteth King for ever.

  Rafe drew the double shutters closed, then the thick drapes. If all went well, they’d still be on dry land in the morning.<
br />
  Zach had spoken of another medical person with Dr. Jerome. He must have been talking about Hartley. Rafe’s thoughts turned a corner to Herald Hartley, the medical assistant to Dr. Jerome Derrington.

  From the time when Hartley first arrived at Kea Lani in the early summer months, Rafe had entertained his private suspicions concerning him. Rafe was game to admit to his personal reasons for not liking Hartley, but there was much more to it than the masculine dislike he felt because of Hartley’s keen interest in Eden, and Dr. Jerome’s apparent hope that his daughter and his medical assistant might somehow come together.

  It was Dr. Chen’s journal that first gave rise to Rafe’s suspicions of Hartley. The Chinese researcher had kept a medical journal for the twenty or more years of his Far Eastern travels into Nepal, India, and China. It was the journal that Hartley had carried away in his suitcase from San Francisco’s Chinatown, along with the news of Chen’s unexpected death. Hartley had brought both the journal and the news of Chen’s demise to Dr. Jerome at Kea Lani.

  True, Rafe did not set much faith in the herbal cures that Chen must have believed in all these years, and saw no reason why anyone would steal it. But among that particular group of medical researchers in the world of medicine, Dr. Chen was a credible force. It was clear that Dr. Jerome believed in it, even if the Hawaiian Board of Health did not. And that Hartley believed in Jerome.

  Rafe turned away from the shuttered window and looked over at Zachary, but decided not to say anything of this now. While Rafe had no idea just how or why they could be allied in motive, he found that he couldn’t shake the suspicion that this incident tonight at Hunnewell’s gate between Dr. Jerome and the Chinaman in silk was associated in some way with Dr. Chen.

  “The medical colleague you say left Kalihi in the company of Dr. Jerome tonight,” Rafe said. “I suppose he was Herald Hartley, his assistant from India?”

  Zachary was staring forlornly into his empty cup. “Hartley?” he repeated as if the name had slipped between the cracks of his memory. Then: “Oh, him,” he said with a tone of dismissal. “No, it wasn’t Herald. I’d never seen this fellow before.”

  “It wasn’t Hartley!”

  Zachary seemed a little surprised by Rafe’s passionate response.

  “I didn’t see Hartley. Rather a bland sort, isn’t he?”

  Sly was the more likely, Rafe thought.

  “He blends into Dr. Jerome’s shadow is the way I sort of think of the fellow,” Zachary said, refilling his cup. This time he added a lot of milk and sugar. Rafe watched the ruination of his superb Kona blend as it became more like “British tea.”

  “Herald would have made a dandy valet for my uncle,” Zachary continued. “Oh, no sir! Oh, why yes sir! Very well, m’lord Derrington!”

  Hands on hips, Rafe watched him too gravely. “I think, old chap, that bash on the head may be settling in now.”

  Zachary cast him an offended look. “To get back to the sobriety of my experience, then. Uncle Jerome and the unidentified colleague entered Hunnewell’s garden through the big gate. I waited a full minute to make sure I didn’t run into them, then followed. No sooner did I pass through the gate, and under some poinciana trees, intending to walk up to the front door as bold as you like it—bam! Something exploded in my brain. That was it. When I came to I’d been drug over beneath a tree, close beside the gate wall—forgotten, like a dead rodent.”

  “Very telling.” Rafe listened as rain threw itself against the panes, and the wind whined and screamed around the corners of the hotel.

  Whoever did it actually drew more attention to himself than if he’d ignored Zachary entirely. It would have been wiser for the person to have acted as if he were coming from the house and given him a friendly greeting.

  The attacker must have reacted out of sudden, mindless fear. That worried Rafe. It was the kind of impulse that proved dangerous when a person believed himself cornered. Townsend possessed that kind of emotional trigger, but Townsend was in San Francisco.

  And Eden had been in that garden. He knew a flash of frustration born from a different kind of fear. She might have been injured moving silently about the thick tropical shrubs.

  Rafe regarded Zachary pensively, walking to the overstuffed chair where he sat slumped. “Let’s go over the time again.” He looked at his timepiece.

  Zachary drummed his fingers on his chest, thinking. “Let’s see … it was a few minutes after six o’clock when I followed Silas to the gambling den.”

  “And when you followed him to Kalihi?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Less than an hour had gone by.”

  “That would make Dr. Jerome’s meeting with the silk-clad Chinaman around—?”

  “Ten after seven. I looked at the time.”

  Rafe wasn’t as sure, but he thought Silas and Ainsworth entered together around 7:15. If so, that did give Silas time enough to accomplish what Zachary claimed. And Hartley? Both Hartley and Dr. Jerome could have come to Hunnewell’s property and no one would have noticed.

  Zachary leaned his head against the back of the overstuffed chair. “What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Rafe said shortly. “What I do know is that Silas was at Hunnewell’s tonight. He was there in the garden when Oliver and Keno had their trouble. What I don’t like about this, besides your getting bashed, is the fact Dr. Jerome was there, evidently not telling anyone of his presence, not even Ainsworth.”

  Rafe did not mention Eden.

  “Silas is up to mischief,” Zachary said. “But not Uncle Jerome. Yet I can’t understand his being at Hunnewell’s tonight, meeting with the Chinese fellow.”

  Rafe kept his suspicion to himself.

  “It had to have been Silas who knocked me out.”

  Rafe was not as sure. “Look here, Zach. I want you to say nothing of what happened tonight to anyone until we can look into it. Keep all this out of the Gazette.”

  “Don’t worry. But if Great-aunt Nora knew, you and Grandfather would be on the front page tomorrow. And I’d likely get a bonus for putting you there.”

  Rafe looked at him for a moment and mused: And if the queen knew the annexationists’ secrets? What manner of bonus might she give?

  “Can you agree to silence? Or will you be going to Ainsworth?”

  “My grandfather wouldn’t believe much of anything I told him anyway. Like I said, I’m going to try and interest Nora in my investigative journalism in San Francisco. There’s plenty I can dig up. Silas has boasted of his newspaper work there, and also in Sacramento. Well, I’m going to take him at his word for once and see if that’s so. I want to know what he was up to in sunny California. And I’d just as soon not have Silas know I’ve been following him around Honolulu.”

  Rafe remained silent about Townsend, not because he expected Zachary would be hurt by the current news. He had shown little distress over his father’s earlier act against Great-aunt Nora. He’d never experienced affection from his father. Townsend had pummeled Zachary with abusive words long before Silas arrived. Silas just made the situation worse.

  It was Townsend’s nature to be abusive, as Rafe had also experienced as his stepson. But Rafe, unlike Zachary, hadn’t been damaged by Townsend’s criticism, nor had it caused him to attempt to win Townsend’s praise. The abuse hardened Rafe against the man his mother had unwisely married. He didn’t care what Townsend thought of him. Oddly, as Townsend discovered that, he respected Rafe more. The people Townsend treated well were those more powerful than he, those he thought might be able to enhance him.

  Rafe decided to let Ainsworth break the foreboding news of Townsend to Zachary tomorrow.

  By now, Ainsworth would be getting the message he’d sent to him at Kea Lani if the errand boy had gotten through before the storm hit hard.

  The medication was beginning to work on Zachary, making him nod his head. The rain continued, and the tropical wind wracked the trees, scattering the flowers along the walks.

  “Better
get some sleep now, Zach. The weather isn’t letting up.”

  Zachary mumbled something and went over to the big Chesterfield sofa, where he sank down with relief and drew an arm across his eyes. This was not his first time on his stepbrother’s couch. He mumbled: “Who was that Chinese fellow … wore silk and embroidery … why would he meet with Uncle Jerome?”

  Rafe looked over at him. He had his own ideas but kept them buried. Dr. Chen and the journal fit the Chinese puzzle. The question was whether the meeting tonight had been on friendly terms, or an unpleasant revelation for Dr. Jerome. What troubled Rafe was the knowledge that Dr. Jerome entered the Hunnewell garden afterward.

  He flexed his jaw. Eden knew, of this he felt sure, but Eden was not willing to trust him with the truth.

  Chapter Eight

  Winds of Allegiance

  The worst of the storm had blown over by morning, though the clouds still covered the sky with gray and the wind came in strong gusts. Palm fronds and broken pieces of shrubbery littered the street in front of the hotel when Rafe came down to the lobby that boasted of undisturbed quantities of orchids and banana plants. He decided to call for a hotel carriage to take him to the meeting at Aliiolani Hale where he was to meet up with Ainsworth. Zachary was still recovering from his head injury, but Rafe thought the worst was over, and had ordered breakfast sent up to the room.

  Rafe had crossed the lounge toward the doors when a bellboy came scurrying up.

  “Message for you at the front desk, Mister Easton.”

  Rafe glanced toward the hotel clerk, who motioned toward the message slots behind him.

  As Rafe walked toward the desk a woman standing there turned to leave, and as she did she looked straight at him. She wore a strange garment, all black, with a head scarf decorated with symbols of the zodiac. She had her eyes painted to make the lashes black, and her lips were red. She saw him looking her over and must have supposed he found her attractive, or it was the other way around, for she boldly stared at him, the corners of her mouth turning upward.