“I doan know. They doan tell Justo nothing.”
“But you know there is a deal,” Quincannon prodded, “I can see it in your face. How do you know?”
“Something I hear the fat haole say to the other one. That clock gonna make us rich, he say.”
“Clock? What kind of clock?”
“Maybe not clock, maybe cloak. Justo ain’t sure.”
“Does either mean anything to you?”
Gomez wagged his head.
“Is that all you overheard?”
“That’s all. Other one shut him up quick, you bet.”
Clock or cloak... neither seemed to fit the established pattern of a Vereen and Nagle swindle, though with those two anything was possible if there was enough profit to be had. Gomez’s eyes said he wasn’t lying, but he might have misheard.
Quincannon said, “Did either of them say anything about an auohe?”
“Auohe?”
“You know what the word means.”
“Sure, sure. Hidden place.”
“Some sort of hidden place on the Big Island near the Millay ranch.”
“I doan hear nothing like that.”
“What about mention of the ranch or the Kona Coast?”
Headshake.
That was all Quincannon could or would get out of him. He stepped back, folded over the tail of his jacket to conceal the Navy again. Gomez let out a breath, then produced a dirty cloth that might once have been a handkerchief and smeared his face free of sweat.
“You some kine bad fella,” he said then, not without a grudging measure of admiration. “What you gonna do to Vereen when you find him?”
“Mayhap the same thing I’ll do to you if you tell anybody we had this little talk.”
“I doan tell nobody. Not me.”
“A wise decision.”
“Poor Justo,” Gomez said mournfully. The little half-caste had decided to feel sorry for himself. “Got all kine pilikia nui. Wife, four children, police, now bad kine fella like you.”
Quincannon had nothing to say to that. Without turning his back to poor Justo, he took himself out into the breathless afternoon.
11
Sabina
She had most of the day to herself. Lyman had gone to his office at J. D. Spreckels and Brothers, Margaret to the school where she taught Hawaiian history, and both Kaipo and Alika had their household duties to attend to. Sabina would have welcomed the solitude under other circumstances. As it was, with John off on his grim mission, she was too restless to remain in the guesthouse awaiting his return.
In spite of her faith in his ability to keep himself from harm, a worm of worry was again at work in her — a niggling little worm that seemed to have been born when she finally admitted to herself that she was in love with him, and that plagued her whenever he was away on potentially dangerous business. Perhaps it was because she had had no such concerns about Stephen, whom she had loved with all her heart and whose sudden death had left her devastated. But Stephen had been young, as reckless as John but much less experienced, and the blind faith she had had in him was a product of her own youth and inexperience.
It was pointless to compare the two men, or her feelings for them. Her love for Stephen had been all-consuming; her love for John, the slow-developing kind of a mature woman for an equally mature man, was less intense but in a sense the bond was even stronger. In time she had been able to overcome the loss of her first love; she was not at all sure she could overcome a loss of her second and last. Hence the little worm of worry.
She went for a short stroll along Kalakaua Avenue and two short side streets. The sultry kona heat was less enervating today; she must be starting to become acclimatized to it. Still, she fervently hoped it would end soon. The balmy trade winds Twain and Stevenson had so highly praised would be a welcome blessing for at least a portion of their time here.
Most of the homes she passed were similar in architectural style to the Pritchards’, but here and there were an odd assortment of others. One was a modified Cape Cod with a pitched gabled roof, probably by one of the New England whalers who had plied these islands in the early years of the century. Another was what Margaret would later identify as a hale pili — a traditional Hawaiian home built of native woods and covered with grass.
The oddest of all was the Pettibone abode. Viewed from the front, it was definitely Queen Anne in design, complete with gables and decorative shingles. No apparent modifications such as a lanai had been added. With few tropical plantings surrounding it, the house had a queer, anomalous aspect, as of something displaced in time and space. Even the carriage lean-to and stable on its far side were American in design. A Chinese groundskeeper, busily removing storm debris from the grass, also might have been transplanted from one of San Francisco’s better neighborhoods.
Margaret had told her some of the house’s curious history. Gordon Pettibone had hired a San Francisco architect and a six-man construction crew who specialized in building Queen Anne homes, and paid their passage to Honolulu along with all the necessary timbers and other components. The crew, with the aid of Chinese laborers — Pettibone refused to hire native Hawaiians for the task — had built the house to specifications on the property here. It must have cost him a pretty penny to have his obsessive (John would have called it “crackbrain”) desire satisfied. Fortunately there was no sign of either the eccentric Mr. Pettibone or his unpleasant nephew on the grounds when she passed.
Shortly after Sabina returned to the guesthouse, Kaipo brought a light lunch of steamed butterfish wrapped in taro leaves, rice, and fruit. At first the meal didn’t strike Sabina as particularly appealing, but she found that she was hungrier than she thought and the food so good she ate it all. Drowsiness overtook her not long after she finished.
She napped for nearly two hours, awoke feeling damp and sticky, and since John still hadn’t returned, she donned her bathing costume and walked down to the beach. It was mostly deserted, the surf less settled than it had been the day before, the rollers breaking over the sand in restless mutters. Not really swimmable, she decided. She went in just far enough to immerse her body, then sat beneath one of the palms to dry before trekking back.
She had finished sluicing off salt residue with fresh water from the rain barrel and was dressing when John finally arrived at the guesthouse.
As soon as she saw him she knew that the day had not gone well for him. If he had succeeded in capturing the two grifters, he would have had a satisfied, even jaunty mien in spite of the heat. As it was, he looked bedraggled, vexed, his jaw set in a grimly determined way.
“What happened?” she asked. “Didn’t Fenner have Vereen and Nagle located after all?”
“He had them located well enough. They’ve been occupying a bungalow on Punchbowl Hill the past week.”
“But you didn’t find them there?”
“I found one. Nagle. Dead.”
“Dead? How?”
“Morphine overdose. Possibly accidental, possibly not.”
“And Vereen?”
“Gone, bag and baggage.”
“Gone where, do you know?”
“The Big Island,” he said. “Evidently to meet with the new mark they’d set up, a man named Millay.” He went on to explain who Millay was, and that the cattleman had apparently made the acquaintance of the two thieves while on a visit to San Francisco.
“Another stock swindle?” Sabina asked.
“Doesn’t appear to be, this time.” John removed his jacket, took a folded piece of paper from the inside pocket, and handed it to her. “Something to do with a clock or cloak, apparently. And with this.”