The person trapped in the cave slid out from under the tanks, and by the time he was out of the cave, Michael was ready. Taking one more deep breath, he pulled the regulator out of his mouth and pushed it toward the other diver’s face.
It was the kid he’d talked to on the beach.
The kid who was diving by himself.
The other boy’s face mask had come off as Michael pulled him out of the cave, but he felt the regulator Michael was offering him, slipped the mouthpiece between his lips, took a deep breath, and returned the regulator to Michael, pointing to the surface as he pulled the emergency cord on his life vest, inflating it. As the Hawaiian boy started to rise through the water, Michael inflated his own vest. Seconds later he was bobbing on the surface, face-to-face with the other boy.
A frightened gasp erupted from the guy’s mouth.
“You okay?” Michael asked. “Can you make it to the beach?”
The boy nodded. “Where’s your buddy?”
“He kept disappearing. I was looking for him when I found you.”
They started swimming, the boy he’d rescued pacing himself in order to allow Michael to stay close to him until they were near the beach. Then the boy ducked his head under the surface. When he reappeared, he was standing in water that was only chest deep, although they were beyond the breaker line.
“Take your fins off,” the boy told him. “Then we’ll get your tank off your back.”
Michael dropped in the water, pulled both his fins off, and stood up. He felt the other boy lift his tank so he could slip out of its straps. “What about yours?” he asked.
The boy shrugged. “I’ll go get it later. At least I know where it is, and it’s sure not going anywhere.” As they plowed through the surf toward the beach, the boy stuck out his hand. “I’m Josh Malani.”
“Michael Sundquist,” Michael replied.
“Mike?”
“Michael,” Michael corrected him. “Nobody ever calls me Mike.”
Josh Malani’s face lit into a wide grin. “Someone calls you Mike now. Get used to it. How long you gonna be on Maui?”
They were on the beach now. Dropping Michael’s tank on the sand, they started peeling out of their wet suits. “I just moved here.”
Josh’s eyes lit up. “You mean you’re not a tourist?”
Michael shook his head. “My mom’s working here. We just got here yesterday.”
“Not too bad, man,” Josh told him. “Only here a day, and you already got a best friend!”
Michael bent down to pick up his tank, but Josh already had it and was starting across the beach toward the small park. Michael stayed where he was. “What if I don’t like you?” he called after Josh. “What if you turn out to be a complete jerk?”
Josh glanced back over his shoulder, his trademark grin even broader. “Lots of people think I’m a jerk. But my grandfather’s Chinese, and in China, if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for him. You’re stuck with me. Get used to it.”
CHAPTER 5
Katharine was just putting the last suitcase on the shelf in her closet when she heard a horn honk and glanced out the window to see Rob Silver’s Explorer emerging from the eucalyptus grove into the clearing. Her eyes flicked to the clock on the nightstand, and she noted with satisfaction that Rob’s habit of perfect punctuality hadn’t changed since graduate school. Two o’clock was what he’d said, and two o’clock it was, right on the dot. She picked up the battered canvas backpack that had served as her field purse since her days in Africa and went out to the veranda just as he swung out of the Explorer’s cab.
“Let me guess,” he said, with a wide smile. “You just put the last of the suitcases away as I was driving in, right?”
“Okay, so we’re still the two most compulsive people we know.” Katharine laughed as she got into the Explorer. “Although I still prefer to think of it as perfect timing. Do I need to lock the house?”
Rob shook his head. “Not up here. Did you find the keys? They were on the kitchen counter, I think.”
“Got ’em,” Katharine replied. “Let’s go. I’m dying to get a look at this mysterious site of yours.”
Rob swung the car around in a wide U-turn, maneuvered it along the narrow track through the eucalyptus grove, and turned down the hill. “You’ll have a car this afternoon,” he told her as they came to Makawao a few minutes later and he turned right to drive out toward Haiku. “Actually, it’s pretty much like this one, just a little more beat up. But it’s free.”
Katharine’s brows arched. “A salary that’s twice as much as I usually get paid, travel expenses for me and my son, a house, and now a car. Who’s funding you? It sure isn’t the National Science Foundation!”
“You’re right,” Rob agreed. “It’s not the NSF. It’s a guy named Takeo Yoshihara. Ever heard of him?” Katharine shook her head. “His headquarters are in Tokyo, and he operates all over the world, but he spends a lot of his time here.”
“How’d you find him?” Katharine asked. “And is there another one just like him who’s interested in early man in Africa?”
“He found me,” Rob explained. “He’s interested in everything having to do with the Pacific Rim, including the native cultures. He’s got quite a setup, which you’ll see on the way to the site.”
They’d passed through the loose collection of buildings that formed the town of Haiku, and a few minutes later emerged onto the Hana Highway. Rob turned right. After a few miles the road narrowed severely, winding through a series of tight turns that hung perilously close to a straight drop into the sea one minute, then plunged deep into the rain forest the next. “This is the weather side of the island,” Rob explained. “The road’s like this for another thirty-five miles. In the rainy season there are waterfalls and streams in every ravine you go through.” He turned sharply off to the right, into a narrow lane that Katharine was certain she’d have missed entirely if she’d been driving herself. Paved only with two strips of concrete, the track wound through a dense forest of vine-covered trees, finally coming to a gate constructed of heavily patinated bronze and copper in bamboo forms that blended almost perfectly with the surrounding vegetation. The gate opened as the car approached, apparently of its own volition.
“All the cars that are authorized for entry carry beacons that activate the gate,” Rob explained in answer to Katharine’s unspoken question. When she turned to look back, the gate was already silently closing.
“What’s he afraid of?” she asked.
Rob smiled. “I have a feeling Takeo Yoshihara isn’t afraid of anything. He just likes his privacy. Believe me, he can afford it.”
Katharine settled back in her seat as the car made one more turn and emerged from the rain forest into a scene that nearly took her breath away, not only in its unexpectedness, but in its sheer beauty.
The area that spread before her covered perhaps five acres. It seemed as if nature itself had sculpted the landscape out of the forest, though Katharine knew that was impossible. Still, the basic contours had to have been there from the start. Takeo Yoshihara’s estate had been constructed on a broad terrace backed by a sheer face of fern-covered rocks, down which cascaded three separate waterfalls — bright silver ribbons that flowed from a ledge high above, filling the air with soft, babbling music as they tumbled into a pool below. In front of the pool was a lawn as perfectly kept as the fairways of the most exclusive golf course, an expanse of emerald interspersed with vividly colored beds of tropical flowers. Banks of towering red flowering ginger were counterbalanced by the most delicately colored stems of orchids Katharine had ever seen. There were rocks, too, great lava boulders, placed so artfully that for a moment Katharine was certain that nature herself must have laid them out. But as the Explorer moved along the gravel drive to which the twin concrete strips had now given way, she realized that she was seeing a Zen garden laid out on an enormous scale, for as the car passed among them, the rocks almost seemed to move, appearing and disappearing in an ever-changing pattern.