A condensed excerpt

The Island of Kauai, 1888

For a lifetime Spence Laamea wondered about Mauna Noe, what this ranch might look like, how it smelled, how the air tasted. Two hours ago he had left the main road and ridden across miles of land without seeing any sign of human life, no paniolo--Hawaiian cowboys--like himself, on the hills, only lazy cattle and horses. From the top of the last rise, the ranch proper came into view, the stables, the corrals and bunk house. The workers’ houses, left from plantation days, appeared deserted except for the vegetable garden that flourished behind one of them and a fish net spread out on a small square of lawn.

But more than the land and the house, he had wondered a lifetime about Franklin Bennett. Although he had never seen Bennett in the flesh, Spence once owned a miniature portrait of him.

"Keep it," his mother had whispered to him as she pressed it into his hand the night she died. He had only been seven at the time so the power of the memory should have faded with it, but he still got chicken skin when he recalled the way her sad, dark eyes had glowed with a strange, faraway look, as if she truly could see what might one day come to pass. "Someday he will want you, Spencer. Someday Franklin will need you and call you to his side."

Deep down in his young heart, where secret hope hides from truth, Spence secretly clung to the dream that somehow, someday, what his mother had predicted would come to pass.

His heart had grown as hard as stone, so that the very name Franklin Bennett left nothing but a bitter taste in his mouth. Even now, as he shifted the reins to guide the big thoroughbred horse, Kahili, toward the house, all Spence could muster were feelings of bitterness, of betrayal.

He was twenty-six years old, a keiki manuahi, a bastard, and there was nothing he wanted from his father now. The greatest satisfaction he would ever know would come the moment he stood in Franklin Bennett’s home, looked the man’s lawyer in the eye and refused whatever paltry hand- out Bennett had bequeathed him.

Spence had almost reached the fence that surrounded the rambling ranch house situated between the foothills and the sea. He felt the twinge in his gut that always came from dwelling too long on the past, on things lost forever- -a father’s name, his mother’s love, a lifetime with Kaala, his beautiful, doomed young bride who had taken her own life. Just then, a large, yellow-eyed owl, pueo, with streaked brown feathers and a flat face, soared overhead, then swooped low, diving toward him before it swung skyward and flew on.

He stared after the bird in awe, felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. Pueo was his ‘aumakua, the god of his family, his ancestral protector. To be visited here, now, was surely an auspicious sign. Was it a warning? Or was good luck in the offing?

When he rode up to the gate, he noticed that it hung forlornly from one hinge. Spence grabbed the maku’u, the pommel of his saddle, and dismounted, then tied his horse to the picket fence. He nudged the gate open with the toe of his boot and stared up at the two-story frame house. Like the fence, the house was in need of repair.

It gave him a dark satisfaction to know that his father’s home was not as perfect as he had always imagined. Franklin Bennett had let the place go to ruin. The shiplap wooden siding was bleached bare in spots turned ghostly gray. Dilapidated shutters hung evenly outside some of the windows, while others were missing shutters entirely.

He walked up a wide path through a maze of low tropical foliage--ti with deep green and red leaves, aloalo, or hibiscus, heavy heliconia, red ginger, angel’s trumpets bent toward the ground. White plumeria with delicate yellow centers infused the air with a heady, pungent scent. Finally, he neared the lanai with its commanding view of the vegetation-covered knob of the ancient volcanic crater Kilauea. The open coastline fanned out beyond the crater.

It was a moment or two before he noticed a haole--a white woman--standing in the shadows. He knew there would surely be others at the reading of Franklin Bennett’s will. Most certainly the man’s widow would be present--but this woman was not dressed in the black garb of widows that haole liked to wear. She wore a faded blue dress banded by a worn collar and frayed cuffs. The gown was too big for her, the fabric too heavy for such a warm day. She looked uncomfortable.

She also looked too young to have been married to a fifty- five-year-old man. A tired wariness her delicate features and reflected itself in her eyes. Of medium height, she had golden hair and perfectly etched haole features set in moonlight-pale skin. She was altogether beautiful. Haunting.

She looked as fragile as a newly hatched bird.

Spence looked up into the perfect oval of her face and searched for some sign that she, like himself, might carry Franklin Bennett’s blood in her veins, but in her features he recognized none of what his cloudy memory retained of his father’s portrait.

A cloud drifted across the face of the sun. The trade winds blew half-heartedly. The barest hint of a breeze roused the fronds of the nearby pandanus trees from a quiescent lull. A stand of eucalyptus planted as a windbreak began to rustle, filling the air with a cloying scent.

The breeze lifted a lock of the young woman’s hair and blew it across her face. He watched her reach up and draw a blond tendril behind her ear before she tilted her chin up, exposing the pale skin of her throat.

From her position at the top of the stairs the woman continued to watch him closely. She offered not a word in greeting but simply stared at him as if she were seeing a ghost.

Once again she reached up to smooth her fine, sun-gilded hair. Her hand trembled.

"Aloha." He nodded as he spoke the greeting. Allowing no flicker of the jumbled emotions he was feeling to cross his face, he met her intense stare, reminding himself that he had been invited. He had every right to be here.

"Aloha." Somehow she managed to reduce a word rich with many meanings to a salutation devoid of any emotion at all.

"May I help you?" She took one step away from the wall of the house.

"I’m Spencer Laamea. Milton Clifford wrote and asked that I attend the reading of Franklin Bennett’s will."

He hadn’t thought it possible, but she grew even more pale.

"The will . . ." she said softly, letting her words trail away as if she were contemplating the meaning of the word.

"This is Mauna Noe? The Bennett ranch?"

He knew damn well he was on the right piece of land. Spence watched her swallow, saw the pink tip of her tongue flick out between her lips. She was staring down at him through clear blue eyes edged with a hint of panic that she could not disguise, even as her gaze shifted away from him.

"Yes. This is Mauna Noe." She swallowed nervously again and scanned the horizon where the Pacific met the sky, then looked back at him. "How did you know Franklin?"

She made him uncomfortable.

Spence cleared his throat. "Isn’t Mr. Clifford here yet?"

Her hand went to the high collar of her dress as if it were choking her.

"He’s late. I wasn’t aware that anyone else would be coming today. He didn’t tell me." She appeared more and more distracted with each passing moment.

Somewhere in the house, upstairs perhaps, he heard a child’s laughter.

He watched her lower her hand and then hide her fists in the folds of her skirt. Her full lips might have been set in a determined line, but she looked as though she was prepared to dash into the house if he took one step closer.

"Is Mrs. Bennett here, then?" He loathed the idea of finally meeting his father’s widow face-to-face, but there was no getting around it. He would have to meet the woman sooner or later.

"I’m . . . Elizabeth Rodrick Bennett . . . Franklin’s widow."

Spence could only stare as the realization of who she was sank in. This pitifully frail, absurdly young haole with skin the color of moonbeams had married his father. Had slept with him.

This woman had given Franklin Bennett a legitimate heir, a white legitimate heir.

Spence thought of the pueo, the owl that flew over him moments ago and wondered if his ‘aumakua might not have been warning him to leave before it was too late.