"Aren't they all?” Brenda said. She handed across the letter and the stamped, neatly addressed envelope. “She wants an answer."

Mrs. Laney nodded and added them to the stack on a corner of the table. The responses would go out the next day. They would all say the same thing:

Dear Mr./Ms.:

Thank you for your letter and the enclosed materials. As you requested, the materials have been deposited within the park.

Sincerely,

Brenda Ho

Supervisory Park Ranger and Interpretive Specialist

"Deposited within the park” was, to put it mildly, a euphemism. As always, all the detritus on the table would be carted less than a hundred feet, out to the “rock graveyard” in back of the administrative carport, and left there. Brenda wondered sometimes what the scientists were going to make of that ample mound of globe-trotting volcanic junk a hundred years from now.

Dumping behind the carport wasn't what Mrs. Root had in mind, but what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her, and neither Brenda nor anyone else had the inclination to lug the stuff out to the rim of the crater and solemnly drop it over the edge. In the first place, that was the kind of thing the rangers were there to prevent, not to perpetrate. You didn't take anything from a national park, and you didn't leave anything either. In the second place, and this was what made all the extra work so aggravating, the curse wasn't even genuine; there was no basis for it in Hawaiian mythology. No, Pele wasn't the kind of deity you'd want to go out of your way to irritate, but she didn't spend her time wreaking catastrophe on souvenir hunters either.

All the same, about fifteen years earlier the packaged lava had started to trickle back, infrequently at first, and now a steady, ever-growing flood. No one knew what had started it. The most likely theory was that the tour bus drivers, tired of cleaning up the volcanic debris left behind in their buses, had invented the story and energetically spread it. Or maybe the rangers themselves had, hoping to keep the tourists from walking off with the park.