"It came right to me,” Brenda said. “I'm the one who opens them."

"But-aren't you in California, at Kings Canyon?"

"Not anymore. Therese, I'm here at Hawaii Volcanoes. I've been trying to get back here for years. I've been here since March."

"Oh,” Therese said. “Nobody told me."

There was nothing surprising about that. The two branches of the family were not in frequent contact. Brenda was a Lau by birth, her father a native Hawaiian, her mother a Tahitian-born Chinese who had moved to Hilo in 1950 to marry Brenda's father. Therese was a Druett, half-Chinese, half-American. Her mother-Brenda's aunt Celine-had been a famous beauty who had been swept off her feet by Nick Druett, the swashbuckling young American newly come to the South Seas to make his fortune, which he very soon did. They had had a daughter, Maggie, not long after they married (well, before they married, but nobody talked about that); then, ten years later, as something of a surprise, along had come the beautiful Therese, now twenty-eight.

Living as they did in two different hemispheres, the Laus and the Druetts didn't see each other often, but there was affection between them, and Brenda was particularly fond of Therese, eight years her junior. Therese had never quite taken up life in the real world, but she was warmhearted and without guile. What you saw on the surface was all there was underneath.

"Therese, I had no idea these things were going on at the plantation."

"No, well, you know my father. He doesn't like to advertise things. Brenda-will those stones really go back into the volcano? I mean, I know you think it's silly but…"

Brenda opened her hand to look at the two glassy pebbles, black and shining on her palm. “Yes, honey, I'll see to it personally.” She would too. On tomorrow morning's routine drive around the caldera she'd stop at the rim of Halemaumau Crater, Pele's private volcano, and drop them over the edge. And hope her boss wasn't anywhere around to see.