Malani thought for a moment. “Couldn’t hurt,” she said.

For some people, their roles in life-the personas they henceforth occupy, not always full-heartedly-are thrust upon them as children, as often as not by some casual or inadvertent happening. For Axel, the groundwork was laid when he was eight: a combination of protruding, weak eyes, bookish interests, and an oddly grown-up vocabulary, oddly delivered. The Torkelsson adults began to refer to him affectionately as “the little man,” and then, almost inevitably, as “the little professor.” And with that, the wheels of his life had been set in their ruts. Axel was, and would always be, the deep thinker in the family, the impractical far-reaching visionary who couldn’t see what was six inches in front of his eyes.

For his sister Hedwig, the crucial moment had come a few years later. Like Axel, she was a reader, voracious and wide-ranging in her choice of books, and one day, one of the stack she’d brought home from the library in Hilo had been Astral Travel for Beginners: The Linga-Sharira Pathway to Experiencing Other Realms of Existence. Her response to being teased about it at lunch a few days later had been to rise from the table, to dramatically quote the book’s epigram: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and to stalk majestically from the room. She had been thirteen.

From that moment on she was the family mystic, the Knower of Strange Things, a role she had embraced, first out of contrariness, and then, over the years, with a certain amount of conviction. Now, three decades later, she was the proprietor of one of the island’s many holistic retreats, the Hui Ho’olana Wellness Center for Spiritual Healing and Body-Centered Empowerment.

The Center was situated on the land she had inherited from her Uncle Magnus, a narrow strip ill-suited for cattle-raising but blessed with several restful groves of eucalyptus and pine, a small, tranquil lake, and the house that she had grown up in with her widowed father and her three siblings. It was smaller than either Axel’s or Inge’s inheritances, but spiritual healing hardly required great tracts of open rangeland. What it did require was an environment conducive to inward contemplation. In other words, peace and quiet.