Rain Forest Rose Page 3

  And I know why, Darby thought with a dizzy smile. The loneliness she’d felt since leaving home faded under this outpouring of love from a total stranger who reminded her so strongly of her mother.

  Hoku hadn’t moved or made a sound. Anxiously, Darby glanced back. The filly had every sense focused on the human before her, but she wasn’t braced to bolt. She looked—Darby searched her vocabulary—peaceful.

  “I dreamed of being here,” Darby admitted.

  She couldn’t help it. Instinct told her that her great-grandmother wouldn’t label her a nutcase, but she hadn’t meant to let the words just tumble out.

  “And I dreamed of having you here,” her great-grandmother said. “You and your horse with the golden tail.”

  Darby broke out in goose bumps.

  “You really dreamed of Hoku?”

  “Dreams, visions…” Tutu wafted her hand through the air. “They’re very much alike.”

  “They are?” Darby asked. “I have dreams every night, but I’ve never had a vision.”

  “They’re not so mysterious,” Tutu said with a mild smile. “But if no one around you feels anything when you do, or if they’re destructive, you’re not having a vision. You’re just—” She broke off to tap her temple. “Hewa-hewa.”

  Darby grinned. She didn’t need a Hawaiian translator for that. It had to mean crazy.

  What she did need was a puff of her asthma inhaler. It was a terrible time to be wheezing. She felt like she could really talk with Tutu and ask her things—about her mother and Jonah, about Ben Kato’s death and Megan’s lost horse—but Darby could barely catch her breath. Having a long chat was out of the question.

  “Yam root tea will help your breathing,” Tutu told her. “I’ll make you some.”

  “I have medicine,” Darby gasped, but when she patted her pocket, it was empty.

  No! She stuck her hand all the way to the bottom of her pocket. She checked the other one. There was nothing there, either. The inhaler was gone, and she really didn’t want to backtrack along the trail looking for it.

  “Yam root tea?” Darby asked. She was willing to try anything to keep from going back.

  “I’m an expert after making it all those years for Jonah.”

  “That’s right.” Darby forced out the words, remembering asthma was something she shared with her grandfather.

  “I plant yams every other year,” Tutu said, then recited, “root toward the mountain, root toward the sea, root to the windward, root to the lee.”

  Darby thought the rhyme was another link to her family. She often used rhymes to help her remember things she was studying. Like i before e, except after c, she thought.

  How cool was it that her great-grandmother was using such memory tricks in Hawaii?

  “Just let your horses go. He’ll stay, won’t you, boy?” Tutu cupped her empty hands and Navigator nuzzled them in greeting. “It’s not the first time Navigator’s brought me company.”

  “But Hoku…?” Darby couldn’t think what to do with her filly, but she didn’t have the breath to explain how much she didn’t want to stay outside and hold the filly’s lead rope.

  Still, she hadn’t yet trained Hoku to stand while tied. A nightmarish image of Hoku flinging her neck back, trying to break loose, invaded Darby’s mind.

  “She leads well,” Tutu said, and her tone sounded like a hint.

  Darby nodded, then wondered what would happen if she tied Hoku’s rope to Navigator’s saddle horn. Darby made a loop in the end of the rope, stood on tiptoe to reach the horn, and flipped it over.

  “Is that safe?” Darby gasped the three words.

  “Here, it is,” Tutu said.

  Darby rubbed her breastbone as if that would loosen her tight chest, but of course it didn’t. It wasn’t terrible pain, but each breath felt like the creak of an unoiled door hinge in a horror movie.

  Darby watched Hoku. The sorrel didn’t seem to notice she was restrained. She fell to grazing beside Navigator.

  A cacophony of brass, glass, and bamboo wind chimes drew Darby’s eyes back to the front porch of the cottage. Her great-grandmother wasn’t there. She must have gone inside to make tea, Darby thought, so Darby followed her.

  Darby remembered to take off her shoes before going inside. She’d been so embarrassed when she hadn’t noticed the custom the first night she’d entered Sun House.

  One step inside this house made her glad she was barefoot.

  Tutu’s cottage was carpeted with a woven rug that felt nubby and smooth, like intertwined sea grasses. The room smelled of herbs and honey, which made her certain that she’d be breathing more freely soon.

  A copper teakettle sat on an old-fashioned stove in the corner. A plume of steam already rose from its spout.

  Darby didn’t have much faith in home remedies, but Tutu moved with the competence of a pharmacist. She reached up to one of the shelves lining the cottage walls, took down a glass jar, and held it at eye level before measuring dried leaves into a green teapot.

  Vapor clouded the corner as Tutu poured boiling water into the pot.

  “Now that will steep,” Tutu said, then gestured widely. “Please, have a look around.”

  Darby laced her fingers together behind her back, feeling awkward. A glance showed her no television, telephone, or computer, but she noticed a lei-draped, black-and-white photograph of a man. He looked a lot like Jonah.

  “Your great-grandfather,” Tutu said, as if she was introducing them. “A scallywag and a smuggler with a million schemes, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for pirates.”

  Darby didn’t know what to say to that. It was a strangely, well, romantic thing to hear from an old lady.

  “I love my little house,” Tutu said, looking around.

  “Me too,” Darby managed.

  “It was a sugar plantation house at one time. Housing for the workers, not the bosses,” Tutu said as Darby looked around. “It had neighbors, but after the tsunami, only this one was left.”

  “Tsunami?” Darby said. They had earthquakes in Southern California, but Darby thought tsunamis were worse, kind of like an earthquake and flood combined.

  And then her gaze settled on Tutu. Was it safe for a woman of her years to live all alone in a tsunami zone?

  “It happened nearly a hundred years ago,” Tutu reassured Darby, as if she’d spoken her concern. “But these are young islands—formed by fire, shaped by earthquakes, floods, and yes, tsunamis, and I’d live here even if such events happened every week.”

  “Why?” Darby asked.

  “Civilization has nothing to offer me. What do I need with video games when I’m entertained by the weather, plants, and animals? Why should I carry a cell phone when visitors stop in with the news? I don’t even need a doorbell. The birds told me you were walking the path to my door.”

  As Tutu moved to pour their tea into mugs, she waved Darby toward a wooden table and chairs.

  “Sit down. After you’ve had some tea, if you have the breath for it, I’d love for you to tell me how your sweet mother is doing. I miss her.”

  Darby settled into a chair, feeling strangely at home. White curtains framed her view of Navigator and Hoku, still side by side, and she heard their teeth grinding grass.

  As she tried to come up with things Tutu would want to hear about Mom, Darby’s eyes took in the bolts of colorful cloth on one shelf and the books on another. Small trees grew in pottery bowls. A blue glass jar held water and stones. A green one was half full of shells. Growing plants sent roots among the stones and shells, and vines cascaded to the floor.

  “You know, she used to ride out and visit me like this,” Tutu said as she set a saucer of lemon slices and a honeypot on the table. “But it’s been, oh, fifteen years or more.”

  Darby took a sip from the pottery cup as soon as her great-grandmother handed it to her. She tried to picture her mother riding out here as she’d just done. The image was hazy, but the idea made her happy.

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nbsp; As Tutu sat down to drink her own tea, Darby said, “She looks like you.”

  Tutu didn’t sound surprised. “Kealoha women keep their family resemblance, no matter the men we marry.”

  Transfixed by the tendrils of steam swirling up from the tea, Darby described her mother’s roller-coaster acting career, her divorce, and her longing to live at the beach, even though it meant home was on a seedy side street that smelled not of salt air, but of Dumpsters and fish bones.

  Tutu soaked up the information, then said, “And the best thing is that Ellen sent you home.”

  “I don’t know how she ever left,” Darby confessed.

  “She’d say she was driven away. Jonah would say she ran.” Tutu shrugged, but she put everything so simply and clearly, Darby wished she’d had Tutu to come home to every day after school.

  “Why haven’t I ever met you?” Darby asked.

  “I knew you’d come out in your own good time,” Tutu said.

  “I mean, ever,” Darby insisted. “Kids with great-grandmothers usually know about them.”

  “What did your mother say about that?”

  Darby didn’t feel mad about her mother’s secrecy anymore. In fact, she gave a breathy laugh as she explained, “Mom said she knew if she told me that the rest of my family lived on a horse ranch in Hawaii, I’d never shut up about it until I got to go there.”

  Tutu chuckled. “And was she right? Do you like ‘Iolani Ranch?”

  “I love it!” Darby couldn’t keep her arms from opening wide as if she’d embrace everything around her. Finally she put her hands back on the table and folded them.

  “I love it, too.” Tutu patted Darby’s hand. “But tell me about yourself, Darby. What else do you love?”

  Darby drew a deep breath. The tea had beaten her asthma, but her list was still short. “Books, horses, and my family.”

  It had been easier to talk about her flamboyant mother.

  “Friends?” Tutu urged her to go on.

  “Sure,” Darby said. “My best friend at home is Heather. We’re both nerds.”

  Tutu smiled in a way that made it clear she understood, then asked, “And here?”

  “I like Megan and Cade.”

  “Wonderful children, both of them,” Tutu said.

  “Yes, but—” Darby stopped, shaking her head.

  Tutu waited. Darby could see this warm conversation would stall out if she didn’t say what she’d been about to.

  “Well, it’s none of my business, and no one seems worried about it except for me, but why does Megan hate Cade?”

  “Hate?”

  “Well, she told me I wouldn’t like him—not like, like, but you know, as a friend—if I knew what he was capable of.” Darby saw Tutu’s eyebrows lift, but she said nothing. “And then there’s something going on with the death of Megan’s father. I don’t want to be nosy, but why would she just let her horse go?

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Darby went on, “but it’s not a good way to start a friendship, to go prying into someone’s private life….” Darby’s voice trailed off. She stared at the greenish tea leaves in the bottom of her cup.

  “Every family has its secrets,” Tutu said. “And even if the Katos aren’t of the same blood as us, they are family. Ben would have taken over the ranch from Jonah—”

  “That’s another thing—I mean, excuse me,” Darby said, covering her mouth.

  “Please, go ahead.”

  “Why is Jonah so worried about someone taking over the ranch from him? He’s not that old, but I’ve heard about”—Darby looked up at the cottage rafters and counted off Kimo, Pani, Ben, and Cade on her fingers—“four men who were supposed to take over the ranch from him.”

  Tutu made a dismissing gesture, then asked, “Has no one told you about Ben’s death?”

  “Not really,” Darby said.

  “On the day Ben died, he and Cade were moving cattle from the forest to the ranch, and Megan had tagged along,” Tutu began.

  Darby felt as if she’d been socked in the stomach. “She was there when her father died?”

  “Oh, yes,” Tutu said.

  “And what happened?”

  “Wild pigs somehow got underfoot. The horses spooked, and Ben fell.”

  Darby was frustrated by the way Tutu shared only the bare facts. She didn’t explain how an experienced paniolo fell off his horse, or say why Cade and Ben had herded the cattle into the midst of wild pigs.

  It didn’t make sense, Darby thought. She’d been warned repeatedly about wild pigs, so they must be common. Hawaiian horsemen would know what to watch for, wouldn’t they?

  “And Megan—”

  “Was with her father when he died,” Tutu said.

  Darby held her hands over her eyes for a few seconds. She wasn’t mourning Ben Kato, a man she’d never met. She was putting herself in Megan’s place and thinking of her own father, back on the mainland.

  Darby gave her head a quick shake. She pictured Megan slipping down from the saddle, running to her father’s side, not caring what became of her green-broke filly.

  “And that’s when she lost her horse?” Darby guessed.

  “Yes.”

  It sounded as if Ben’s death was just a terrible accident. So, what grudge was Megan holding against Cade?

  “But Megan…” Darby tried to put her thoughts in order before going on. “Does she think Cade could have saved Ben? Or is it just easier to be mad instead of heartsick over her dad?”

  “I wasn’t there,” Tutu said, “but I helped later. No one could have saved Ben after the horse fell on top of him.”

  Darby tried to accept that and start a new conversation, but as long as Tutu was putting up with her curiosity, she had to ask one more thing.

  Tutu hadn’t been there.

  Jonah hadn’t been there.

  But Megan had been, and her words about Cade pounded back at Darby: You don’t know what he’s capable of.

  “Tutu, could Cade have—totally without meaning to—caused the accident?”

  “That,” Tutu said, “I do not know.”

  Chapter 3

  Tutu left Darby brooding at the table.

  Returning to her kitchen corner, Tutu said, “It’s lunchtime. Late for it, really. Before time gets away from us and you have to make camp in the dark, you’ll need some food in your stomach.”

  “Thank you,” Darby said. She noticed again how much Tutu resembled her mother. Except, Darby thought, smiling, Ellen Kealoha Carter joked that she aspired to be “high maintenance.”

  “Did my mom like the ranch?” Darby asked.

  “She loved it,” Tutu insisted. “And now that you’re here, I think she’ll return.”

  “I don’t know,” Darby said. Her mother was pretty stubborn, and she had kept her promise not to return to Hawaii for well over a decade.

  “Wait and see,” Tutu said, arranging something that looked like a vegetable steamer on the stove. “Everyone who’s lived on that ranch knows it’s a treasure, and we’ve been very fortunate to keep it.”

  Tutu left cooking and returned to the table. Darby looked up and met her great-grandmother’s brown eyes. They looked misty for a few seconds, then cleared as she tapped her index finger on the table.

  “This land is part of us, no matter what. When one of my children went with the old ways and one with the new, I split the land between them.”

  “You split the ranch?” Darby repeated.

  “Yes, I simply drew a line”—Tutu slid her fingertip across the table—“between the Two Sisters to the sea.” Tutu’s imaginary boundary ran off the table’s edge.

  “Who gets the other half?” Darby’s mind spun with confusion.

  “Babette, your aunt Babe, as she’d want you to call her,” Tutu said, “is on one side, and my son, Jonah, is on the other.” Tutu drank off the cold tea in her cup, then smiled at Darby. “I’ll bet he’s wearing you out.”

  “Oh, no…,” Darby fibbed politely.

&nbs
p; “Age has not turned Jonah into a gentleman.”

  “We’re getting along okay now,” Darby said. “But in the beginning, we didn’t. At first, he made me feel more rebellious than my mother ever did, but at least he’s not overly protective of me, like my mom.”

  “I doubt he’ll leave you alone in the forest for long,” Tutu told her. “He’d like a second chance at parenting, I think.”

  “So he adopted Cade,” Darby said.

  “He rescued Cade,” Tutu corrected, as if Darby should see the difference.

  Just then, a rustling sound came from nearby. Tutu was busy and didn’t seem to notice, so Darby leaned back in her chair and took a quick look around.

  In the dimmest corner of the cottage, something moved.

  Darby blinked and then recoiled with a gasp.

  An owl was balanced on a wooden perch, blissfully chewing the head off a mouse.

  Darby bolted out of her chair, knocking it over behind her at the sight of the owl devouring its victim.

  The owl opened its yellow eyes and glared at her.

  “You know better!” Tutu scolded, and it took Darby a second to realize her great-grandmother was speaking to the owl. “He’s supposed to eat outside,” she said, aside, to Darby. “I don’t know how he slipped that mouse past me.”

  The owl’s head swiveled, looking anywhere but at the humans, until Tutu held the door wide and pointed at it. The owl gulped, made two quick grooming movements—one with his beak, the other with a claw—then swooped across the room.

  Wind made by his flapping disturbed a carved walking stick that had been propped against the wall. It slammed to the cottage floor and the owl detoured away from the sound, skimming so near Darby’s face that she heard air sing through its feathers. It banked left, fit its wide wings through the doorway, and was gone.

  “Wow.” Darby wished Heather, her best friend from home, were here. She would have loved the surprise of it. Wild owls didn’t show up in Pacific Pinnacles. And they sure didn’t bring along a take-out rodent to eat in a corner of your living room.

  But then Darby reminded herself that not everyone had their family roots in old Hawaii. Owls were the ‘aumakua—a sort of guardian or reincarnated ancestor—of her family.