Koa, being drawn into the tale, nodded. Pueo, like many old islanders, had a gift for talking story.
“That night a great fire—dis avalanche of rock and burning lava—comes a bustin’ down the mountain, engulfs the village, and buries the fish pond. By the time people realize dis old beggar was Madame Pele, it was one whole boatload of time too late. The fire and brimstone, it spares the houses of the generous fisherman and the young girls, but everybody else gets their shit baked. The old fire god, she like that, she got her friends and her enemies, yeah.”
Silence hung heavy in the mountain air for a time. Despite his faith in modern science, the Hawaiian in Koa loved the old legends. He couldn’t help wondering, at least for a few moments, who had offended Pele. Certainly not the innocent children who’d died at KonaWili. Finally, he said, “Tell us about the steam vent.”
“Which one?”
“There’s more than one steam vent up here?” Koa asked.
“Yeah. There’s one farther up the mountain.” Pueo hooked a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the direction of the summit. “And then there’s the one that popped the kiddie school. Quite a show with all ’em flashin’ lights. Better than a fuckin’ Grateful Dead concert.”
Pueo didn’t have much empathy for the dead kids. “Tell us about that one.”
“It don’t go splish splash too often—jus’ every couple a dozen or so years after we get one of those motherfuckin’ Kona storms and the angry gods they dump a boatload of rain on my mountain.”
“But you’ve seen steam from that vent?”
“Luahine moe.”
“Old woman who sleeps and snores?”
“Yeah, man. Pele sleeps and she snores. Most of the time the vent’s asleep. But I’ve seen ’er vent leakin’ a little trickle of steam and, yeah, I’ve seen it steaming like Old Faithful, ’cept it smells like shit.”
“When?”
“Maybe two or three times since I come here in ’72 and before dem developers covered it up. Da buggah stopped steaming after they dumped all the rock and shit down the hole.”
“Damn,” Tatum interjected. “Trying to seal a volcanic vent is beyond stupid. Just causes the pressure to build up until you get an explosive release.”
It was even worse than Koa feared. If Pueo was to be believed, the developers had deliberately filled the vent to choke it off, creating a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode. “When’d they cover it up?”
“First, the cowboys put a fence around it to keep the stupid cows from gettin’ roasted—”
“The old ranchers knew about the vent?”
“Sure as shit, yeah. Fenced it off way back.”
Koa wondered if the ranchers disclosed the existence of the fumarole when Paradise bought the property or if Paradise told Gommes and Makela. He guessed not. Why would Gommes buy into a volcanic problem? But then again, Koa thought, a sharp operator like Gommes might have used the existence of the fumarole to bargain for a better price. Either way, the buyers learned of the existence of the vent. Pueo’s recollection made that clear. And rather than disclose the hazard, the Hualālai Hui developers bulldozed it over.
“When?” Koa asked. “When did the developers bulldoze the site?”
“Just before the surveyors showed up to mark out all ’em streets. Yeah, man, the developer, he brings in a dozer to fill up the sucker with rocks and dirt.”
Koa wanted to pin the time frame down. He guessed the Hualālai Hui had hired a heavy machinery contractor to do the job. Most real estate developers didn’t own construction equipment. They rented what they needed, and only a few outfits on the island rented heavy equipment. Koa planned to have Piki check those companies. “You’re talking about 2006. How long before the surveyors showed up on-site?”
“Yeah, man, sounds about right,” Pueo responded.
That wasn’t good enough. Koa wanted a better date. “How long before the surveyors arrived?”
“Maybe a couple of weeks … yeah, about that.”
If there’d been a volcanic vent down there, and it popped off every fifteen or twenty years, why hadn’t the USGS known about it? Koa turned to Tatum. “Doesn’t the USGS monitor Hualālai?”
“Yeah, we do, all the time,” Tatum responded. “Better today than in the seventies and eighties, but we watch for magma movements.”
“So how come you didn’t detect these vents?”
“We use seismographs to monitor earthquakes, GPS to measure ground movement, and satellite imagery to search for temperature changes, but none of those methods would pick up an isolated steam vent, especially if it only rarely erupted.”
Koa outlined the timeline in his head. Gommes’s Hualālai Hui covered up the vent before selling the land to the state. The state hired Boyle to build the school, and Tony Pwalú graded the site, scraping away enough rock to reveal hidden yellow sulfur powder. Tony told Hank Boyle, who showed it to “the lady from Honolulu.” The school project should have died. But no. Somehow Boyle got money to buy over a thousand yards of concrete and forged ahead with construction. They thought they’d fooled Pele, but the old fire witch never tolerated interference for long.
All the important players in the chain of title had known about the fumarole, and none of them raised the alarm. Why? Why would they knowingly put grade-school children at risk? Money? Could it just be pure greed? The Hualālai Hui stood to make tens of millions of dollars on the subdivision. But could greed alone—even big-time greed—motivate a whole group of people to expose children to the risk of being burned alive? Maybe, but Koa’s instincts told him something more sinister must be at work.
CHAPTER TEN
BACK IN HIS office, Koa answered his sister’s call. His brother had fainted, but Koa first thought of his mother. “How’s Māpuana?”
“She’s fine. It’s our brother Ikaika we have to worry about. The doctors did some kind of scan and say he’s got a brain tumor. It’s really serious, Koa. I’m here with the doctor now. He wants to perform surgery tomorrow.”
A brain tumor? Surgery? The news stunned Koa. After a pause, he said, “Can you put the doctor on the phone?”
A moment later. “This is Dr. Carlton.” The doctor’s deep baritone voice reached across 213 miles from the hospital in Honolulu.
“Tell me about my brother.”
“Your brother has a pilocytic astrocytoma in the cerebrum.”
After years of listening to pathologists, Koa hated medical jargon. “Excuse me, Doctor, but I need you to speak English.”
“Oh, sorry, your brother has a large tumor, or maybe two tumors, in the frontal lobe of his brain. This type of tumor typically occurs in children and grows very slowly. It’s rare, but not unheard of, in adults. In children, it is typically benign, meaning non-cancerous, but your brother’s tumor shows some evidence of malignancy.”
Koa wanted to be sure he understood. “You’re saying my brother has brain cancer, and the tumor may have been there for years?”
“That’s partially correct. I can’t tell you for sure when the tumor developed, but he’s most likely had it since childhood. And we won’t know if the tumor is malignant until we remove it.”