For a lifetime Spence Laamea wondered about Mauna Noe, what this ranch might look like, how it smelled, how the air tasted. Two hours ago he had left the main road and ridden across miles of land without seeing any sign of human life, no paniolo--Hawaiian cowboys--like himself, on the hills, only lazy cattle and horses. From the top of the last rise, the ranch proper came into view, the stables, the corrals and bunk house. The workers’ houses, left from plantation days, appeared deserted except for the vegetable garden that flourished behind one of them and a fish net spread out on a small square of lawn.

But more than the land and the house, he had wondered a lifetime about Franklin Bennett. Although he had never seen Bennett in the flesh, Spence once owned a miniature portrait of him.

"Keep it," his mother had whispered to him as she pressed it into his hand the night she died. He had only been seven at the time so the power of the memory should have faded with it, but he still got chicken skin when he recalled the way her sad, dark eyes had glowed with a strange, faraway look, as if she truly could see what might one day come to pass. "Someday he will want you, Spencer. Someday Franklin will need you and call you to his side."

Deep down in his young heart, where secret hope hides from truth, Spence secretly clung to the dream that somehow, someday, what his mother had predicted would come to pass.

His heart had grown as hard as stone, so that the very name Franklin Bennett left nothing but a bitter taste in his mouth. Even now, as he shifted the reins to guide the big thoroughbred horse, Kahili, toward the house, all Spence could muster were feelings of bitterness, of betrayal.

He was twenty-six years old, a keiki manuahi, a bastard, and there was nothing he wanted from his father now. The greatest satisfaction he would ever know would come the moment he stood in Franklin Bennett’s home, looked the man’s lawyer in the eye and refused whatever paltry hand-out Bennett had bequeathed him.

Spence had almost reached the fence that surrounded the rambling ranch house situated between the foothills and the sea. He felt the twinge in his gut that always came from dwelling too long on the past, on things lost forever--a father’s name, his mother’s love, a lifetime with Kaala, his beautiful, doomed young bride who had taken her own life. Just then, a large, yellow-eyed owl, pueo, with streaked brown feathers and a flat face, soared overhead, then swooped low, diving toward him before it swung skyward and flew on.

He stared after the bird in awe, felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. Pueo was his ‘aumakua, the god of his family, his ancestral protector. To be visited here, now, was surely an auspicious sign. Was it a warning? Or was good luck in the offing?

When he rode up to the gate, he noticed that it hung forlornly from one hinge. Spence grabbed the maku’u, the pommel of his saddle, and dismounted, then tied his horse to the picket fence. He nudged the gate open with the toe of his boot and stared up at the two-story frame house. Like the fence, the house was in need of repair.

It gave him a dark satisfaction to know that his father’s home was not as perfect as he had always imagined. Franklin Bennett had let the place go to ruin. The shiplap wooden siding was bleached bare in spots turned ghostly gray. Dilapidated shutters hung evenly outside some of the windows, while others were missing shutters entirely.

He walked up a wide path through a maze of low tropical foliage--ti with deep green and red leaves, aloalo, or hibiscus, heavy heliconia, red ginger, angel’s trumpets bent toward the ground. White plumeria with delicate yellow centers infused the air with a heady, pungent scent. Finally, he neared the lanai with its commanding view of the vegetation-covered knob of the ancient volcanic crater Kilauea. The open coastline fanned out beyond the crater.

It was a moment or two before he noticed a haole--a white woman--standing in the shadows. He knew there would surely be others at the reading of Franklin Bennett’s will. Most certainly the man’s widow would be present--but this woman was not dressed in the black garb of widows that haole liked to wear. She wore a faded blue dress banded by a worn collar and frayed cuffs. The gown was too big for her, the fabric too heavy for such a warm day. She looked uncomfortable.

She also looked too young to have been married to a fifty-five-year-old man. A tired wariness  her delicate features and reflected itself in her eyes. Of medium height, she had golden hair and perfectly etched haole features set in moonlight-pale skin. She was altogether beautiful. Haunting.

She looked as fragile as a newly hatched bird.