The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (36 page)

I heard her gasp with relief as he turned back to his newspaper. “Then we are going home,” she said, and my heart rose hopefully along with hers.

“
You
are going home, Miss Beale,” my father said from behind the paper. “The boy stays.”

“I will not leave without Johnny,” Nanny cried heatedly. “He cannot live here. He is not used to such wildness. His mother wanted him brought up at the Villa Mimosa; she trusted me to take care of him. I
insist
he comes with me.” Astonishingly, she banged her fist on his desk.

“I think you forget, Miss Beale, that his mother is dead,” Archer said, suddenly angry, “and that he is
my
son. Go pack your things, and be down at the dock in an hour.” He glanced at me and said decisively, “There will be no lingering good-byes. The boy will stay here until you have gone.”

“Nanny,” I wailed, clinging to her. But she was beaten, and she knew it.

“Be a brave boy, Johnny,” she whispered tearfully. “Eat all your meals and grow big and strong. When things seem bad, remember I am thinking about you and that the Lord is on the side of the good. Don’t forget me, Johnny,” she said finally, kissing my
cheek. “I shall be there, at the Villa Mimosa, waiting for you, when you come home again.”

But my heart sank as I watched her go. I knew it would be a long time, if ever, before I saw her again.

   Jack Kane set out to make my life hell. But it wasn’t until later that I learned why he hated me so much. My jealous half brother knew more about me than I knew myself.

He started in a modest way, putting huge, hairy spiders in my bed and forcing me to eat wriggling mealy grubs and daubing me with red paint, like an Indian. He grinned wickedly at me because there was nothing on the island to remove the paint, and he knew I would have to live with my red face until it finally wore off with ferocious scrubbing.

He fed my dinner to the pigs, so I was half starved; he set trip lines across the paths and sent me innocently running up them and laughed as I fell. He took me into the forest, where he had dug a trap and shrieked with joy as I tumbled into it. He kept me a terrified prisoner there until dusk, when a servant came looking for me. He crept into my room at night, and I opened my eyes and found him grinning at me, holding a knife at my throat. “I’ll kill you one day, Monkey,” he whispered menacingly, sticking the point in, nicking my flesh. I felt the hot trickle of blood, and I believed him.

I grew impervious to his taunts about my thinness and my looks, but I lived in dread of the new tortures he might dream up for me. He was consumed with a jealous rage. He was king of his castle, and he intended to keep it that way.

When Nanny Beale left, I thought I was alone, that there was no one who would even care about me. But there was a servant girl on the island, Maluhia, whom my father, Archer, favored. She was a beautiful mix of Chinese and Polynesian, exotic, gentle,
soft-spoken, and kind. Her name, Maluhia, meant “peaceful,” and she told me it had been given to her by her mother, a poor woman already burdened with too many girl children, in the hope that this child’s life might live up to her name. Sadly it had not. Through various family disasters she ended up alone and homeless at age thirteen.

Maluhia’s skin had a warm golden sheen to it, and she walked with the fluid grace of a Hawaiian woman. She wore creamy plumeria blossoms in her long, glossy black hair, and she smelled of lilies and sweet fresh air. She was twenty years old, and Archer had bought her when she was fourteen from the Honolulu waterfront brothel where he had discovered her. Now she was his “personal servant,” and she was grateful to him for being rescued from the squalid life she had led. She had a sweet oval face and luminous almond eyes of a light brown color and a soft rosebud mouth. She was uneducated, beautiful, and kind. And too good for a man like Archer Kane.

I knew that like me, she was afraid of him, though he did not treat her badly, only indifferently. She was there for his use when he wanted her. In Honolulu Archer lived the life of a rich society gentleman with his fleet of cars and his yacht and his speedboats, his Diamond Head mansion, and his grand parties. But on Kalani he was the old-fashioned “master” with a master’s rights.

Maluhia was witness to Jack’s daily cruelties. She overheard when he told me that his father despised me, that no one cared whether I lived or died. Jack said I was an interloper and this was his territory, that I was sponging on his father, taking things that didn’t belong to me. “Even the food you eat belongs to
me
, Monkey,” he snarled, and though Maluhia glanced sympathetically at me, she dared not say anything.
But late at night, when she heard my stifled sobs, she came and sat on my bed and held me close.

“Poor Johnny,” she whispered in her lilting island voice. “Poor, poor little Johnny. It is not true. You know I care about you. And Nanny Beale still cares about you. And look, Fido cares about you, too.” She put the little toy dog in my arms and tucked the white sheet tightly around me and whispered, “Do not be afraid, Johnny. I will not let anything bad happen to you.”

Maluhia took me under her wing, a mother bird to a wounded sparrow. But alas, she, too, was an endangered species. I heard her telling my father that Jack was taunting me and leading me into dangerous games where I got hurt. “Johnny is only a little boy,” she pleaded.

I peeked through the door and saw Archer push her roughly aside. He would not hear a word against Jack, and she saw that he did not care, that Jack had the freedom to torture me as and when he wished.

Jack dared me on, knowing I could not compete. And poor, foolish child that I was, I fell for every one of his ploys. “Be brave,” Nanny Beale had said when she left me, and “brave” was what I was going to be.

Jack dared me to climb the forty-foot coconut palm, not even explaining the special way it is done, laughing when I ripped my hands and skinned my shins, skidding down from the meager height I had managed to achieve. He dared me to jump from high rocks that were easy for a nine-year-old but impossible for a small boy like me, and when I closed my eyes and hurled myself from the top, his mocking laughter rang in my ears. And he laughed even harder as I lay on my bed later, moaning with the pain of the sprains I had suffered.

One morning I awoke in my usual haze of misery, dully anticipating the day’s tortures. I reached out, as I always did, for my old friend Fido. I sat up and
felt under the sheet for him. I leaned over and searched under the bed.

I heard Jack outside on the lanai, laughing, and I guessed he had taken my dog. Fear mingled with anger as I ran out, still in my nightshirt, to confront him. He was sitting on the lanai rail, tossing Fido high into the air, catching him casually by a foot or an ear, grinning mockingly at me. “Want him back?” he demanded. “Then come and get him.”

I charged madly at him, but he vaulted over the lanai rail and started walking backward, away from me. I clambered over the rail after him, and he began to run. “If you can catch me, Monkey, you can have him back,” he yelled, waving Fido teasingly aloft.

I stumbled after him, too distraught even to be aware of where I was going, tripping over stones and scratching my face on the bushes. The dog was the only thing from the past I possessed. To me, he symbolized the security of the Villa Mimosa, of Nanny Beale and my sweet, ordered existence. Fido belonged to the time before I knew about fear and evil. Before I had had to learn to be “brave” and live by my wits. And I loved Fido desperately.

When I finally caught up to Jack, he was standing on the rocks at the edge of the ocean, still holding Fido over his head.

“You are nothing, Monkey,” he yelled triumphantly. “They wouldn’t even give you a real dog because you were too stupid to know how to look after one. So Nanny gave her goddamn namby-pamby pissy-pants little pansyboy a stuffed one. And you were dumb enough to think it was the real thing.”

I lunged at him, and he kicked out at me, catching me in the chest and sending me sprawling back onto the rocks, where I smacked my head. Crazy with pain and anger, I jumped to my feet and at him again, to
pummel him while I reached desperately for the dog.

He leaped nimbly away from me onto another rock. His blue eyes raked me mockingly up and down as he held Fido out over the water. “Okay, let’s see how brave you are now, Monkey,” he yelled, laughing at me. “If you love your stupid little woolly dog so much, go get him.” And he tossed Fido into the ocean.

And poor sap that I was, I jumped in after Fido.

Jack knew that I could not swim and that Fido was lost. A few minutes later he fished me from the surf, choking and retching seawater. Because you see, my lithe, strong, murderous half brother had remembered, just in time, that he could not let me die. Not yet.

He knew that he could not let me die for another thirteen years, when he and his father would have their hands on my inheritance. Those thirteen years yawned in front of me, a terrifying chasm.

   Suddenly there came an unexpected reprieve. Archer decided that Jack must return to school. “There’s more to running Kanoi Ranch than riding a range,” I heard him snarl angrily to a sullen Jack. “We employ paniolos to do that. How the hell do you expect to be able to run this place, after I’m gone, if you don’t learn? You’ll go back to school, Jack, and then to college, and you’ll be a credit to me.” And when Jack said stubbornly he was damned if he’d go back to school, he yelled, “You’ll do as I say, son, or I’ll give the goddamn ranch to the Monkey.”

There were no more protests after that. Jack knew his father was capable of anything, especially after he had been drinking, and I guess he knew he was right about running the ranch. And if anything in the world ever meant anything to Jack Kane, it was the
Kanoi Ranch. I knew he ached to possess it with every fiber in his body. I would have said “with all his heart,” but by then I knew Jack had no heart. He went off to school in Honolulu, and I was left in peace with Maluhia and the servants.

I was almost six years old now and still puny when Maluhia took me to meet Kahanu, the young Hawaiian in charge of the Thoroughbred horses. He also oversaw the prize herd of pedigree Herefords kept specially on the island for breeding.

Kahanu was around thirty years old and solidly muscular, with a broad Hawaiian face, shiny copper brown skin, a shock of thick black hair, and narrow amber eyes. Maluhia told me she thought he was the handsomest man she had ever met. She had no one else to confide in on the island, so she told me her secret: She was in love with Kahanu, but she was afraid to say so because of Archer. I, too, was afraid of Archer, so I did not question this, but I understand now that she was afraid because she was Archer’s concubine, his possession.

Maluhia begged Kahanu to help me. “Make Johnny strong, like you, Kahanu,” she pleaded. “Teach him all that you know because if you do not, I am sure he will die.” She looked at me sadly, because she recognized a broken heart when she saw one.

Kahanu put me on a piebald pony, bareback. I clung desperately to its mane, not knowing what to do. “Sit up straight,” he yelled at me. “Grip with your knees.” I gripped and straightened up as the pony paced slowly around the corral. After a while I stopped being so afraid and began to look around me, enjoying myself. Sitting straight-backed, I waved to Kahanu and Maluhia, and they laughed and waved back. And for the first time, on the back of that little dappled pony, I felt a thrill of achievement.

Kahanu let me help around the stables, and every morning, when the sun woke me, I rushed there. I worked shirtless alongside him, currying the horses, mucking out the stables, hosing down the yards. I adored my new friend, and I hung breathless with admiration over the corral fence, watching as he broke a new colt.

I followed him everywhere. He let me eat with the men, squatting on the ground, scooping poi and sweet baked meats from a banana leaf with my fingers the way they did. Later, exhausted, I would fall asleep in my own secret place in the hayloft.

Months passed, and Jack still did not return to the island. Maluhia told me that Archer had sent him to boarding school in America. He was behind in his studies, and he would not be allowed back on Kalani until he had done better. I cheered when she told me, whooping and hollering like a normal little kid as I danced over to Kahanu’s room in the stables to tell him the good news.

“Then you are not gonna waste your time neither, Johnny,” he told me. “Don’t think you’re just gonna loaf away your days doing nothing but currycomb a horse and ride a little pony around the island. No, sir, I’m gonna teach you to be a man, so when that little bastard, Jack, comes home again, you can take him on. And win.”

So I began my crash course in bodybuilding and physical skills. Kahanu taught me to climb trees, to chop wood, to box, to paddle a canoe; to fish. The Chinese cook taught me the martial arts, and Maluhia taught me to swim. And gliding naked with her under the crystal green water with tiny jeweled fish darting around us, I was happy again.

Many months passed in this fashion, and I was beginning to believe that life would always be as serene and beautiful as this. Kahanu had even given me a
Hawaiian name—Ikaikakukane, meaning “One of Manly Strength,” to commemorate my new prowess.

And then, when I was eight, Jack returned, and the torture began all over again.

The Hawaiians had given me a new name, but they also had one for Jack. Lauohomelemele, the Yellow-haired One. He took it as a compliment to his superior “white man” status, but the Hawaiians knew better, and it was always said with a subtle contempt.

Everyone on the island, the stable hands, the paniolos, the Chinese servants, hated the Yellow-haired One. He treated them all like dirt, throwing orders around and kicking the servants out of his way when they didn’t move fast enough. He threw dishes at the Chinese cook when he didn’t like the food, and he even had grown men fired and banished from the island when he complained to his father about their work or their slowness or their “bad attitude.” Archer gave him full power. “It’s good training for when you run the ranch,” he said approvingly.