Lana'i of the Tiger (The Islands of Aloha Mystery Series) (25 page)

She looked stunned.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s at least
be honest with each other. You hooked up with my boyfriend while my back was
turned and now you want me to tell you it’s okay because some low-life came to
your apartment and scared you. Well, it’s not okay. It’ll never be okay. Even
if Hatch and I had broken up—which we hadn’t—he’ll always be off-limits to you.
That’s one of the rules of friendship. But moving in with him while I was gone?
That was not only disrespectful, it was disgraceful. I guess I had way more
faith in you than you deserve.”

I turned and marched out the
front door. I sat down in one of the ancient wicker chairs on the porch. It
felt kind of awkward sitting outside where everyone on the street could see me,
but being in the same room with Farrah made me want to smack her.

She opened the screen and came
outside. “Pali, would you please listen to me?”

“I’ve done all the listening I
care to do, Farrah. Please go now.”

Farrah didn’t have a car. She
didn’t even have a driver’s license. I knew that. After all, for years I’d been
the one who’d driven her everywhere. Well, too bad. She’d have to be smokin’
some pretty strong
pakalolo
if she expected me to grab my keys and ferry
her guy-stealing butt back to my former boyfriend’s house.

She didn’t. Without another
word, she clattered down the porch steps. She marched down the shadowy street,
never looking back. After a few minutes, I pushed myself up from the wicker
chair and went inside.

CHAPTER
32

Even with the Farrah and Hatch
mess hanging over me, I still slept well in my own bed. I woke up on Christmas
Eve at seven and showered and got ready for the day. I briefly considered going
down to the Palace of Pain and reacquainting myself with Sifu Doug, but that
would require a bunch of horsing around and silly banter I wasn’t prepared to
handle.

At around eight the phone rang.
It thrilled me to once again hear my own phone ringing. I got up from the
kitchen table and checked the caller ID. It said, Decker, H.

I let it ring one more time.

“Hello?” I said, sounding like I
didn’t have a clue who was calling. I wasn’t sure why I was playing coy. Hatch
knew perfectly well I had caller ID.

“Hi Pali,” he said. Then he
stopped. As if he’d forgotten why he’d called.

“Are you going to give me some
song and dance about how Farrah’s damsel in distress act was so charming you
couldn’t help yourself? Because if you are, I’m hanging up.”

“No, I’m sitting outside your
house. I’m calling to ask if you’ll let me in.”

Great. They didn’t get a chance
to double-team me, so they went for the tag-team approach instead.

“Sure. But I’ve got a lot to do
today. Steve didn’t even get around to getting a Christmas tree.”

I went to open the door. When I
did, Hatch was sitting on my porch.

“How long have you been out
here?” I said.

“About an hour or so.”

I didn’t know what to make of
that.

“I feel terrible about what’s going
on between you and Farrah,” he said. “I was trying to do something nice for you
and it got all twisted up.”

“You think shacking up with my
best friend while my back was turned was
something nice
? Boy, have you
got a
pupule
notion of ‘something nice’.”

“Look, can I buy you a cup of
coffee or something? Or maybe we could go down to Lahaina and grab some
breakfast.”

Okay, I was furious with both of
them but the mere thought of the banana mac pancakes at Hargrove’s Restaurant
in Lahaina softened my heart.

“Could we go to Hargrove’s?” I
said. “I’d like to see what’s happened to my shop while I’ve been away.”

My wedding planning business,
“Let’s Get Maui’d” had been temporarily relocated to Lahaina after my shop in
Pa’ia suffered a fire. When I got whisked into witness protection, I was only a
signature away from getting a new lease on my Pa’ia shop. But I’d had to leave everything
in Lahaina when I’d been taken to Lana’i.

“Sure,” he said. “Today’s my day
off so I’m all yours.”

“If only that were true,” I said
under my breath.

“Pali, give me a break here.
Farrah and I are as freaked out about this as you are.”

“Oh, I doubt that, Hatch. I
really doubt that.”

“Look, make me a promise, okay?
No more snide comments until you’ve heard me out. If after I’ve said my piece
you want to hit the ‘delete’ key on me, then have at it. But first, give me a
chance to tell my side.”

We drove to Lahaina in silence.
It was actually a pretty comfortable silence. It was the kind of silence I’d
imagine two old married people might share as they traveled a stretch of road
that’s not only scenic, but familiar. The road to Lahaina offers spectacular
ocean views, as well as a short tunnel and hairpin turns around a steep,
mountainous coastline. I’d missed it so much. I drank it in as if I were a
dehydrated camel at an oasis.

We got to Lahaina Town and Hatch
parked his truck in a pay lot but he didn’t put any money in the slot. Most
locals often don’t pay, but police and firefighters
never
pay. There’s
not a judge in Hawaii who’d enforce a parking ticket on a cop or a
firefighter. 

We walked over to Hargrove’s and
I looked up at my shop above the restaurant. I still had the key on my ring,
but I had no idea if my stuff had been left as is or if the landlord had dumped
it all in a storage locker when I hadn’t paid the December rent.

“You want to go up and check it
out?” said Hatch.

“Half of me wants to go up there
and the other half doesn’t. I suppose I’d like to keep pretending all of this
has just been a really bad dream.” I think he knew I wasn’t just talking about
my shop.

“Tell you what. You go in the
restaurant and get us a table, and I’ll go upstairs and check out your place.
It might be easier for you to handle if you know what to expect.”

“
Mahalo
.” I handed him my
keys. When I’d taken my key ring out of the drawer that morning I’d clutched it
in my fist. I held the keys to my house, my car, and my shop. Tangible proof I
was really home. “It’s that big one there. The one marked ‘Schlage.’

I went to Hargrove’s. There was
a sign on the door reminding people the restaurant would be closing at two
o’clock so the staff could be home for Christmas Eve. I was seated at a table
by the open windows. It’s usually hard to get a window seat, but I was one of
only five customers. I ordered coffee and by the time it arrived, Hatch was
walking toward the table.

“Looks pretty good up there,” he
said. “You’ve got some way-dead plants and a couple of mega-size cockroach
carcasses, but other than that, it’s the same as I remember it.”

“How about the phone machine?” I
said. “Did you check to see if there were any messages?”

“Oh, I didn’t realize I was
supposed to get your business back up and running,” he said. “Get me a to-go coffee
and I’ll get crackin’.”

“No, no, I didn’t mean that,” I
said. “I was just wondering…”

The waitress came and took our
order. When she turned to go, I looked closely at Hatch for the first time that
morning. He was wearing a white polo shirt with a local golf course logo on the
pocket. The shirt was neatly tucked into a pair of tan shorts. Around his waist
was a braided brown leather belt. For Hatch, a collared shirt and belted shorts
were his usual off-duty attire. Even if he was just hanging around his house,
he always wore neatly pressed clothes. I flashed on Ono’s more casual approach
to life—the rumpled khaki shorts, his live-aboard lifestyle, and his checkered
past. Some women go for the ‘bad boy’ thing, but I realized my own world view more
closely lined up with buttoned-down Hatch Decker than endearing, but chaotic,
Ono Kingston.

Which led me to my next point.
How did it figure that my tarot-card-reading, Ouija-board-consulting,
latter-day-hippie best friend Farrah Milton had hooked up with my knife-pleat
and spit-shine firefighter boyfriend? Talk about your odd couple.

“Okay,” said Hatch, breaking the
silence. “Do you want to go first or do you want me to?”

“Have at it,” I said. “You’re
the guy who’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

“Well, this is kind of hard for
me to talk about, but I gotta tell ya I was pretty cheesed when you didn’t
respond to my Christmas card.”

“How could I respond?” I said.
“Wong gave me the card and left. And anyway, it wasn’t like I had a phone or a
computer or anything. I was on lock-down. And I’d have gotten in major
kukae
if I’d try to send you something in the mail.”

“Wong told me you didn’t even open
it. Did you
ever
read it?”

“Of course I read it.”

“So?” he said.

“So,
what
?” I said. I was
beginning to get a little ‘cheesed’ myself. How dare he try to avoid the
conversation about what was going on with Farrah and him? “I don’t think a
stupid Christmas card is the eight-hundred pound gorilla at this table, do
you?”

“
Stupid Christmas card?
I
write and tell you I love you and I miss you, and you call it ‘stupid’?”

I tried to remember the message
in Hatch’s card. Had he written,
I love you
? I couldn’t believe I’d
missed that part. Well, even if he had written it, wouldn’t that make them shacking
up just that much worse?

“Who cares what you wrote in the
card?” I said. “From what I hear, you and Farrah were already sleeping together
by that point.”

“Says who?”

“Says Ono and Steve and most of
Pa’ia Town. You think I’m deaf or something? People talk, Hatch. And it gets
back, whether I’m over there or over here.”

“Well, ‘people’ don’t know
everything they think they know. Sometimes things aren’t what they look like.”

How strange that notion kept
cropping up.

“Well then, why don’t you clue
me in on how things really are? ‘Cause, you know, I’d really love to know where
I stand.”

He leaned in and lowered his
voice. “I’m only telling you this because I know sooner or later Farrah will
tell you herself, if you’ll listen. People think Farrah and I are lovers and I
let it stand because I’m protecting her. And I’m only protecting her because
you
weren’t around to do it. And she’s in danger because of
you
. So if you
want to get all high and mighty, you go right ahead. But it’s only going to
make it that much harder to swallow the giant helping of crow you’re gonna be
eating when you get your facts straight.”

“I’m not following you. A scummy
guy came up to Farrah’s and Lipton ran him off. Isn’t that it?”

“Yeah. But that was
after
the guy had beaten Farrah so bad you could hardly recognize her. And after Lipton
bit him, he ran. But before he left, he told Farrah if she called the cops he’d
come back and finish the job, for good.”

The waitress put a plate down in
front of me and I smelled the yummy pancakes but I had no desire to take a
bite. My eyes stayed on Hatch.

“Here’s where it really gets ugly,”
he went on. “He beat her to make her tell him where you were. Farrah knew you
were on Lana’i, we all knew it. But she refused to talk, so he kept choking and
beating her until the dog managed to trip the latch on the bedroom door and go
after him. No one knows about it. I only found out because a guy at work said
it was weird the Pa’ia store had been closed for two days and nobody knew where
the owner was. I had a bad feeling so I went up to her place. When I found her,
she was a mess.” 

At this point my I’d scrunched
my forehead so tight I was getting a headache.

“She refused to let me take her
to the hospital because so was so scared. I stabilized her jaw and treated her
black eyes. One was completely swollen shut. She had a couple broken ribs. In
fact, she’s still taped up. She was terrified if anyone saw her they’d call the
police, so she had Beatrice work the store for more than two weeks. She moved
into my place and I’ve kept an eye on her ever since. You can’t tell anyone
about this, Pali. She’s sworn me to secrecy.”

I laid my fork down and bowed my
head. I have a rule about crying in public. I don’t allow myself to do it.
Unless, of course, it’s unavoidable. And right then, it was unavoidable.

CHAPTER
33

It’s not the good times that
define your character, it’s the rotten times. My character was definitely on
the line when I learned Farrah had been brutally beaten by a skuzzy druggie
who’d come looking for me. And it was even further on the line since my
boyfriend had offered her refuge but the whole town was talking about how they’d
cheated on me behind my back. Throw in that I couldn’t straighten it out
because I was sworn to secrecy and you have a major character-building
opportunity.

The thing about being attacked
in your own home is that it bruises your soul. It’s not like having your purse
snatched, where somebody grabs your handbag and takes off and it’s a hassle to
replace your credit cards and your ID but within a couple of weeks things get back
to normal. When someone invades your home and physically harms you, you no
longer feel safe anywhere. Every stranger becomes a potential assailant, and
every dark corner becomes a place where evil lurks.

After Hatch told me about
Farrah’s assault, I wasn’t able to eat a bite. I asked Hatch to ask the
waitress for the check and just take me home. I didn’t even want to go up to my
shop and check it out.

I sat in stunned silence on the
drive back to Hali’imaile. I thought about how I’d sent Farrah out into the dark
the night before. She must’ve found a ride home, because it’s miles and miles
from Haili’imaile to Sprecklesville, but even walking a couple of blocks must
have been terrifying.