Lana'i of the Tiger (The Islands of Aloha Mystery Series) (3 page)

“Is that an operating fireplace?”
I said.

“Oh yes, we use it a lot. It can
get pretty nippy up here on winter nights.”

“Where do you get the wood?”

She smiled. “Look around. These
Cook Island pines sometimes drop ten-foot branches when we get a big storm.”

That was less than comforting.

The three guest rooms were
similar, but not identical. Two rooms had queen beds, and the other room had a
queen and a set of bunk beds. All had attached bathrooms with toilet, sink and
shower.

“The larger room is for
families,” she said. “You’d be surprised how many kids we get here. I think the
parents are afraid to stay at the Four Seasons. The kids might break
something.”

Yeah, I thought, like dad’s
wallet.

“Every morning we pick fresh
fruit and serve it with breakfast. We’ve got mango, papaya, bananas—all kinds
of trees. We even have some strawberry plants in the greenhouse.”

She went on. “My husband,
Darryl, makes muffins or scones to start with. Then, when the guests are
seated, we offer them egg dishes. Sometimes to order—like specialty omelets or
bacon and eggs—or sometimes he just makes a sausage and egg casserole. He’s got
all kinds of recipes he’ll leave for you.”

I was getting a little nervous.
I usually scarfed down some yogurt or cold cereal for breakfast. Whipping up
omelets and casseroles wasn’t my strong suit.

“You look worried. Don’t be,”
she said. “We promise a full, healthy breakfast. If you want to buy some
muffins at the store and fix some oatmeal with fruit, that will be fine. The
only thing you’ve got to get perfect is the coffee. People on the Internet rave
about our coffee.”

“I’m a big fan of the stuff
myself.”

“Good. Because we use the best
Kona beans and we grind them fresh for every pot. We use French presses and
each table gets their own press so they can help themselves.”

“I’ve never done that.”

“It’s simple. If you can operate
a bicycle pump, you can make French press coffee. It’s the same principle.”

She showed me where the cleaning
supplies were kept and then she opened the linen closet. “We wash our own
linens here, but we only change the guests’ sheets every three days, unless
there’s an accident. The guests know that they don’t get new sheets daily, so
it’s not a problem. The washing machine is out in the carport and I dry
everything on the back clothesline. People go
pupule
over the smell of
sheets dried in the fresh air. I guess back on the mainland hardly anybody does
that anymore.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t about to
tell her I’d check on the sheet-drying situation when I was over on the
mainland testifying against a murderous drug cartel.

“By the way,” she said. “How
long have you been here on Lana’i?”

“Not quite a month.”

“Have you gotten your electric
bill yet?”

“No.” Truth was, I was never
going to get an electric bill. Uncle Sam—my new Sugar Daddy—paid all my bills.
He fed me with an electronic food stamp card (which I hated using at the local
grocery store because it always garnered
stink eye
from the hard-working
clerk), and he intercepted all my mail. I didn’t even get stuff addressed to
“Occupant.”

“Well, you’re in for a shock,”
she said. “Our electric bills are outrageous. Hundreds of dollars. That’s
another reason why I dry stuff outside.”

I nodded.

“Oh!” She clamped a hand on her
belly. “The little bugger’s kicking a goal in there. Sco-o-o-re!” She threw her
hands up in mock celebration, but she looked like she was in pain.

“Do you need to sit down?”

“I probably should. Why don’t I
make you a cup of coffee while we work out the details?”

“Better yet,” I said, “why don’t
I
make
you
a cup of coffee? Consider it a training session.”

“I’m off coffee,” she said. “I’m
stuck with herbal tea. But you could make me some tea and then make yourself a
small French press of coffee. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds good. At least that way
if I mess up, I’ll be the only one who has to drink it.”  She led me into the
kitchen. Hawaiian-themed coffee mugs were visible through the glass-fronted
cabinets. I pulled out two mugs and took the tea kettle off the stove and
filled it with water.

“Oh my gosh, I did it again,”
she said. “I never even asked you your name. As you can see, I’m way too
distracted to be running a guest house.” She put a hand over her mouth in
embarrassment.

“No, it’s my fault. I should
have told you earlier. My name’s Penny Morton. Just Penny, not Penelope or
anything fancy like that.”

“Well, Penny, I’m Ewa Fontaine.
My first name’s pronounced Eh-va, but it’s spelled E-W-A—the Hawaiian spelling.
There’s an Ewa Beach over on O’ahu, right?”

“Yes. Up toward the North
Shore.” I was glad she’d been named for a well-known beach. If it had been some
obscure place on the windward side of O’ahu, I wouldn’t have had a clue.

“You must miss being over there.
It’s so different from here.”

“Oh yeah, it’s different all
right.”

She led me to the breakfast
room, which was a small alcove off the main kitchen. There were three tiny
tables covered in tropical print oilcloth tablecloths. The chairs were so
spindly I was afraid she might not be able to balance herself on the tiny chair
seat. She took her time sitting down.

“As you can imagine, the only
bad reviews we get are from
ali’i
-sized people,” she said once she got
settled. “Everything here on Lana’i is kind of small. During the pineapple
days, most of the folks were short skinny guys who burned up every available
calorie working in the fields all day long. The women worked hard too. They
didn’t have conveniences like we have today.”

“I figured these plantation
houses had been built with small people in mind,” I said. “My rental’s only
five hundred square feet.”

“That sounds about right. This B
and B is actually two houses we put together. My husband added on all the guest
bathrooms himself. When we moved in, there was only one indoor toilet in the
whole place. The second house hadn’t been modernized yet.”

We finished our tea and coffee
and I went back outside and resumed my run. My feet barely touched the ground
as I took a loop around Dole Park before heading for home.

I could hardly wait to tell Wong
I’d found a job, all by myself.

CHAPTER
3

The next morning I made my way
down to the White Orchid Bed and Breakfast at six-thirty. Ewa had asked me to
arrive by seven, but I was too excited to wait around any longer. I skipped up
the front steps and rapped lightly on the front door. A guy’s face came into
view through the small four-pane window. He smiled and opened the door.

“Hey,
aloha
! Ewa told me
she’d found a new girl. You must be her.” He pushed the screen open for me to
come inside.

Whew, what a hunk. From all
appearances, that baby of theirs was getting some Grade A genes. Ewa’s husband
was a
poi dog,
what we Hawaiians call people with mixed ethnicity. He
looked Asian, Hawaiian, and
haole.
I’ll bet his family tree sported a
whole fruit salad of ancestors. He wasn’t tall by American standards, but he
was taller than most of the locals, probably five-ten. He was toned and ripped from
neck to feet, and he sported a set of biceps that would make my best friend
Farrah, back home on Maui, weep. He was darkly tanned, highlighting his wide
smile and espresso brown eyes.

“My name’s Darryl,” he said,
extending a hand.

“I’m Penny.” We shook hands.
Then he leaned in to whisper to me.

“I’m so glad to see you. Ewa’s
been a wreck worrying about this. It’s not like we have that many guests, but
she didn’t want to have to cancel on anybody. Or send them up to the big boys
on the hill.” He nodded in the general direction of the Four Seasons Lodge at
Koele.

“Yeah, I understand. You work
hard to build up a good reputation, and then your life gets in the way,” I
said.

“Exactly. Anyway, like I said,
it’s great you’ve agreed to help us out here. Did Ewa go over your duties?”

“Not everything. We talked in
general about taking reservations, cleaning the rooms and making breakfast, but
I’m not one-hundred percent sure of everything I should be doing.”

“No worries. I made you a list.
It’s kind of a check-list, but don’t feel you have to follow it to a ‘T’ or
nothin’. I thought it might help, though.”

He handed me a three-page list
of tasks. At the top of the first page it said,
Reservations & Check-in
;
on the second page,
Breakfast
; and on the third,
Cleaning and
Check-out
. It detailed things I needed to know, like how to process a
credit card payment and where the toilet plunger was kept. Obviously, Darryl
had spent some time on it.

“Wow, this is perfect. This will
really help when Ewa’s not here.”

“Don’t forget I’ll be gone too,”
he said. “We’ll be staying with my folks over in Mililani, and as much as we’ll
probably want to get outta there in a day or so, there’s no way my mom’s gonna
let us. This is her first grandchild.”

“I understand.”

“I hear you’re from over there.”

It took me a few seconds to make
the connection. “Oh yeah, from O’ahu, you mean?”

“Yeah.” He eyed me suspiciously.

“I’m sorry. I’m still kinda
freaked out from everything that’s happened.”

“You mean, you husband? I was
really sorry to hear about that. I wanted to thank you—and him—for his service.
Guys like that are heroes, you know? I mean, real American heroes.”

I nodded.

“You’re probably tired of
talking about it.”

“No, it’s good to talk about it,
but I’m still kind of getting used to it. Sometimes I just space out. You know,
sometimes it feels like it never happened.”

“Understood.”

We stared at each other for a
couple of seconds and then he clapped his hands together. “So, why don’t I give
you a few minutes to look over the list? We don’t have any guests with us this
morning, but someone’s checking in later on. Hopefully, by the time he gets
here you’ll feel ready to go.”

“Sounds good.”

“You want a cup of coffee?” he
said. “We’ve got killer coffee.”

“I had some yesterday with Ewa.
It was fabulous.”

“She’s not supposed to be
drinking the stuff.” His eyes narrowed, like he wasn’t at all happy to hear of
Ewa’s transgression.

“No, well actually, I had
coffee. She had herbal tea.”

“Oh, good.” He looked way more
relieved than I thought the situation called for.

We went into the kitchen and I
offered to demonstrate my prowess with the coffee bean grinder and the French
press. I measured out the Kona beans and ground them for about half a minute.
Ewa had clued me in that the coffee needed to be coarsely ground, not finely
ground like you use in drip coffee makers. Then I measured two scoops of the
coffee into the bottom of the French press. I poured boiling water up to the
top and then I watched the clock as I waited exactly three minutes for the
coffee to steep. Finally, I slowly lowered the press through the coffee,
separating the grounds from the liquid. I poured a small cup of coffee for both
of us and watched Darryl’s face.

“Perfect,” he said after taking a
sip. He downed the rest of his coffee in two gulps and stood. “That was great.
I’ve got to get going, but Ewa will be up soon to work with you. Until then,
why don’t you just relax in here and read over your list?”

“Sounds good. Nice meeting you,
Darryl.” I stood.

“Back atcha,” he said. We shook
hands again. “I’m really glad you showed up, Penny. Must be
karma.
You
need a short-term job, and we need short-term help.
Mahalo
for taking
this on.”

“I’ll do my best.”

After Darryl left I carefully
read over my duty list. Compared to everything involved in coordinating a
wedding, it looked like running a bed and breakfast would be a piece of cake.

***

Ewa didn’t make an appearance
until almost nine. Even with the late hour, she still looked tired and drawn.

“I’m so sorry to be such a lazy
bum,” she said. “I’m usually up by seven, but lately neither of us is getting
any sleep.” She patted her belly as if to let me know it wasn’t Darryl who
wasn’t getting his beauty sleep.

“It must be hard. When is your
due date?”

“Last Saturday.”

“Oh, so you’re overdue?”

“No, I’m right on schedule. It’s
this little bugger who’s overdue.”

“They won’t let you go to the
hospital now?”

“The doctor said it’s best to
wait until my water breaks or I go into labor. The insurance company doesn’t
like women hanging out on their dime if they’re not actually pushing a baby
out.”

“But what if you can’t get there
in time?” I sounded panicky. I vowed to dial back the alarm bells a tad.

“I’ve got a friend here who’s a
midwife. She’s assured me if I get into trouble she’ll come over and help.”

Ewa was way more mellow than I’d
have been, given the situation, but then I’ve been accused of being a control
freak more times than I can remember.

“We’ve got a guest who’ll be
checking in at four this afternoon,” she said. “Why don’t we go over how you’re
going to handle it?”

I was more than willing to
change the subject. “Sounds great.”

“Let’s talk in the breakfast
room,” she said.

We sat at one of the tiny tables.
I drank coffee, she drank herbal tea. She went over greeting the guest, getting
his credit card on file, pointing out the room amenities, and so on.

“He’s our only guest for a few
days, so it ought to be pretty easy.” She shot me a look that contradicted what
she’d just said.