“Let
the police handle this, Pali. Don’t make it your problem.”
I
nodded. I’d promised to butt out, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to do
everything in my power to keep tabs on their efforts to find Crystal and bring
her back unscathed.
Outside,
two car doors slammed shut. I peeked out the window. Wong had brought along a
partner.
“Hey,”
I said to Wong as I opened the door. “It’s just a sheet of paper. Probably
won’t require two of you guys to haul it out of here.”
“Pali
Moon, this is my partner, Detective Bert Konomanu.” Konomanu was holding a
soft-sided briefcase with both hands. He bobbed his head in greeting.
“You
any relation to Noni Konomanu?” I’d gone to school with Noni, but she was no
longer a friend. It had to do with her trying to steal my business earlier in
the year.
“Yeah,
she’s my cousin on my dad’s side. She’s living over in Honolulu now, working
for Tank Sherman.”
I
invited them in and offered them something to drink. Both asked for water. I
went into the kitchen to get the water and pick up the ransom note. The cash
was still fanned out on the table. I gathered it up and stuffed it in my purse.
“Nice
house,” Wong said as I came back to the living room. “How long you been living
here, Ms. Moon?”
“A
couple of years. Why do you ask?”
“No
reason. We’re supposed to put the public at ease by starting off with small
talk. It’s part of the chief’s new ‘customer service’ program.” He turned to
Konomanu as if expecting him to contribute some idle chit chat of his own, but
Wong’s partner stared straight ahead—silent.
“Okay,
then, let’s get down to business. May I see the note?” Wong pulled a pair of
latex gloves from his pants pocket and snapped them on his hands. Konomanu did
the same.
“I’m
afraid I’ve been handling this paper all morning,” I said. My voice came out in
a panicky tone I hadn’t expected. “I mean, my fingerprints are probably all
over the thing.”
“We
watch
CSI
, Ms. Moon. Our technicians can deal with ruling out known
prints. Your fingerprints are still on file from the last time you called us
for help.”
“Oh.
Okay.”
He
carefully opened the folded note and leaned over so he and his partner could
read it at the same time. Then Konomanu extracted a plastic bag from his
briefcase and held it open while Wong dropped the note inside. Konomanu sealed
the top and then took out a felt pen and wrote on the bag. He carefully laid
the bag on top of a stack of papers already in the briefcase. Wong and I
watched the whole procedure in silence.
Before
zipping the briefcase closed, Konomanu yanked off his gloves and Wong did the
same. They stuffed them in their left pants pockets. Then they both took out
notepads and ballpoint pens from an inside pocket of their jackets and clicked
the pens at the same time. They’d obviously been partners for some time—it was
like watching a tightly choreographed Cirque-du-Soleil
pas de deux
.
“Okay,
let’s begin,” said Wong.
Two
hours later I wearily closed the door. I’d told them everything I could
remember about Keith and Nicole, even throwing in Farrah’s claims of bad auras
and chilling tarot readings. After they left, I felt even more ill at ease. I
flipped the lock on the door. Strange—the last time I’d been careful to lock my
front door was the first time I’d ever met Detective Glen Wong.
***
The
next morning, I drove to Lahaina anticipating the miserable task of notifying
my vendors that Saturday’s wedding had been cancelled. I made a list, and
prioritized it by who needed to know first. Keahou topped the list since she
typically started making her cakes three to four days before the wedding. The
guy I’d signed up to perform the ceremony brought up the rear. He used a
fill-in-the-blanks script and typically showed up only a few minutes before the
start time. His contribution was rarely moving or eloquent, but he was a
plus-size local guy, with the big
kahuna
look that Keith and Nicole had
insisted on.
I
clomped up the back stairs to my shop and unlocked the door. The fish smell
didn’t seem as robust as it sometimes was, but maybe I was just getting used to
it. When I got inside, the light on my answering machine was blinking. The
first two calls were vendors checking in, and the third call was from Trish, my
prospective December bride. “
Hi wedding lady! You must really be a busy gal.
Seems we’re playing phone tag here. Anyhow, I need to talk with you about me
and Buddy’s Christmas-time wedding. Call me.
” She left her number.
I
started dialing Trish’s number, then checked my watch and realized it was five
o’clock in the morning over on the mainland. As eager as Trish seemed to lay
claim to Buddy, a crack of dawn phone call probably wouldn’t be appreciated.
I
dialed Keahou instead.
“Hey,
girl,” she said before I could launch into my no-go speech. “I was going to
call you this morning. Don’t worry, I got everything ready. I special ordered
those nice papayas from the Big Island and they came in yesterday. They’re
perfect. Oh, and I already baked the groom’s cake. Komo says it’s my best boob
job ever.”
I
told her the groom had cancelled wedding.
“Oh,
too bad. He dump her or she dump him?”
“I’m
not sure what’s going on. They took off before I could talk to them. But don’t
worry, he paid me. How much do I owe you?”
“Hey,
stuff happens.
Mai hopohopo
—don’t you worry about me. Do you want some
Big Island papayas? I got two dozen here, and Komo and me will only be able to
eat three or four before they go
hauna
.”
I
insisted on paying her for the groom’s cake and for the twenty papayas she’d
had flown in from Hilo. She refused any money for her time and trouble.
“You
the one paying for this crazy boobie cake, then you should be the one eating
it,” she said. “When can you come and get it?”
I
promised I’d drive up to Kula before noon. Then I went on to the next call. By
ten o’clock I’d talked to everyone on my list. My cancellation charges totaled
almost nineteen hundred dollars. Even after rounding it up to two grand, I
still had a whopping five thousand dollars left over.
I
convinced myself it was okay to keep at least some of the money. After all,
when I’d made my pact to donate the excess to charity I’d never dreamed it
would be so much. I settled on giving half to a worthwhile cause and putting
the other half in my skinny savings account. After all, wasn’t
I
a
worthwhile cause?
Unfortunately,
as everyone knows, nothing good comes from broken promises. As Farrah would
say,
bad karma is way worse than bad luck
. Looking back, I wish I’d
handed the entire ten grand over to the local women’s shelter or the food bank
and paid my vendor expenses out of my own pocket. Maybe if I hadn’t tried to
scam the universe I could’ve headed off a lot of what was about to unfold.
CHAPTER 16
The
ride up to Keahou’s bakery in Kula was peaceful even though my mind was going a
hundred miles an hour. Had Keith somehow known about the ransom note? Was he
worried whoever snatched Crystal might later come for Nicole? How much did he
know, and more importantly, what would the kidnappers do to Crystal now that
he’d taken off?
“There
you are,” Keahou sang out as I peered through the window in her kitchen door. “
E
como mai
—come in, come in.” She’d boxed up the groom’s cake and had a big
paper bag, bulging with the almost-ripe papayas, ready for me on the table.
“You
hear anything from your bridal couple?” she asked, gesturing for me to sit down
while she cut a thick slice of cinnamon bread and placed it on a plate before
me.
“Nah.
They’re long gone, probably on their way back to the mainland. I don’t even
have a home address for them.”
“Huh.
What address did they put on their marriage license application?”
I
looked up from buttering my bread. “That’s what’s strange. They used a post
office box number. Almost like they didn’t want anyone to know where they
lived.”
We
talked for about ten minutes and then the timer went off on her stove. “Oh, I
gotta get that out of the oven,” she said. “Komo’s niece’s boyfriend is having
his twenty-one birthday and I’m baking a cake for the party.”
“Busman’s
holiday, huh?”
She
squinted at me. “No, I think he sells ads for KPOA radio. Not a bus driver.”
I
considered explaining the goofy expression, but then thought better of it.
Besides, I needed to pick up the absurdly expensive bridal gown Nicole had left
behind. The seamstress had been none too pleased to hear the bride had
abandoned it, and she’d sounded nervous about getting paid. I’d promised to
bring her the money and pick up the dress, but I had no use for it—my garage
was already bursting with cold-feet castoffs from “Let’s Get Maui’d.” Farrah
was always buying and selling stuff online, maybe I’d ask her to help me find
it a good home on Craigslist or e-bay.
I
picked up the pink cake box with one hand and hefted the bag of papayas in the
other. “
Mahalo
for being so nice about this, Keahou. It seems I’m always
cancelling on you. This is the third time this year.”
“Oh,
these things are hard to see coming. It’s better they decide not to do it then
go ahead and be sorry later, eh?”
“Yeah.
But I wish they wouldn’t wait until the last minute.”
“This
not last minute. Last minute is like what happened to my sister’s sweet baby
girl. You remember her—my niece Kulakai? Anyhow, her man says he has to
go to the
lua
—how you say, ‘the john’—ten minutes before the wedding
supposed to start and then he beat feet right on out the back door of the
church. That was stinky thing to do. Kulakai still spits on the ground when
anybody say his name.”
She
pecked me on both cheeks and I returned it. Then I went out to my car and slid
the cake box onto the backseat. I still couldn’t look at that seat without
seeing the ghost of Crystal’s hair draped across it. Now that the ransom note
had surfaced, looking at it freaked me out even more.
The
clock in my car said twelve-thirty, which meant the work day had begun on the
West Coast. I called Trish’s work number and she picked up.
“Hey!
Thanks for calling me back,” she said. “Guess what? I’m leaving for Hawaii
tonight. I talked my boss into letting me go to this swanky conference in
Honolulu. Can we meet sometime to talk about my wedding?”
“Uh,
well, Honolulu is on the island of O’ahu, not Maui. Any chance you could fly
over here? I could show you around and we could start sketching out ideas.” I
prayed she’d say
yes
; I wasn’t in the mood for another quick trip to
Honolulu.
“I
thought Hawaii was a state.”
“It
is.”
“But
isn’t it, like, connected?”
“No,
it’s a group of islands. There are seven major islands and a bunch of tiny
islands. The only way to easily get from one island to the other is by plane.”
I couldn’t believe I had to give her a geography lesson. This is how Canadians
must feel.
“How
long does it take to get to Maui from Honolulu?”
“It’s
a short flight, less than an hour total. And planes leave Honolulu all the
time. It’s kind of like taking a bus. You just buy a ticket and get on the next
available flight. By the way, where do you live on the West Coast?”
“I’m
in Portland. The Oregon Portland, not the one in Maine,” she said. I resisted
telling her I could’ve figured that out since Maine was definitely not West
Coast and, unlike her, I’d managed to stay awake in school during social
studies class. Instead, I said, “Great. When you arrive, give me a call and
we’ll set up a time. I’m looking forward to meeting you.”
We
signed off and I checked the clock on my dash. Not quite one o’clock. I still
had Keith’s money in my bag and I needed to get to the bank. But the little
chunk of cinnamon bread I’d had at Keahou’s had whetted my appetite. I turned
at Hali’imaile Road and headed for home.
I
walked in the back door and Steve met me in the kitchen.
“You
know, you really ought to hire a secretary,” he said, handing over four scraps
of paper with scribbled phone numbers. I quickly scanned the messages—none were
from Keith.
“But
why would I do that? You’re doing such a great job.”
“Don’t
push me, Pali.”
“Tell
you what. Since you’ve been so helpful and we haven’t had any fun time lately,
why don’t I take you to lunch at Hali’imaile General Store. It’ll be my
Secretary’s Day treat.”
“I
think it’s called Administrative Assistant Day now. Is that today?”
“Probably
not. But you deserve something nice for holding down the fort.”
“Well
there’s nice, and then there’s fabulous. Are you sure you can afford to take
your ‘secretary’ to a gourmet lunch like that?”