The Flaming Luau of Death (18 page)

“He work here with you, right? He know how you grow the wasabi, but he doesn’t tell us. I give him two chances. Number three and I shoot him. He tell me one good thing. He tell me your wife is here on the island now.”

They caught up with Kelly some time after he left the Four Heavens on Friday afternoon and his mixed-up encounter with Holly. And when he wouldn’t give them the secrets to Marvin’s success at growing wasabi, they shot him and threw him into the Pacific. Horrible.

“So you see, I’m a serious man. Now your wife will die with you,” said the gunman. “Unless you tell us what we need to know.”

“They think I’m Holly,” I told Marvin. “And they found out that Holly and you are still legally married.”

“You have to love the irony,” said Marvin to me, dazed. “The only people in the world who recognize that I’m married to Hollyhock are about to kill me.”

“Marvin,” I hissed, “just stay focused. We’ll get out of this.”

“How?” he asked me, his voice reckless and angry. “How are we going to get out of this? We’re in a bloody abandoned house out in the middle of nowhere, Madeline. And there is no one on earth out looking for us.”

Just then, the loud
chop-chop-chop
of helicopter blades roared loudly overhead.

“Well,” I said, just short of fainting from relief, “that’s not exactly true.”

“What’s that?” cried the gunman. One of his goons ran to the window to look.

“Police,” yelled back the goon. “The police are above us.” The sound of a second helicopter roared in.

“I had a plan,” I explained calmly to Marvin as the Japanese thugs ran around the room, looking for escape possibilities.

Before they could think up their own plan of escape, the front door broke down and several of Hawaii’s finest officers came crashing in on us, guns drawn. “Down on the floor!” they yelled. “Right now!”

The perfect ending to a perfect luau night.

G
raffiti saved us; I’d been telling the story all night long.

It was just past midnight at Club Breeze, a funky nightspot in Kailua-Kona on the Kona Coast of the Big Island. Outside, a few couples clustered around Formicatopped tables, nursing mai tais in the warm night air, the muffled sounds of dance music wafting out from the club each time the door opened. Inside, the DJ was spinning “Let’s Get This Party Started” as a disco ball spangled the crowd with specks of light and Saturday turned into Sunday. And the gang was all there.

Holly’s four sisters were bumping and spinning on the little dance floor near the front of the nightclub, singing along to the tune. Liz Mooney was also there, sipping club soda and talking to a bartender. Wesley was sitting with his arm around me on the black leatherette bench of the club’s back booth as we watched the scenesters having fun. On the booth seat across from us was a pile of snazzy gift boxes.

Holly had just that second arrived at the club. On her way back through the bar she was stopped by a number of our friends. By her expression, I figured she was hearing snips and snaps about Wes’s and my thrilling luau romp from a variety of folks who had already heard
quickie versions of the tale. By the time Holly got back to our booth, her mouth was a circle.

“Tell me every single detail,” she said, sliding her silver leather miniskirt into the booth seat across from us. “I can’t stand it already. Tell.”

“I saved Madeline’s life,” Wes said, a smile on his face. “What’s to tell? After all, I am the senior partner.”

“Wes saved you!” she squealed, turning to me.

“Yes. True,” I admitted. “But that was only because he followed my directions.”

“You left him directions?” Holly asked, totally enthralled. “But I just now heard from Gladdie that you were being held at freaking gunpoint, Maddie.”

“True. But before that, I left him a note.”

“Graffiti,” Wes explained. “I was up in the air on a little private helicopter tour, just a quick trip to see the lava flow.”

“Oooh,” Holly interjected. “I’ve heard that’s amazing!”

“Amazing!” Wes said, enthused. “It’s alive! The Kilauea Volcano has been spewing liquid rock from the Mauna Ulu area off and on since 1983. At night, Holly, it’s like a stream of pure liquid fire on black velvet. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

“Hey,” I said, “let’s get back to me, please. The rescue?”

“Right,” Holly said, returning to the important topic of me. “Tell.”

Wes shrugged his shoulders. “Okay. Well, we were coming back from the volcano, flying back along the Kohala Coast, and we started checking out prime real estate from the air.”

“You’re kidding me!” Holly said.

Wes nodded. “It’s fantastic from up there. The only way to shop.”

“Get on with the ‘me’ part, Wes,” I prompted.

“Anyway,” Wes continued, “we were not far from the house, the one where they were holding Kelly’s luau, and suddenly all the lights below us just blinked completely off. From the air, it’s a pretty dramatic sight. All the buildings on the property and the exterior lighting just blacked out.”

“Go on,” Holly said. “I didn’t hear this part.”

“Vance wanted to fly closer and see what we could see. And then we noticed a crazy thing. Deep onto the property, away from the main house, bordering the lava rock fields, there was light. And we realized we were seeing headlights. But they weren’t moving. They were the headlights of a parked car. And the closer we flew, I began to realize it was our Mustang—the one Mad and I had arrived in earlier. That was odd enough. But when we got closer, we saw the headlights were illuminating graffiti.”

“What?” Holly looked enthralled. “Where?”

“On the black lava field right next to a small house.”

“It was Hawaiian graffiti, Holly,” I explained. “Letters made out of white coral rocks. You know, the sort of thing you see all around here from the highway.”

Wes said, “It was amazing. Maddie wrote out a special graffiti message just for me.”

“You didn’t!” Holly said, always the best audience ever. She ordered a drink from the waiter—a blue Hawaiian, which, she explained quickly, matched her nail polish tonight—and then turned back to me, rapt.

“I prayed he was still up there somewhere, flying around,” I explained. “The heliport was so close by, it seemed possible.”

“She’s either a genius or a witch,” Wes said. “I can’t tell which one I’m partial to.”

I ignored him. “But it made sense to me at the time. They would have to notice how dark the property had suddenly gone, wouldn’t they? From the air, that had to be damn alarming. I thought there was about one chance in hell that they’d fly over and take a closer look. So I spelled a message out of white coral. And then turned on the headlights of the Mustang.”

“Oh,” Holly said, shivering in approval. “That’s good.”

“Well, it sounds clever now,” Wes acknowledged. “But I’m sure it was pure desperation. Our poor Maddie.”

“What did the message say?”

Wes smirked. “I believe she used her last minutes on earth to leave the vital message: Mad Loves Cake.” He turned to me. “Wasn’t that it?”

“Oh, Wesley!” I punched his shoulder.

Holly giggled.

“It did not,” I pointed out in a little bit of a huff. “I wrote: WES HELP! And then I made an arrow pointing toward the house.”

Wes finished the story. “Vance radioed the police helicopter, and the rest was easy.”

“Right,” I said, thinking again of how “easy” it had all been a couple of hours ago, talking to the police, explaining a thousand details, giving a statement, watching them lock up Kelly Imo’s killers.

“Maddie,” Holly said, “not to change the subject…”

Of course not. I nearly get killed and orchestrate my own fabulous rescue and my posse can only give me about three minutes of attention at best. Right. Gotta love them.

“…but I need to have a heart-to-heart with you right now,” she said.

The waiter arrived with Holly’s blue Hawaiian, a sapphire-colored concoction of white rum, blue curaçao, pineapple juice, and cream of coconut, decorated with a paper umbrella, and suddenly smitten, I asked for one too. Wes stood up and excused himself so Holly and I could talk privately, but I noticed Vance had arrived at Club Breeze and was standing near the dance floor. The guys probably had volcano news to discuss.

“Hey!” I said, remembering a party detail, “let’s open your bridal shower gifts. The girls brought these. Aren’t you excited?”

Holly looked at the tower of boxes beside her. “Are you sure…?”

“Of course. The girls are all over the club, having a blast. Open them now!”

I thought this would be the highlight of Holly’s night, but she was rather subdued as she untied the ribbon on the first slender box.

“Oh!” I said as she lifted the lid. “Hot pink! One of your favorite colors.”

She had pulled out the slinkiest, sexiest little silk thong and tiny matching satin bra.

“This is cool,” she said wistfully.

“It’s not cool,” I said, trying to perk her up. “It’s hot!”

She quickly opened the rest of the boxes. More deliciously outrageous lingerie followed. Some even featured feathers. But it didn’t appear that Holly’s heart was in her underwear.

“Holly?” I asked as Holly put the new duds back into their shiny boxes and cleared the wrapping paper and bows.

“Maddie,” Holly said, “it’s about Donald.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. How ridiculous of me! In all the tumult of the night, I had momentarily forgotten about the possibility that Donald was involved with Liz. And frankly, there had to be a better word than “involved” when referring to one’s fiancé fathering a child by one’s best friend.

“What’s up, sweetie?” I asked her gently.

“I am not going to marry him, Maddie,” she said. “And I feel like I should have told you about this way way earlier. Except, you totally surprised me with this cool flaming bachelorette luau getaway trip. And you had gone to such amazing lengths to make this party great, I didn’t want to be the one to dampen your fun.”

“
My
fun?” I was shocked.

“Yes, Mad. I know I work for you guys and all, but I have to tell you, seriously, you and Wes are the best event-planners in the universe. And, well, aside from the murder and mayhem parts, this whole entire weekend has been totally awesome fun! Really. The best bachelorette party ever. So how could I be the buzz-kill of the century and tell you I’m having big doubts about the wedding?”

“You’re having doubts?” I asked.

“Yep. Donald is a terrific guy. He is. But I have been wondering if we were going to go on battling with each other all our lives, you know? We have always been rocky. And then when I heard Marvin’s name again after all these years, something happened. The oddest damn thing. I got kind of misty for Marvin.”

“You did?” I stared at Holly.

“Weird, huh? But I can’t stop thinking about him. He was the one guy I ever knew who just simply worshipped me, Maddie. I know it’s a silly concept, but that’s how I
felt back then. Like I was worshipped. And he was such a smart guy. I started wondering if a smart guy like Marvin could love me, maybe he knew more about love than I did back then. I mean, I never know what’s right. I just go with my gut.”

“So you’ve been thinking these thoughts about Marvin,” I said, trying to get my brain around this new development. It is, frankly, a bizarre enough story for a bride-to-be to discover she’s in love with her former prom date just on the brink of her wedding, eight years later, to an entirely different guy. But then one had to factor in the equally unusual fact that Holly was actually still married to this former prom date. Which made the entire thing a little more convenient, if no less romantically complicated as hell.

“So you see,” she continued, sipping her blue drink, “it just wouldn’t be right for me to consider marrying Donald now, while I’m feeling all confused.”

The waiter brought me my own blue Hawaiian, and I sipped it thoughtfully. I then told Holly all she needed to know about Marvin Dubinsky, today’s version. I told her about his elaborate plans to bring us here to the Big Island, and his hope to see her one more time. I told her also about Kelly Imo’s role in the affair. How Marvin had sent Kelly to talk to Holly on his behalf.

“That,” I gently explained, “is why Kelly had been waiting in your hotel room.”

“Oh, no!” she said, her face crumpling. “Oh, my God. I hit him, Maddie. I thought I was defending myself. Oh, no. I attacked the very guy who was bringing me news of my Marvin!” Tears popped into Holly’s pale blue eyes. “And now it’s too late. I can’t apologize to him. I mean, the guy is dead, Mad. I can never make it up to him. I feel awful.”

“You made a mistake. It was a strange situation. It’s okay,” I said, knowing how bad she must feel. “But you had nothing at all to do with his death, Holly.” Then I proceeded to recount the rest of the terrible story.

“So poor, poor Keniki loses her love,” Holly said, a tear dropping into her blue Hawaiian, “and I gain back my old love. How is that fair?” She looked up at me. “I’m so confused.”

“I know all about confused,” I said, agreeing. “That’s how I’ve been feeling, too.”

Holly looked at me. “Honnett?” she asked, right as always.

“Yep. I’ve been running away from him, Holly. I just don’t know how he and I can forget about our past junk. And even planning this trip and coming over to Hawaii seemed like a way to avoid Honnett for a bit longer.”

“Maybe you’re trying to fight your natural feelings,” she said.

“You think?”

“Maybe you totally care about that dude, but you were hurt, Mad. He lied to you and you hate that. So it’s a pride thing. That’s why you’re getting all these little flirtations out of your system. You can’t admit you fell hard for a man who wasn’t honest with you.”

“He wasn’t honest about the fact that he still had a wife,” I said, defending my stupid position. “That wasn’t an insignificant detail.”

“All right,” she agreed. “But men are kind of idiots. If they turn out to be the good-hearted idiots, we have to just forgive them.”

I smiled.

“Over and over again,” Holly said.

I laughed. “True.”

“Like I am gonna do with Marvin,” she said. “Even
though the way he brought us here is weird-city, it shows how much he still cares.”

“You have a big heart,” I said, admiring Holly.

“And I don’t think your story is finished with Honnett yet.”

“I don’t know,” I said, my eyes burning. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just consult my fairy and see what she advises.”

“Good idea,” Holly said, completely serious. I love Holly.

“So you’re breaking off your engagement with Donald. You’re sure.”

“Right,” she said, sounding relieved.

“Right,” I said slowly. “And then there’s Liz.”

“Oh.” Holly looked up at me, caught. “How do you know about Liz?”

“Holly, sweetie. You are talking to a woman who wrote the word
HELP
out of white coral rocks in the middle of the night. I think figuring out that Liz is pregnant and Donald may be the father is rather the easier trick of the two.”

“Right. Right. You know everything. That’s why I always come to you for help, Maddie.” She smiled. “Anyway, I thought something was up with Liz and all those fainting spells. Liz may be tiny, but she’s usually strong as a horse. At the hospital, I heard she was pregnant. Well. I had my suspicions about Donald and Lizzie too. Marigold has been warning me about them for two years.”

“Thirteen-lined ground squirrel?”

“Exactly,” Holly said, sighing. “But if they can be happy together, I say God bless.”

“You are a good soul, Holl.” I toasted her with my blue Hawaiian.

“Thanks, Mad.”

“And you can forgive Liz?” I asked, making sure Holly was really okay.

“Well,” she said, taking another sip and sounding pretty optimistic and philosophical, “why not? I mean, she’s been my best friend for twenty years. And since I’ve known her, let’s face it, I’ve had like a million boyfriends. And Lizzie only had this one. It sucks that he’s the one I was engaged to, but what the hell? How can I hold it against her that she fell so hard?”