Chapter 2
Jinx
“Sashes, swimsuits, and sabotage,” Halea sighs beside me with a gold clipboard in one hand and a mai tai in the other, because Halea Palani multitasks beautifully and has never once seen a reason not to. “I told you, Jinx. I was Miss Mango. I know exactly how this ends.”
“With a winner?” I ask, a touch too hopeful.
“With a body count.”
“Halea.”
“What?” She gives a not-so-innocent shrug. “I’m a former queen. I get to be ominous.”
She is, in fact, a former queen, and currently the only person on my staff to have personally survived a Miss Mango week from the inside, so I’m taking her ominous energy very seriously and have adjusted my emotional support snack inventory accordingly.
Halea is curvy in all the places curves are encouraged, with a long waterfall of brunette hair and a smile currently conducting brisk business on a cluster of pageant dads.
Every last one of them has momentarily forgotten which contestant he’s related to.
Halea also works at the resort I manage, and has quickly turned into one of my best staff members.
Honestly, it wasn’t hard to do considering the competition.
It’s a balmy Friday evening on Kauai’s North Shore, and the sky over Coconut Cove Paradise Resort is looking rather ambitious. It’s cycling through every shade between lavender and tangerine like it can’t commit to one dramatic exit, so it has decided to stage all of them at once.
Hanalei Bay stretches out before us looking breathtaking without any apparent effort, which frankly feels like showing off at this point.
The entire North Shore has that golden late-evening glow that makes everything feel slightly more momentous than it probably is.
The air is thick and heated with what I like to call the Hawaii hug, and the sand is still warm between my toes.
Even the nearby plumerias are showing out tonight, perfuming the ocean breeze and turning a perfectly ordinary Friday into something that feels vaguely legendary and not at all like a homicide waiting to happen.
It’s my delusion, and I’m choosing to lean into it.
What I am choosing not to lean into is the glittering hot-pink banner someone strung across the resort entrance, the one that reads Welcome, to the Miss Mango Beauty Pageant!
May the Best Set of Mangoes Win! I have some serious questions about that sign.
Several of them. Most of them are about the mangoes, and whether we’re still pretending we’re talking about fruit.
I’m saving them all for later, along with my dignity, which I have a feeling I’ll be needing by midnight.
The Miss Mango Beauty Pageant has officially taken over my resort for the next solid week, and when I say taken over, I mean taken over completely, as in wall to wall, every corner of the property, no surface left unclaimed or unglittered.
Forty contestants, a full camera crew, a panel of judges, and a delegation of former Miss Mangoes with their tiaras already on, because apparently the crown never retires, it just goes dormant.
And then there are the mothers, about whom Halea warned me extensively and at length, and for whom I was apparently still not sufficiently prepared.
They descended this afternoon like a very glamorous, very opinionated invading army, and the resort has not been the same since.
“Well now, would you look at all these hot-to-trot gentlemen?” says the woman on my other side, and I turn to find Ruby Figgins already in full hunting mode, which is the only mode Ruby Figgins has ever operated in.
Ruby happens to be one of my island besties, and she’s retired and lives at the resort.
She’s somewhere in her eighties, has a wild head of bright red hair, is devoted to her love of gold hoop earrings, and she moves through life like she never received the memo about slowing down and wouldn’t have read it anyway.
Her fuchsia muumuu is a visual terror. Her earrings swing like they have somewhere important to be, and her eyes are conducting a slow, deliberate sweep of the beach that has nothing whatsoever to do with beauty queens.
She’s looking past them, through them, and clean around them, straight at the men now filtering in from the lobby, the bar, the beach, and various corners of the parking lot.
Those men have been drawn here by some primal signal the rest of us can neither send nor receive.
“Jinx, honey, I want you to look across that beach and tell me what you see.” She snaps her fingers when she says it, and her jewelry chimes as if it too is urging me on.
“Forty beauty queens and a welcome buffet, Ruby.”
“I see prospects.” She says it with complete certainty, not a shred of self-doubt anywhere in it, and no intention of developing any tonight. It’s safe to say Ruby has a small addiction to the opposite gender.
“The contestants aren’t prospects, Ruby,” I tease.
“I’m not looking at the contestants.” She lifts a muumuu-draped arm and points at a cluster of men hovering around the glam squad that’s taken over our humble resort, every last one of them all but drooling into their mai tais.
“Widower at two o’clock,” Ruby continues.
“Divorcé at four. And there’s a man at six in a Hawaiian shirt that I can only describe as an emergency, in the best possible way. ”
“How can you possibly tell that man is a divorcé?”
“The tan line.”
I squint. “He’s not wearing a ring.”
“Exactly,” Ruby says. “But his finger still is. Look at that stripe. The tan took twenty years, honey. The stripe took one lawyer.” She nods like we’ve just cracked the Da Vinci Code together.
“You two.” Lani materializes at my elbow with a tray of ahi poke, kalua pork sliders, and coconut shrimp appetizers, her wooden spoon already tucked into her apron. She’s clearly expecting to use it before the evening is out.
Lani Mahelona is another one of my island besties, sharp and sturdy and well into her seventies, and not a single one of those years has managed to slow her down or soften her opinions.
She’s traded her chef’s whites for a bright green muumuu covered in hibiscus the size of dinner plates, and her lavender-tipped silver hair is pinned back with a fresh plumeria blossom.
She looks magnificent, which she always does, and also slightly like she’s about to deliver a verdict.
“Behave,” she says. “Some of us are here to work.”
“I am working,” Ruby protests. “I’m scouting husband number fourteen. That’s a vocation.”
Lani scoffs in horror. “You’ve divorced nine of them and buried four, Ruby.”
Honestly, I’m not sure if those numbers are correct, but it’s close enough to get the multiple-matrimonial point across.
Ruby nods. “And I would like to add a fourteenth before I go myself. That’s called planning ahead.”
“Heaven help us,” Lani mutters, then pivots to me. “I’ve been thinking, Jinx.”
I lift a brow. “Should I be worried?”
“I’ve been thinking about the menu,” she continues.
“It’s the Miss Mango Pageant, so I’m committing to the theme.
Tell me what you think. Mango ice cream.
Mango pies. Mango chutney. Mango salsa. Mango marinades.
Mango cookies. Mango cakes. Mango shave ice.
Mango haupia.” She pauses for breath. “And I am nowhere near finished. I am riding this fruit until it begs for mercy. Oh, and butter mochi,” she adds, eyes narrowing with intent.
“Mango butter mochi bars. Chewy, golden, delicious and dangerous. I’ve already made four pans and hidden two from Spam, who has been casing the kitchen like he’s planning his third heist of the week. Because he is.”
I tick my head to the side. “That’s a lot of mango, Lani.”
Somewhere on this island, a mango tree just felt a chill run through its roots.
“The fruit started it,” she says with a shrug. “The pageant practically demands it. And I have no regrets.”
A rooster rounds the corner, stops dead in his tracks at the sight of forty beauty queens, and puffs his chest out to approximately twice its normal size, as if throwing his hat into the proverbial ring.
Or his feathers, as it were. Two hens trail behind him, but he’s already lost interest in them entirely. Typical male.
Hawaiian country music drifts from the outdoor speakers, warm and lazy as the trade winds, and a small herd of cats—Coconut, Pineapple, and Mango—are conducting their usual feline surveillance from their preferred stations around the property.
Each one manages to look both completely relaxed and deeply judgmental at the same time, which is a skill I respect enormously and have yet to master.
The beauty queens have fully claimed the beach now, wearing sarongs that are mostly suggestion and bikini tops that are mostly decoration. Each one walks like she’s the only woman worth looking at, and the infuriating part is she might be right.
“Sweet mother of all things slutty,” Ruby breathes. “Look at that one wearing nothing but a long gold necklace.”
I shake my head. “That’s a swimsuit, Ruby.”
“It can’t be,” Ruby protests as she squints at the woman in question.
“Can be,” Lani says with a nod. “I’ve used more fabric to dust a lamp.” She sighs hard. “Some of us are too old for parties like this.”
“And some of us,” Ruby says, eyes still fixed on the legion of ogling men, “are here for an entirely different competition.”
A smattering of former Miss Mangoes drifts by in their tiaras, because what else are you supposed to do with a tiara on a Friday night in paradise. That was rhetorical. The answer is wear it. Always. Maybe even in the shower.
I spot the contestants’ mothers clustered near the welcome table. Every one of them radiates two decades of sacrifice with an invoice attached, and every one of them fully intends to collect.
The pageant board hovers just beyond them, looking officious and slightly underpaid. And the men, well, the men are everywhere. They’re orbiting the beauty queens like men who have forgotten their names, their room numbers, and in several cases their wives.