Chapter 12
The thing about Kauai in the early afternoon is that it doesn’t ask whether you’re ready for it. It simply shows up at full volume and expects you to keep up.
It’s the very next day, and the sun is doing something borderline aggressive to the cobalt water of Hanalei Bay, scattering light across the surface at a wattage that would be illegal in several less attractive states. The heat is thick, the humidity is high, and the breeze is a godsend.
Ruby, Kitty, and I are parked in beach chairs eating shave ice roughly the size of our own heads, and for one shining moment, nobody is dead. I’d like to keep it that way at least through the shave ice. A woman needs goals.
The whole bay is alive and kicking. Kids are charging in and out of the shallows shrieking at a frequency only dolphins should be able to register, a cluster of snorkelers is bobbing out past the break like very relaxed buoys, and a paddleboarder who has clearly never paddleboarded before is finding that out in real time.
I give him four minutes and my full emotional support.
The pool area behind us is pumping plumeria-scented everything into the air, the trade winds are carrying it down the beach, and somewhere off to the right at least four roosters are deep in a disagreement that never gets resolved and never will. It’s their entire retirement plan.
“Husband number nine had arms like that,” Ruby announces, gesturing with her spoon toward a passing lifeguard.
Ruby’s shave ice is the exact color of her hair—fire-engine red.
Okay, fine, it’s sort of the same shade as my hair too.
What can I say? Ruby and I seem to have a lot in common.
“He had arms and absolutely nothing behind the eyes,” Ruby continues.
“He was like a Greek statue that had learned to order cocktails.”
“That’s the saddest sentence I’ve ever heard,” Kitty Champagne says, delighted.
She’s tucked into the next chair under an enormous floppy hat, glowing the way she apparently glows by default, working through a mango shave ice with total focus.
She plans to enjoy every spoonful, and she dares anyone to comment on it.
I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m three spoonfuls ahead of her.
“It wasn’t sad at the time,” Ruby says. “It was very relaxing. You don’t want conversation from a man like that. You want him to stand near things and look expensive.”
“Wink talks,” Kitty offers.
“Wink is a unicorn,” Ruby says with full diagnostic gravity. “Hold on to that one with both hands, he’s a keeper.”
Kitty nods. “I’ve got our marriage certificate framed for exactly that reason.”
Lani comes barreling down the sand with a tray held high, her lavender-tipped hair catching the light as she weaves between beach towels at full speed. Obstacles have never once slowed her down, and the sand isn’t about to start now.
“I tried a new recipe!” she calls out. “Mango-lilikoi turnovers. Flaky on the outside, criminal on the inside. Eat one before they riot.” She’s already pivoting toward a knot of contestants who’ve spotted the tray and risen from their towels with the synchronized alertness of starved seagulls.
“There’s mango in the filling and mango in the glaze and mango in the future, because I bought forty pounds of it and I refuse to be defeated by produce. ”
I take a turnover. It is, in fact, criminal. Somebody should press charges. Preferably after I’ve had another one.
“Wow,” I say, moaning with delight. I make a note to tell her how delicious they are later, when she’s not actively running.
I make a second note that I’ve now eaten a turnover and a shave ice before two in the afternoon, and I file both notes somewhere I’ll never look at them again.
My filing system has a wing for exactly this purpose.
Besides, calories don’t exist in paradise.
A commotion down by the water catches my attention.
Halea is posed at the edge of the surf in a sundress the color of the inside of a guava, one hand on her hip, chin tilted up like she’s done this professionally—because she has.
Melanie stands beside her in something sleek and black and entirely unsuited to sand, looking like she wandered out of a boardroom and onto the wrong continent.
And crouched in front of the two of them, cameras swinging, cologne and cigar smoke announcing him a full ten feet in every direction, is Flash.
“What’s happening over there?” I ask, already starting to get nosy, because I’m physically incapable of not getting nosy. Ask anyone. Ask my last four homicides.
“I think it’s just a promo shoot,” Kitty says.
“Really?” I ask, already making my way down.
“Jinx!” Halea waves me over without breaking her pose, which is genuinely impressive. “Flash is taking some shots for the resort while he’s here. New brochures, the website, all of it.”
“I thought it was a good idea,” Melanie says, in a tone establishing for the record that it was, specifically, her idea. Right. “Our current brochure has a typo and a photo of a green pool that no longer technically exists. We’re overdue.”
“It is a good idea,” I admit, and her eyebrows climb a fraction, because I so rarely pat her on the back—or anywhere, for that matter. “Quick question, though. Why is the secretary being photographed as the face of management?”
“Because secretaries photograph well,” Melanie says smoothly, “and the manager”—she gives me a slow once-over that takes in the shave ice, the sand, and the turnover crumbs I hadn’t realized were on my shirt—“is dressed for a different occasion.”
I look down. She has a point. I hate that she has a point.
Besides, Halea could double as a supermodel and have the rooms booked out for the next solid decade.
I, on the other hand, would most likely scare people away from the North Shore forever.
I brush off the crumbs anyway, which at this stage is less about the photo and more about clinging to the idea that I have any standing left around here. I do not. We both know it.
“Give me your best manager smile!” Flash beams at me over a camera and fires off a frame before I can object, then glances at the back of it, looking thoroughly satisfied with whatever he caught.
“There she is. Don’t go anywhere, I’ll want you in a couple of these.
We need some reality to give them that authentic vibe.
Not a bunch of pictures where everybody’s pretending the pools have been cleaned. ”
“The pools have been cleaned,” I tell him. “We take a lot of pride in those chemicals we keep pouring into them.”
He snorts and laughs and coughs a bit, and by the looks of it those cigars will be biting him in the butt a little bit sooner than he anticipated.
“Thank you for doing this,” I say. “And I saw you last night, shooting the girls here at sunset. You’re really keeping busy.”
“Sunset is the only honest hour.” He’s swapping a lens, talking while juggling thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. “Everybody’s beautiful at sunset. The trick is the hour after, when they think you’ve stopped.” He grins again. “That’s where the real photos live.”
“You and Vera worked the circuit a long time,” I say. It’s not quite a question. Okay, fine, it’s entirely a question. I’ve just learned to dress them down so they can move through a crowd unnoticed. And hopefully get answered honestly.
“We worked together for decades. Vera and I go way back to—” He pauses to look at the ocean.
His smile is still frozen in place, but something flickers behind his eyes as if he were recalculating his thoughts, and he busies himself with a lens cap that didn’t need attention.
“We went back so long that you learn where the bodies are buried, in a manner of speaking.” He winces.
“Bad choice of words. You know what I mean.”
I do know what he means. I also know that Flash just looked, for one half of one second, like he’d said something he meant to leave unsaid, and I file it away in the increasingly crowded drawer of my brain marked come back to this.
The drawer has a waiting list now. There’s a system. The system is chaos, but it’s mine.
But before I can poke at it, Ruby arrives, because Ruby has detected the presence of Flash, and Ruby has plans for Flash that she hasn’t yet been able to fully execute, and Ruby doesn’t let a thing like that sit.
“Flash,” she purrs, planting herself directly in his sightline and extending a hand weighted down with a good nine rings. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
“Have you,” Flash says, charmed already.
“I’ve buried six husbands and divorced seven, and I have an excellent feeling about photographers. Number fourteen. Right this way. The interview’s brief and the benefits are generous.” She shakes her chest at him.
Flash takes her hand and kisses the back of it, which is the single most dangerous thing he could’ve done. The man has no idea he just signed paperwork.
“A woman with experience,” he says.
“A woman with vacancies,” Ruby corrects. “Photographers are very giving.” She bats her lashes at the photographer in question. “You said so yourself.”
“That was about lighting,” I say.
She waves me off. “Everything is about lighting, honey.”
Flash gives a full-bodied laugh at the exchange, and Ruby has him exactly where she wants him, which is slightly off balance, and I can see this playing out across the entire week and possibly the rest of his natural life. I’d warn him, but honestly, I want to see how it ends.
A whistle cuts clean across the beach.
“Everyone!” Pickles is standing up near the pool deck with a notepad pressed to her chest, projecting to the far end of the sand.
The woman has never once needed a microphone, and she knows it.
“The next group outing leaves in twenty minutes! Meet out front, wear comfortable shoes, bring water bottles, and absolutely no heels, Charlotte, I can see you, I mean it!” She claps twice.
“We’re headed to Makai Ranch for a little sightseeing by way of an ATV! ”
The reaction is immediate and divided straight down the middle.
Half the contestants groan at the threat of red dirt.
The other half squeal. And one woman near the back lets out a scream of pure joy that startles a rooster clean into the air.
I didn’t know they could get that kind of altitude. Neither did the rooster.
“I’ve always wanted to do one of those side-by-side things,” Lani says, materializing at my elbow with an empty tray and a gleam in her eye. “I call shotgun.”
“You’ll call shotgun to nowhere,” Melanie says crisply, “because you’re not going. None of you are going. This is a pageant excursion. It’s booked solid.”
“I’m driving,” Ruby informs everyone, ignoring her completely.
“You are not driving anything with a motor,” Lani says. “We discussed this after the golf cart.”
“Neither of you is going,” Melanie repeats, slower, the way you’d talk to a toddler you suspect of plotting against you.
Which, in fairness, is exactly what she’s dealing with.
Two of them. “And neither are you, Jinx, so don’t even start.
You are not going along to jinx this outing like you jinx everything else.
Besides, Makai Ranch books out a year in advance.
There’s not a chance in any tropical climate that you’re getting on that excursion. ”
“No problem,” I say, pulling out my phone. “I’ll just have Mr. X handle it.”
Melanie’s expression curdles on the spot.
For anyone who hasn’t been keeping up, Mr. X is the affectionate nickname we’ve kept for Dane Huntington, our resort owner, who spent all of last year hiding behind a disembodied voice and a stock photo of a beach before turning out to be both the activities director and the man signing our paychecks.
We still call him Mr. X for fun, mostly because the alternative is The Smile, which he earned with a thousand-watt grin that has personally talked at least one person onto a sunset cruise.
He also runs Island Dreams cruises along the Nā Pali Coast, knows everyone who runs anything on this island, and considers my entrepreneurial schemes here at the resort a spectator sport he generously funds.
“Not even Dane can get you onto that ranch,” Melanie says, but she says it with the smallest tremor of doubt, because she’s met Dane.
“We’ll see.” I’m already dialing.
He picks up. He listens. He laughs the laugh of a madman, tells me it’s booked tighter than a drum and there’s genuinely nothing he can do, sorry, sweetheart, there are some things even he can’t work his way into, and hangs up sounding apologetic in a manner that does me no good whatsoever.
“He can’t do it,” I admit.
Melanie’s smile is the widest I’ve seen it all week. I consider having it framed. Nobody would believe me otherwise.
“What’s going on?” Koa says, arriving at my shoulder with that quiet authority of his. He can sense a problem from a hundred yards out, a skill he’s had ample reason to develop since meeting me. I like to think I keep him sharp. He likes to think otherwise.
“Makai Ranch ATV outing,” I say. “Everyone’s going. I’m specifically banned, and even Dane can’t get me in. They’re booked solid.”
Koa is quiet for a moment. He looks out at the bay, then back at me, and when he speaks, it’s low and even and lands somewhere south of reassuring. “I might know somebody,” he says.
Four little words, and just like that, I’m back in business.