Chapter 14
Birdie drives like she has something to prove and has Koa as a captive audience, which, to be fair, she does and she does.
She takes the lead out of the yard in her sleek little two-seater and immediately makes it everyone else’s problem, fishtailing through the first turn in a spray of red dirt, whooping, glancing over to make sure Koa saw.
Koa, also known as Buns of Steel, is beside her, wearing the braced and neutral expression of a hostage, and I know that expression well, because it’s the one he wears in Pele whenever I’m behind the wheel.
The rest of us fall in behind her like ducklings, if ducklings were forty beauty queens and a fuchsia-clad widow operating heavy machinery she has not been licensed to operate.
“HOLD ON,” Ruby bellows, and stomps the gas.
Mud Honey leaps forward. Lani grabs the roll bar.
Kali grabs Lani. I grab whatever’s nearest, which turns out to be the dashboard, and the four of us go tearing off across the flatlands with our free arms thrown straight up over our heads like we’re cresting the first hill of a roller coaster, because at a certain point that is simply what your body does.
And then Kauai shows off like the verdant queen she is. The trail climbs and the whole island opens up underneath us. Waterfalls thread down the green faces of the mountains, thin and silver and impossibly high, feeding into pools I’ll never reach and rivers I’ll never name.
We rattle along clifftop paths with the ocean glittering cobalt far below and nothing but air between us and the drop, which I choose not to think about.
The trail dives back into the trees, and the trees are enormous, draped in ferns that climb all the way to the crown, hung with foliage the size of dinner plates, the size of my own head, the size of a small tornado.
Red ginger blazes along the path like someone lit torches.
Chickens explode out of the brush as we pass, roosters scream after us about it, and the whole thing is wrapped in a rolling cloud of red dust that gets into everything and asks permission for none of it.
It is, without question, the most fun I have had since moving to this island. I’d feel guilty about that, what with the open homicide investigation and all, but the homicide will still be there tomorrow. That’s the thing about homicide investigations, they’re very patient with you.
We climb to a scenic lookout and everyone tumbles out to take pictures, and that’s where I get my first good look at the group, which is when I realize we’ve all turned the exact same color.
Every single one of us is coated head to toe in red dirt.
Same faces, same lips, same eyelashes, same hair, same shoes.
Forty contestants, one widow, one cook, one Kali, and one me, all rendered in identical terracotta, indistinguishable as a row of clay pots.
I couldn’t pick Charlotte out of this lineup at gunpoint. We look like we were fired in a kiln.
Koa and Birdie are the same rust-colored hue, naturally, but she’s yanked him off to the side, separating him from the crowd the way predators separate their prey from the herd. I watch it happen with professional interest and one eye twitching.
Flash is up at the railing working the group, because Flash materializes wherever there are people pretending not to pose.
He’s somehow still immaculate. The man drove through the same dust storm we did and looks like he stepped out of a dry-cleaning bag, and I’ve decided not to investigate how, because some mysteries are meant to be just that.
He fires off frame after frame, and Birdie drifts over to him with her hip cocked.
“You gonna make me famous, handsome?”
“Sweetheart, I couldn’t make you anything you aren’t already,” Flash says, not looking up from the viewfinder, and Birdie laughs like he’s hung the moon and personally dedicated it to her.
She’s cheating on Koa already.
She spots me watching, and her laugh flies away.
“Jinx.” She glides over, sugar-sweet, and looks me up and down, terracotta to terracotta.
“Glad to see you’re keeping up. That’s so brave of you, at your age.
Try not to strain anything,” she says, patting my dirt-caked shoulder, leaving a clean handprint.
Great. I now have exactly one clean spot on my entire body, and it’s shaped like her condescension.
Koa makes his way over, looking like a clay figure of an Adonis that came to life. “Having fun?” He grins, and his teeth glow like moonbeams.
“Of course they’re having fun,” Birdie is quick to answer for me.
“You know,” she says, swiping mud off her cheek and somehow making even that look like a flirtation, “a fortune-teller told me once that I was destined to marry a tall, dark man on an island in the sea. She read it right off my palm.” She looks at Koa, then at me, sweet as arsenic.
“And we all know the third eye is never wrong.”
I think she may have left out a few logistics. The restraining-order energy, for one. The standing girlfriend, for another. Also, and I say this with a modicum of respect for the profession, any fortune-teller worth her crystal ball would have mentioned me.
Okay, fine, I don’t believe in that crystal-ball voodoo, nor do I believe a word of what Birdie is flinging at us. But the scary thing is that I believe Birdie believes it. And we all know possession is nine-tenths of the law—even where the imagination is concerned.
Birdie loops her arm through Koa’s and reels him back toward her vehicle like she’s repossessing a car. “And if you thought that was fun,” she calls to the crowd of red dirt beauties, “you girls haven’t seen nothing yet. Wait’ll you see what I’ve got planned next. Yeehaw!”
And off we go again.
By the second stretch I have red dirt in places red dirt has no business being.
It’s in my nose. It’s in my eyes. It’s behind my teeth.
I taste red dirt. I am fairly sure I can hear red dirt.
I’ve inhaled enough of it that I suspect it’s reached my lungs and is putting down roots, and it would not surprise me to learn it’s circulating through my bloodstream by now, that I am, on a cellular level, slowly becoming the island.
Honestly, there are worse things to morph into.
We pull up at the next lookout, and I climb out directly behind Koa and his feisty-feathered friend.
“You know,” Birdie muses, eyeing me, “Jinx. Now that’s quite a name. It’s bad luck, isn’t it? A jinx? Something that ruins things just by showing up?” She laughs. “Why, I think it suits you.”
“It does suit her,” Koa says, stepping over to my side of the conversation. “She’s ruined every killer’s plan on this island for the last few months. They never see her coming.” He looks down at me, and there’s a glimmer of warmth riding in those dark eyes. “Best jinx I ever met.”
Birdie’s smile stays right where it is, but something behind it looks ready to commit a homicide.
And just when I think it cannot possibly get more dramatic, the sky says hold my beer.
A dark cloud comes rolling in over the green peaks, fat and low and aimed directly at us, and I look up at it with the weary recognition you reserve for an old acquaintance. “There it is,” I say. “My personal black cloud. It follows me every—”
I don’t get to finish.
The sky opens like someone undid a zipper, and the warm, fat tropical rain comes down in sheets, and every speck of red dirt on forty-plus people and one ranch full of dusty trails turns instantly and gloriously to mud.
Soon enough the rain is coming down sideways, from every direction at once. It’s raining cats and dogs. Spam and Spam Musubi. Axes and grindstones. Jealous ex-girlfriends and ranch guides named after songbirds. Okay, fine, that last one was one and the same. You name it, it rains down on us.
Birdie shouts at everyone to get back to their vehicles.
“WE’RE GOING MUDDING!” Ruby screams, and yanks the wheel.
We hop back in and Mud Honey lurches off-trail and straight into a puddle the size of a small lake, and a wall of brown water goes up on both sides and comes back down on all of us, and just like that we go from terracotta to full bog creature.
Birdie is somewhere behind us leaning on her horn, beeping and honking and shrieking at Ruby to stop, stop right now, which is precisely the wrong thing to say to Ruby Figgins, who takes it as encouragement and finds a bigger puddle.
And then the other girls follow her. Forty beauty queens, given one taste of permission and a flooded ranch, abandon every safety briefing they received and go feral.
Side-by-sides peel off in every direction.
Mud flies. Engines roar. Someone’s doing donuts.
The chickens have given up entirely and are running for the treeline, roosters screaming after them like the sky is falling, which, from a chicken’s perspective, it is.
It’s total bedlam. It’s total clay-colored chaos. Everyone is screaming and laughing and nobody can tell anyone else apart, and Ruby is taking hairpin turns through the puddles with the grim glee of a woman thirty years younger and twelve times more reckless.
“RUBY,” I yell, “MAYBE A LITTLE—”
She hits a slick patch on the turn. Mud Honey tilts.
The whole left side lifts, and for one long, weightless, deeply spiritual second we are balanced on two wheels and I make peace with several things.
Then it drops back down with a tooth-rattling whump, fishtails, and grinds to a stop in the middle of the biggest puddle on the property.
Silence.
The engine is still ticking. The four of us are caked with red dirt, dripping, and very much alive.
“Well,” Lani says.
Then the bullhorn starts.
Ranch hands and ranch security come splashing across the flats toward us in a grim semicircle, and a man with a megaphone and zero discernible sense of humor lifts it to his mouth. “REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE VEHICLE. SLOWLY.”
“I told you it was my lucky day,” Ruby says serenely, hands still on the wheel.
We remove ourselves from the vehicle. Slowly. It’s not my first time complying with a megaphone, and something tells me it won’t be my last.
Koa splashes past us toward the security detail, already reaching for the badge on his hip, and I catch the look he gives me over his shoulder—the one that means he’ll smooth this over if I don’t make it worse in the ninety seconds it takes him to do it.
I have no intention of making it worse. I have every intention of making it productive.
In the aftermath, with the rain easing to a warm mist and the ranch hands rounding up forty muddy women like very glamorous cattle, the group scatters toward the trees to catch their breath and assess the damage.
I find Kali beside our wrecked little chariot, swaying slightly.
“Kali. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She presses a muddy hand to her chest and manages a weak smile. “I just need a minute. I think I’m going to sit by the trees.”
And she peels away from the group and heads for a quiet stand of monkeypod, alone, away from the noise.
Alone. Away from everyone. With nowhere to be and nothing to do but talk.
I wipe what I can off my face, which accomplishes nothing, and start after her, because the universe in its infinite mud-soaked generosity has just handed me exactly what I came here for.
This is my moment.
Time to talk to suspect number two.