Chapter 15
Ipeel away from the wreckage and pick my way through the mud to where Kali has settled on a bench under the monkeypod tree, while behind me Ruby receives what can only be described as a stern talking-to from Birdie and two ranch security officers, none of whom appear to be enjoying it as much as Ruby is.
Off to the side, Lani is attempting to bathe.
This is going about as well as you’d expect.
The rain has reduced to a steady drizzle now, so every swipe she takes at the red mud on her arms just relocates it somewhere else and adds a fresh layer, and she’s slowly working herself into a more comprehensive state of filth than when she started.
She refuses to accept the terms reality is offering her, and honestly, I’ve never respected her more.
Somewhere in that woman’s apron, the wooden spoon is also filthy, and somebody is going to pay for that eventually.
“Can you believe this?” I drop down next to Kali. The rain is easing, softening to a warm mist that beads on the leaves overhead. “Are you okay?”
“I’ve done this a hundred times.” Kali shrugs one muddy shoulder. “Rain doesn’t bother me. Mud doesn’t bother me. I grew up in it.” She tips her face up to the mist like she’s greeting an old pal, and I believe her completely. There’s a steadiness to Kali that the rest of this pageant is missing.
“I’m so sorry about your friend,” I say. “About Vera. Losing her like that.”
Kali turns and gives me a look I wasn’t expecting, somewhere between startled and skeptical. “Right. Yes. It’s awful. I can’t believe someone did that.” She recovers, but I caught it.
“Who do you think could’ve done something like that?”
“Oh.” She blinks. “It never occurred to me anyone singled her out. I figured it was random. Some troublemakers running the beach that night, somebody with too much to drink.” Her eyes dart toward the trees. “I can’t imagine anyone doing that on purpose.”
I let that sit for a moment. Kali thinks this was random?
Her eyes went to the trees instead of to me, and I file that without deciding what it means yet.
Could be guilt. Could be a woman who simply doesn’t want to think about her friend being hunted.
People deflect for all sorts of reasons, and I’ve learned the hard way not to mistake uncomfortable for guilty.
The two get confused around here more often than the geckos show up on the ceiling, which is to say constantly.
I change tactics and ask about her instead, because nothing loosens a guarded person like permission to talk about something safe, and Kali lights up the second the subject turns to her family’s land.
She tells me about the farm up the valley, about her parents and her grandmother, about the mango trees her family has tended for four generations and the early mornings and the work, the constant work, and the way she talks about it makes her glow from the inside.
I notice she keeps her hands tucked away, though.
Folded under, fingers curled in, half-hidden in her lap, even as she describes loving every callus the work gave her.
People hide their hands when something’s on them they’d rather you didn’t read, and with Kali I’m guessing it’s those calluses the farm gave her.
“Are you planning to stay on the island?” I ask.
“I’m never leaving,” she says without hesitation. “I’ll live here my whole life and die in that valley.” She inches back and looks at me. “How’d you end up here?”
I give her the short version, which still somehow feels like the long way.
“I spent seven years married to a corporate tax attorney who tried to resolve arguments with pie charts,” I say.
“I caught him in our bed with his yoga instructor, who was also his assistant, who was also twenty-three. So I wanted to vacate Ohio as soon as possible and applied for a barista job at a cozy little inn in Maine. You know—lobsters, lighthouses, the whole cozy fantasy.”
“That’s not Kauai,” Kali points out.
“Turns out if you cry through a Zoom interview, you miss details. My soon-to-be boss, Mr. X, had a tropical background going, and I thought it was a screensaver.” I wring out the hem of my T-shirt.
“So, short story long, I basically moved to Hawaii by way of typo. And then I figured paradise beat serving cold coffee in a parka, so I stayed.”
Kali belts out a laugh, a real, genuine laugh.
I also fill her in on how I clawed the resort back from the brink with Lani and Ruby, whom I met along the way and have never quite been able to shake since. Not that I’d ever want to. They came with the island, like the roosters, and I’ve stopped distinguishing between the three.
We both look over at Ruby, who’s now gesturing wildly at the security officers, apparently delivering driving tips.
“She’s really something,” Kali says, laughing.
“She’s a felony in a sun hat,” I agree. “So, tell me about pageant life. Is it true the pageant is strict about men?” I ask with an innocent shrug. “No boyfriends, no husbands, any of it?”
I mostly know the answer. But I want to watch her give it. And there’s the nervous flicker again, right on cue.
“Oh, you have no idea.” Kali leans in. “No men. None. No husbands, no boyfriends, no engagements during competition. Vera ran it like a convent. She had a whole list of girls she’d disqualified over the years for it.
” She picks at a clump of dried mud on her knee.
“Vera knew everything about everybody. That was her whole thing. She collected the goods on just about everyone. If Vera thought she could use it, she used it indeed.”
“She collected the goods on people?” I repeat.
“You’d be amazed what some of these women are hiding.
” Kali’s voice drops further. “Charlotte, for one. Charlotte Ashby-Wells. She runs some sort of business on the side, hush-hush, members-only, and she’s got that man who travels with her everywhere.
Forsythe—her so-called assistant.” She raises her eyebrows.
“I’ve never once seen him assist with anything.
And the money that woman moves around?” She shakes her head.
“I think Vera had her number. They had words about it more than once. Loudly.”
“Wow, I’d love to know what that was about.”
“You and me both,” she says with a huff.
I keep my face arranged at mildly interested while my brain files all of this in triplicate. The folders are multiplying. At this rate I’ll need a filing cabinet and a small administrative staff.
“And Flash, well, he and Vera were close. All I know about him is he takes pictures of all of it,” Kali goes on, warming up now.
“Everything. Every party, every fitting, every breakfast. That man never puts the camera down. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried, it’s him.
” She winces as she says it. “You know what I mean.”
I do. And I’m starting to think Flash sees a great deal more than he photographs. That’s twice now that phrase has come out of somebody’s mouth in his general orbit, and I don’t believe in coincidences. I barely believe in innocent conversations.
“What about the others?” I keep it light. “Everyone seems so close.”
“Well, there’s Jelly.” Kali says the name fast, like she’s been waiting for the door to open.
“Pamela Crenshaw. I’d watch that one if I were you.
She tends to smile a lot, but she wanted what Vera had, the director’s chair, the whole operation, and she made sure people knew it.
She and Vera got into it the morning of the kickoff.
I heard her say Vera wouldn’t be running this pageant much longer.
” She offers a satisfied smile, the bus fully driven over Jelly.
“I’m just saying. If you’re asking who had a reason, I’d look at Jelly. ”
She’s basically delivered Jelly to me gift-wrapped, and this is one gift I don’t entirely trust. But I take it, because it’s all I’ve got, and my standards for gifts, like my standards for evidence, have gotten flexible.
“And Pickles?” I ask, almost an afterthought, because Pickles is the one person at this entire pageant nobody has a bad word for, and that itself is a small marvel.
I can’t blame anyone. I’m looking to claim Pickles as my own and put her up at the resort so she can entertain me on the regular.
She’s my sort of people, down to earth and with a little kick to her.
Come to think of it, that’s exactly how I like my pickles.
Kali’s face goes soft and fond, the first uncomplicated expression she’s worn all afternoon.
“Oh, Pickles is an angel. Everybody loves Pickles.” She smiles.
“She’s coached more winners than anyone alive for more than thirty years.
And the spooky part?” She lowers her voice.
“She always knows. Before the judges, before the scores, before anything. She can look at the whole field of contestants on day one and tell you exactly who’s taking the crown, and she’s never wrong.
Not once. It’s like she can see the future. ”
“That’s quite a gift,” I say.
“It’s a gift, indeed,” Kali agrees. “That woman should take her act to Vegas.”
“WATERFALL!” somebody shrieks from around the bend. “THE WATERFALL CROSSING!”
Birdie’s voice sails over the whole soggy pack of us, triumphant. “I TOLD you I had something planned! Get off your rears and let’s get back into gear!”
And the entire mud-caked pack of us is up and running, because the one cure for a flipped side-by-side and a stern security lecture is apparently a waterfall.
We come around the bend and there it is—a white ribbon pouring off a cliff a hundred feet up.
The rock face is green and fuzzy with hanging ferns and gnarled trees leaning in overhead.
The pool at the base is so impossibly aqua it looks lit from below, and forty women plus one Ruby go thundering straight in, clothes and all, with mud sloughing off them in glorious brown clouds.
I jump in feet first and go straight down like a stone, which surprises absolutely no one, least of all me.
The cinnamon rolls, malasadas, heaps of ice cream, and banana bread I’ve been inhaling for the last few months aren’t surprised either.
The water is cold and clean and shocking and perfect, and for a second the whole terrible muddy day rinses straight off me.
When I surface, Koa is right there, swimming up close with water running off his gorgeous face, those gorgeous eyes finding mine.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to.
For one perfect moment it’s just the two of us and the waterfall, nobody is dead and there’s not a single birdie chirping in our ear.
“There you two are!” someone chirps.
And I spoke too soon.
Birdie surfaces beside us in a spray with her hair perfectly slicked back, and somehow she’s the only person on this island who manages to look better wet—with the exception of Koa, of course. She loops her arm around Koa’s and gives me a smile sweet enough to rot a tooth—and maybe a relationship.
“Jinx.” Her lethal smile expands. “You should really get that mud off yourself. Mud is so aging, and you were already working with so much to begin with.” She laughs as if she just issued a compliment before tugging Koa half a foot away.
“Birdie.” Koa’s voice comes in the stern tone he saves for suspects who’ve just talked themselves into a corner. “That’s enough.”
“Oh, I’m only teasing. Koa, hon, do you remember this waterfall?
Because I certainly do.” She gives a husky laugh that drums up all sorts of X-rated visions in my head that I wouldn’t be able to scrub out with a gallon of bleach.
I can’t help it. I have a very active imagination. It’s a gift, and today it is a curse.
And as I tread water in my ruined clothes and my apparently aging face, watching this woman attempt to repossess my boyfriend in a jungle pool while a suspect’s half-truths settle into my bones and a dead woman’s secrets pile up around me like lava rock, I come to a calm and certain realization.
There is absolutely going to be another murder on this island.
And if Birdie touches my boyfriend one more time, I can’t entirely rule out that the body will be hers.