Chapter 21
The next afternoon, Pickles loads everyone back onto buses, which means I am once again standing in a parking lot watching forty beauty queens board like it’s an evacuation, and once again climbing into Pele with Lani and Ruby and checking the back twice for furry little stowaways.
“Clear,” I announce, peering under the seats.
“Check the cooler,” Lani says.
“I checked the cooler.”
“Check it again,” she shouts. “Spam’s been studying us.”
I check it again. No cat. For the first time in recorded history, Pele is carrying only the people who bought proverbial tickets, and the three of us pull out behind the buses feeling like we got away with something. Knowing this island, we’ll pay for it later, with interest.
“Where are we going?” Lani asks.
“Spouting Horn,” I say. “There’s a photoshoot at the blowhole.”
“The blowhole,” Ruby repeats with relish. “Kauai’s very own. A hole in the rock that shoots seawater forty feet into the air on a schedule. Nature’s least subtle attraction.” She rubs her hands together with glee. “I have a feeling I’m going to do my best work today.”
I tick my head her way. “It’s a geological feature, Ruby.”
Lani shrugs. “Everything’s a geological feature if you don’t think about it too hard.”
“So am I, sweetheart,” Ruby adds. “Old, salty, and prone to erupting on a schedule.”
The drive south does its usual showing off, and when we hit the tunnel of trees, that long green canopy of branches arching clear over the road, all three of us shout, “TUNNEL OF TREEEES!” going through it, because you have to, it’s the rule, I don’t make the rules.
We come out the other side blinking into the sun, roll down through Poipu, and follow the buses out to where the pavement gives up at a field of black lava rock and the blowhole is already showing off for the early arrivals.
The parking lot is a disaster.
“Oh, no,” I say.
There are tour buses. There are cruise buses, the big ones with the dark tinted windows that look suspiciously comfortable, unloading what appears to be the entire manifest of a midsize ocean liner, and the whole point overlooking Spouting Horn is a solid wall of tourists in matching lanyards and sun hats, phones up, jockeying for the perfect shot.
You cannot see the blowhole. You can barely see the ocean.
You can see roughly nine hundred strangers and a forest of selfie sticks.
It’s hot, it’s windy, and the scent of salt water mingles with coconut sunscreen.
“I really miss when they had the little shops out here,” Lani sighs, climbing out. “The vendors, the stalls, they were all so great. You could buy a shell necklace and a shave ice and make a whole afternoon of it.”
“Where do you think I got all these?” Ruby holds up both hands and her rings glitter in the sun as if she mugged a pirate.
“I bought the whole lot of them right here. Then they shut it all down after COVID and never brought it back. It’s just food trucks now, if you’re lucky.
It’s not the same. A woman can’t accessorize off a food truck. ”
Pickles comes bustling over, clutching a clipboard and surveying the human wall with mounting distress.
“What are we going to do?” She wrings her hands.
“Look at this. Look at all these people. How on earth are we going to get forty girls photographed in front of that blowhole with the population of a small cruise ship standing in the way?”
“Leave it to me,” Ruby says, cracking her knuckles. “I’m your photographer. I’ve got this handled.”
“Ruby—” I start.
But Ruby is already wading into the crowd, camera up, and bellowing in a voice that has buried six husbands and intimidated all of them into the grave posthaste.
“Watch it, folks! THIS IS OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHY BUSINESS! Step back, please, step back! Coming through! We have contestants! These are official Miss Mango Pageant contestants and we need this blowhole, people, this is a working blowhole!”
Not one person moves. A man in a lanyard takes her picture.
“They’re not moving,” Pickles frets.
“They’re tourists,” I say. “They’ve come to see a hole that ejaculates the Pacific. Ruby could set herself on fire and they’d film it.”
Ruby regroups, undeterred, and turns to the girls with a gleam in her eye that assures me she’s had an idea everyone here will soon regret. “I’ve got a new plan,” she calls out. “Follow me, ladies.”
And before anyone can stop her, she’s leading forty contestants around the end of a chain-link fence, past a large and extremely official sign that reads DANGER.
DO NOT PASS THIS POINT. HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS.
VIOLATORS PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW, and out onto the black lava rocks toward the blowhole itself.
“Ruby, that sign—”
“Signs are suggestions, Jinx. Like speed limits and serving sizes.”
“That one threatens prosecution,” I point out.
“Then we’d better be quick.”
And heaven help me, I follow, because somebody responsible has to be down there when this goes sideways, and Lani follows me because she’s not missing it, and the next thing I know I’m standing on wet black lava rock at the edge of the most beautiful catastrophe in the world.
Because it is beautiful. I’ll give it that.
The lava rocks spread out jagged and glistening, slick and dark and ancient, and beyond it the open ocean heaves and crashes, huge white waves exploding against the shelf, and right in the middle of it the blowhole waits, breathing and building.
The water that splashes along the edges of the black rocks somehow, magically, turns a glacial shade of blue. I’m spellbound.
Ruby arranges the women in a ring around the blowhole, green ones and purple ones and the ones who’ve finally faded back to human, and honestly, in this light, against that ocean, every last one of them looks glorious.
“Closer together!” Ruby shouts. “Chins up! Here it comes, here it comes—”
The blowhole goes off. A column of seawater rockets twenty feet into the air, then thirty, roaring like the island itself is clearing its throat, and the girls shriek and the spray rains down on all of them and Ruby is firing off shots like a woman possessed.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed.
“YES!” Ruby howls over the roar. “Give it to me! Bigger! Look at the size of that thing! That’s the money shot, ladies, work it!”
“Ruby,” I say it flat, with mild horror locked in my voice, because I have a feeling something very, very bad is coming. I give it three seconds.
“I have never seen one perform like this,” Ruby howls. “Magnificent! Truly! Some of you will never see its equal!”
“Ruby,” I try again.
The contestants are losing it, soaked and laughing, hamming it up for the camera, somebody yells that it’s the most action she’s seen since the divorce, somebody else shrieks that her boyfriend should take notes, and I stand there dripping in the spray of Kauai’s least subtle natural wonder thinking that I did not anticipate quite this much melee when I moved here.
The blowhole heaves again. Everyone screams. It’s chaos. It’s joy. It’s deeply, deeply inappropriate. If Vera were alive, she’d disqualify the entire field, and honestly, she’d have a case.
It’s also, I realize a half-second too late, very illegal.
Because then I hear it, cutting under the roar of the surf.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
I turn, and so does everyone else, and coming down the rocks toward us, past the very large sign about prosecution, is not security.
It’s the police.
“IT’S THE POPO!” Ruby bellows. “RUN, GIRLS! BOOT SCOOT LIKE YOU’VE NEVER BOOT-SCOOTED BEFORE!”
And they do. Forty soaking-wet beauty queens break in forty directions at once, sprinting across slick black lava in platform sandals, which is a sport nobody trains for and everybody should, and Kauai’s finest descend onto the rocks in their windbreakers, radios crackling, chasing sequins, and Pickles is up on the safe side of the fence with both hands pressed to her face, counting heads and coming up short—and Lani has my arm in a death grip, though I couldn’t tell you which of us she’s saving, and the entire afternoon dissolves into wet, shrieking, fully deserved bedlam.
And then, with truly catastrophic timing, a food truck rolls into the parking lot. It’s painted lime green. The side of it reads WICKED MATCHA & A?Aí BOWLS in cheerful script, and the effect on forty fleeing contestants is instantaneous and total.
“MATCHA!” someone screams. “A?Aí BOWLS!”
And just like that the great lava-rock escape reverses direction.
Forty women who would not touch a malasada, who scorned Lani’s mango turnovers, who have survived all week on air and skinny drinks and spite, abandon their flight from law enforcement and stampede toward the truck, shoving past actual police officers to form a line, dripping, frantic, and waving credit cards.
“So that’s what they eat,” Lani says faintly, watching her entire week’s menu get upstaged by a man in a visor selling frozen pulp. “Acaí. I could have made acaí. I have a blender.”
The poor truck never stood a chance. They buy it out to the bolts in under four minutes, and somewhere in there at least two contestants get detained mid-bowl, which is how you end up with the timeless image of a green-tinted beauty queen explaining herself to a police officer with a spoon still in her mouth.
I hope somebody photographed it. I hope it was Ruby.
Which is exactly when I spot her.
Off to the right, away from the chaos, perched alone on a flat black rock with her knees drawn up and her gaze fixed out on the water, sits Jelly. She’s not running and she’s not laughing. She’s just sitting, apart from all of it, the one still point in the whole scrambling mess.
My last suspect. Holding perfectly still while the world scatters around her.
I tell Lani I’ll be back and start making my way across the rocks toward Jelly, because there’s a killer on this island and a dead photographer’s secret going cold and I have exactly one suspect left I haven’t cornered.
Kauai’s finest can arrest me for trespassing if they want.
But they’ll have to catch me first.