Chapter 22
Itiptoe my way across the lava toward the crimson-haired beauty right here at the blowhole, and it turns out she’s not as alone as she looked, because Spam Musubi is doing victory laps around her rock, ears spiked to the sky, tongue out, having what is unmistakably the best afternoon of any living creature at Spouting Horn.
Of course. She’s Jelly’s dog. She didn’t stow away in Pele today because she didn’t need to. She came in style, on the bus, with her foster mama, like a cute pooch with nothing to hide.
“Hi, Jelly,” I say, settling onto the rock beside her while behind us the entire afternoon continues to come apart.
Pickles is up by the fence shrieking at no one and everyone.
Ruby is shrieking at the police. The police are shrieking into radios.
It’s a full symphony of shrieking, and Jelly and I are sitting in the eye of it like two people who wandered into a slightly violent tornado and decided to stay for the view.
“How are you holding up? Enjoying the chaos?”
“I’ve been to a lot of pageants,” Jelly says serenely, watching a contestant get gently corralled off the rocks by a man in a windbreaker. “This is one of my top three.”
“Only top three?”
“There was a thing in Reno I’m not allowed to discuss for legal reasons.” She finally smiles, and it transforms her whole face. “But this is up there.”
I like her more than I expected to, which I’ve learned to treat as information rather than reassurance.
Then I take a gander at her clothes, because it’s impossible not to. She’s in a tank top the exact orange of a ripe mango, with the word JELLY across the front in cheerful bubble letters, paired with shorts in the same impossible orange.
“Okay, your outfit is adorable,” I say. “I love the way you match.”
“Thank you.” She plucks at the hem, looking pleased.
“It’s mine. From my line, JELLY. I do loungewear, athleisure, and a little swimwear—all in the bright colors.
I started it three years ago out of my apartment and now we’re in two hundred boutiques.
” She says it with a touch of pride. She built the thing with her own hands, and it shows.
“The pageant’s just for exposure, honestly.
Win Miss Mango, you get a year of eyeballs on the brand. That’s the real prize.”
“I guess it would be.”
Spam Musubi chooses this moment to launch herself directly into my lap, all eleven pounds of wiggling Shiba, and I catch her with an oof and she immediately sets about washing my chin in kisses like it’s her job and she’s up for a promotion.
“Wow, she really likes you,” Jelly laughs, then just as quickly something somber flickers across her face. “I’m going to miss this little goofball when the week’s over. She’s the sweetest thing in the world.”
“Miss her? Don’t you want to keep her?”
“It’s complicated.” Jelly scratches the dog’s ears. “My apartment back home doesn’t allow dogs.”
“Sorry to hear that.” I let Spam Musubi settle against me, warm and heavy and delighted, and I ease into the part I actually came over for.
“Can I ask you something? This whole thing, Vera, then Flash. It’s awful.
Your poor production has lost two people this week.
You’ve been on this circuit a long time. What do you think happened?”
Jelly goes quiet for a second, looking out at the water. “I have some ideas,” she says.
“I’m listening.”
“Well, there’s Charlotte.” Jelly says the woman’s name flatly.
“Charlotte Ashby-Wells. She looks like a prim and proper garden party, but she’s running something.
Some sort of operation, members only, very hush, very online.
I think it’s called The Velvet Veranda. She’ll tell you it’s a lifestyle brand but from what I heard it earns money that’s wrong for a lifestyle brand.
” Jelly snorts. “Anyway, Vera knew about it, and Vera never once in her life knew a thing like that and sat on it for free.”
“You mean she was blackmailing her?”
“I’m not saying words like that on lava rock with police ten feet away.” Jelly gives a little laugh. “I’m saying Charlotte had every reason to want Vera quiet. Take it where you like.”
I take it exactly where I like, which is straight into the mental file labeled Charlotte. That file is developing one serious spine and a table of contents.
“What about Kali?” I ask, because I’d seen it myself, the friction between Vera and the sweet, quiet farm girl. “Vera and Kali didn’t seem close.”
“Oh, Vera had it out for Kali.” Jelly leans in, and her red hair flies in my face.
Wait, that would be my red hair. Carry on.
“Which made no sense,” Jelly continues, “because Kali’s the shoo-in.
The local girl, the Kauai girl, the hometown story.
She was going to win this thing and walk away with the crown, and everybody knew it.
The crowd, the sponsors, she’s favored across the board.
And Vera spent the whole month trying to find a way to disqualify her.
Just digging for something. I don’t know what, or why, but she wanted that girl gone.
” Jelly shrugs. “You don’t try that hard to sink a sure thing unless the sure thing scares you. ”
“Why would the frontrunner scare the director?”
“That,” Jelly says, “is a great question. I don’t have the answer, but I’d love to know it, too.”
I not only would love to know it—I think I need to know it.
“Although, at times it felt as if Vera was going after Kali too hard. You know?” she goes on.
“Sort of like she was putting on an act. But then, Vera really was the queen of mean. I felt sorry for Kali, or anyone Vera went after.” She gives her sweet puppy a scratch and sighs.
“I’ll be honest with you, Jinx, because you seem decent and I’m tired of pretending.
But I didn’t like Vera. Nobody did. She held things over people.
She had this little book of everybody’s worst day and she’d open it whenever she wanted something.
” Jelly’s jaw tightens, and for the first time I can see a spray of freckles across her nose as her makeup begins to melt in the heat.
“She had a page on me, too. Something old, something stupid, something that could’ve sunk my new clothing brand if it got out at the wrong moment.
And I’d be lying if I said I cried when I saw that she bit the big one.
” She finally looks at me and steadies her eyes over mine.
“I didn’t do anything to her. But I’m not going to sit here and pretend to grieve when I don’t feel it. Anyway, that’s all I know about Vera.”
It’s the most honest thing anyone’s said to me all week. It’s also the most incriminating, and Jelly said it knowing exactly that, which is either innocence or a very good imitation of it. Vera had something on her. And Jelly isn’t the least bit sorry that woman is dead.
Her gaze drifts past me to where Pickles is up by the fence, herding a clutch of soaked contestants toward the buses with her arms spread wide like a shepherd, her cardigan flapping, somehow scolding and comforting in the same breath.
Jelly sighs hard. “And then there’s Pickles,” she says quietly.
“Pickles?” I almost laugh. “Everybody loves Pickles.”
“Everybody loves Pickles,” Jelly agrees, and there’s an edge under it.
“You want to know something funny about Pickles? She’s never wrong.
Thirty years, and she’s never once coached a girl she didn’t place exactly where she said she would.
She’ll tell a family on day one where their daughter’s going to finish, and that’s where she finishes.
Every time. She’s just that good.” Jelly watches the old woman work the crowd.
“People think it’s instinct. A gift. But I’ve been around a long time, and instinct doesn’t run that clean.
Nothing runs that clean unless somebody’s making it run that clean. ”
Something cold ticks in the back of my mind.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “What does she do with the girls? Outside of coaching?”
“She places them,” Jelly says, like it should be obvious.
“She’s got girls all over this country who owe her everything, who do exactly what she says, who’d never breathe a word against her because she made them and she could unmake them just as fast. She knows things.
She’s got every girl on this circuit by the mangoes and they don’t even mind, because she’s so sweet about it.
” Jelly shakes her head. “That’s the part that gets me.
How sweet she is, the whole time she’s got her hand around your throat. ”
I open my mouth to ask the obvious follow-up, but I don’t get to.
Because the rest of Kauai’s finest arrive. Two more cruisers come whooping down into the lot with their lights spinning, and the energy on the rocks shifts from bad afternoon to active emergency, and Jelly is on her feet in one smooth motion, scooping Spam Musubi out of my lap.
“That’s my cue,” she says. “Good luck, Jinx. You’re going to need it.”
How does everyone here know that I’m investigating? Oh, that’s right. Ruby Figgins.
And just like that, Jelly is gone, melting into the scramble of fleeing contestants, her coral tank top swallowed up in the crowd.
Pickles’s voice rises over everything. “EVERYONE ON THE BUSES! NOW! GO, GO!”
I scramble back across the lava toward solid ground, toward Lani, who is standing nose to badge with an officer and informing him, as loud as she can, that he should be ashamed of himself for harassing a woman of her age, as she gestures toward Ruby, who is—
Oh, no.
Ruby is in handcuffs.
“IT’S FINE,” Ruby bellows against the wind, beaming, as an officer guides her toward a cruiser. “DON’T ANYBODY PANIC! I’VE BEEN ARRESTED ON FOUR CONTINENTS! THIS IS NOTHING!”
“Ruby,” I shout, “do not say another—”
“THE FOOD TRUCK WAS NOT MY IDEA, BUT THE BLOWHOLE PHOTOS WERE WORTH EVERY FELONY!”
I make my move.
And that is how I, Jinx Julep, resort manager and reluctant finder of bodies, come to be sitting in the back of a Kauai PD cruiser between Lani and a fully unrepentant Ruby, dripping seawater onto county upholstery, watching Spouting Horn shrink in the rear window.
“Well,” Ruby says, holding up her cuffed wrists like a prize. “I got the shots.”
I lean my head back against the seat. Two murders, one trespassing charge, a pending pageant, a killer still circulating my resort with everyone’s adoration and holding somebody by the mangoes, and now a criminal record acquired in the name of photography.
Somewhere on this island, a killer is sipping a mango drink without a care in the world.
And I’m the one in the back of a cruiser.
Seeing that it’s my life? The math checks out.