Chapter 25
The pageant opens the way everything on this island opens, which is to say beautifully and twenty minutes late.
Island time is a very real thing.
By the time Pickles takes the stage, the sky over Hanalei Bay has burned down to its last golden embers, the tiki torches are blazing in rows all the way down to the water, and the new runway my staff built straight out toward the ocean glows under string lights like a pier at sunset.
Above it sits the stage, wide enough for forty contestants as the bay shimmers black and gold behind it.
Traditional Hawaiian music drifts from the speakers.
I’ll admit, the whole thing looks spectacular. If a killer weren’t circulating somewhere below those torches, I’d call it a perfect evening.
I’m seated near the front with Ruby, Halea, and Melanie.
Wink and Kitty are just down the row, and Lani is prowling the buffet line making sure Spam and his cat harem haven’t attacked it—yet.
Loco and Shaka are standing at the back with their arms crossed, admiring their own runway, which they have earned.
And, well, they might be admiring the contestants a little bit too.
It’s sort of hard not to. This is their big night, and let’s just say the mangoes have come out to play.
Pickles takes the stage and taps the microphone.
“Aloha, my beautiful people!” The crowd quiets, beaming up at her grandmotherly charm.
“Welcome to the forty-third annual Miss Mango Pageant, here on the most gorgeous island in the Pacific, and I’ll say it louder for the other islands in the back.
” A polite ripple of laughter ensues. “Now, I know it’s been an unusual week.
” She offers a somber pause. “We’ve had some sun.
We’ve had some rain. We’ve had a great deal of mud, about which I’ve received a number of complaints, all of which I’m forwarding directly to the mud.
” Bigger laughter ensues. She’s got the crowd right where she wants them.
In a good mood and about as far away from two homicides as you’d want to get.
She holds up a finger. “We honor those we’ve lost this week by doing what they’d want, which is putting on the most beautiful show this island has ever seen. So let’s begin.”
Okay, so the redirect to the homicides was delicate and smooth. Pickles really does know how to finesse a situation.
She runs through the format of the show quickly.
First introductions, then a brief interview where each girl draws a question.
A talent round. And then, she announces, the swimsuit competition, at which the crowd whoops loud enough to startle a rooster off the runway.
He does not take it well. Nobody consults him about anything around here, and it shows.
Melanie leans my way. “Try not to trip over another body,” she mutters out of the side of her mouth, and there’s a threat buried in there somewhere.
“I don’t seek them out,” I whisper back.
“And yet.” She hikes a brow my way that says more than an entire litany of words. Mostly expletives.
Halea leans my way—looking like a true-blue beauty queen herself tonight. “With these women, and the mothers I’ve met this week, I’m honestly amazed it’s only been two.”
Ruby sighs, scanning the crowd. “Still no men worth the trouble. A pageant this size and not one eligible bachelor in the bunch. In my day there were hot male judges.”
“Ruby, I didn’t know you participated in pageants,” I say.
“I didn’t,” she says. “I participated in hot male judges.”
That sounds about right.
And somewhere underneath the music and the laughter, Charlotte’s little side biz keeps turning over again in the back of my mind, and I try not to think too hard about it right now.
The pageant quickly gets underway. The introductions zoom past us in a blur, forty names and forty hometowns, and then the interviews start, and the interviews are where it gets strange, because somebody has decided the questions should be deep—as in off the deep end.
Jelly steps up looking radiant in her own signature shade of coral as she draws a card from the coconut shell.
“If you were a color,” Pickles reads, “what would you smell like?”
“Tangerine,” Jelly says without missing a beat. “Confidence. And just a hint of revenge.”
The crowd loses it. She winks. Somewhere, a philosophy professor weeps while the rest of us have a wonderful time. I’m not sure if that was Hawaii magic talking or the rum.
Kali Akoni steps up next, calm as still water. She dips her hand in the coconut shell and Pickles reads. “What does the ocean owe you?”
“Nothing,” Kali says simply. “I owe it everything. My family has farmed right next to it for four generations. You don’t ask the ocean for a debt. You just keep showing up.”
And the crowd goes quiet, and then roars, because she’s the hometown girl and she just said the hometown thing, and I think, not for the first time, that this woman was built to win.
And if she doesn’t win, I think half the island will storm the stage, and the judges know it, and honestly, so do the judges’ cars.
Charlotte Ashby-Wells draws next.
“If your reputation were a house, what room would you never let anyone into?”
“The cellar,” Charlotte says, with a serene Charleston smile, and somehow makes it sound both charming and like a confession.
I file that too. The Charlotte folder now has a basement, which feels thematically appropriate.
Then comes the talent round, in which things go sideways.
Quickly. There’s a fire dancer. There’s a girl who plays ukulele so sweetly half the crowd cries into their mai tais.
There’s an interpretive hula, a woman who juggles pineapples—much more difficult than it sounds—a contestant who delivers a dramatic monologue she is clearly misremembering in real time, and one who simply yodels, at length, for reasons that are never explained and never will be.
Kali dances hula, real hula, slow, rooted in tradition, and beautiful—and the whole beach goes still for her. Again, winner.
Jelly does standup. Actual standup, three minutes of it, most of it about her ex-boyfriend, all of it hitting our funny bones, and I make a mental note that a woman that comfortable holding a hostile room is a woman to keep an eye on.
And Charlotte? Polished, pearls, country-club Charlotte? She strides out with two flaming torches and announces she will be eating fire.
“She’s going to eat what?” Melanie squawks.
She does not eat the fire so much as the fire eats her.
The flame that shoots out of her mouth is a churning column of orange the size of a small fiery tornado, and for one glorious second the whole beach is lit up like high noon.
It’s going fine, genuinely fine, right up until she tips her head back for the big finish and a trade wind gusts off the bay at the worst possible second, and there’s a small but unmistakable fwoomp, and the front of Charlotte Ashby-Wells’s flawless blowout goes up like a birthday candle.
Oh my—WOW.
Charlotte shrieks. Lani materializes from nowhere with a pitcher of ice water and a sense of purpose.
The fire is out in two seconds, Charlotte’s hairdo is not coming back, and she exits the stage smelling like a campfire and radiating the composure of a woman pretending, very hard, that this was the plan all along.
The judges confer. I’d pay real money to hear that conversation.
“Best talent round in pageant history,” Ruby says, launching a solo applause that leads the charge.
They call a short intermission so the girls can change into their swimsuits, and the crowd surges toward the bar, and then Koa appears at my shoulder. And sweet mother of pearl does he ever look delicious.
“My men are in position,” he says it with a low growl.
Have I mentioned how smoking hot he looks tonight? After looking at nothing but women for the last hour straight, I’m more than a little starved for some beefcake. Fortunately, Koa was the first man I laid eyes on. If it’d been Wink, I’d probably still be picking chest hair out of my imagination.
Koa nods. “Every exit, the parking lot, both ends of the beach. I’ve got this place surrounded.”
“Thanks for beefing up security,” I say. “And I mean it. Ruby was terrified there wouldn’t be enough testosterone to balance out all this estrogen.” So was I, but I’m keeping that testosterone tidbit to myself.
“We’re going to need it tonight.” His eyes are moving the whole time, scanning, never landing in one place twice.
I step into his line of vision. “You know something, don’t you? You’ve got that face.”
He frowns at me for a second. “Stay put,” he says, not answering, which is its own answer. “Stay where it’s bright and away from the dark. Stay safe.” His gaze pins itself onto mine. “I promise, I’ve got this handled.”
He gives me a peck on the lips and melts back into the crowd before I can argue, because he knows me, and arguing was absolutely the plan.
I’m still watching him go when Jelly hurries this way with Spam Musubi wriggling in her arms. “Jinx, you’re a lifesaver!
Can you take her for two minutes? I’m up first in the swimsuit lineup and I can’t exactly carry a dog down the runway.
” She deposits the warm, delighted bundle into my arms before I can answer. “She likes you. She’ll be good.”
“Go on,” I say. “Break a leg. Metaphorically, of course. But before you go,” I add, “what did Vera actually have on you?”
Jelly’s smile tightens. “You want to know what Vera had? My first line was knocked off, buckle for buckle, from a designer who’d have buried me in court.
She found the proof. One word from her and JELLY would be over.
” She glances down at the dog already snug in my arms. “Look, I won’t insult you by grieving. But I really didn’t kill her.”
Then she turns to go, glances back toward the stage, where Pickles is herding contestants into line, clapping, beaming, calling everyone darling. And Jelly shakes her head with something that’s half a laugh and half a sigh.
“That woman,” she says, never taking her eyes off Pickles.
“You want to hear something wild? She told me weeks ago that Kali wasn’t going to win.
Flat out. Before a single judge had laid eyes on any of us.
” She shrugs. “And Pickles is never wrong. Thirty years, never once. I gave up betting against her a long time ago.”
Jelly heads for the changing rooms, leaving her words hanging in the warm air behind her.
The changing rooms, for the record, are a tent the size of the Taj Mahal erected in front of Building Three. At least the guests residing there have something to see now. The tent doesn’t have a top, and my guess is that right about now, neither do forty wannabe beauty queens.
I stand there holding a wiggly cute pooch who happens to share a moniker with a fluffy orange cat who is somewhere on the grounds actively plotting my demise.
Pickles told me weeks ago Kali wasn’t going to win. Before a single judge saw her. And Pickles is never wrong.
And Kali was the sure thing. The hometown girl, the shoo-in, the one the whole island wanted. The one Vera spent her last month frantically trying to find a reason to disqualify.
You don’t try to sink a sure thing unless the sure thing scares you.
And you don’t know who’s going to lose weeks before a single judge has so much as glanced at a contestant unless you already know who isn’t supposed to win.
Unless somebody’s been deciding it for thirty-plus years.
The right rooms. The right people. The right outcomes. Never once wrong.
Oh.
Oh, no.
It lands all at once, the whole shape of it, every soft warm grandmotherly piece clicking into a single cold machine, and the bottom drops out of my stomach the way it did on that swing over the valley, except there’s no rainbow at the end of this one.
I think I know who killed Vera Vanderkamp. I’m almost certain I know who pushed Flash off that trail.
And the certainty comes with an awful, swooping lurch, because I’ve figured it out about ten minutes too late.
I just watched that person walk off the stage and down toward the dark end of the beach, where the tiki lights give out and the black sand meets the water and there is no one, currently, watching her at all.
Spam Musubi goes very still in my arms and looks up at me.
“I know,” I tell her. “I see it, too.”
And heaven help me, instead of finding Koa, instead of doing the one thing the man asked, I tuck the dog against my chest and start walking into the darkness.