Confessions from the Mango Pageant

Chapter 1

The Killer

There are a remarkable number of ways to die on a Kauai beach.

You can be swept out by a rogue current while reaching for a flip-flop.

You can step into one of those soft, sudden sinkholes the tide carves overnight and disappear like a magic trick.

You can be impaled by a beach umbrella that the wind decides to repurpose into a javelin.

A coconut can drop from sixty feet straight onto the crown of your skull.

A jellyfish, a reef break, a bad oyster, a stray surfboard. Paradise has an imagination.

But none of that is mine to arrange. The ocean does what it wants. The wind does what it wants. The coconuts answer to no one. All of that is chance, and chance is a sloppy partner. Tonight I’m working with better odds.

Kauai and all its splendor unfurls around me. The sand, the sea, the scent of plumeria—it’s all here, surrounding me in all its glory.

Welcome to the Miss Mango Beauty Pageant! May the Best Set of Mangoes Win!

The sign sways between two palms in the trade winds, gold-foiled and ridiculous.

I can’t decide if it’s the wittiest thing I’ve read all week or the most embarrassing.

Probably both. Pageants tend to live in that little crawlspace between dazzling and humiliating, and whoever wrote that sign would know.

I lift a glass and watch the kickoff party do what kickoff parties do.

The tiki torches lick along the sand with their soft orange tongues.

Above them the sky has gone the color of a bruise—deep purple bleeding into pink at the horizon.

The air smells of plumeria and salt and grilled pineapple and someone’s coconut sunscreen.

From the speakers, a slow Hawaiian country song unspools, and the singer sounds halfway in love with whoever he’s never going to call.

The beach is a sea of bodies. Sashes and sequins.

Pageant mothers in linen. Photographers chasing the light.

So many beautiful women, all teeth and trained posture, and so many handsome men leaning against the bar, ogling them with the impatience of men who can’t afford to wait for anything.

The mainland has shown up in force, and Kauai has politely declined to be impressed.

And there she is. Standing in the center of the sand and holding court. She lifts that ridiculous trophy above her head like she pulled it out of a stone, and the gold catches the light from the tiki torches and throws it back across the faces around her.

She is smug and gleaming and slightly drunk on her own ego. She toasts the contestants. She toasts the photographer. She toasts the sky. She laughs like she owns this beach, this resort, this island, this entire stretch of the Pacific.

She has no idea this is the last laugh she gets. The last toast. The last time she’ll look me dead in the eye and assume she’s the one holding the leverage.

No more threats. No more cruel intentions. No more files in a basement she thinks I don’t know about.

Tonight, I’m not leaving anything to chance.