Chapter 9
Pele is the Coconut Cove Paradise Resort’s official transport van, named after the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes, and if you’ve ever met the van, you’d understand immediately why her name went that direction.
“She’s haunted,” Lani says from the middle bench, wooden spoon already in her apron, because Lani Mahelona does not leave home without it regardless of the occasion or the hour. It’s both her weapon of choice and her emotional support cooking utensil.
“She has an electrical short,” I say.
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive,” Ruby says serenely from the back.
Her sun hat is enormous, her fuchsia muumuu is immaculate, and her gold hoops swing with every rattle Pele produces, which is considerable.
“My fourth husband had an electrical short. It was very unpredictable. We lasted three years.”
“Your fourth husband was a person,” I say.
“And Pele is named after a volcano goddess,” Ruby says. “Respect the energy, Jinx.”
Pele was painted white once, technically, before Kauai got to her, and Kauai gets to everything.
Now she’s the color of the island’s red dirt, sun-faded beige with rust spots that I’ve started describing to guests as abstract art celebrating tropical decay, which is either excellent reframing or a complete lie, and I’ve stopped trying to figure out which.
Also, those rust spots look an awful lot like angry faces.
I try my best to stay on their good side.
Pele is held together by optimism, duct tape, and what Lani calls the grace of the Man Upstairs and what I call a very specific form of denial.
The front bumper stays attached through sheer force of will.
One side mirror is secured with duct tape that has itself started to need duct tape, which raises philosophical questions I’m not equipped to answer before noon.
The passenger door only opens from the outside, which means whoever sits there is either trapped or liberated depending entirely on whether anyone remembers to let them out, and the interior smells like old upholstery and salt air and the ghost of a thousand takeout meals.
A family of geckos lives in the cup holders.
They’ve been there longer than I have, they pay no rent, and they show no signs of considering alternative arrangements.
At this point I list them on the staff roster.
Along with the cats. And the chickens. Okay, fine, the chickens are upper management.
And the roosters? Well, they rule the roost.
Pele’s engine this morning sounds like a garbage disposal eating silverware, which is actually one of her better moods.
“She stalled on the Kapaa bypass last Tuesday,” Lani says. “The radio came on by itself playing ‘Beyond the Sea.’ No station. Just the song.”
“That’s an electrical short with taste,” I say. Also a haunted van with taste, but I leave the obvious out for now. I respect the energy.
I also put Pele in second gear and aim her south, because Hanapepe is forty-five minutes away on a good day and we have forty.
Koa left before us in his truck and will somehow still arrive at roughly the same time, because his vehicle doesn’t have mechanical bronchitis or a gecko situation or two cats who materialized on the middle bench at the last possible second, calm and cool, fully convinced they’ve done nothing wrong, because in their minds they never have.
Spam sits on Lani’s left. Coconut, our sleek black princess, sits on Lani’s right. They both have their paws tucked under them, and they watch the road through the windshield like seasoned travelers with strong opinions about the route.
“When did they get in?” I ask.
“Spam was in before you started the engine,” Lani says. “Coconut came through the window.”
“The window was closed.”
Lani looks at me. I keep my eyes on the road, because some mysteries are above my pay grade, and I’ve learned to ration my investigations.
Pele groans through a gear change that sounds like she’s working through something personal.
The air-conditioning, which functions about forty percent of the time, has today elected not to, so the windows are down—now—and the trade winds have taken over the job, warm and salt-tinged, with plumeria drifting in from somewhere nearby.
Honestly, it’s better than air-conditioning anyway.
The air-conditioning has never once smelled like flowers.
The road south is one of those drives you can’t get enough of.
Kauai produces them the way Lani produces banana bread, constantly and without ever being asked.
We wind through Kapaa, with its cute red-barn-inspired shopping strip, past the red-painted storefronts and the fruit stands and the roosters conducting their morning business on the highway shoulder with the magnificent indifference to traffic that is both their entire personality and, as far as they’re concerned, their constitutional feathered right.
Then the tunnel of trees opens ahead of us, a long corridor of eucalyptus that reaches overhead and laces its branches together until the sky almost disappears. Pele hums through it, quiet and respectful. She’s made this trip before, and she knows what it means. The rest of us are quiet, too.
Okay, fine, we’re not quiet. We’ve started a tradition of screaming TUNNEL OF TREEEES each time we enter this magical place.
“I love this part,” Ruby says.
“You say that every time,” Lani says.
“Because it’s true every time.”
She’s not wrong. None of us are ever wrong about loving the tunnel of trees.
It does something to the light that I don’t have a word for, and by the time we come out the other side into the wide golden south shore sun, with Poipu spread out below and the ocean glittering beyond the resort rooftops, everyone in the van has gone briefly quiet, the way you do when something is beautiful and you don’t want to talk over it.
Then, after getting lost in Poipu and realizing we took a wrong turn back on the main highway, we backtrack for a bit.
“TUNNEL OF TREEEES!”
Soon enough we’re on the right road, the highway curves inland, and Kauai produces, as it always does just before Hanapepe, a canyon that could best be described as the Grand Canyon’s Hawaiian cousin.
It appears on the right without warning or announcement, red dirt walls dropping away into lush green below, and the whole thing looks like the island opened a seam in itself just to show you what’s underneath.
Spam scoots forward on the bench and stares at it with his good ear up and his half-bitten stub twitching.
“Every time it’s twice as beautiful as the last,” Lani says softly.
“Every time,” I agree.
We veer left at the sign and our destination is finally upon us.
Hanapepe knows exactly what it is. Adorable. That’s the thing about it. The biggest little town on Kauai wears that title the way Ruby wears her muumuu, completely, without apology, and with the full understanding that it works.
Old wooden storefronts in colors that were bold in 1920 and are now simply iconic, a main street that takes four minutes to walk end to end if you’re not stopping, galleries and a swinging bridge and a general atmosphere of cheerful stubbornness that the rest of the island respects, because Kauai respects a thing that knows its own mind.
The three of us have been here before, obviously. Ruby caused a situation at one of the Friday night art festivals a few months back that I have been asked not to detail, certain gallery owners have chosen to move past it, and we’re all honoring that choice by simply existing in the present moment.
There’s also an old pickup on the side of the road that the local artists get to paint each year, and the tourists love to take pictures with.
This year it’s pink with baby-blue writing that bears the town’s moniker, and it happens to have an overgrown hot-pink bougainvillea taking over the back of it.
Pele rattles to a stop along the road behind the pageant buses, and I cut the engine, which involves a secondary rattle and then a long, exhausted sigh from somewhere under the hood that feels personal.
We pile out. Spam and Coconut exit with us as if this was always the plan, which from their perspective it was, and take up positions near our feet with composed authority.
Nobody briefed this security detail, but they’re committed to improvising confidently, and frankly, their track record is better than mine.
Screams rip through the air. Not the alarmed variety. The other variety, which in some ways requires a faster response, because it means a good forty beauty queens have encountered something that has bypassed their higher functions entirely.
I follow the sound around the front of the bus and nearly walk directly into the photographer, appropriately named Flash, who is backing up slowly with a camera pressed to his face, completely absorbed in whatever he’s found, protective of his shot as only a photographer can be.
He smells like cologne and this morning’s cigar, and he doesn’t look at me, just holds up one hand in the universal gesture of do not ruin this or else.
Then I see what he’s shooting.
Koa is standing at the entrance to the bridge with his shirt off.
Not voluntarily, judging by his expression.
Pickles stands beside him holding the shirt, her whole warm face lit up with pure delight.
She clearly had an excellent idea, executed it before anyone could object, and has zero regrets about any of it.
His badge is on his belt. His gun is holstered at his hip.
His bandaged arm is right there in the Hanapepe morning sun, and the rest of him is also right there—for all to see—and I’m going to be completely professional about this and simply note that Koa Hale has a build that makes you briefly reconsider your relationship with a functioning vocabulary.
Thus the screaming.
Also—he has an eight-pack.
The contestants have formed a loose semicircle around him. Several phones are out. Flash is already shooting, his cameras swinging, a silver business card at the ready in case anyone needs reminding who he is.
“Detective Koa Hale is our hero!” Pickles announces, beaming at the gathered crowd and at the camera and at the general concept of this moment.
“This man was shot protecting our girls, and I will not let that go undocumented.” She turns to Flash.
“Get the bridge in the background. And get the badge. People love a shiny badge—especially women.”
She’s not wrong.
“Pickles,” Koa says, flat and controlled, watching the situation get away from him in real time.
“Oh, come on. Smile, Detective,” Pickles says warmly, and pats his good arm. She has no idea what she’s asking.
Ruby appears at my elbow. “Wow, would you look at those abs? I need a moment.”
“Ruby.”
“A small one,” she insists. “I’m only human, Jinx.”
Lani stands very still with her wooden-spoon hand not moving, which is how I know she’s experiencing something she considers undignified to acknowledge out loud.
The swinging bridge itself is exactly what it sounds like and exactly as committed to the premise as that implies.
It stretches over the Hanapepe River on narrow wooden planks and rope rails, and it sways cheerfully, because it’s been doing that since 1911 and stopped being self-conscious about it sometime around the invention of the seatbelt.
The river below is green and slow and beautiful and far enough down that you’d prefer to keep your eyes forward.
Contestants cross in pairs, some laughing, some gripping the rope rails with focused determination.
A few of them were clearly not fully briefed on what swinging bridge meant, and every last one of them is being photographed attempting to cross it, because this is Miss Mango and everything is content.
Koa tosses his shirt over his shoulder and makes his way over to me, his badge still catching the light. “Don’t breathe a word of this.”
“I’m not going to say anything,” I say. “I’m going to think about it privately and at length, and that’s between me and myself—and maybe your abs.”
Lani and Ruby titter like schoolgirls. The muscles in his jaw redefine themselves.
“You look very on duty,” I say.
“I am on duty,” he insists, bronzed chest and all.
“Very convincingly,” I add.
“Jinx.”
“Koa.”
He straightens up and looks at me with those coffee-colored eyes, fully aware of what I’m thinking.
“Okay.” He nods my way. “I’ll be done soon.
Just remember who owns this case,” he says, low and final, and walks toward the bridge without looking back, and eleven contestants are on him before he hits the entrance, and I don’t fault a single one of them because same.
Lani steps in close and Spam jumps into her arms in one clean motion, clearly a maneuver he’s rehearsed. Coconut jumps into mine, because apparently we’ve joined the cat circus, and she settles against my chest with her black paws tucked under her and her green eyes very calm.
I hold her and look at the bridge and the river and the slow green water below, and I think about who owns this case.
Then I look to my right.
Charlotte Ashby-Wells stands slightly apart from the group near the far end of the bridge, pearls at her throat at nine in the morning, her ice-blue eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance, her ash-blonde hair impervious to the trade winds, as usual.
She holds a coffee cup and doesn’t take a sip. She hasn’t noticed me yet.
Koa can have the case.
I’ll take Charlotte.