Chapter 17
The thing nobody warns you about paradise is how much of it is uphill.
I’m standing in the resort lobby in hiking boots I have worn exactly once, listening to Pickles tell forty beauty queens to lace up, because this afternoon we are caravanning out to the very end of the road to hike the Kalalau Trail and shoot the contestants against the Nā Pali Coast, which is, admittedly, the single most beautiful backdrop on planet Earth.
It’s also reachable only by foot, up a cliff, through mud, and I have feelings about that arrangement.
Several feelings. I’ve numbered them with cinnamon rolls.
“I hate hiking,” I tell Ruby.
“I hate hiking,” Ruby insists, adjusting a sun visor the size of a satellite dish. “I’ve buried six husbands and not one of them got me onto a trail. That was love, Jinx. That was respect.”
“I’m only going because Flash will be there.” I lower my voice. “He knows something. He as good as told me yesterday. I need to get him alone.”
“And I,” Ruby says, “am only going because Flash will be there, and a man who survived that muddy adventure at the ranch deserves a woman who’ll hike to him. Romantically. Traveling a distance. In good shoes.”
Lani comes out of the kitchen wiping her hands, already shaking her head. “I can’t go. I have to build an entire new menu out of things these women will actually put in their mouths, which so far is a list with nothing on it. I’m thinking broth. I’m thinking air with a garnish. Maybe lipstick.”
“Go on, Lani,” Halea says, breezing past us with her notebook in hand. “I’ve got the resort. Be honest, those women aren’t going to eat whatever you make anyway, so you might as well enjoy the view while they don’t eat it on a cliff.”
Lani considers this. “You’re right.” She unties her apron. “I’ll come watch them not eat somewhere scenic.”
We pile into Pele, who senses an audience and rises to the occasion by stalling twice before we clear the parking lot.
The drive out past Hanalei is so beautiful it makes you stop talking.
The road narrows and starts giving itself over to the landscape, ducking through a tunnel of green, crossing those one-lane bridges where everybody takes turns and waves and nobody’s in a hurry because there’s nowhere on this stretch worth hurrying to.
Paradise has a way of waiting for you. We pass the taro fields laid out flat and silver, then the wet cave yawning dark and cool in the cliffside, the mountains crowding closer and greener at every mile until the road simply gives up and ends, because there’s nothing past Ke’e Beach but ocean and the trail and the wild coast beyond.
Ruby shakes her head. “Used to be that you could just drive out here and park anytime you liked. Walk right up to the beach. Now you need a reservation, a pass, and the blessing of three separate websites.”
“That’s because everybody found out it’s the most beautiful place on earth,” I say, easing Pele into our reserved spot. I had to stay online until midnight to get it.
“Everything good gets a waitlist eventually,” Ruby says. “I should know. I’m one of those things.”
Lani and I don’t argue with her. We simply unload.
We also, it turns out, unload four cats.
From various corners of the van where they’d been riding in stowaway silence emerge Spam, Coconut, Mango—a second-round orange—and Mochi—a sweet gray tabby with marshmallow feet—who hop down one after another and arrange themselves on the warm asphalt as if they paid for their seats and tipped well.
“How?” I ask.
“They’re cats,” Lani says, as if that explains it, which it sort of does.
I checked that van twice before the ranch trip and found nothing, and now I’m forced to conclude they simply materialize wherever the plot thickens. I’ve stopped fighting it. The resort’s security division goes where it pleases.
The hike begins, and so does the suffering. Not mine, for once. The contestants are miserable. Forty women who have spent a week perfecting themselves are discovering that the Kalalau Trail does not care about any of it.
The trail is steep and root-laced and slick with red mud, and within the first quarter mile the complaints come rolling back down the line like thunder.
Someone’s hair is ruined. Someone has sand on her lip gloss and it will not come off.
Someone announces, to no one, that she still hasn’t gotten the mud out of her ears from the ranch, which I believe, because neither have I.
“I’m getting sunburned,” wails a contestant who is, I note, still faintly green from the self-tanner sabotage, which means she is now sunburning in a layer over the green, achieving a color not found in nature.
On the bright side, it does make her stand out among the rest, and at this pageant that’s half the battle won.
Spam Musubi, by contrast, is having the best day of her short life. She scrambles up the trail and back down again, herding the cats, and the cats do not wish to be herded, and the yowling, hissing negotiations are ongoing. It’s a treat to watch exactly one creature on this hike enjoying it.
At the foot of a particularly vicious switchback, Pickles gathers the troops.
“All right, my beautiful girls.” She presses a water bottle to her chest. “I want you to take this moment to go inward. Find your center. Reconnect with whatever it is that makes you you.” She beams around at them.
“Because right now, frankly, several of you are radiating an energy that is going to read in the photographs, and not in a good way. Tiffany, you look like you’re solving a math problem.
Brenda, the slouching has to stop, you’re a contestant, not a question mark.
Go. Find joy. You have ten minutes and I’d like to see it in your faces.
” She claps twice. “Joy, ladies. Manufacture it if you must.”
I watch forty women disperse to grimly manufacture joy, and I have to hand it to Pickles, who delivers withering cruelty with the warm, twinkling affect of everyone’s favorite grandmother.
I know exactly one other woman who can weaponize a twinkle like that, and I let her drive a side-by-side yesterday.
I stick with Ruby and Lani, who are bringing up the rear of the entire expedition at the glacial pace of two women with nothing to prove.
We catch Charlotte for a stretch and I fish a little, but she’s all shiny nail polish and sunshine, and isn’t this invigorating.
She essentially gives me nothing before peeling off ahead, and then it’s just the three of us, the trail, and the increasingly editorial cats.
By the time we crest to where the group’s gathered, half the contestants are sitting in the dirt taking a solid one million selfies, and two of them are leaning so far out over the edge for the shot that my stomach drops.
“Okay,” I say to Lani and Ruby. “I’m going to find Flash before someone goes over the side for content. You two stay here. Do not move. Do not hike. It is not worth dying for the view.”
“I’m coming,” Ruby announces, already heaving herself up.
“Ruby—”
“I am not letting you get him alone.” She levels a finger at me. “You’ve had your eye on number fourteen since the ranch. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“I have a boyfriend. He’s six feet tall and carries a badge.” I’d say he has a body that can stop a bullet, but clearly he doesn’t.
“And yet here you are, hiking off to find a different man,” Ruby says, her eyes narrowed on me with judgment. “I’m just saying. It looks a certain way.”
“I am not trying to steal Flash from you.”
“That’s exactly what someone trying to steal Flash would say.”
We bicker our way up the last stretch with Spam Musubi trotting ahead of us, ears up, and suddenly very focused.
Jelly doesn’t seem to mind that her quasi-adopted pooch is hanging out with us instead.
In fact, I don’t see Jelly in the vicinity.
I don’t see any of the contestants in the vicinity.
Here’s hoping they all didn’t go over the edge.
I’m watching my feet, trying to sidestep all of the roots, when the tip of my boot catches a branch and I pitch forward, grabbing a rock, my gaze swinging out over the cliffside to the long green drop below.
“Close call,” Ruby shouts behind me. “Good thing you didn’t go over.”
But I can’t hear anything else. Because down there, at the bottom of the drop, sprawled across the rocks where the trail fell away beneath him, is a man in a linen shirt with two cameras still around his neck and his head turned at an angle that necks do not turn.
“I didn’t go over,” I hear myself say. “But somebody else did.”
Spam Musubi reaches the edge beside me and goes still.
Then she starts to whine, low and mournful, staring down at the rocks, and behind her Spam, Coconut, Mango, and Mochi arrive one by one and line up along the trail’s edge, four cats and one dog, all of them looking down at the same terrible thing, silent as a row of headstones.
Flash knew who killed Vera. He told me so himself, not eighteen hours ago. And he’s never going to get the chance to tell me now.
Reggie “Flash” Guttman is dead at the bottom of the most beautiful trail in the world.