Talk Story (Paradise Crime Cozy Mystery #7)

Chapter 1

A one-eared, kink-tailed tortoiseshell cat with a tabby face sat in the middle of my desk at the Ohia Post Office, sprawled out and licking her privates.

She glanced up at me from lazy yellow eyes, as pleased with herself as if she’d won Feline Playcat of the Year. Around her, Priority Mail envelopes were scattered like autumn leaves, and she’d knocked over my special Do Not Speak to Me Until this Mug is Empty cup to make room for her latest “gift.”

I paused in the doorway. I had a bad feeling about the gray and lumpy object she’d brought me this time.

Outside, mynah birds were having an argument in the coconut palm that shaded the post office steps, their raucous cries carrying through the open louvered windows along with the smell of hot tar from the new paving project going on next door.

“What have you got there, Tiki?” I approached hesitantly, eyeing the offering.

My favorite formerly feral feline had a habit of bringing me clues that led to mysteries.

Her first gift had been the desiccated hand of my predecessor at the post office.

Solving that dangerous puzzle had kicked off a side hustle as a private detective with my hot pilot fiancé in our tiny town on Maui.

Since then, Tiki had delivered her little presents with the regularity and mild menace of a subscription service I hadn’t signed up for and couldn’t cancel.

I was six-foot-one, former Secret Service, and trained to take a bullet for the President—but this cat had me pussy-whipped.

Tiki sat up and patted the item. Today’s trophy appeared to be a thin piece of stone about the size of my palm. She nudged it toward me with an imperious paw, her golden eyes slightly slitted as if daring me to reject it.

“What the heck could this be,” I muttered, reaching for the stone.

Tiki allowed me to pick it up and turned her attention back to grooming.

The largish fragment of rock was smooth on one side, gouged with marks that seemed deliberate rather than natural.

The stone felt cool despite the muggy air, and something about its dark weight in my hand sent a prickle of ‘chicken skin’ up my arms—a local term for goosebumps that had worked its way into my vocabulary after living in Ohia.

I gazed closer. My belly tightened as I recognized what I was holding.

This appeared to be a piece of an ancient Hawaiian petroglyph: a crude human figure with a spear held overhead. Beside it, a zigzag line like a lightning bolt or a bird’s wing.

“Where did you get this?” I glared at Tiki.

Of course she didn’t answer; she’d now switched to grooming her kinked tail with elaborate unconcern.

I glanced around. I’d locked the post office for lunch, but that wily cat had found a way in as usual. How she did that kind of thing remained one of those mysteries I’d stopped trying to solve.

A distant roll of thunder from up on Haleakalā promised afternoon showers.

The mountain behind the town was the eastern flank of the dormant volcano that made up most of East Maui, and it kept its own counsel about the weather.

Right now a wall of purple-gray cloud was building over its summit—decorative before it dropped six inches of rain.

Meanwhile, the industrial fan in the corner fought a losing battle against the humidity, pushing warm air from one side of the room to the other with the futility of a campaign promise.

I was still staring at the stone in my hand when the back door opened, letting in a blast of construction noise and a gust of fresh asphalt smell.

Pua Chang, my ever-elegant coworker, bustled in carrying her designer handbag and wearing a crisp aloha print blouse in coral and white.

Despite the heat wave, she looked fresh as the fragrant white ginger that grew wild along the road, while I’d sweated through my polo shirt by approximately nine fifteen a.m.

This was one point of comparison (out of many) that I didn’t care to dwell on between Pua Chang and me. What would she have to say about Tiki’s “gift?” I needed time to figure out what I was going to do about/with/because of the darned thing before I let her see it.

I slipped the stone into my desk drawer as Pua hung her bag on its hook.

“You will never believe what I heard at Opal’s store,” Pua announced, settling into her favorite role of Gossip Queen the way people drop into a favorite chair.

She had a gift for it, with a practiced delivery somewhere between news anchor and concerned auntie.

“Someone’s vandalized the Sacred Valley petroglyphs. ”

The hair rose on my arms; my desk drawer seemed to pulse RED ALERT at me.

“Oh my. Tell me everything,” I said, which was her favorite response. I leaned against the sorting table as Pua touched up her lipstick in the little mirror on the wall; we still had a few minutes before we needed to unlock the glass doors and deal with the small crowd gathering on the front steps.

“Some of the petroglyphs up at Sacred Valley have been stolen,” she said, lowering her voice with the particular relish of someone delivering genuinely important news. “They’re priceless, and many of them are gone. Chipped out of the walls inside the hidden lava tube cave.”

I glanced at the desk drawer guiltily—then glared at my oblivious cat. What had she gotten me into? Somewhere above, a gecko chirped from the ceiling—probably Ringo, the plump fellow who’d claimed the corner above the new stamps poster as his personal territory.

“Opal says Uncle Kalani Opuna—you know, the kahu priest? He does weddings and morning services up at the Awawakapu Valley heiau. Keeps the grass trimmed on the burial grounds, tends the graves—that sort of thing.” The oscillating fan swept past us, lifting the edges of the papers on the bulletin board with a sound like rushing wings.

“He went up there early this morning for his prayers and found someone had cut pieces right out of the boulder rock face in one of the caves. Those carvings have been there for hundreds of years.” Pua paused to pull tissues from a nearby box and press them to her forehead.

Even Pua, it turned out, was not entirely immune to the heat.

“You know how important that valley is. My tutu used to say the night marchers still walked there.”

“Night marchers?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Ghost warriors.” Her tone made clear this was not a subject for skepticism.

“They come out by the light of a full moon to protect sacred ground. Uncle Kalani says we need to find those petroglyphs and return them before the night marchers decide to take matters into their own hands.” Pua sounded deadly serious.

I shivered despite the heat and reached over to touch Keone’s grandmother’s vintage pearl ring where it rested on my right hand. I’d been doing that for a month now. Touching it the way you touch a loose tooth, compulsive and a little worried that it will disappear.

The ring was beautiful. A creamy baroque pearl set in simple yellow gold, worn smooth at the band from decades of daily use.

His grandmother had worn it until the day she passed.

Keone had pressed it into my palm, proposing in front of the crane statue under the plumeria tree at the Heritage Garden—and I’d said yes.

But the ring was on my right hand, and I wasn’t living with Keone anymore, either.

I had . . . reasons. Official reasons and unofficial ones. The fact that I was still separating them in my head was probably its own kind of data.

The official reason was Aunt Fae. My fit, no-nonsense aunt from Maine, who had moved to New Ohia to share the state park caretaker position with me, who had become indispensable to the Pahinuis at the store and now one of our most active Red Hat Society members—had taken a tumble a few weeks ago.

One misjudged step in the dark, a broken lava stone edging, and she’d ended up with a fracture and a walking cast that ran from below her knee to the arch of her foot.

The doctor said she’d have to wear it six to eight weeks, minimum.

She needed someone nearby. The New Ohia model home had two floors, and the stairs were steep. That much was true.

The unofficial reason was that every time I pictured moving the ring to my left hand, having the wedding date conversation, saying that yes aloud in front of everyone . . . something in me went very quiet. And small. And scared.

Not unhappy with Keone in any way—but frightened of something I couldn’t name. This was the same reflex that had made me keep people at arm’s length for most of my adult life, one I thought I’d finally gotten a handle on.

Apparently it wasn’t entirely handled.

Keone hadn’t confronted me about it. That patience of his was, in equal measure, one of the things I loved most about him and the thing that was currently making me feel like the world’s worst person.

Through the window, I smelled the Pahinuis’ fresh baked banana bread drifting from the general store next door, trying, and mostly failing, to compete with the hot-asphalt smell of the new parking lot. The result wasn’t savory.

“Did anyone see anything?” I asked, picking up the scattered envelopes and trying to sound merely curious.

“That’s the strange part.” Pua dropped her voice to the confidential register she reserved for significant coconut wireless transmissions.

“Uncle Kalani says he felt something was wrong days ago. The birds stopped singing near that section of the valley. His dog wouldn’t go near the cave.

” She glanced at the wall to her right, as if she could see straight through to the mountains.

“And the hula halau that performs up there is in an uproar. Those carvings aren’t just pretty pictures, they’re sacred records. ”

“I bet. I wonder if Josie knows anything,” I said, thinking of our Red Hat Society friend who’d taken it upon herself to educate me about Hawaiian traditions. Josie Maluhia knew things about the Valley I hadn’t yet thought to ask about.