Chapter 2 #2
Keone appeared at my other side. “Garden, Trouble?”
“Garden,” I confirmed. “Hop in,” I told Uncle Kalani, clicking Sharkey’s doors open.
The big white SUV had developed a faint smell of cat food from a bag that had gotten left in the back seat two weeks ago, but it was cooler than outside now that we’d had rain.
Uncle Kalani climbed in without complaint.
Tiki materialized from the hedgerow beside the parking lot with the confidence of a cat who had been conducting her own reconnaissance and was now prepared to join the official investigation.
She bounded into the back seat and arranged herself on Uncle Kalani’s lap before he’d finished closing the door.
The dignified kahu looked startled. Then, cautiously, he stroked her.
Tiki cranked up her engine—that deep, resonant purr that sounded less like a cat and more like a small tractor.
Uncle Kalani’s stern face acquired a smile that didn’t entirely soften the gravity of his eyes, but softened the corners of his mouth.
“I’m sure there’s a story behind that nickname,” he said, watching me in the rearview mirror as I pulled out of the lot.
“Which one?” I hit the turn signal.
“Trouble.”
Keone snorted a laugh. “Only I get to call her that, and it refers to Kat’s tendency to end up in the middle of things.”
“True, dat,” he said. “Been hearing about that tendency since you arrived in Ohia.”
I had no rebuttal to this statement of fact.
From his lap, Tiki shot me a look of smug satisfaction.
The Hana Highway was a two-lane thread of broken asphalt and unlikely beauty.
After the rain shower, the foliage along the shoulder had gone electric green, every leaf oversaturated, the red and orange of the roadside heliconia almost cartoonishly bright.
We passed a stretch where a waterfall came right down to the road’s edge, a thin curtain of white floating on a black rock face.
Then the forest opened up toward the coast and the smell of ocean came through the windows—clean and sharp and cold from the deep, a smell that Keone said was “the island breathing.”
I thought about petroglyphs and parking lots and a man in a white linen suit, and the way the kahu beside me had said everything is connected, like he was confirming a fact he’d been waiting for the rest of us to notice.
The Heritage Garden occupied a promontory above Hamoa Beach, set back from the road by a long driveway lined with torch ginger and bird-of-paradise.
Pearl Yamamoto’s family had maintained it for three generations, a living archive of Japanese-Hawaiian botanical history that included plantings brought by her grandparents and species gathered over decades of Pearl’s own research and advocacy.
Or it had been all of that. Right now, it appeared a Tasmanian devil had gone through it with malice aforethought.
We arrived after Ilima and Lani who were driving Pearl.
The gravel lot held a handful of cars already; word traveled fast in Ohia, and several people had apparently followed the commotion directly from the community center.
The afternoon light was going golden and sideways through the trees, which would have been beautiful under different circumstances.
The gate hung crooked on its hand-forged hinges, bent outward from what looked like something heavy driven against it.
Beyond it, the garden’s stone-lined paths were churned with boot prints, and the lush plantings on either side showed the haphazard damage of something done in anger or haste—pointed destruction.
Specific things targeted. Others left alone.
The massive old plumeria at the garden’s center was still standing. The bronze crane statue beneath it that had witnessed Keone going down on one knee to propose—which I’d photographed approximately forty times—was toppled, its elegant neck bent, one wing broken off.
My throat tightened in a way I hadn’t expected.
Keone came up beside me and saw it too. His hand found mine, his thumb moving over the ring. I let myself lean into his shoulder for a moment.
“This seems targeted,” he said, quiet and controlled. “They knew what they were damaging.”
It seemed that way to me, too. The stone lanterns Pearl’s grandfather had brought from Kyoto were broken.
The hand-carved entry arch was gone, just the anchor posts left.
The crane had been smashed. And along the paths, the ti plants had been hacked at, the heliconia torn up by the roots.
Specific plants were ruined, rather than wholesale slashing.
Someone had known which ones mattered—what meant the most to Pearl.
“Tiki’s on it,” Keone said.
I followed his gaze. The tortoiseshell had gone ahead of us without my noticing and was now weaving between the demolished flower beds with her whiskers twitching.
She paused at the broken stone lanterns, moved on, paused at the damaged plumeria trunk, and then settled at a spot near the base of the tree, pawing at the soil.
The soil there was recently disturbed, fluffed up. I could see that even from here—a dark freshness of turned earth against the older, packed surface around it.
“What are you finding now, girl?” I said under my breath.
I moved toward her, but Keone caught my arm as footsteps crunched on the gravel behind us.
Lei Texeira had arrived, rounding the damaged wall with a no-nonsense walk, wearing day-off clothes: board shorts with her badge clipped to the waistband, rubber slippers, a touch of sunburn on her freckled nose.
Her dark curly hair was tucked behind her ears.
“Day off with the family at Hamoa Beach,” she said by way of explanation, scanning the damage with the eyes of someone who couldn’t actually take a day off.
“I heard the scanner at Hasegawa’s. Figured I’d check on Auntie Pearl’s garden.
” She came over and hugged us both quickly in the Hawaiian way that still sometimes activated my old touchphobia.
“Officially this is Hana PD’s jurisdiction.
The officer on duty gave me a ride as a courtesy.
He’s at the gate taking statements.” She surveyed the broken crane, the hacked plantings, the churned paths.
“Nasty business. Someone wanted to make a statement.”
“That statement is getting louder,” I said. “First the petroglyphs up at Sacred Valley, now this.”
Lei’s eyebrows went up. “What petroglyphs?”
“Pearl’s here!” came from the far end of the garden. Pearl Yamamoto had arrived, her motorized wheelchair humming over the ground at a pace that suggested she had opinions about the garden’s condition and planned to express them to anyone who got in her way.
“Fill me in on the petroglyphs in a minute,” Lei said, already moving toward Pearl with her phone out. “Tell me when I get back.”
I turned back to Tiki.
She was still pawing at the disturbed soil near the plumeria base, with the methodical focus of a cat who has found something and is waiting, with dwindling patience, for the humans to catch up.
Something was buried there.
Keone crouched beside her. “Don’t dig it out,” I said, and he nodded, pulling back. “We need Hana PD to see this first. Tiki . . .” She glanced at me, single ear swiveling. “Good girl. Don’t touch.”
She gave me a frosty glance that told me she was already several steps ahead on this.