Chapter 3
Mayor Ilima had her phone to her ear with the expression of a woman managing a dozen things simultaneously.
Beside her, Pearl was giving a young female officer—someone new guessing by the pristine uniform—a summary of the garden’s history, the vandalism, and her opinions about both in roughly that order.
I moved to where a business card lay face down in the mud. Too clean to have been there through the morning’s downpour, its edges were barely damp. I photographed it where it lay, then carefully picked it up with the corner of a tissue from my pocket.
Chang Development. Madison Chang, Cultural Integration Specialist.
“I bet she’s the woman we saw by Chang’s rental car,” Keone said, reading over my shoulder.
“Cultural Integration Specialist,” I said. “What does that even mean?”
“In this context? Probably exactly what it sounds like.” His jaw was set. “Making the development sound less like what it is and more like what people will accept.”
I photographed the front and back of the card and tucked it in my bag for Lei.
The light was going now, the golden hour sliding toward gray as the next bank of clouds rolled in off the ocean.
The smell of crushed flowers mixed with rain-wet earth and, faintly, the salt of the beach below the bluff.
Trade winds moved through the plumeria tree overhead, dropping a scatter of blossoms onto the toppled crane, and for a moment it was almost peaceful down here in the wreckage, the way quiet can follow a disaster.
“Still think moving to Ohia was boring?” Keone asked.
“I never thought that,” I said honestly.
He took my hand and squeezed; I was glad of the contact.
The young policewoman, Officer Peahi, I caught from her badge—was finishing with Pearl and moving toward Tiki’s excavation spot. Good. She’d handle it properly.
“Let’s get everyone together before this rain arrives,” Ilima called, her voice carrying pleasant but immovable authority. “Artie’s store has more malasadas. Let’s get out of the weather and talk.”
Tiki chose to abandon the dig and fall in step beside me, tail high, apparently satisfied that the right people had been alerted. She trotted toward Sharkey with the self-possessed air of a consultant who had completed her presentation.
I glanced back at the broken crane lying in the grass, the single remaining wing catching the last of the afternoon light; then I followed my cat to the car.