Chapter 4 #4
“Good processing or worried processing?” I cocked an eyebrow.
“Both. Mom’s stress cooking,” he said. “Maybe she’ll even add laulau to the menu.” He said it with the specific, affectionate resignation of someone who monitored his mother’s cooking as emotional weather data.
How great that he had a mother to love that way. Remembering the loss of my parents shot a dart of pain through my heart; it still ambushed me. I touched the ring on my right hand to comfort myself. The nacre of the pearl caught the last gray light of sunset gleaming off the moody ocean.
“Come over for dinner?” he asked. “There’s guaranteed to be too much food for the two of us.”
“How much poi and chicken are we talking?” I teased, to give myself a little time to consider; I’d been anticipating a quiet evening with Aunt Fae after the rigors of the day.
“I told Mom you’d come.” He tilted his head, sheepish.
“You assumed I would.” I felt bad about my negative response, but couldn’t seem to help it. A few weeks ago we’d been happily living together in his cottage beside Ilima’s and had eaten with his mom at her house at least weekly. What was wrong with me? “I have to check with Aunt Fae.”
“I hoped you’d want to come,” he said, and the small careful distinction of hoped instead of assumed landed somewhere in my chest—and stayed there. “Mom hoped so too.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Dinner. And time with you at your place after, if you’ll have me.”
“Hell yes. I was hoping for that, too.” He took my hand, lifted it to his lips, kissed it. “I’ll make it worth your while.” He waggled his brows.
“Now that I’ll look forward to, Mr. K.”
Tiki appeared from the waterline and fell into step beside us, smelling of fish and appearing satisfied, which was her default state after eating.
Keone rubbed my ring with his thumb as we walked back toward the parking lot; it felt good but was also a reminder that I’d put the brakes on us moving toward a wedding date.
Tough kitty. I wasn’t going to be rushed into anything, no matter how much pressure was on me from him. His mother. The whole freakin’ town.
Hell, only Aunt Fae seemed to want me to stay where I was, in the house with her—and maybe that was why I was still living there.
I stopped at the post office on the way to Ilima’s for dinner to secure the day’s late mail delivery—one of the perpetual rhythms of the job that didn’t pause for petroglyph theft or garden vandalism.
Keone had taken his truck and gone before me, so the brand-new parking lot was empty.
Pua had locked up, so the building was dark.
The mynah birds that usually occupied the coconut palm beside the shack behind the building had already gone to roost. My stomach rumbled in anticipation of Ilima’s stress cooking dinner of tasty Hawaiian food.
The new asphalt was still giving off that hot tar smell even in the cool evening air as I approached the back door, where Chad the delivery guy had dropped the afternoon’s waterproof mail bag into a handy wooden storage bin.
I could’ve left it there until tomorrow, but I never liked to do that for security purposes; once a Secret Service agent, always a Secret Service—yadda yadda and all that.
I undid the combination lock of the bin, unlocked the back door, flipped on the lights, and hauled in the bag. I dumped the bag of mail onto the sorting table, so it was ready for tomorrow morning.
An envelope slid out and landed in front of me: my name, printed in block letters: KAT SMITH, POSTMASTER OHIA.
A nasty feeling chased away the hungry rumble that had been in my belly as I snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and worked the flap open carefully. Inside was a single sheet of plain paper, the message on it in the same neat block printing as the envelope:
POSTMASTER KAT:
SOME THINGS IN OHIA ARE OLDER THAN YOUR CURIOSITY.
STAY WITH YOUR MAIL.
THIS IS A FRIENDLY REMINDER.
I read it twice. Then I photographed it, front and back, photographed the envelope, and photographed the mail bag from whence it had come.
“Right.” I slipped note and envelope into a plastic zip bag from my supply drawer and stuck it in my desk beside the petroglyph.
I locked the desk, and then I locked my office door.
Not that any of that mattered to a determined intruder, but I had to try for my own sense of control. “Friendly reminder, my big toe.”
I shut the building, armed the alarm (which Pua had left off) and called Malia Peahi on the drive to Ilima’s, leaving a voicemail with a description of the note. I called Lei next and left the same message.
Stay with your mail.
I thought about that as I drove the dark, familiar, winding road with its overhanging trees, reaching ferns, leaning bluffs and tiny bridges.
The note was meant to frighten me. It was also, in its way, an admission. You only warn people who are getting close to something. The note meant we were getting somewhere, and that there was somewhere to get.
Whatever that meant; I was too tired and hungry to unsnarl the whole thing right now.
I left Keone’s at 10 pm. I’ll be honest—it was hard to say goodbye, after a delicious dinner and conversation with Ilima, then sweet hot sexytimes with my fiancé.
A girl can only take so much loving, though, and I’d told Aunt Fae I’d be back; I didn’t want to disappoint her. She’d probably be waiting up for me.
The drive back to New Ohia State Park was thirty minutes of winding coast road in the dark, the headlights carving a path through the trees, Tiki asleep in her carrier on the back seat with the deep unconsciousness of a cat who has had a satisfying day.
The light in the living room glowed warm through the curtains, and of course Aunt Fae was still up; since my parents died in that long-ago car accident at night, she didn’t sleep well until I was home.
When I came through the door carrying Tiki, she glanced up from her crime mystery paperback with the careful expression of someone who had been listening for the door but wasn’t going to admit it.
“Long day?” she asked.
“Petroglyph theft, garden destruction, a developer with a suspicious family tree, and someone sent a threatening note to me,” I said. “Average day for life in Ohia.”
“I heard most of that but not that final bit.” She marked her page. “Come sit. I’ll make tea.”
“You stay off that foot.” I put Tiki down and indicated Auntie’s booted appendage, which was propped on a stool as I moved toward the kitchen. “I’ll make the tea.”
Aunt Fae let me, which meant she was more tired than she’d admit.
The kitchen was exactly as I’d left it that long-ago morning—dishtowels folded and hanging neatly on the rack, Kona coffee in its airtight canister, a small collection of Aunt Fae’s dog-eared cookbooks propped on the sideboard alongside a collection of Hawaiian food recipes that Opal had given her.
The kitchen had been the impersonal showpiece of a model house when we moved in, but now was the heart of our home. Was I ready to leave this place, and the woman who’d been my second mom since I was a girl? Even for Keone and his cozy cottage, I wasn’t sure.
I made chamomile tea and brought two steaming mugs to the living room. I sat in the armchair across from Aunt Fae. Tiki emerged from crunching kibble in the kitchen and arranged herself in her comfy basket beside her snoozing daughter, a gray-and-white tabby we’d named Misty.
We sat in comfortable silence, the frogs outside harrumphing and trade winds whispering through the potted palms on the lanai.
This was one of the things I’d found here: the ease of this particular silence.
I’d lived alone for a long time before Ohia—by design, mostly—and the ease of this was different from aloneness.
This was the ease of being with someone who knew you well enough that your silence didn’t need to be filled or explained.
“Keone ask about the ring?” Aunt Fae asked. “When you’re going to move it to the proper finger?”
I was wriggling the ring with my thumb again and she’d noticed. “He didn’t ask. He never asks. That’s the problem.”
Aunt Fae gazed at me over her reading glasses with the expression she’d been deploying since I was nine years old—a face that meant she was waiting for me to hear what I’d just said. It was a remarkably efficient expression.
“Right,” I said. “I know. That’s not actually the problem.” I took the ring off and set it on the coffee table. “Maybe I need a break from this entirely.” But that didn’t feel good at all; my finger felt naked and sad. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Auntie.”
“You’ll work it out,” she said. “You always do.” She took a sip of tea. “Now tell me about the threatening note. That sounds more interesting than your love life.”
I chuckled despite myself and told her.