Chapter 12
I woke to the sound of the sea and the smell of Kona coffee. For a moment I didn’t move at all but lay there in the soft gray light with the trade winds breathing through the screens. I shut my eyes and let myself be exactly where I was, fully occupying this moment.
Keone’s cottage sat on a little knoll above Hana Bay, tucked in the shade of Ilima’s bigger plantation house.
From the bed a wedge of water was visible through the window, pale silver and glossy as a mirror in the early light.
A gecko chirped somewhere in the rafters.
On the nearby screened lanai, Ilima’s orchids made little silhouettes against the brightening sky.
I’d lived here once, briefly, in the in-between time after Keone’s proposal and before Aunt Fae broke her foot. Lying here now, with the pillow still holding the shape of Keone’s head beside mine and his old Hawaiian quilt pulled up to my chin, I let myself imagine it again.
Not as a temporary thing, somewhere I was crashing while my life sorted itself out, but as mine.
Ours.
Coffee on the deck every morning. The plumeria tree dropping its blossoms on the grass throughout the day, the Bay going from this pale silver to deep windblown cobalt by noon to a soft, bruised purple at dusk.
The ring’s pearl caught the light. I gazed at it for a while. I thought about moving it to my left hand—further than I usually let myself go.
“You’re awake.” Keone appeared in the bedroom doorway, filling it the way he filled most spaces, a dishtowel over one bare shoulder and two mugs in his hands. “I heard your brain start up. It’s loud.”
“It is not.” I snorted. “Gimme that Elixir of Life.”
“Your brain’s like a little outboard motor. Putt-putt-putt.” He handed me a mug and sat on the edge of the bed; the mattress dipped under his weight, and something in my chest went warm and uncomplicated. “G’morning, Trouble.”
“Morning.” I wrapped both hands around the mug, a joke monstrosity that read, PILOTS DO IT GEAR DOWN. “What’s that smell? Besides the coffee.”
“Portuguese sausage, eggs, and the last of the sweet bread before it goes stale. Figured we earned a real breakfast.” He tipped his head toward the lanai. “Come eat with me outside. It’s too nice a morning to waste.”
We took our plates out to the little deck off the front of the cottage, where two mismatched chairs sat angled toward the water, and ate with the bay spread out below us and the morning coming up gold over the eastern point.
The sausage was crisped, the eggs were soft, and the sweet bread, toasted, was exactly as good as the last of a loaf ever is—better, even, for being nearly gone.
Down the hill, a rooster was working through his material.
Somewhere in Ilima’s garden a sprinkler ticked on.
“I’ve been thinking,” Keone said, around a forkful of eggs.
“Always dangerous,” I said, around a mouthful of sweet bread.
“I think we take today for ourselves. The whole thing. No case, no phone, no driving to Kahului, no Changs, no petroglyphs, no other people’s drama.
” He gestured at the bay with his fork, taking in the shining morning.
“We’ve been going flat out for a week. Yesterday you pointed a gun at a woman before lunch and watched a guy get arrested on a body cam after.
We earned a day. Let’s just—be together. Swim. Nap. Eat. Be boring.”
“Boring together,” I said. “Hmm. You really know how to sell a girl on domestic life.”
“It’s underrated.” He reached over and took my hand, the one with the ring, and turned it over in his big warm one. “I like being boring with you. Best kind of boring there is.”
“Speaking of boring. I miss the cat,” I said. “Is that pathetic? It’s been one night away from Tiki.”
Keone grinned. “No, I miss her too. The deck’s not the same without twenty pounds of tortoiseshell judgment supervising us.”
We’d left Tiki with Aunt Fae overnight because I didn’t want to leave her in the car during our date, and because Ilima’s cat Mango and Tiki maintained an armed truce that required active human management.
Auntie had accepted the loan of the cat with the studied indifference of a woman who was secretly delighted, and Tiki had accepted time with Fae and her grown kitten Misty with the aplomb of a feline who knew which human kept the good treats.
The two cats had probably slept like a pair of contented dragons on a hoard of Liver Bits in Auntie’s bed.
“Let’s get her this afternoon,” I said. “She’ll punish us for a few hours and pretend she didn’t miss us at all.”
“As is her right. So. Today. . .” Keone leaned back, stretching his legs out, his face turned up to the sun. He was something to behold; I pinched myself that he was mine. “You in? Swim, nap, the whole nothing day?”
“I’m in,” I said.
And then my phone rang on the deck rail where I’d left it. It buzzed and lit and chimed with a prioritized number. Keone and I both glanced over, then glanced at each other; Mr. K let out a long breath through his nose that was almost a laugh.
“You jinxed it,” I told him. “You said ‘no phone’ out loud. You woke it up.”
“Don’t answer it.”
But I’d already spotted the name on the screen. “It’s Lei,” I said, and that was that, because you don’t let a call from Lei Texeira go to voicemail.
Keone knew it too; resignation was already settling over his face as I thumbed the phone on and put it on speaker so he could hear.
“Tell me you slept last night,” I said by way of hello.
“Three hours. It was great.” Lei’s voice had the flat brightness of a cop running on caffeine and case momentum.
“Santos talked. Or—his lawyer let him talk, once they understood what we already had. Smart move, actually. He’s trying to get out ahead of the worst of it by giving us details about the Changs. ”
I frowned. Beside me, Keone scowled.
“Give me the deets,” I said.
“The short version is Santos laid out Victor Chang’s whole plan for the valley.
The development was always a front. What Chang actually wants is the archive—the rest of the documents Hannah Chang wrote about, the ones tied to that royal land decree.
The petroglyph theft was cover: strip the site of anything that could get it protected, slow down the cultural designation, buy time to find the papers.
” A pause, and the sound of Lei moving. “Based on what Santos gave us, I went to a judge first thing. I’ve got a warrant for Victor Chang’s arrest.”
“That’s huge, Lei.” I held my fist up and Keone bumped it. “We got him.”
“It would be,” she said, “if we could find him. Nobody’s seen Chang since your little tea party at Pearl’s yesterday.
He’s not at his Wailea house, not at the development office, not at any of the numbers we have.
Madison’s gone too. The Escalade hasn’t pinged a plate reader since yesterday afternoon.
” Her voice sharpened. “So I’m calling everyone who saw him last. Kat—you were in the room with him. Where do you think he’d go?”
I stood up, suddenly on my feet at the deck rail, gazing out at the bay without seeing it, because the answer had come up from somewhere underneath the thinking part of me, the way intuition did—fast and certain and a half-second ahead of the reasons. “The valley,” I said. “He went to the valley.”
“Awawakapu? Why would he? He’s a wanted man, why would he go somewhere he could be trapped . . .”
“Because the warrant doesn’t matter to him yet.
He doesn’t know about it. As far as Victor Chang knows, he walked out of Pearl’s clean yesterday—we had nothing concrete; he said so himself, and he was right.
” The certainty kept building as I talked, each piece clicking into the next.
“Pua told him, right to his face, that the decree was real, and the protection was coming, and his development was dead. So the development’s gone.
He knows that. The only thing left that’s worth anything to him is the archive—the papers that could either save the Chang land position or sink it. That’s the whole game now for him.”
“And the archive’s in the valley somewhere,” Lei said slowly.
“Still hidden in the caves. Hannah’s journal pointed at it but never said where.
Chang’s had people combing that valley for weeks.
Pali’s been searching for it too.” I was already moving, scooping my plate off the side table; the lazy gold morning was evaporating like it had never been.
“He’s not running, Lei. He’s digging. He went to get the thing before anyone else can. ”
A silence on the line, which meant Lei considering my theory.
“That makes sense with why he’s seemingly disappeared,” she said.
“Dang it, that tracks.” Her voice dropped into the clipped register she used when she started giving orders.
“I’m not sending units up that valley road blind; if he’s in there and spooked he could do anything, and someone already caused boulders to fall.
Those caves are a maze. I’ll get the department helicopter, get eyes from above, and gather a team. ”
“Keone and I will meet you at the trailhead area,” I said.
“Contact Malia Peahi and her guys to meet us there.” Beside me Keone was already pulling on a shirt; our ‘boring day’ was folding itself away without a word of complaint.
“We know that valley better than anybody you’ve got in Kahului.
We can guide your approach from the ground. ”
“One hour,” Lei said. “Don’t go in without me, Kat. I mean it. You find him, you watch him, you wait for the bird to arrive.”
“One hour,” I agreed, and didn’t quite promise the rest.
I ended the call. Keone handed me my flip-flops and my keys and a final piece of toasted sweet bread for the road, because some things you do without being asked when you’ve loved someone long enough.
His face held no resentment, but the determination and hint of excitement that I’d fallen for in the first place. “So much for boring,” he said.
“Rain check,” I said. “I swear. The whole nothing. Swim, nap, lying around.”
“I’ll hold you to it.” He kissed me once and grabbed his own keys. “Come on. Let’s go catch a developer.”
Below us the bay had already gone from silver to hard daytime blue, and up the coast, miles away in the green folds of the mountains, Awawakapu waited in the light with its stolen heritage and secrets.