I'm Kona Love You Forever (Islands of Aloha Mystery Series Book 6) (3 page)

“We’re here. Where are you?”

“No, you’re not here,” she said. “We’re at your house. We got in early so we thought we’d surprise you, but nobody’s home.”

It
was turning into one of those “Who’s on first?” moments.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re down at the harbor. We brought a bunch of people to welcome you home.”

“Wow, groovy. Hang on, okay?” I heard her tell Ono what was going on. Then she came back on. “Ono says it’s your call where we should meet up.”

“Stay there. We’re coming back. You know where the key is, right?”

“Under the hibiscus?” she said.

“
You bet. Make yourselves comfortable. We’ll get there as fast as we can.”

***

“I guess we botched this,” Steve said as I rounded the curves past Oluwalu. “But it’s technically not my fault. You said ‘nightfall’ and they came early. Now they’re up there thinking we snubbed ‘em. It’s gonna take at least forty-five minutes—” 

“
Look, I’m going as fast as I can,” I said. I had the Mini Cooper pushed to the limit.

Steve
looked at the enormous speedometer on the dash. “The speed limit’s only forty-five through here. You’re doing almost eighty.”

“
No worries, I’ve got friends in the police department.”

“
Did you read in the paper about Maui police and fire being way over budget?” he said.

“
I didn’t need to read it. Hatch has been whining about it for weeks.”

“
I’m just saying maybe you should slow down,” he said. “What if the cops try to make up the shortfall by writing more tickets?”

“
They’ll hit the tourists, not locals,” I said. “I’ve been stopped loads of times. I never get anything tougher than a warning.”

“
Well, you better hope your luck holds. Thirty-five over the limit’s no doubt a big chunk of change. And Maui’s Finest is in need of some pretty big chunks.”

As if he’d summoned the
public safety gods, blue lights began flashing in my rearview mirror.

Steve turned
to look out the rear window. “And I’ve got a real bad feeling you’re about to find out exactly how big your chunk’s gonna be.”

***

After the cop wrote me the speeding ticket I carefully pulled back out on the roadway. I used the Bluetooth to call Farrah. I said I’d been caught in a speed trap but I’d be there soon.

After I hung up Steve said,
“Eighty-one in a forty-five doesn’t technically qualify as a ‘speed trap,’ you know.”

“This hasn’t been my best day,” I said. “How about you pretend I’m
a cute guy you’re trying to pick up at the Ball and Chain? Be nice to me. Maybe ask if you could buy me a drink or rub my neck or something. Do anything but rag on me all the way to Hali’imaile.”

“
Oh, sweetie,” he said. “You had me at ‘pretend.’ You nervous about seeing Farrah?”

“
Nervous? Why should I be nervous?”

“Well, she did
sort of up and marry your former boyfriend. That’s gotta be a little weird. And they’ve been gone for two months. Who knows what she’ll be like after sixty-some days of lolling around the South Pacific?”

“I’d like to clarify a couple of things,” I said. “First of all, Ono Kingston was never my boyfriend. He was my friend, that’s all. And second, I doubt there was much in the way of ‘lolling’ going on while they were sailing. Ono’s a real Captain Bligh when it comes to
that boat. I bet he had Farrah working like a scullery maid to keep things clean, stocked, and ship-shape tidy.”

“
Aren’t you just the little Miss Cranky Pants? They were on their honeymoon. I can hardly imagine him tying her to the mast and whipping her for insubordination.” He laughed. “Although, who knows with Farrah? That girl could be totally into the tying and whipping scene.”

I shivered at the mental image of my friends
locked in
flagrante dilecto
in Ono’s cozy cabin below-decks so I ignored Steve’s final remark. “I’m not being cranky. I’m being realistic. It’s hard work sailing a catamaran for months on end.”

We pulled up to the house and there were already six cars parked out front. The door was open and thumping music poured out across the porch and down to the quiet street below.

“We should’ve invited the neighbors,” I said.

Steve pointed to
the houses on either side and the one across the street, “Done, done, and done.”

“You’re a genius,” I said.

“Good to see you’re finally admitting it.”

I gave him a soft punch in the arm and he feigned injury. He looked around and said, “I wonder if anybody saw that? I could sue, you know.
You, with the black belt, assaulting a member of a protected class.”

We went up to the porch and
, as I paused at the door, I realized Steve was right; I was nervous. I hadn’t been apart from my childhood friend for this long since I’d met her in the second grade. Even when I was going to college on O’ahu I managed to sneak in a visit to Maui every month or so. Farrah and Ono had been gone for nearly seven weeks as they plied the waters of Tahiti, Bora Bora, and a bunch of tiny South Pacific islands I’d never heard of.

Farrah was terrified of flying and
had barely made it back in one piece when she flew to Honolulu for my college graduation, but she seemed utterly at ease on Ono’s boat. For the past ten years I’d figured she was somewhat agoraphobic because she seldom left the confines of her grocery store and the illegal apartment she occupied above it. But when she met Ono she’d taken to sailing as if she’d been born to ply the oceans blue.

“Well, it only makes sense
I’d like sailing,” she’d told me. “I’m a Pisces, a water sign. Maybe if I was an air sign like you, I’d be cool with climbing inside a tin missile and hurtling through the air with only an engine built by the lowest bidder keeping it from crashing to the ground in a fiery blaze. But I’m the sign of the fish. And everyone knows fish take to water.”

I took a deep breath and walked through the front door. People were standing shoulder-to-shoulder so it took a few moments to spot Farrah. She looked better than I’d ever seen her, all tanned skin and smiling white teeth. Her navy cotton shorts and form-fitting tank top showed off a body you’d expect to see on a marathon runner. Except for the boobs. Her impressive display of pulchritude hadn’t suffered a wit from her recent weight loss.

Okay,
I felt a small pang of jealousy. But it passed in the time it takes to blow out a candle.

“Pali,” she squealed when our eyes met. “Get over here, girl.”

We hugged like a couple of teenage girls who’d been reunited after a scary night of being lost in the jungle. I started to pull back but she held on.

“Not yet,” she said. “I want to take in your scent.”

Alarm shot through me. Had I remembered deodorant that morning? The room was stifling with dozens of people crammed in there. And the paltry overhead fan was no substitute for A/C. None of these old houses had either furnaces or air conditioners, so we were used to sucking it up on the occasional days when the temp dropped below sixty or soared above eighty-five. But the heat radiating off thirty bodies at ninety-eight-point-six degrees made the room feel stuffy and close.

She sucked in a deep breath. “I love how you always smell like toast,” she said.

Toast
?

“I’ve missed you so much,” I said.

“Me too.” Tears pooled in the corners of her brown eyes.

“Are you okay?
” I said. “Are you enjoying married life?”

“I love it. I love Ono
nearly as much as I love you,” she said.

I glanced over at Ono
, glad to see he was out of earshot. “What are you saying? Don’t you love Ono more?”

“No way.
I’ve only known him a few months. I’ve known you forever. We’re
‘ohana
, remember?”

“Of course.
But Ono’s your
‘ohana
now.” ‘
Ohana
is the Hawaiian word for family. Family is at the tippity-top of the social pyramid as far as island people are concerned. Your job, your school, your neighbors, your pets—they’re important. But they will always be relegated to a lesser status than family members. And in the case of Farrah and me, we’d become
‘ohana
in fourth grade. We’d each picked a scab and pressed our bleeding knees together and became “blood sisters.” Nowadays such tribal rituals were no doubt frowned upon due to concern over blood-borne diseases, or even good hygiene, but back then it was a common schoolyard practice.

“He
’ll be
‘ohana
in time,” she said. “But for now we’re just groovin’ on each other. We’re not quite there, but we’re working on it.”

I gave her a kiss on the cheek and went to greet Ono. He gripped me in a tight one-armed hug since he was holding a gigantic tiki-shaped plastic cup in the other hand.

“Hey, you,” he said. “We both missed you.”

The meeting was bittersweet for me. I’d
known Ono long before he’d ever met Farrah.  He and I had shared a fleeting glimpse of the boyfriend/girlfriend thing, but we hadn’t clicked. Ono is the poster boy for the laid-back boating lifestyle, but not in a Tommy Bahama way. He’s not “casual chic” as much as simply “casual.” He’s a transplanted mainlander with a checkered history of success, loss, despair, and redemption. Now and forever he’ll be an avid friend of Bill W and he takes his sobriety seriously. No doubt his tiki cup held pog—passion fruit, orange, and guava juice. It was his signature cocktail.

“Did you have a great sail?” I said.

“The best. I got to wake up every morning with the most beautiful girl on earth—uh, you being the second most beautiful, of course—and sail brilliant blue water to islands so green they make you squint.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah. ‘Wow’ is the only way to describe it. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for bringing Farrah into my life. It’s wonderful to finally have my own
‘ohana
.”

“Farrah feels the same,” I said. I wasn’t
a hundred-percent certain about that one, but I sure as heck wasn’t going to tell him Farrah was “working on it.” As the French say, “When two lovers meet there’s one who kisses and one who gets kissed.” Farrah was clearly the one getting kissed in their relationship.

“Where’s Hatch?” Ono said.

“He’s on shift today. I left him a message but I haven’t heard back. Some days are like that. A few weeks ago he told me their call-out rate had doubled over the past couple of years. I guess either people’s houses are burning down more than they used to or there are more car wrecks out there.”

“I bet it’s both,” he said. “It’s on account of drugs
and alcohol. The meth cookers burn down the place if the cops start closing in, or if they forget and leave the Bunsen burners on. And there are more wrecks because people are getting drunk or high and then getting behind the wheel.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. For Ono,
nearly all forms of everyday evil could be attributed to substance abuse. I thought it was a rather simplistic way of looking at things, but if it helped him stay clean and sober who was I to argue?

“You busy with weddings?” he said.

I made a rocking gesture with my hand, to indicate “sort of.” “I had a dry spell there for a while after you left but I’m working on one now,” I said. “It’s kind of a weird situation, though.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it’s two teenagers. They’re both not quite eighteen. When I called about getting a certified copy of the girl’s birth certificate for the wedding license I found the name and date of birth she gave me was for a kid who’d died.”

“What?”

“The birth certificate the bride brought to me is from a dead baby.”

“And she’s been using it all these years?”

“Yeah, that’s what’s strange. She goes to high school at Seabury Hall. I’d have thought they’d require a certified birth certificate to enroll there.”

“You
never know,” he said. “Fancy place like that, maybe they let things slide if her daddy flashed enough cash.”

Seabury Hall is a
stately private school in Makawao, a bit further up the road from my place in Hali’imaile. The price tag’s steep; more than tuition at the University of Hawaii. I went to Maui Public Schools so I can’t comment on whether it’s worth it or not, but from what I’ve heard, wealthy families will do whatever it takes to get their kids into Seabury Hall.

Of course
, for Hawaiian kids there’s another option: the Kamehameha Schools. You need to prove you have native Hawaiian ancestry to apply to Kamehameha Schools, but if you get in, it’s gold. Not only are you guaranteed a first-rate education, but you will forever be able to brag about being a Kamehameha alum. In the islands it’s right up there with being a Rhodes Scholar.

David
Onakea, the teen-aged groom I was working with, was a student at the Kamehameha School in Hilo. Lili looked like she would qualify as having Hawaiian blood, but she still might not have gotten in. The Kamehameha Schools give preference to Hawaiian kids who are orphans or come from “indigent” families. Lili’s Sprecklesville address and enrollment at Seabury Hall led me to believe her
hanai
family was a far cry from indigent.