The Flaming Luau of Death (2 page)

“Hm.”

“And then I got dropped off at home. Next thing I heard, my sister told me Marvin had gone right off to college, early, just like that. And I never heard another word from him.”

“Wow.”

“But, Mad, this was all so long ago. I haven’t really thought about Marvin or the prom or any of it in years.”

“Does Donald know about this?”

“No. Heck,
I
don’t even really know.”

Just then a muffled sound made its way from the back of the house, from the direction of the kitchen. We both looked up.

“What’s that?” Holly asked. “Wes?”

“Must be,” I said and quickly went back to Holly’s urgent matter. “But now, about your present crisis.”

“Can you help me?”

“Of course. It looks like you have three main problems, Holl.”

“You are always so organized,” she said, exhaling. “Thanks, Maddie. Thanks.”

“First, if I had to place a bet, I’d say you probably
are
married to this Dubinsky person, because how else would these anonymous e-mailers get your name unless it was off of some official marriage record somewhere, right? Which means you need to get out of that fluky old marriage immediately in order to marry your Donald.”

“Right.”

“Second, you are going to have to tell Donald about your past.”

Holly nodded, her face serious. “Okay. I can do all that.”

“Good.”

“And third?” Holly asked.

“But then third, clearly,” I said, looking back at the creased paper, “since you actually knew a Marvin Dubinsky, and you actually
married
a Marvin Dubinsky, then you are actually the Holly these jerks are threatening by anonymous e-mail, after all.”

“That’s the part,” Holly said, “that I sort of already
got,
Mad.”

“And I hate to see anyone I love being bullied. So just don’t worry about this anymore, okay? Some idiots using scare tactics. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“I knew you could help me.”

“Do you have any idea where Marvin Dubinsky is today?”

“I have absolutely no idea in the world,” she said. “Nada, none, zilch.”

“Well, that’s something we need to find out. Because this Marvin dude seems to be dragging you into some kind of trouble, and we have to clear that up.”

“Cool.”

“And we’re going to need to get you clear of that marriage too, if it was legal and you really got hitched.”

“Right.”

“So we’ll just have to do a little digging around and find Marvin Dubinsky. I mean, how hard can that be?”

I
don’t know whether I should laugh about this or cry,” Holly said. “I wrote back to them, whoever they are, right away. I don’t know Marvin at all anymore; I have no idea where on earth he might be. They must have made a mistake.”

“A really big mistake.”

Holly nodded. “I put in: please, please leave me out of it. No hard feelings.” Then she looked up at me. “How did they ever get my e-mail address, Mad? It’s been bugging me all morning.”

“It’s easy to figure out a person’s e-mail address if they do a little investigating and find out where you work.”

“Yes, but how did they hear about me in the first place? I mean, I may have gotten myself into a one-night marriage to Marvin Dubinsky, but I’m hardly his wife! I haven’t heard a thing from Marvin in years and years.”

“We have got to find out a lot more,” I agreed. “Did they respond?”

“No. No more e-mails. Not before I left my apartment, anyway. You asked me to come in this morning at nine, but I thought I’d better get here a little early and catch you.”

I looked at my watch: 8:52. We still had eight minutes
yet. “Why don’t you log on to your computer and see if they replied?”

Holly jumped up, and I followed her just beyond my office door.

The reception desk was set up in the entry hall of my old Spanish-style house—tall ceilings, archways, dark hardwood floors. We’d renovated the main floor to serve as our business space, where I shared an office with Wes in what used to be the grand old formal dining room, and Holly worked close by.

She turned on her PC, and in a few seconds the screen blinked to life. A few more whirs and blips and she began receiving her new e-mail. There were five new entries, four of which promised to enlarge a certain male appendage. She quickly deleted down to the fifth.

It was from [email protected]. I read it over her shoulder. The subject header read: Re:
Ugly Trouble Coming.
Nice.

Mrs. Dubinsky,

Don’t be foolish. We know where to find you. We know where you work. We know exactly where you are sleeping tonight. We can visit you at any time. Send us his current location immediately or you will see how serious we can get.

“Madeline.” Holly’s pale face had lost its smile. “That’s a threat.”

“This is just stupid,” I said. “Scary and stupid.”

“They know where I live!”

“I’ll take care of this,” I said, picking up her desk phone. My friend Chuck Honnett is a detective with the LAPD. He’d tell us what to do. “Just as a precaution. I’m not really worried, okay?”

Holly snatched her perky little cap off her head and pushed her light bangs to the side. “This is getting worse and worse. What should I do? I can’t go back to my apartment. What the hell?”

I dialed quickly and, after a brief conversation, hung up. “Look, I left a message for Honnett. It’s the best I can do at this moment. But don’t worry. I’ll figure this all out.”

“Okay,” she said, giving me a helpless look. “Isn’t this awful?”

“Don’t worry. It will be fine,” I said. I have spent much of my professional life saying these same words to hundreds of hosts and hostesses. No matter what the trouble—from opening a mislabeled crate of truffles, which turned out to contain live earthworms, to discovering one of our part-time waitresses was also a part-time hooker—these magic words always work. “Everything is going to be just fine.”

“I knew you’d help me,” Holly said. Her confidence was touching. “Thanks, Mad.”

I checked my watch. Nine o’clock on the dot.

“Hey, Holl. Why don’t we go see what Wes is up to in the kitchen?”

“Sure.”

Holly popped her pink sailor’s cap back onto her head and rose from her desk chair to her full height, which is about half a foot taller than me. I followed this cute, willowy giantess back through my office and on through the original butler’s pantry. The little hall is lined, floor to ceiling, with lighted, glass-fronted shelves and cabinets where we display our serving platters and partyware. And on past the butler’s pantry is the kitchen, remodeled several years back to the specifications required for a professional chef.

“It’s awfully dark,” Holly was saying as she reached for the switch to the kitchen’s overhead lights.

“SURPRISE!”

As the halogen fixtures flashed white light across the stainless-steel and butcher-block kitchen, the sudden blazing brightness also revealed five screaming women and one bellowing man jumping up from behind the kitchen’s center island. And they were throwing confetti. Instantly, someone punched on a boom box, and Snoop Dogg music began blaring.

Holly turned to me, her mouth a perfect pink O.

“Surprise.” I smiled at her. “We’re kidnapping you for a bride-to-be party.”

“You are? Get out of town!” Holly yelled, taking in the scene.

Boogeying down to the loud rap music were Holly’s younger sisters, all four of them. Marigold, Daisy, Azalea, and Gladiola Nichols were almost as excited as Holly, as was Holly’s best friend from high school, the tiny, darling Liz Mooney. They were all doing the bump, yelling “Surprise! Surprise!” and crowding around, giving hugs to the guest of honor.

“We have no idea what’s up,” Marigold said. She was the next in age after Holly and worked at the L.A. Zoo.

“All Madeline told us was to pack our bags for the weekend and just show up here this
A.M.,
” Gladiola added. Gladdie was next in line agewise, about twenty-two now, I realized, and she worked as a makeup artist for Nickelodeon, accounting for her pronounced mascara and extra rosy cheeks.

I looked at them all as they hugged one another. Holly’s sisters were clearly bred from the same stable—all of them fair-haired, lean, and long of leg. I could tell I’d be spending the weekend trying to remember who was who.

“We don’t even know where we’re going yet,” Azalea pointed out, lifting a glass of orange juice and champagne. “We were thinking maybe Thanta Barbara.” Both Azalea and her twin, Daisy, lisped a little when they were drinking.

“Or Than Diego?” Daisy guessed. I noticed Daisy had skipped the orange juice altogether and was taking her champagne straight up. The twenty-one-year-old twins, I remembered, were in junior college. Daisy was also big into astrology and earned money giving tarot-card readings, while Azalea taught a yoga class.

“Or maybe Palm Desert,” Gladdie suggested, batting her heavily made-up eyelids while handing Holly a crystal-stemmed flute.

“You’ve all been great sports,” Wes said as I refilled their glasses, “so I’ll reveal this much: we’re going to go
spa-hopping,
chickens.”

“We’re going to a thpa!”

This is the sort of pronouncement that was guaranteed to bring whoops of girlish glee to our half a dozen beautiful guests, and Wes smiled at me as it had its predicted effect.

The two of us had been designing and organizing this surprise Bachelorette Party weekend for months, each of us over-the-topping the other in creative party planning insanity. Hey, we’re event planners. It’s our deal. The big thing at the moment is the “destination” party, where you invite everyone on your guest list to meet you someplace exotic and magical and party over there—so we decided to take the ladies on a “destination” bridal shower and spring the location on them at the last second. I had pulled in several important markers, getting us comped into the amazing new Four Heavens Resort.
Our bridesmaids’ beauty weekend was all about dropdead glamour. What fun.

In fact, it was my knowledge that we were leaving Los Angeles in just a few hours and taking Holly away that allowed me to relax a little over the strange e-mail she’d received. By the time we got back in three days, I was sure we’d have plenty of ideas for how to handle it.

“So where are you taking us?” Holly asked, dimpling with anticipation.

“To the…” Wes said, raising his own glass of sparkling apple juice in toast, “Big Island!”

“Hawaii!” shrieked Azalea and Daisy, the twins, in unison. The decibel level of squeals set a new high.

Who says surprise parties are tough? You just have to make sure you know your guests’ tastes and then overwhelm them with luxuries big and small. I sipped my own mimosa and looked over at my partner.

Wesley Westcott smiled back at me kindly. He knows how hard I try to plan things to perfection, and we both know how impossible perfection is—but this party was not just another business event. This party was personal, a celebration for one of our own. And we owed Holly big-time for her years of loyalty and friendship.

“Everything okay?” Wes asked under the din of reveling sisters and the percussive drive of the music.

I crossed my fingers and took another sip of mimosa, the wave of happy chatter sweeping me up in our guests’ delighted anticipation. This big bad bachelorette party ship had left the docks, and come what may, we were on our way. Plans had been made. And confirmed. Bags had been packed. Our guests had arrived. Our surprise was sprung. And now, despite whatever fate might want to throw at us, this party weekend was launched.

Wes drained his glass and looked happy. He was, as always, well dressed for the occasion. Today, for instance, he was wearing the perfect khaki cargo shorts with the perfect light blue shirt open over a white T. What else would a good-looking guy wear on the morning he was taking seven chicks to Hawaii?

“Can you believe it?” he asked me under cover of the party noise. “Can you believe our baby is getting married?”

“More than you know,” I said. I would need to fill Wes in on the recent startling developments, but for now, I let him enjoy the rewards of springing a most successful surprise. “Let me help you get breakfast going.”

“No problems. It’s all set.”

Wesley had earlier prepared the fresh waffle batter, whisking together eggs and milk in a large blue ceramic bowl. He’d measured in the oil, vanilla extract, and coffee, hot and rich, made from freshly ground Kona beans of a medium-dark roast. He had then blended the wet ingredients with the dry, the flour and sugar mixture protecting the tender dry yeast from the heat of the coffee. It was Wes’s trick; just one more instance where his chemistry degree from Stanford had come in handy in the kitchen. The coffee-flavored batter, covered in cellophane, had been rising in a warm spot for forty-five minutes now, and it looked fluffy and fabulous.

The breakfast area was at the back of the large kitchen, against the wall of French doors, and was this morning filled with flowers. Last night I’d set the pine farm table for eight, using heavy yellow pottery plates and our best silver. Now there was a carafe of freshly brewed coffee. A silver pitcher of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. A porcelain pot of freshly brewed tea.

But as Wes and I moved over to the waffle irons, now
nicely preheated, I knew it was time to tell him Holly’s startling prom-night story, and fast. Because as soon as the four cups of mini chocolate chips were added to the coffee-rich batter, and as soon as a dozen sweet waffles began steaming on the heart-shaped irons, and as soon as Holly’s bridesmaids settled down from their estrogen high over the news we were all being hijacked away to a world-class luxury spa, flown to the Kona-Kohala coast on the Big Island of Hawaii for two luxurious days of girl-power bonding, prewedding gossip, aromatherapy, and upper-lip waxing, I expected our lives would no longer be the same. And we really needed to figure out what to do about Holly’s other husband.

A
sweet little breeze, soft with moisture, puffed against my neck, coiling my naturally curly hair into tight corkscrews, gently lifting the edge of Wesley’s pale blue shirt. Wes and I stood together at the door to our room at the Four Heavens, rolling weekend cases by our sides, happy to feel the caressing Hawaiian breeze play against our sun-warmed skin.

He inserted a key card into the slot, and a small green light flashed, allowing Wes to turn the knob and open our door. This simple drama was also being played out all along the path, down at the three doors to our left. Our party had been assigned to four adjacent guest rooms located on the lower floor of a secluded two-story bungalow, a seashell’s throw from the shoreline of the Kona-Kohala coast. After our champagne and waffle breakfast in Los Angeles, and our champagne and spinach salad flight over the Pacific, and our champagne and chilled guava juice greeting as we checked into this fabulous resort on the Big Island, we were relaxed and happy, if not exactly sober.

The eight of us, freshly festooned with bright and fragrant plumeria-flower leis upon our arrival in the hotel lobby, had giggled our way through the resort’s
lushly landscaped grounds toward the beach, and turned up at our rooms in rather ragged jet-lagged roommate pairs.

“Schnitzel!” Holly semi-cursed.

Wes caught my eye and gave a nod to Holly, down at the far end of our building. She and her roommate, Liz Mooney, were simply not in a state where they could accurately insert their key card into such a tiny slot, and we could faintly hear Holly’s ladylike oaths carried on the ocean-scented breeze.

Wes and I entered our room, and I let out my own ladylike whoop. This was the newest resort in the super-deluxe Four Heavens family. The gold standard. The Rolls-Royce of hotels. Quiet luxury. The room was massive, with understated Polynesian-style furnishings, two bambooposter beds, and a huge plasma screen TV with DVD player. Wes and I did our drill, our hotel recon mission. He checked the bathroom; I went to the sliding doors.

“Amazing,” came Wesley’s voice. “Soaking tub. And there’s a door to a private outdoor garden with a lava rock shower.” He poked his head back into the main room. “Did you hear that? An outdoor shower!”

I was just pulling back the heavy curtains and opening the sliding door. “Look, Wes. A furnished lanai.” There were two heavy chaise longues outside, waiting for us with thick pads covered in the finest terry cloth. Only a few paces beyond our lanai was the dip of white sand and then the bright blue ocean, sparkling in the hazy afternoon glow.

Wes pulled a robe out of the closet. “Oh, look! They have our favorite kind.”

Just as I was coming over to join him to check it all out, we heard heavy knocking and Holly’s voice, loud, just on the other side of our door.

“Maddie! Wesley! Oh my God, you guys. Open up. Open up!”

“What is it?” Wes yelled back, both of us at the door in an instant, pulling it open in a rush. “What’s the matter?”

Holly looked physically ill. How many glasses of champagne had she drunk? I checked my watch. Even accounting for the time change, it was still only seven o’clock Los Angeles time. Not late at all. And yet, we’d been partying pretty hard all day.

Wes was encouraging Holly to come in and sit down. She didn’t look so chipper, he was saying.

“No,” she said, “I can’t. You’ve got to come and help Liz.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“She passed out,” Holly said, and tears were beginning to well up in her eyes. “I’m afraid she may have hurt herself when she fell.”

“What?” Wes and I shared a brief worried look. He stepped outside our room, and I followed. “Was she sick or was she drunk?”

“Don’t get scared,” Holly said, keeping up with us as we walked down the pathway toward her room. “I mean it,” she said, her voice getting squeaky. “Don’t get freaked.”

“What
scared?” I asked.

“What
freaked?” Wes asked.

“And keep your voices down. I don’t want my sisters to hear us,” she said in a loud hush as we walked past the closed doors of their rooms. “They worry about everything.”

“We should call the front desk,” I said, “They can call a doctor for Liz. Maybe…”

Whatever I had meant to suggest, in my zeal to fix yet one more little problem—our friend Liz, who may have
overimbibed—remained forever unspoken, because just then Wes and I reached Holly’s room. The self-closing door had been propped partially open. There was now a leg sticking out.

Liz, Holly’s very best all-through-school friend, was lying crumpled on the floor, just a few steps into the room. She looked peaceful, thank God, and unhurt, her cheek pressed into the clean green carpet, but altogether too unconscious for my taste.

Wes knelt by her side, felt for her pulse. “She’s okay.”

I opened the door fully, hoping to help lift her up to one of the beds. It was then that I saw the broken lamp, shards of azure pottery strewn all over the coverlet of the nearest bed. And the tousled bedspread.

“You ever hear about how sometimes people check into their hotel room and get a little surprise?” Holly said, gulping air. “They go to the front desk, let the clerk swipe their credit card, and then they are given their key card.”

“Holly, what happened in here?”

“You know,” she continued, eager to get her point across, “stories about a time when things go a little flooey? They open the door only to discover that the room has not yet been vacated? You remember Carol McCoy, my friend from Dallas? She checked into a room in Omaha and actually walked in on a lady.”

Wes and I exchanged glances. Why was Liz lying unconscious on the floor? Why was there a smashed lamp on the bed?

“I had a friend who opened the door at some big hotel in D.C. only to find someone else’s stuff all over the place—you know, showing the room was still occupied.”

“Are you saying there was someone already here in your room when you and Liz came in?” I asked, impatient to get to the truth. “At the Four Heavens?”

“What the hell?” Wes, the guy least likely to use a fourletter word, followed my eyes over to the nearest bed.

Atop the neat blue bedspread, embroidered with yellow pineapples, was a pattern of several stains—still wet and bright red.

“Now don’t get excited,” Holly said, her voice getting higher as she tried to keep us calm. “He was dressed in brown shorts and a brown T-shirt. The T-shirt had something written on it in Japanese, you know, like two white Japanese characters on the front.”

“A man? Holly, are you saying there was a man here in your room?”

“Yes.”

“
Who?
Who was he? What happened?”

“Just some strange guy, Maddie. Like about our age, maybe late twenties. He looked Asian-American. I don’t know who he was. I mean, I never saw him before. I couldn’t figure it all out; everything happened so fast. One minute Liz and I were laughing so hard we couldn’t get into the freaking room, you know? Then this guy in brown was just like
here!
Inside the room. Liz finally got the key to work, and we walked in. Then, wham, this guy came from out of nowhere.”

My eyes swept over Holly and Liz’s hotel room, identical in every way to the one Wes and I had just checked into. It looked perfectly clean, with the exception of the mess on the bed. It looked unoccupied. I took a few steps over to the closet and opened the door. There were no personal items hanging there, only the two guest bathrobes provided by the Four Heavens. I moved to the bathroom. It was neat and clean, just like the housekeeping staff must have left it; all the fabulous designer toiletries were new and carefully laid out. Whoever the
guy had been, it didn’t look like he had been residing there.

“He came at you?” Wesley’s voice was calm, but he had to work at it. “Tell it all, Holly. Did he touch either of you?”

“I came in first, and he sort of grabbed my arm.”

I stared at her.

“I was so totally in shock at finding a man here, just waiting here in the room,” Holly said, beginning to shake. “I guess I just had a reflex. I yelled. Liz kind of tripped and fell down. I tried to pull free, but he was holding me really hard. Here.”

I looked at her bare arm but couldn’t see much. Maybe a slight bruise starting to turn blue.

“So with my free hand I grabbed out and caught something. I swung it at the guy.”

“You grabbed the lamp,” Wes said, pointing out its unbroken mate, which was still standing on the matching bedside table across the room.

“I swung out. I guess it was instinct. I didn’t even know what was happening.”

“This is not good,” I said. Our party weekend. Our plans for fun. I turned to Holly and said in as comforting a voice as I could, “I specifically reserved rooms without extra men.”

Holly, bless her heart, had to giggle. How many parties had we planned together where it was only the darkest humor that got us through it all in style?

“So what happened to the guy?” Wes asked.

“He went down on the bed,” Holly said, her smile fading. “I began to, well, to scream. Could you hear me?”

The walls at the Four Heavens were thick, and there were several rooms between ours.

“When he got up, he was holding his face and it looked cut pretty bad. I thought he was going to grab me again. But he just ran on out the door. I noticed he was careful not to step on Liz.”

“This is not in my itinerary at all,” I said.

Just then Liz began stirring, and I quickly walked over to help her up.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her voice sounding like she was just waking up after a long night’s sleep but couldn’t quite figure out why she had been dozing on a low-pile carpet emblazoned with a bamboo motif.

“I think you had a fall,” I said softly. “Are you feeling up to standing?”

“You feeling okay, Liz?” Wes asked, crouching down beside her too, and as she slowly nodded, he said, “Why don’t I help you over to our room.” And to me he added, “We better not touch anything else in here.”

I turned to Holly. “Tell me more about the guy. Give me details. While it’s all still fresh in your mind.”

“He wasn’t as tall as me,” Holly said. “More like your height.”

Five feet six.

“And he was kind of muscley, worked out, buff. You could see all this arm definition because he was wearing a tank-style T-shirt.”

“Anything else, Holly?”

“He was wearing glasses and his hair was kind of long. I don’t know. What else? I told you, Asian features.”

I waited for more.

“You know, Mad,” Holly said, “I’m not really sure anymore. Any guy looks pretty scary when he’s coming at you like that.”

“I think we should call the police.”

“Oh, Maddie. Police? On my bachelorette weekend?”

At the door to the room, Wes returned. “Liz is fine,” he said. “She walked the whole way. I don’t think she hit her head or did any real damage, thank goodness. And she didn’t see very much.”

“What do we do now?” Holly pulled her hand through her blond hair.

“Why don’t we discuss it back in our room?” Wes suggested.

“Yeah, okay,” Holly agreed. Her eyes swept back over the nearest of the two beds one more time, over the white silk lamp shade with the long rip, the broken pieces of the heavy lamp base, one large piece with the intact lightbulb still attached, and the bright spatters of fresh blood on the bedspread. “You know what else is odd?”

I looked at her.

“I think the guy used my name.”

Wes had been holding his arm around her, walking her back out of the room. But that odd piece of news stopped him. “What did he say?”

“Just that. Just ‘Holly.’ Or maybe he said ‘Honey.’”

We guided Holly out of the room and retrieved her and Liz’s little overnight bags, which had been left sitting outside the door. With Liz and Holly in our room, I began to calculate what this incident meant to our weekend. For one thing, it threw a rather major crimp in the whole spirit of party-party-party.

“Wes,” I said, waving him out onto our beautiful patio lanai. “Can I see you for a sec?”

We left the two friends inside, Holly pouring bottled water for Liz, retelling their versions of what had gone down, the two of them phoning Marigold and Gladdie and Daisy and Azalea, urging them to hurry over, while Wes and I stepped outside into the insistently cheerful sunshine.

“Should we call the cops?” I asked.

“Hotel management,” Wes advised. “They’re the ones responsible for the property.”

“Good,” I said, relieved. “But do you think we should cancel tonight’s festivities? I mean, Liz fainted. Holly’s kind of a wreck. And, Wes, there was blood on that bedspread.”

“I saw it.”

I sighed.

“But you know, Maddie…” He caught my eye, and I smiled. “We have a simple philosophy.”

“The party must go on,” I said.

“Exactly, sweetie.”

I reached out to hug Wes. He was right. Before every party, something always goes wrong. The party girl gets stress-hiccups. Or Aunt Laura in Baltimore can’t overcome her fear of flying. Or the guest of honor’s sitcom is canceled. Or…

“We’re on the Big Island for exactly two days,” Wes said. “We can overcome this.”

We stepped back into our room, and while Wes discreetly called the hotel manager, I answered the door, admitting the gaggle of colorful and bickering Nichols sisters. They loved their rooms. They pointed fingers at the sister who forgot to pack the digital camera. They screeched that Marigold must share her shampoo that keeps blond hair from turning green in the pool. But when they heard Holly’s tale the group became silent.

“You mean some creepy guy was hiding in your room?” asked Marigold.

“And you think he meant to hurt you?” Gladdie wanted to know.

“I don’t know what he wanted,” Holly said. “But what the hell was he doing there?”

“Could he have been a hotel thief?” Daisy asked.

“And you just surprised him when you entered?” continued her twin, Azalea.

“A burglar?” asked Liz Mooney, thinking it over.

“What could he have wanted to steal?” Holly asked. “We hadn’t even moved our stuff into the room yet. If the guy was hoping to find wallets or jewelry, wouldn’t he have been smart enough to break into an occupied guest room?”