Her Last Flight(24)
“Yes,” she said to Mrs. Rofrano. “I guess I know what you mean.”
Hanalei, Hawai’i
October 1947
My suitcase is already packed when I wake to brilliant sunshine. I packed it at three o’clock in the morning, after tossing in bed for hours, because I figured I might as well do something useful if I wasn’t going to sleep. And it worked! When I climbed back into bed my nerves went still, as if the act of packing had flipped some switch inside me from on to off.
How my head aches. How stiff and sore the length of my body. I long for coffee, but that means going downstairs to face the desk clerk, so instead I wash and dress. It turns out the hour is only just past six o’clock, so I have plenty of time to make the boat to Oahu. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at my reflection in the mirror. I’m wearing a white shirt and navy slacks, and a cardigan sweater knotted around my shoulders in case of draft. Underneath the collar of my shirt, the necklace lies against my skin. I guess I’ll have to face Leo again, on the boat, but I figure he’ll be busy at the wheel. When we arrive, I can slip away in the bustle, and Leo will go to visit his uncle at the hospital in Honolulu, on the other side of the island, and that will be that.
Now here’s a funny thing. To think I was knocking bits with Irene Lindquist’s own stepson! What a gas. What a way life has of connecting you by invisible threads with other human beings. On the other hand, how could I have guessed they were related? Leo’s mother was a local girl, he explained last night as he buttoned his shirt, a native Hawaiian with whom Olle fell in love when he first arrived in Hanalei as a healthy young globe-trotting whippersnapper a quarter-century earlier. Leo was born seven and a half months after they married, or something like that. I didn’t dare ask Leo how she died; at such a moment, it hardly seemed tactful. Anyway, he was already halfway out the door, rushing off to the Lindquist house to get the full story from his father and Irene, who had returned from Oahu once the doctors had stabilized Uncle Kaiko.
Uncle Kaiko. Of all the dumb luck in the world.
I rise from the bed and unlatch the suitcase. Buried between the shirts and the underwear, the small leather-bound diary has the electricity of an artifact. I smooth my fingers over the top and sides to remind myself that it’s real, that Sam Mallory’s fingers rested here, too, that he lived and breathed and requires some kind of justice.
The clock says a quarter to seven. Time to go.
I close the suitcase and lift it from the luggage stand. Pick up the matching leather satchel that holds my portable darkroom equipment, my notebooks, my hairbrush, my jar of Pond’s cream.
The door creaks when I open it. The stairs creak too. I suppose they send some warning of my approach, because Irene Lindquist is already on her feet when I reach the foyer.
“Good,” she says. “You’ve already packed.”
Lindquist has left her beat-up yellow truck at home today. Instead she’s driving a fast little ragtop Buick, cherry-red, creating such a monumental draft that I can’t hear a thing, and half the time I can’t even see through my hair that blows every which way. We roar past the harbor. I catch a glimpse of the passenger ferry, two or three customers lined up at the gangplank, though not Leo in his sharp navy uniform, the one I tore off him yesterday evening. He’s probably in the deckhouse.
The car curves up the bay and around the point, past Lumahai Beach of yesterday morning, until we come to a sprawling white house overlooking the ocean, surrounded by porches and flowering shrubs and a few clusters of mature palms.
“Nice place,” I say, when she shuts off the engine.
“We call it Coolibah. You’ll be staying in the guest cottage.”
“Oh, I will, will I?”
“Not that I don’t trust you, Miss Everett,” she says dryly, “but this was the deal, remember? If we’re going to be sharing secrets, I’m going to keep you where I can see you.”
“Are we going to be sharing secrets?”
She opens the car door and removes her sunglasses. “Probably. Now collect your things and follow me.”
It occurs to me, as I follow this legendary woman down the lawn to a cottage, that I have somehow lost the upper hand in this match and that perhaps I never had it at all. The cottage is tiny, and a fresh coat of white paint can’t quite disguise its ramshackle character. Irene tells me, as she opens the door, that this was the original building on the property, when she bought it from some fellow who had thought to make a fortune in pineapples, and discovered too late that he had a brown thumb.
“We don’t have many guests, so I’m afraid it’s not all that up to date.” She flips on a light, and boy was she telling the truth. There is an ancient canopy bed with a yellowing counterpane and two flat pillows, a dresser nobody wanted, a braided rug my great-aunt Mildred would call old-fashioned, a general air of dust and must. Even Lindquist looks taken aback. She inspects the interior of a Victorian wardrobe and frowns. “I suppose I’ll have Lani come down this afternoon and freshen it up a bit,” she says.
“Perhaps you might loan me that cat of yours, as well? I have a feeling I’m not the only inhabitant.” I gesture in the direction of the baseboard, which sports a mousehole large enough for Mickey.
Lindquist pokes her head through a door. “At least the bathroom’s new. Olle had the plumbers out last year, when his mother-in-law made noises about moving in.”