Page 6 of Talk Story

My throat tightened in a way I hadn’t expected.

Keone came up beside me and saw it too. His hand found mine, his thumb moving over the ring. I let myself lean into his shoulder for a moment.

“This seems targeted,” he said, quiet and controlled. “They knew what they were damaging.”

It seemed that way to me, too. The stone lanterns Pearl’s grandfather had brought from Kyoto were broken. The hand-carved entry arch was gone, just the anchor posts left. The crane had been smashed. And along the paths, the ti plants had been hacked at, the heliconia torn up by the roots. Specific plants were ruined, rather than wholesale slashing.

Someone had known which ones mattered—what meant the most to Pearl.

“Tiki’s on it,” Keone said.

I followed his gaze. The tortoiseshell had gone ahead of us without my noticing and was now weaving between the demolished flower beds with her whiskers twitching. She paused at the broken stone lanterns, moved on, paused at the damaged plumeria trunk, and then settled at a spot near the base of the tree, pawing at the soil.

The soil there was recently disturbed, fluffed up. I could see that even from here—a dark freshness of turned earth against the older, packed surface around it.

“What are you finding now, girl?” I said under my breath.

I moved toward her, but Keone caught my arm as footsteps crunched on the gravel behind us. Lei Texeira had arrived, rounding the damaged wall with a no-nonsense walk, wearing day-off clothes: board shorts with her badge clipped to the waistband, rubber slippers, a touch of sunburn on her freckled nose. Her dark curly hair was tucked behind her ears. “Day off with the family at Hamoa Beach,” she said by way of explanation, scanning the damage with the eyes of someone who couldn’t actually take a day off. “I heard the scanner at Hasegawa’s. Figured I’d check on Auntie Pearl’s garden.” She came over and hugged us both quickly in the Hawaiian way that still sometimes activated my old touchphobia. “Officially this is Hana PD’s jurisdiction. The officer on duty gave me a ride as a courtesy. He’s at the gate taking statements.” She surveyed the broken crane, the hacked plantings, the churned paths. “Nasty business. Someone wanted to make a statement.”

“That statement is getting louder,” I said. “First the petroglyphs up at Sacred Valley, now this.”

Lei’s eyebrows went up. “What petroglyphs?”

“Pearl’s here!” came from the far end of the garden. Pearl Yamamoto had arrived, her motorized wheelchair humming over the ground at a pace that suggested she had opinions about the garden’s condition and planned to express them to anyone who got in her way.

“Fill me in on the petroglyphs in a minute,” Lei said, already moving toward Pearl with her phone out. “Tell me when I get back.”

I turned back to Tiki.

She was still pawing at the disturbed soil near the plumeria base, with the methodical focus of a cat who has found something and is waiting, with dwindling patience, for the humans to catch up.

Something was buried there.

Keone crouched beside her. “Don’t dig it out,” I said, and he nodded, pulling back. “We need Hana PD to see this first. Tiki . . .” She glanced at me, single ear swiveling. “Good girl. Don’t touch.”

She gave me a frosty glance that told me she was already several steps ahead on this.

3

Mayor Ilima had her phone to her ear with the expression of a woman managing a dozen things simultaneously. Beside her, Pearl was giving a young female officer—someone new guessing by the pristine uniform—a summary of the garden’s history, the vandalism, and her opinions about both in roughly that order.

I moved to where a business card lay face down in the mud. Too clean to have been there through the morning’s downpour, its edges were barely damp. I photographed it where it lay, then carefully picked it up with the corner of a tissue from my pocket.

Chang Development. Madison Chang, Cultural Integration Specialist.

“I bet she’s the woman we saw by Chang’s rental car,” Keone said, reading over my shoulder.

“Cultural Integration Specialist,” I said. “What does that even mean?”

“In this context? Probably exactly what it sounds like.” His jaw was set. “Making the development sound less like what it is and more like what people will accept.”

I photographed the front and back of the card and tucked it in my bag for Lei.

The light was going now, the golden hour sliding toward gray as the next bank of clouds rolled in off the ocean. The smell of crushed flowers mixed with rain-wet earth and, faintly, the salt of the beach below the bluff. Trade winds moved through the plumeria tree overhead, dropping a scatter of blossoms onto the toppled crane, and for a moment it was almost peaceful down here in the wreckage, the way quiet can follow a disaster.

“Still think moving to Ohia was boring?” Keone asked.

“I never thought that,” I said honestly.