by Frankie Bow
“Did they find out who did it?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Security’s still looking into it. In fact, they left a message for you, Molly. They want to ask you some questions about it.”
“Well, I guess I could talk to them again,” I said. “I’m not sure it would help. Listen, Serena, I called earlier because I found a suitcase in my office. Do you know anything about that?”
“What? Oh, the suitcase. You know Mercedes Yamashiro from the Cloudforest Bed and Breakfast, right? Of course you do. You were sitting at her table.”
“Right,” I said.
“Our college put Jimmy Tanaka up there. At the Cloudforest.”
“Mercedes mentioned that. Gee, I wonder why he didn’t want to stay at the Hanohano. There’s a real mystery, huh?”
“Mr. Tanaka was supposed to check out this morning. We paid his bill, but Mercedes says she can’t store all the property that guests leave behind. She had one of her interns bring his suitcase up right after breakfast. We don’t have any storage space, so Dean Vogel wanted me to ask you if you would keep it in your office.”
“Ah.”
“You weren’t in. I hope that was okay,” she said.
“Well, do I have a choice?”
“You know, Molly, there isn’t much room in there.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that. How long do I have to keep it?”
“It shouldn’t be for very long. Just until you get a-hold of Mr. Tanaka to interview him. You can give it back to him then.”
I don’t have room in my office, but I’m also the only person in my department who doesn’t have tenure. Vogel wouldn’t ask Dan Watanabe to watch the suitcase. Dan’s the department chair. And if Vogel had tried to pawn it off on Larry Schneider or Hanson Harrison, he’d get a formal grievance filed against him within the hour.
Rodge Cowper would probably have said, “Sure, no problem” and then left his office door open to let the bag get stolen. That strategic incompetence is exactly how Rodge gets out of doing any committee work, by the way. Either he doesn’t bother to show up to the meetings, or he does show up and tells one of his jokes, and then he gets pulled off the committee and sent to sensitivity training.
Rain drummed on the vinyl roof of my car. I pulled Pat’s hand closer to my mouth so Serena could hear me.
“Why can’t we ship Mr. Tanaka’s bag back to his office in Honolulu?” I yelled into Pat’s hand.
“I checked, but the College of Commerce can’t afford to pay for the interisland shipping.”
I twisted the knob to start the windshield wipers. They inched about halfway through their arc and stopped. I already knew how much it would cost to replace the old vacuum wiper motor with an electric one, which was why I hadn’t done it yet.
“Okay!” I shouted. “No problem. I’m just driving back from the Hanohano Hotel. I was hoping to find Mr. Tanaka.”
“Was he there?” Serena asked.
“No. I’ll keep trying though.”
Pat slipped my phone back into my bag.
“You’re never gonna bring those windshield wipers back to life,” he said. “Just buy some Rain-X. Works great.”
“My windshield wipers are fine,” I squinted at the road ahead through the rivulets on my windshield.
“Hey, why don’t you bring the suitcase back to your house?” Pat said.
“I do not want that thing in my house,” I said. “You really think it’s a lost cause?”
“Your windshield wipers? You remember what Earl said about those old vacuum systems?”
Earl, my mechanic at Miyashiro Motors Autobody, disapproves of squarebirds (referring to model years 1958 to 1960, when Thunderbirds went big and rectangular). He grumbles about their vague handling and self-destructive front-end suspensions, and gives voice to unflattering inferences about the judgment and mental acuity of anyone who would willingly drive one. Earl is also the only mechanic on the island who will even attempt to work on my car.
“Earl’s a competent mechanic,” I said, “but he has no imagination.”
“Why don’t you call down to the Cloudforest?” Pat said. “Maybe Mercedes didn’t realize you were the one who’d get stuck with the suitcase.”
“You know what? I think I will call her. Maybe she’ll have some idea about how I can get hold of Tanaka. Or maybe she’ll even take the suitcase back.”
Pat pulled the phone out of my purse again and held it up for me to speak to as I drove.
“Aloha, and thank you for calling the Cloudforest.”
He sounded young. One of our interns, I assumed. The Cloudforest takes a few of them every semester. I gave my name and asked for Mercedes.
“Oh, hi, Dr. Barda! This is Nate!”
“Oh, Nate. You’re doing another internship there?”
“No,” he said, “I graduated. I work here now!”
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” I gushed. Nate Parsons had been one of my best students. I wondered if answering phones at a bed and breakfast was worth the time and the student loans he had invested. Maybe, if the alternative was unemployment.
“I’ll go get Mercedes,” he said. “Nice to talk to you, Dr. Barda.”
Eventually Mercedes got on the line.
“Oh, Molly. They gave Jimmy’s suitcase to you?”
“Yep. Dean Vogel made Serena park it in my office.”
Mercedes laughed. “Well, I can’t keep everything that guests leave behind. I’d run out of space!”
“I was just at the Hanohano,” I said. “Jimmy Tanaka wasn’t there. Do you have any idea where he might be?”
“No. And it looks like he didn’t even sleep in his room. You know, Molly, we have birria tonight. Come down if you don’t have dinner plans. My treat. To make up for the suitcase.”
“Is that the goat stew?” Pat whispered.
I nodded.
“Mercedes, that’s very nice of you,” I said. “But Pat Flanagan is with me, and we—”
“Pat is invited too, of course! Both of you come down!”
“We’re on our way,” Pat shouted into the phone.
After I hung up, Pat said, “You didn’t have anything else planned tonight, did you?”
“Just finishing up my Student Retention Office reports for this week.”
“That shouldn’t take a lot of time. Just cut and paste from last week’s report.”
“Can I do that?” I asked.
“Do you think they check to make sure you come up with a brand-new teaching philosophy every week?”
“Mercedes says it looks like Jimmy Tanaka didn’t sleep in his room.”
“I heard,” he said. “I think I’d like to have a look around. There might be another angle to this Hanohano story.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I had forgotten how far out of town the Cloudforest Bed and Breakfast was. As we drove south, the road narrowed from two lanes to one as the jungle became denser and taller. Then the road ran out of asphalt. I bit off a swear word and slowed the car to approximately walking speed.
“I don’t remember the road being this bad,” I said.
“The homeowner’s association hasn’t gotten around to resurfacing it,” Pat said. “Do we have to go this slow?”
“Yes, unless you want to be the one to pay for my next front-end rebuild. Oh, and listen to the inevitable lecture from Earl? Anyway, what do you mean, the homeowner’s association hasn’t—”
I caught my breath as the car plunged into a pothole.
“This is a private road,” Pat said. “Back when they were building this subdivision, the planning commission let the developers decide what to do with the streets. You know, whether to pave them, put in proper drainage, stuff like that.”
“I wonder what the developers decided,” I said, steering carefully around a crater in the middle of the road. “Jimmy Tanaka wasn’t among these visionaries by any chance, was he?”
“Of course he was,” Pat said.
“Ah.”
“The developers could afford to sell the individual lots for cheap, ’cause they didn’t have to build infrastructure. The rain this summer really did a number, though. The association is still trying to raise the money to do repairs. They can’t agree on which part to fix first. Of course you’d know all of this, Molly, if you’d been following my series in Island Confidential.”
My bag hummed again.
“Let it go to voice mail,” I said, as Pat pulled out my phone.
“Oh, hi, Stephen.” Pat grinned broadly and raised his eyebrows at me. I shook my head and mouthed, “No!”
“Sure, she’s right here. Hang on. I’ll put you on speaker.”
I wanted to shoot Pat some serious stinkeye, but I had to keep an eye on the washed-out remnants of the road.
“Hi, Stephen.” I tried to project casual insouciance. If my ex was finally going to apologize, I wanted to sound gracious and pleasantly surprised.
“Molly, I need your help,” he said.
“You what?”
“Want to pull over?” Pat said. “I can drive.”
“I’m fine! No one was coming the other way. In fact, look, there’s asphalt up ahead. Stephen, what is going on?”
“Someone broke into my prop room. Either last night or this morning. And then—”
“Aaah! Let me guess. One of your props appeared on a dessert tray. At the event that was supposed to honor the biggest donation in our college’s history. When you say broke into your prop room, do you mean you’ve started locking it now?”
The silence lasted so long I wondered if I’d lost the connection. Finally, the phone in Pat’s hand spoke.
“You don’t have to sound so accusing.”
“I’m not accusing. I’m just guessing. I’m guessing that your prop room’s still completely disorganized and you never remember to lock it and you have no idea who or what goes in and out of there.”
“Molly—”
“Right? What happened to that spreadsheet I spent hours setting up for you? Did you ever even open it?”
“You have no idea how bad this is for me, Molly.”
“How bad this is for you. Good point. We might have alienated our Friends in the Business Community along with our biggest donor, but let’s not lose sight of the most important issue: how does this affect Stephen Park?”
“Road!” Pat was using his free hand to brace himself against the dashboard. I steered back into my lane.
“Look, Stephen, I’m going to give you some helpful advice. You obviously messed up. What you need to do now is apologize. Apologize to the people you need to apologize to—”
“To whom you need to apologize—” Pat interrupted.
I grabbed the phone from Pat.
“Apologize.” I pressed the phone to my right ear and batted Pat away with my left hand.
“Steering wheel!” Pat yelled.
“Listen, Stephen, you can argue with me, or you can try to make things right. That’s all I can tell you.”
“But Molly, I think they—”
I mashed the hang-up button and threw the phone into the back seat.
“Molly, look out!”
“What? I’m fine. Everything’s under control.” I steered the car off the bumpy forest floor back onto the narrow strip of asphalt. We drove in silence along the rutted thoroughfare until the road widened and smoothed through the town of Kuewa. The termite-eaten boardwalk featured a few New Age shops, a health food store, a couple of restaurants and a tattoo parlor advertising family discounts. Then the Old West–style storefronts thinned out and we were past the town and driving through jungle again.
I finally spotted the glint of solar panels through the trees, in time to turn up a dirt road so narrow and overgrown that it looked like an abandoned driveway. After a few minutes we were approaching the Cloudforest’s main building, a single-story house with a green metal roof and a wraparound lanai. I parked the car and we walked to the building.
It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the low light inside. Dark bloodwood floors and koa wainscoting didn’t help the visibility. A young woman behind the front desk looked up from her computer and smiled.
“Hi, Margaret,” I said. “We’re here to see Mercedes.”
“Aloha, Dr. Barda, nice to see you! Aloha, Mr. Flanagan. Just a minute, please.”
The text alert pinged on Pat’s phone.
“It’s from Emma,” he said. “Last Bon Dance of the season is tonight. I wanted to do a piece on it. I’m glad she reminded me.”
“Why didn’t she text me too?” I asked.
“She probably did. I think your phone’s still in the car. In the back seat.”
“Oh, right,” I said.
“Where you threw it.” He glanced at his watch, an ancient Timex that used to be gold tone. “I shoulda taken my car separately.”
“I’ll go to the Bon Dance with you,” I said. “I can drive. It’s on the way back to town, right? I’ve never been to a Bon Dance.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“You sure you want to go with me to the Bon Dance?” Pat said. “I mean, that would be great, but when are you going to do your Student Retention Office paperwork?”
“I’ll get it done over the weekend. If it’s late I’ll just have to fill out a Personal Responsibility Reflection Form.”
After a few minutes Mercedes emerged to greet us. Although we had eaten breakfast together that morning, she embraced me like a long-lost sister. Pat got a hug and a kiss too.
“Well,” she said. “I was expecting you two a lot sooner.”
“Molly’s a careful driver,” Pat said.
“I forgot how far out of town it was. The trees have grown in a lot. It looks nice. The bougainvillea is gorgeous!”
“It matches your highlights,” Pat said to her.
Mercedes dimpled and touched her hair, a sleek burgundy bob streaked with fuchsia. “Oh, the trees need to be cut back. I’ve been trying to get the boy down here to do that, but he’s so busy now. Anyway.”
“Can we take a look at where Jimmy Tanaka was supposed to be staying?” Pat asked.
“Couldn’t hurt, I suppose. Why not?” She led us out onto the lanai and down the wooden stairs to the pathway.
“Let’s go out to the cabin now, before it gets too dark. Terrible, that thing this morning, ah? Good thing Jimmy never saw it. Oh, Molly, I heard your Stephen might be in some trouble over this. Was his responsibility to manage the theater props.”
“I heard that too,” I said.
As she walked ahead of us, Mercedes paused occasionally to pluck a shriveled bract from the bougainvillea. “Nice, that boy Stephen, but so absent-minded. Molly, I think you can do better. You know, Donnie Gonsalves is single. Remember Donnie? You sat next to him this morning?”
“He seems very nice,” I said. I fixed my eyes on the red gravel path in front of me. We followed Mercedes through the double doors and down the walkway to the guest cabins. Hibiscus hedges crowded us on either side, forcing us to walk single-file. I kept my elbows close so the branches wouldn’t snag my blouse.
“Mercedes,” Pat asked. “Did you actually see Jimmy Tanaka? Are you sure he was ever on-island to begin with?”
“Oh, yes, he was here. I talked to him when he checked in yesterday afternoon. Then he went out to dinner with your dean. I never saw him after that.”
She gestured at the wooden frame of a structure being built at the edge of her property. It was going to be a sweat lodge, she explained. “I know. Kind of out of place in Hawaii.” She turned her palms upward. “My mainland guests keep asking for it, though, and they get so disappointed when I say no, no sweat lodge anywhere on the island. I already have the crystal bed and the meditation chapel. But”—she shrugged—“the customer is always right, yah Molly?”
“The customer? I guess.”
“You repainted the cabins,” Pat said. “They look good.”
Mercedes frowned as she touched a small, splintered divot in the doo
r casing of Jimmy Tanaka’s cabin. She unlocked the door and pushed it open.
“This is just how he left it. Bed still made and everything.”
Pat opened and closed each drawer of the simple pine dresser, from top to bottom. Then he disappeared into the bathroom and I heard the medicine cabinet squeak open and then thunk shut. I glanced around the small, simply furnished room. What were we supposed to be looking for? A forwarding address?
When Mercedes had left us, Pat said, “Her hair looks cool with the magenta highlights. You should do something like that to your hair.”
“I think that’s new,” I said. I slid the closet door open, looked around and confirmed that it was empty except for a few wire hangers and a heady fresh paint smell. “I mean, new since breakfast this morning.”
The front door opened and my former student Nate Parsons peeked in. Pat emerged from the bathroom wiping his hands on his shirt, introduced himself, and disappeared again.
“Hey, Professor! What are you guys doing down here? I already brought Mr. Tanaka’s bag up to the College of Commerce, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
I told Nate that I was trying to find Jimmy Tanaka so that I could write a story about him for our college. Also, I had Tanaka’s suitcase in my office and was eager to return it to him.
“Is Pat Flanagan writing a story about it?” Nate asked.
Porcelain clanked in the bathroom. It sounded like Pat was looking inside the toilet tank.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How do you know Pat? I mean, Mr. Flanagan? Did you take comp from him?”
“I wish. His sections are so popular. They always fill up so fast. I was never able to get in.”
“Oh. That must be a terrible problem for him. Being so popular with the students.” I sat down on the bed, having exhausted all of the places I could think of looking. Nate pulled over the single chair and sat down on it backwards.
“I read Island Confidential every day,” he said, glancing back toward the bathroom door. “What did you think of the series on the Kuewa Road?”
“We were just talking about that on the way down,” I said. “Pat told me Jimmy Tanaka was one of the original developers.”
