by Frankie Bow
“Hey, you have a fridge! That’s handy. I didn’t get breakfast toda—”
“Don’t touch that.”
I paused with my hand inches from the handle.
“That’s not a refrigerator,” she said. “It’s an incubator.”
“Oh.” I pulled my hand away. “So how did it go?” I asked. “Everything went okay?”
Emma finally looked up at me. “I don’t normally work with human tissue. I had to lean on one of the grad students from anthro to get me the primers I needed. Fortunately, the grad students are in here all weekend.”
The lab was empty now, except for the two of us.
“Are you supposed to be wearing a white coat or something?” I asked.
Emma glanced up at a sign over the doorway. “This is a Biosafety Level Two lab. So yeah, I’m probably supposed to be wearing a lab coat. You too.”
“How do you know if there’s a match?” I asked. “Does something light up?”
Emma peered into the monitor.
“Not exactly. I sequenced the meat and a sample from the toothbrush separately. Then I fed the two sequences into this program. It’s comparing the two sequences. Aaaaaand—”
She slumped in her chair, looking crestfallen.
“Not a match.” She shook her head. “Huh.”
“What about the fine muscle fibers?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “It must have been just a smaller animal. Maybe even a piglet.”
“So then the meat is just pork?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
I sighed and sank down onto a lab stool, immensely relieved.
“So is there any left,” I asked, “or did you have to use it all up?”
Emma shot me a look, and I didn’t pursue the question any further.
“Oh, while we’re on the subject,” I said, “let’s not mention to Donnie that we tested his potluck dish for a murdered man’s DNA. Okay?”
“This was a lot of work.” Emma glared at me. She seemed annoyed at Donnie for disappointing her.
A muffled jingling sounded in my bag.
“What happened to ‘O Fortuna’?” Emma asked as I pulled out my phone.
“It went off in class and one of my students kind of freaked out. Oh, hi Donnie! Yes, I am feeling much better, thanks. Much better,” I repeated, directly at Emma. “In fact, I’m back on campus today. Right now? Oh, nothing. Just hanging out with Emma. Listen, you want to hear something funny? Hang on, just a minute.”
I walked outside and closed the door behind me. The sun was up now, and the air felt surprisingly warm for so early in the day.
“So Donnie. I was looking up information on covenants not to compete, you know, for my class?”
“I’m familiar with those.”
“So in the search results, I happened to see a news article about you.”
“Oh?”
“It said that Merrie Musubis was suing Donnie’s Drive-Inns, over a noncompete agreement.”
I paused, but Donnie didn’t say anything.
“For a huge amount of money,” I added.
Another few seconds of silence. Finally, Donnie said, “M-hm. That was a pain in the okole.”
“Is it still going on? The lawsuit? Jimmy Tanaka’s death didn’t change anything, right?”
“As far as the lawsuit? No, not really.”
The lab door opened and Emma came out to join me. We started walking together toward my office.
“Right, because it’s Merrie suing you, not Jimmy Tanaka as an individual. So where does it stand now?”
“We’re working on a settlement. Just to avoid having to go to court. Greg doesn’t think the case has any merit, but it’s not worth the humbug.”
“Was it because you started selling musubis?”
“They can’t stop us from selling standard musubis. Even convenience stores sell them. It was our Loco Musubi. With the beef patty and the gravy.”
“Ooh, I’ve never tried those,” I said. “They sound good. Anyway, I couldn’t believe the amount they were asking for. I didn’t think there was that much—”
I was about to say that I didn’t think there was that much money on the whole island, but I realized that that might sound kind of condescending.
“You didn’t think there was that much what?” Donnie asked.
“Uh, competitiveness among the local businesses. I thought you guys tried to work together.”
“Most of the time we do,” Donnie said. “Jimmy can sue for any amount he wants. That doesn’t mean he’s going to get it.”
“Jimmy? You mean his company, Merrie Musubis, right?”
“Yes, that’s what I meant. Listen, are you going to the Business Boosters installation this weekend?”
“I probably should go.”
“You should. Quite a few of the members were at your potluck the other day. They’d notice if you weren’t there.”
“Really?”
“Why don’t you come down and we can drive over together.”
“Come over to your house?” I said. “Sure, okay. Why not? That sounds good.”
I’d stopped walking as I talked, and was now standing in the middle of the pathway blocking the flow of between-class traffic. Student bodies jostled around me, and Emma had gotten ahead of me. I hurried off the phone and dodged through the crowd of students to catch up to her.
“What was that about?” Emma asked.
“The lawsuit. They’re settling. It’s no big deal. Just like I said.”
Emma was still sulking.
“Fine,” she said. “Donnie might not be a cannibal. That doesn’t rule out his being a murderer. I wouldn’t spend any time alone with him if I were you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
I started to put my phone away when I saw that I had missed a call from an on-campus number. I also had a new voice mail.
“Go ahead and check it,” Emma said. “It might be important.”
The message was from Officer Medeiros. He had some news for me about the classroom tapes, and could I please call him back at my earliest convenience?
Finally. We were getting somewhere.
CHAPTER FORTY
I was alone in one of the Student Retention Office lounges. The door must have been propped open. One of the Student Retention Officers had come in without my noticing. She was pushing an AV cart.
“Molly! I’m glad I found you here. You need to take responsibility for these students.”
She lifted the top skull from the pile on her cart, and placed it carefully on a table.
“Wait a minute,” I objected, as she continued placing the skulls, one per chair, on the round tables, facing inward.
I picked one up and peered in through an eye hole. “These are empty skulls! There’s nothing inside!”
Now Bill Vogel was there too, and Vogel and the Student Retention Officer were batting the skulls around, as if they were playing beach volleyball. The skulls hovered in the air like balloons. I had to get to my class, but I couldn’t leave. My feet were stuck. I tried to cry out, but I could barely breathe. Bill Vogel turned to me and let the skulls float to the ground. “Head count,” he said. “We need to maximize our head count.”
“No excuses,” the Student Retention Officer added. “You don’t have the luxury of academic rigor.” She made air quotes with her fingers when she said this.
Bill Vogel snorted. “Rigor. Like ‘rigor mortis.’ ” Then he said, “We’ll be keeping an eye on your student satisfaction reports, Molly.”
“No!” I cried. “Student satisfaction reports? Come on! How are they supposed to fill out student satisfaction reports? This is impossible!”
Clearly the Student Retention Officer thought I was being difficult. “As we have told you people many times, a dedicated teacher doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘impossible.’ For your information, Dr. Rodge took them out for night golfing.” She smiled proudly. “They glow i
n the dark! Can you do that?”
I could hear my heart pounding. I forced my eyes open as the infuriating dream thinned out and faded away.
You didn’t have to be an expert in dream interpretation to figure out that the Jimmy Tanaka murder had been bothering me. Pat was as close to the police as anyone, and as far as he knew, they weren’t making any significant progress on the case—or if they were, they were keeping it quiet. The tip line hadn’t yielded anything substantial. Stephen couldn’t remember anything, assuming there was anything for him to remember. I wondered if Nate had ever called in to report the voices he’d heard. I had been leaving messages for Officer Medeiros to see what his news was about the class recordings, but he wasn’t answering his phone, and he hadn’t called me back.
I had fallen asleep on my kitchen counter with a stack of ungraded papers in front of me. I noticed with alarm that it was already four in the afternoon. I didn’t have much time to get ready to meet Donnie for the Business Boosters event. I rushed through hair, makeup, and wardrobe in under two hours (which included about twenty minutes searching for a particular pair of shoes that I finally remembered I had stored in an unused area of my kitchen).
I parked down the street from Donnie’s house and checked the time. I was a few minutes early. I decided to give Officer Medeiros’s direct line one more try. This time he did answer. He had wanted to talk to me in person because what he had to tell me was confidential.
“There are no recordings,” he said. “This is very disappointing.”
I spotted a smudge on the center of the steering wheel, on the clear half dome with the tiny thunderbird embedded within. I rubbed it with my thumb.
“You mean someone destroyed the tapes,” I said.
“There was never any tapes,” he said and paused. “There are no recordings from that classroom at all.”
“What?”
“ ’Cause of the budget cuts. They installed part of the lecture capture system, but there was no money to install the rest of it.”
“What about those cameras they have hanging from the ceiling?” I asked.
“Yeah. Expensive, those things. But they’re not connected to anything.”
“Great,” I said. “I’ve been suffering from stage fright for nothing. Were they going to tell us at some point?”
Officer Medeiros was quiet for a moment. “No. They didn’t even want to tell me about it. And they don’t want to let this get outside the university. Would be too embarrassing.”
I assured him that I would not say a word. The administration had already asked us not to make public statements about the effects of the budget cuts. Such information might shake the public’s faith in the university, frighten away potential students and make the legislature even more disinclined to invest in us. The problem was that when we put on a happy face and kept our suffering to ourselves, the legislature concluded that we hadn’t been punished enough and that they still had leeway to cut some more—and so they did.
I put away my phone, locked up my car, and approached Donnie’s house cautiously. To my great relief Donnie’s yard was silent and hellhound-free. As I stepped up to his front door I realized that I was shielding my throat with my hands and quickly let go.
This time I had worn platform mules with bare legs. This time, I wasn’t going to go plodding around Donnie’s house in my stocking feet like a dork. When Donnie opened the door I slipped my shoes off and walked in barefoot. My feet stuck to the hardwood floor and with each step I took I could hear a little pop. I wondered if I should have worn stockings.
“It’s so nice and quiet,” I said.
“Davison is out hunting this weekend, so he took the boys with him.”
“The boys. Oh! Right. Cerberus and company.”
I looked around the living room. It was as perfectly arranged as I remembered it. This evening the jade green vase held a turgid, bright red anthurium.
“How was your Saturday?” Donnie asked. “Did you do anything fun?”
“Not very eventful. I was trying to get some grading done, but I fell asleep in the middle of it, and then I had this weird dream! I was being forced to teach a room full of empty—” I realized that describing my dream might not make a very good impression on the father of one of my students. “Actually, I can’t remember all of it now. You know how that is, with dreams. How about you? Saturday is your busiest day, isn’t it?”
“Business is good. I can’t complain. What would you like to drink? Wine? Guava juice? Coffee?”
“Coffee sounds good, if you don’t mind. If the speeches last as long as they did last year I might need some help staying awake.”
“That’s true,” he said.
At that moment I remembered where it was that I’d first seen Donnie.
“Oh! I wasn’t talking about you, of course. I thought your presentation was really good last year!”
Donnie smiled. “Fortunately for everyone, I won’t be speaking this year.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but then I decided that for the rest of the evening, I should probably speak as little as possible.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Donnie disappeared into the kitchen. I made myself comfortable on the genuine Sottsass sofa and imagined what it might be like to live in Donnie’s lovely house. I heard the whirring of a coffee grinder, and then quiet. A few minutes later Donnie returned carrying two thin-walled white china cups on saucers. He seemed to have the correct vessel for every possible beverage: coffee cups, tea cups, red wine glasses, white wine glasses, port glasses, sherry glasses, highball glasses and who knows what else.
“So your son is out with his friends,” I said.
“Until tomorrow night.”
“That’s good. I mean, to get his mind off of things. How is he doing now?”
“Am I allowed to answer that question?” Donnie asked. “I thought we weren’t supposed to discuss Davison.”
“I can’t tell you his grades, or how he’s doing in my class or anything like that. But I’m asking as a person, not as his professor.”
I had been feeling slightly more tolerant toward Davison recently. He had been attending class fairly regularly, and turning in original, if not stellar, work. He was making an effort. More importantly, I was really starting to like Donnie, and the cognitive dissonance of disliking his son at the same time was starting to wear on me.
“He’ll be okay,” Donnie said. “He’s strong.”
“So, it’s just you and Davison living here? No one else?”
“Just the two of us.”
I paused to let Donnie elaborate, which he did not. I had so far resisted the temptation to find out more about Donnie’s background by asking around. Mercedes would surely be able to tell me anything I wanted to know. But the coconut wireless transmits both ways, and I had no doubt that any inquiries about Donnie’s personal life would get back to him. I didn’t want him to think I was snooping.
“Do you have any cream for the coffee?” I asked, more to break the silence than anything.
“If you like. But taste it first.”
It was inoffensive, thin and mild.
“It’s Kona,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t need cream.” I wasn’t really in the mood for coffee; I would have preferred something with a robust ethanol content. On the other hand, I did have a long night of speeches and ceremony in front of me. Also, drinking coffee probably made a better impression. I didn’t want Donnie to think I was a lush.
Donnie quietly placed his arm on the backrest of the couch behind me. His eyes met mine.
“Donnie,” I blurted out, “would you mind showing me around the outside? I’d like to see it before the sun sets. I didn’t really get a chance last time.” I still had no idea whether he was divorced, or widowed, or what. I had to find out before things went any further.
Donnie sighed and pulled his arm back.
“It’s not anything to write home about,” he said.
“Davison and I have an agreement. The front and the inside are mine. Davison and his dogs have the backyard. I make no promises about what you’ll find back there.”
“I was just thinking, we’re going to be sitting for a long time at this dinner. It might be nice to walk around a little now.”
I hurried to the front door to retrieve my shoes, then padded barefoot to the back door with my shoes in my hand. I placed the shoes outside the back door and wiggled my feet into them. Then I realized that the sun was low on the horizon and I needed my sunglasses, so I slipped back out of my shoes and went back into the living room to retrieve my purse. After a few trips back and forth I was finally in the backyard, wearing my shoes and my sunglasses and carrying my little red brocade clutch, the one that went so well with my vintage Lilli Ann dress.
Donnie was right about the aesthetic appeal of the backyard, which was mostly an expanse of patchy lawn. Hibiscus bushes covered some of the chain-link fence. A shed in the far corner had a white corrugated roof to match the one on the house. A long kennel, a concrete pad enclosed with tall chain-link walls and roof, occupied the center of the yard. Chewed-up sticks and bone splinters littered the grass, and patches of bare dirt marked where the dogs had been digging.
“How many dogs are there?” I asked. I guessed two dozen, at least.
“Six,” Donnie said. “No, five now. Ku, Kaupe, Milu, Kanaloa, and Kukailimoku. Pig hunting is dangerous. Those tusks are like daggers.”
“The backyard looks nice and clean, considering.”
Donnie squinted at the rubble heaped along the fence. “This looks clean to you?”
“Well,” I said, “compared to what you’d expect from five dogs. We had a Golden Retriever when I was a kid. She was a big floppy dog, really friendly and sweet. But walking out onto the lawn was risky. Kind of like an Easter egg hunt, in a bad way.”
“Do you like dogs?” Donnie asked.
“Sure. I mean, I like some dogs. I judge them on their individual merits. I don’t have any pets. Geckos don’t count, right?” I wondered if I was sounding like a heartless pet-hater. “I don’t have anything against pets,” I added. “But if you have them, you have to take care of them. It’s hard on pets when you have to travel.”
