The Miss Fortune Series: Aloha, Y'All (Kindle Worlds Novella) (The Mary-Alice Files Book 4)

by Frankie Bow

  Talking of food made Mary-Alice realize she was hungry. She helped herself to a slice of pizza. “And they didn’t only have food, which was a surprise to me. One of the booths had all sorts of lovely things carved out of koa wood. I’d never heard of it before, but it’s lovely. I bought this letter opener. Isn’t it the most gorgeous thing? So simple, but the grain’s just beautiful.”

  Mary-Alice pulled the letter opener out of her purse to show Fortune.

  Fortune laughed.

  “They’ll never let you take it on the plane, Mary-Alice. You’ll have to mail it back if you don’t want it confiscated. It is very nice, though.”

  “Confiscated? My goodness. Thank you ever so much for warning me, Fortune, I believe I will send it back. Oh, I also happened to find a real estate office downtown. It was at the end of the row of shops along the shore, just before the road turns into the bridge that crosses the river. It was a lovely pink building. Now Fortune, you might find this interesting. They had several nice looking lots for sale.”

  “Are you looking to buy land?”

  Mary-Alice was confused.

  “Me? Buy land? Well no, darlin’, I was under the impression that you were fixing to purchase a parcel on behalf of your family.”

  Fortune coughed and swallowed.

  “Of course. That’s the whole reason we’re here in Hawaii, right? Sure, let’s go have a look tomorrow. You have the locations?”

  Mary-Alice pulled a couple of brochures out of her purse and handed them to Fortune.

  “Volcano, huh? Like your mysterious postcard. Sure, let’s do it. When do you want to go?”

  “Well, the young lady who gave me these brochures informed me that they have a farmers’ market in Volcano on Sunday mornings. You missed the one today, and they had ever so many interesting vegetables and things that you don’t ever see back in Sinful.”

  “Okay. We’ll go first thing tomorrow. I have the feeling we’ll be going home soon, so we might as well catch the sights while we can.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Volcano farmers’ market was smaller than its Hilo counterpart. It was also much, much colder. Mary-Alice noticed many of the same vendors that she had seen the previous day. Nadia was there in a mint-green cowboy hat. Blaze hovered around the table, putting things in bags for customers or refilling the display trays with eggplants or lettuces. On the opposite side of the market was Madame Jasmine’s fortune-telling booth.

  Mary-Alice wondered whether Blaze Ocean was one of those invented names that Fortune had been telling her about. Mary-Alice’s crafting circle back in Mudbug had a Candy Barr and a Mary Christmas, and you might think those were made up, but in fact they were their honest-to-goodness names.

  “We should go over there and say hello to Miss Nadia when the crowd goes down a little,” Mary-Alice said.

  “I hope it’s okay if we don’t buy anything,” Fortune said. “I have just enough cash for the cab back to town. I didn’t realize how far it was.”

  Mary-Alice rubbed her arms to fight off the chill.

  “What did you think of the lots we saw?”

  Fortune shrugged.

  “I don’t know. All I saw both times was an overgrown lot with a real estate sign. Hard to tell what you’re getting.”

  “Fortune, do you suppose it’s possible that my mother was here in this town?”

  “Oh, Mary-Alice. Anything’s possible. Hey, you could ask Madame Jasmine. She sees all and knows all.”

  “Oh my goodness, a fortuneteller? I mean, I suppose I’d be curious to know what she has to say, but I do wonder what Father Michael would say. He seems to take a rather unfavorable view of divination and sorcery and the like.”

  “How about this: I’ll be your fortune teller. Fortune Morrow, Fortune Teller.”

  Fortune closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her temples.

  “Your mother loved you very much. So do your friends. We all want you to be happy. And Boon St. Clair totally likes you.”

  Fortune opened her eyes and grinned.

  “How was that?”

  “I’m sure Mister Boon St. Clair would be utterly mortified,” Mary-Alice tittered. “Fortune, I’ve seen most of these booths already, and I could do with some breakfast. What do you say? My treat.”

  Mary-Alice and Fortune walked over to the local diner, a pink clapboard building with a green corrugated metal roof. When the waitress came over to take their order, Mary-Alice ordered sweet bread French toast and then asked whether she had heard of a lady from the South who might have lived in the area.

  “She would have been from Arnaudville, Louisiana,” Mary-Alice explained. “But her final resting place would be Grand Coteau. St. Landry Parish.”

  “Sorry, Aunty,” the young woman said. “Never met her. I can get your order, Miss?”

  Fortune ordered the loco moco, a local specialty. It was a heap of rice with a burger patty on top, smothered with brown gravy and topped with a fried egg. Mary-Alice was glad to see Fortune’s appetite was back.

  As they were finishing their breakfast, Fortune’s phone rang.

  “I’m sorry, Mary-Alice,” Fortune said. “It’s Ida Belle.”

  “You go on and answer Ida Belle’s call,” Mary-Alice urged. “I’ll meet you outside.”

  When she had finished paying (the price was surprisingly reasonable, only a little more expensive than Francine’s Diner), Mary-Alice found Fortune video-chatting on her phone with Ida Belle and Gertie.

  “Oh, hey there, Mary-Alice,” Ida Belle said.

  “You will not believe what happened,” Gertie added, breathlessly. “Is anyone there to hear us?”

  “Only me,” Mary-Alice said.

  Fortune started walking into the woods, and Mary-Alice tagged behind her.

  “I think we’ll have some privacy here,” Fortune said to her phone screen. “So you were saying?”

  “This doesn’t look like Hawaii,” Ida Belle exclaimed. “There’s kudzu everywhere! Did you even leave the parish?”

  Mary-Alice looked around and saw a coating of the familiar trifoliate leaves covering the ground and trees. Goodness, that pesky vine was everywhere.

  “Where are you really?” Gertie asked.

  “Volcano,” Fortune said. “We came for the farmers’ market and had a nice breakfast.”

  “Volcano?” Ida Belle challenged. “Where’s the lava?”

  “It’s off the main road, kind of a hike. So what’s the big news?”

  “Well, you know how Ida Belle and I are staying at your house while you’re gone to keep an eye on it?” Gertie asked.

  “Sure,” Fortune said.

  “You had intruders,” Ida Belle said. “Don’t worry. We shot ‘em.”

  Fortune went a little pale.

  “Intruders? How many?”

  “Just two,” Ida Belle said, as if having to shoot only two intruders were no big deal. “Young guys, maybe late twenties, early thirties.”

  “And wearing leather jackets,” Gertie exclaimed. “Can you imagine, in this heat?”

  “What were they after?” Mary-Alice asked, genuinely curious. “I mean to say, Fortune, you do have a lovely house, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of place that would attract the attention of young miscreants in leather jackets.”

  “Well, we could ask them,” Gertie said.

  “Except they’re dead!” Ida Belle cried, and to Mary-Alice’s horror, Ida Belle and Gertie high-fived.

  “Probably stalkers from Fortune’s beauty pageant days,” Ida Belle added, in a serious tone.

  “Yes,” Fortune said. “Those beauty pageant stalkers can be persistent.”

  “If you can find a copy of the Times-Picayune you’ll see the story,” Ida Belle said. “Oh, wait, we can show her.”

  Fortune’s little phone screen was filled with a blurry newspaper page.

  “I can’t read it,” Fortune said. “Oh, wait. Local woman defends home from burglars. Gertie, that’s you in the photo!”


  “That’s right,” Gertie said. “So if any more beauty pageant stalkers are out there looking for you, they’ll see this story of mistaken identity and conclude you’re not in Sinful.”

  “Good thinking,” Fortune said. “Thank you.”

  “Now how about this Jodie fellow who died?” Gertie asked. “You two gonna look into that? Oh, wait, does Mary-Alice know?”

  Fortune glanced at Mary-Alice.

  “There’s some indication that the man who died meant me harm,” Fortune said.

  “Oh my, how simply awful. And he seemed like such a nice man! Was he a beauty pageant stalker too?”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  “Why Fortune, you didn’t say!” Mary-Alice exclaimed. “If I had known, I daresay I would have been much less polite to him.”

  A rustle in the bushes made Fortune turn her head, as alert as a pointer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “You have company?” Ida Belle asked as Fortune turned to the rustling in the underbrush.

  Fortune laughed and pointed her phone down. A black snout and the outline of two flaring ears poked out of the leaves.

  “A wild pig?” Gertie exclaimed. “Fortune, I’ve changed my mind since yesterday. I don’t believe you’re in Hawaii at all.”

  “Me neither,” Ida Belle added. “I believe you and Mary-Alice are camping out on Number Two Island and you’re just pulling our leg.”

  Fortune and Mary-Alice headed back to the farmers’ market, which was wrapping up. Nadia Nygaard was packing up her truck. She looked up and waved, and Mary-Alice and Fortune headed over.

  A few parking spaces down, Mary-Alice noticed Madame Jasmine loading her things into her own car—a powder-blue 1955 Cadillac with a spacious trunk. The woman had removed her veils for this quotidian task. From the back Mary-Alice saw shimmering blue-black hair. Although elderly, the woman moved with languid elegance. Mary-Alice watched admiringly, and wondered how she would look if she traded her own trademark red hair for blue-black. After all, her mother—who had been on her mind a lot lately—wasn’t there to scold her for making unsuitable fashion choices.

  No, black hair would probably clash with her freckles, she thought sadly. Or I could go platinum, like Nadia. Of course that’s a wig, which makes it easier to switch.

  “You two have a way back down to town?” Nadia asked as they approached.

  “We were going to get a cab,” Fortune said.

  “I saw a bus stop in front of the diner,” Mary-Alice said. “Would you recommend the bus?”

  “Bus doesn’t run on Sunday. Why not ride with us? Sorry I can’t invite you to sit up front, but the seedlings are delicate and can’t ride in the back.”

  Mary-Alice peered into the truck and saw the seats were covered with newspaper, on top of which sat cardboard trays full of seedlings in little green plastic pots.

  Blaze Ocean was already sitting in the truck bed, glowering when Nadia opened the gate to let Mary-Alice and Fortune climb in. Mary-Alice smiled and said, “Good morning.”

  The old hippie nodded and gazed into the distance. The truck jolted to a start and Blaze took hold of the closest object, a half-empty cardboard box of lettuce heads.

  Nadia drove slowly down the highway, creeping along in the right lane as cars and trucks whizzed by on the left. The scenery was beautiful but monotonous; towering trees embedded in a thick carpet of greenery.

  “Invasive species, all of ‘em,” Blaze said, glaring at the verdure.

  “Invasive species?” Fortune asked.

  “Albizia trees. Strawberry guava. Kudzu.”

  Mary-Alice rubbed her bare arms, wishing she had brought a sweater. Sitting in the metal bed of a moving truck made the damp cold even worse. Mary-Alice wouldn’t have imagined that traveling to Hawaii in the middle of the summer would involve her freezing her bottom off.

  “Would you say we human beings are an invasive species?” Mary-Alice asked, hoping conversation would take her mind off being so cold.

  For the first time, the man cracked a grin.

  “You can call me Blaze. And yes, I believe we’re one of the worst. As far as Mother Earth is concerned, we’re a skin infection. A parasite.”

  For the rest of the drive down, Blaze Ocean expounded on this topic in off-putting detail.

  Finally, they reached Hilo, and Nadia pulled the truck up in front of the apartment building. As Nadia and Blaze helped Mary-Alice down from the back of the truck, Nadia said, “Why don’t you two come up for dinner tonight? We feel so terrible that our tragic accident scared you away. I’ll be using the produce that didn’t sell today, so we can look forward to some lovely salad.”

  “I hate to impose,” Fortune said. “We’ll probably just have a quiet evening here in town.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” Nadia said. “What are you going to eat? All of the restaurants are closed Sunday night.”

  “Oh. Sunday,” Fortune said.

  “We have friends driving up from town,” Nadia said. “They can pick you up and bring you back.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nadia’s friends, two friendly, gray-haired men in their seventies who looked alike enough to be brothers, stopped by as promised to drive Mary-Alice and Fortune to dinner. Their names were Fred and Frank. One was a real-estate agent and the other was a contractor, so the drive passed quickly with conversation about the merits of various subdivisions on the island, the fine points of fee simple versus leasehold property, and the new downtown building code that was so stringent that it had effectively brought new construction to a halt.

  Nadia Nygaard had set a table for six: Herself and Blaze, Fortune and Mary-Alice, and Fred and Frank. When she had seated her guests, Nadia brought out a large, bristling bowl of salad, which Mary-Alice assumed would be the first course for the entire table. But she set the bowl in front of Fortune, and then went back into the kitchen and brought out an equally large salad bowl for Mary-Alice. This continued until everyone had a huge bowl of greens in front of them. This, it seemed, would be the entire meal. To Mary-Alice, this was by no means a proper supper. But the polite thing was to eat what was put in front of you, even if it was spiny greens with shredded beetroot and what appeared to be raw black-eyed peas.

  Just as Mary-Alice took her first bite, the front door burst open.

  There stood an elderly woman with blue-black hair, long purple nails, and impeccable posture.

  “Madame Jasmine.” Nadia snarled. She braced herself on the table, and stood up slowly.

  Mary-Alice stared at the woman in the doorway.

  Two police officers, one man and one woman, stepped into the house from behind the fortuneteller.

  As the female officer cuffed Nadia and Blaze, the male officer snapped on gloves and went around the table, dumping each serving of salad into a separate evidence bag. When he got to Mary-Alice’s salad, he peered closely at the bag.

  “Has anyone consumed any of this salad?” he asked. Fortune, Fred, and Frank shook their heads.

  “Oh dear,” Mary-Alice said. “I did take a few bites of mine. I didn’t want to be impolite, you see. Did I do something wrong?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mary-Alice woke up in a bright room. Something was clamped on her finger, and a machine was beeping in the background. The woman with the blue-black hair was sitting by her bedside, watching her. The light slanted in from the window to highlight the woman’s elegant cheekbones and remarkably smooth skin.

  Mary-Alice blinked at the fortuneteller. For a few minutes, she just stared.

  “Mama?” Mary-Alice said, finally.

  “Right here, darling,” said the woman.

  “Mama, you’re not dead.”

  “No, darling. Not in the least.”

  The woman reached over and brushed a stray bit of red hair off Mary-Alice’s face.

  “Mama, what’s going on? Why am I in the hospital?”

  “It was that Nadia Nygaard. She put rosary peas in your salad. If I
hadn’t alerted the police, you’d surely be dead by now.”

  “Dead?” Mary-Alice exclaimed. “Gracious! How did you come to find all this out?”

  “When I saw you were fixin’ to come to Hawaii after all these years, well, one thing I was sure of, and that was I was going to keep an eye out for my baby girl. So when I saw you getting mixed up with that Nadia Nygaard, I kept a close watch. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen that woman do something nefarious. Lord, someone should have put her away years ago.”

  “But what on earth would Miss Nadia have against me?”

  “I swear to you, I have racked my brains trying to find rhyme or reason in that woman’s actions. I’m just happy she’s finally come to justice.”

  Mary-Alice squeezed her eyes shut and tried to get her bearings.

  “How’d you know I was fixin’ to come to Hawaii, mama?”

  “Darlin’, I’m a fortune-teller. And that’s just a fancy term for private detective.”

  “You’re a private detective?”

  “Yes indeed. Your mama has what I believe is called a day job. Imagine! It’s a mercy your father isn’t here to see it.”

  “So you’ve been keeping an eye on me all these years?”

  “That I have. I’ve been following everything you’ve been up to, sweetheart. I know you lost your home in Mudbug to a fire, and moved out to Sinful to be closer to Joe’s cousin’s Celia. And of course I recall the news about Joe Arceneaux. Never met a man who deserved getting eaten by a gator more than him.”

  Thelma Rose smiled, and Mary-Alice squinted at her.

  “Mama, whatever you’ve been doing here in Hawaii, it certainly agrees with you. I hope you don’t mind my saying, I believe you look younger than when I saw you last.”

  Thelma Rose touched her flawless cheek.

  “Well now, I do go in for a little touch-up now and then. That’s something else your father would never have permitted.”

  “Mama, I’ve missed you.” Mary-Alice said. “Did you miss me at all?”

  Mary-Alice’s mother touched the imaginary pearls at her throat and blinked, and Mary-Alice felt embarrassed that the moment had taken such an emotional turn.