by Toby Neal
The man scrambled to the door and slammed it shut behind him.
Marcella took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself. That bitch! Some friend Sophie was, first holding back intel about the Ghost, next pulling a disappearing act when she might be facing a murder charge!
Marcella’s eyes landed on a colorful postcard held onto the rusting, avocado-colored fridge with a magnet.
She walked over and removed a scene of the stunning Na Pali Cliffs, their corrugated, jutting green expanse marching into a blue horizon like an endless row of green, Chinese clay soldiers. A caption in yellow at the bottom blared, Visit Kalalau, Kaua‘i!
Marcella slipped the card into her pocket. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of the garbage.
Who knew when Sophie would be back? It would be awful to come home to this reek.
Marcella pulled the white trash can liner out of the plastic can, tying it tight, and looked around one last time. “I’m going to find you, Sophie,” she muttered. “You can run, but you can’t hide.”
Sophie folded her damp tent as tightly as she could, but still, somehow, the damn thing had expanded. She usually had to refold it several times before she could get it back into the bag, and the ever-present, bright red Kaua‘i mud adhering to the slick plastic bottom made her hands and knees filthy.
“No one told me how dirty you get camping,” she remarked to Ginger. The Lab looked on, tongue lolling in her usual doggy grin. Sophie had taken to talking to Ginger as days went by without other human contact.
There had been other hikers on the trail to Kalalau, of course. She and Ginger had done the rugged twelve-mile hike in three segments as she got used to carrying the heavy pack and working her camp stove, water filtration system, assembling and breaking down her tent and gear. She’d sent her obligatory text on the third day to her father, letting him know she was still alive, but her phone told her No Signal.
“That Lyft driver said it was ambitious to take on Kalalau as a first-time backpacker,” Sophie said, scrunching the tent down tightly. “I think he might have been right.” Ginger woofed in agreement. The Lab’s coat was rough with mud; it had rained off and on for the five days they’d been out here. “Maybe it will be drier deeper inside the valley if we can find a ridge.”
Finally wrestling the filthy tent into its zip-up container, Sophie finished breaking camp, brushing leaves and soil over her fire ring. She’d camped near the stream and hadn’t seen a soul since she finally arrived at the remote place, with its famously stunning, jungle-clothed valley arms that opened from a peak in Kokee and spread into a wide, lush valley that ended at a massive beach and the wide blue sea.
But the beach was populated with other campers and frequented daily by boatloads of tourists who came by Zodiac from Port Allen on the south coast, sunburnt and loud, their juice boxes and sandwiches and snorkel gear celebrating a vacation in paradise…and Sophie wasn’t here for a vacation.
She wasn’t entirely sure why she was here, except that she had needed to get away and start a new life, and the postcard that had led her here had drawn her, with its gorgeous capture of the extreme beauty of this setting.
She’d fled Oahu and her life there. Fled a broken heart, a possible murder charge, even her own pattern of falling into a black hole of depression.
So far, the crazy idea had worked to keep her demons at bay. Hiking and learning to survive out here had been a total distraction: she was too tired by nightfall to wonder or worry, happy to burrow into her tiny tent with her dog, and sleep the deep and uncomplicated sleep of the physically exhausted.
The depression medication might be working, too. For the first time in her life she’d resorted to that, but the circumstances had dictated radical intervention. She had a three-month supply, and hopefully she’d be ready to resume a normal life by the time her prescription ran out.
Or maybe not. But she didn’t have to know right now.
Sophie popped the little white pill into her mouth and swished it back with a mouthful of water she’d filtered and boiled from the nearby stream. “Come, girl. Let’s go.”
Ginger fell in next to Sophie as she pushed ahead in wet-dry hiking shoes onto a narrow trail, slick with iron-rich red mud, winding between tall banks of pili grass and wild guava trees. The smell of wet grass, mold, and the sweetness of rotting guavas flavored the air. Sophie plucked a yellow guava off one of the trees and bit into it as she pushed forward, already feeling the forty-pound pack’s weight sinking heavily onto her hips. She paused to tighten the belt so the weight didn’t land on her lower back.
She took another bite of the firm, tangy guava, enjoying the sweet-sour pink flesh as she paused to look around at the soaring, green-robed sides of the valley. This place reminded her of Waipio Valley on the Big Island, her first real exposure to this environment—and a case that had scarred her for life.
She shut down the memory of that place, that case—and her partner Jake, who’d saved her life.
Jake.
She wouldn’t think of him, of her conflicted feelings about and toward him. Because that reminded her of Connor. And Connor didn’t deserve anything from her, at all.
Sophie pushed forward faster, bumping into Ginger and urging the dog into a trot. She used the sturdy bamboo stick she’d picked up on the first day she left to push branches out of the way and for leverage as she hiked as rapidly as physically able straight toward the back of the valley.
She’d heard from some other hikers that there was some kind of settlement back there, renegade local people who refused to honor the five-day permits issued by the state for camping. She was ignoring the five-day limit too, and thus needed to avoid the areas patrolled by state park rangers.
The trail meandered along the clear stream, climbing steadily back toward the steep head of the valley where the junction of the valley walls boasted a waterfall that plummeted hundreds of feet.
Sophie paused eventually to let Ginger drink from the stream and to drink herself, from a canteen of boiled water. At each elevation, she paused to look back at the view down toward the ocean, to savor a slight breeze that dried sweat brought to the surface of her skin by effort and humidity.
She wanted to see that waterfall, and then she’d pick another campsite, one with enough openness that hopefully she’d get her gear dried out, and be able to connect her satellite-ready laptop with some wireless internet.
She hadn’t been online for five days, an eternity for someone as “wired in” as she normally was. After the first couple of days of free-floating anxiety, she’d come to enjoy the anonymous feeling of being unplugged.
She was well and truly off the grid.
Finally.
And she’d left everything and everyone behind to go—including her name and identity. Her father. Her friends Lei and Marcella.
It was all the Ghost’s fault. That bastard. He’d let her grieve for him…
She shook her head to rid it of those buzzing, painful thoughts as she reached a small knoll surrounded with the bright yellow-green of kukui nut trees in full leaf. The remains of lo‘i, the ancient Hawaiian terraces used in the cultivation of taro, provided a stacked rock wall that would block the wind. If she was under the trees, her camp would be out of the sun…but she didn’t want to be in sight of the path.
“Come, Ginger.” She turned off the trail and bushwhacked through waist-high ferns and undergrowth deep into the grove of kukui trees.
Looking up into their interlaced branches, she enjoyed the hum of the wind blowing across the trees. “This seems like a good spot.”
She had just unslung her heavy pack, lowering it to the ground, when she heard the sound of gut-wrenching weeping, and a woman burst through the bushes, making Ginger sit up and bark.
“Help me! My son is gone!”
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About the Author
Kirkus Reviews calls Neal's writing, "persistently riveting. Masterly."
Award-winning, USA Today bestselling social worker turned author Toby Neal grew up on the island of Kaua`i in Hawaii. Neal is a mental health therapist, a career that has informed the depth and complexity of the characters in her stories. Neal's police procedurals, starring multicultural detective Lei Texeira, explore the crimes and issues of Hawaii from the bottom of the ocean to the top of volcanoes, and are so popular that they've spawned a licensed fan fiction world on Amazon. Fans call her stories, "Immersive, addicting, and the next best thing to being there."
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