Primitive Secrets

by Deborah Turrell Atkinson

  Storm stood in the waiting room, with the eyes of several clients, one of them a familiar suit that she couldn’t place, and two secretaries on her. “She’s been a little antsy for the last hour,” one of the secretaries said.

  Storm raised an eyebrow. “I see.” She went to her office and closed the door. It had been a long week.

  Chapter 11

  Storm looked at the files stacked on her desk, then glanced at her watch. It was three-thirty; with the lines at the airport these days, she didn’t have much time to straighten up and think about what work she needed to take with her.

  She picked up the phone and dialed Aunt Maile. Her aunt was thrilled to hear her voice.

  “We’ll have dinner ready, my dear.”

  “I won’t be there until late, Aunt Maile. The plane leaves here at six.”

  “A cup of tea, then. Drive carefully.”

  Storm punched in Leila’s number. When she got the answering machine, she realized that her friend was picking up Robbie and doing afternoon errands. “Hi, Leila. Would you guys keep Fang over the weekend for me? I’m going to Pa’auilo to see Auntie Maile. I’ll call you later.”

  Storm leaned back in her chair and tried to think. The events of the week were like a pile-up on the freeway, with grief and frustration jumbling any sense she might be able to make of all that had occurred. She still rankled from Rick’s betrayal, so Wo’s appropriation of Hamlin was especially irritating.

  Frowning, Storm shuffled some papers piled next to her laptop. Her earlier cartoon of Fang peeked out from under one of them; the words seawall, Dr. OTToole, and narsing homes were scribbled beneath the little caricature.

  Old habits were what you fell back on when you didn’t know what else to do: list the events, make an outline. She added cancer patient? and Hamasaki’s name, then balked at writing the word death. Instead, she penned theft. Twice, if she counted the attempt on her laptop.

  She sat back. The burglaries, a meeting the night Hamasaki died, plus the elusive and sick client were disturbing loose ends. Storm dug around in her laptop case for the phone number of the detective that had come to the office after she’d found Miles’s body.

  “Sergeant Fujita here.”

  “Hello, this is Storm Kayama.”

  “How you doing? I heard about your break-in last night.”

  “That’s partly why I called. Did you know that someone tried to steal my laptop the night before?”

  She heard him rattle through papers. “No, that’s not in the file yet.” He paused. “That’s not good.”

  “Um, Detective Fujita, did you see anything suspicious when you came to the office Monday morning?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “A man who gave a false name visited Miles a few days before he died.”

  “Do you know what he wanted?”

  “No, but Miles’s secretary saw him and said that he looked very ill. Plus, Hamasaki had a meeting with someone the night he died.” As she spoke them, Storm’s words came back to her as a bit paranoid. Hamasaki had a lot of meetings, and still often worked long hours.

  “Those thefts would bother me, too. If you find out who this man was and what he wanted, I want to know.” Storm could hear him ruffle through papers. “But right now, we don’t have any hard data. Just hunches, which I respect, but we can’t run an investigation on so few facts.”

  “I see,” Storm said. And she did. The detective was being kind.

  “Ms. Kayama, please be careful.”

  Storm hung up the phone. Lorraine had laid a fat labor union file from Hamasaki’s office right next to Storm’s laptop where she wouldn’t miss it, bless her heart. Storm jammed it into the case. She would review it over the weekend and give Roy Tam a call on Monday to set up a meeting.

  She went out to the front desk to check and see if Lorraine had anything else for her. Diane, Wang’s secretary, was talking to Lorraine.

  “I’m taking off,” Storm said. “Do either of you know if Wang has anything for me to look at over the weekend? He’s already upset about Miles’s briefcase and the papers that were stolen.”

  Diane smiled at her. “Don’t you worry about him. His bark is worse than his bite.” She glanced around and spoke in a near-whisper. “He’s just moody because of his mother.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Her Alzheimer’s is getting worse. She’s pretty helpless, she wanders out of the house, and he still won’t put her in one of those homes.”

  Diane exchanged a concerned look with Lorraine. “He says the patients are tied up, or locked in their rooms.”

  “What does he do during the day when he’s at work?” Lorraine asked.

  “He has a private nurse, but at night he takes care of her himself. Gets up and gives her all her medications and everything. He told me about it when the nurse was late one morning.”

  Storm shook her head with sympathy. “You never can guess the extent of another person’s troubles, can you?” Diane and Lorraine tsked and agreed.

  All three of them looked up at Hamlin, who approached. “Storm, have you got a moment?”

  “About half of one. I’ve got to catch a plane.”

  Lorraine and Diane exchanged a glance and headed toward the kitchenette.

  “I’m sorry about Meredith dragging me off like that,” Hamlin said. “She can be high-strung.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “You going to the Big Island?”

  “Yes, I thought a few days where I don’t have to wear shoes, where I can watch the sun set over the ocean without any buildings in the way, would be a good break from last week.”

  Hamlin looked wistful. “Sounds nice.”

  “It is.” Storm felt a wave of sheepishness for taking her frustration about Meredith’s rudeness out on him. He could have refused to go, but that would have caused a scene in front of clients. Bad form, for sure.

  “Will you tell me about it next week over that glass of champagne?”

  “Sure.” She smiled at him.

  By the time Storm was running through the VW’s gears on the ramp from the parking garage to the street, she figured she had all of a half hour to get home, change, and throw some clothes in a duffel in order to get to the airport in time to deal with the long security lines.

  Two minutes after she walked in the front door, the phone rang. She ignored it and continued throwing tee-shirts into her bag. When Leila’s voice on the answering machine drifted back to the bedroom, Storm picked up. “Hi, Leila, I’m here.”

  “You’re late, aren’t you?” Leila asked and both women laughed. “I just wanted to let you know I got your message. Fang is fine and Robbie is thrilled. Relax and give Auntie Maile and Uncle Keone hugs for Robbie and me.”

  “Thanks, I’ll call you Sunday.”

  Storm jogged to the car and threw everything into the back seat. She zoomed down the freeway entrance, only to jam on the brakes at a line of cars forming behind some idiot who thought stopping at an on-ramp was the way to merge. She winced as she heard the contents of her purse clatter to the floor behind her.

  Something rolled forward and hit her foot, then retreated as Storm accelerated with the car in front of her to slip into a slot in the column of traffic. If it was the pink lipstick that turned orange, then it could roll around until it fell through a rust hole in the floor, but if it was the Montblanc pen Uncle Miles had given her for graduation, she needed to rescue it.

  There was no way she could reach it as she wove through the rush hour traffic, so she waited until she’d found a parking place in the multistoried airport lot. She did not have time for this, what with the long lines at the ticket counter and the thorough security check. She cursed the top-heavy purse for falling, then herself for careless driving.

  She jumped from the car, jammed forward the driver’s seat, threw aside a tennis racquet and some old S
unday newspaper want-ads that had been sliding around for days, and gasped with surprise. There was Uncle Miles’s briefcase.

  He must have left it Friday morning, when she’d helped him drop his car off at the Lexus dealership. Was this what the thieves were looking for? Or something in it? She regarded the case as if it were newly unburied treasure.

  A noise brought Storm back from her mental wanderings and plucked at stretched nerve endings. Footsteps echoed in the cement chamber of the parking structure. She scrambled to stuff things back in her purse, then dropped to her knees on the floor of the garage and struggled to reach under the front seat.

  It had been the Montblanc rolling around, of course. She could see its black and white tip, nestled into the sliding mechanism of the seat. Storm pushed against the back of the driver’s seat with the side of her head and reached out her fingertips. Not quite. She couldn’t reach over the damned briefcase.

  The footsteps got closer. Storm jerked the attache to the garage floor and bent into the back of the car again. Her face stuck to the vinyl of the seat with the heat of her exertion. She felt like her rear end was waving in the air like a Coast Guard buoy in the channel. She stretched forward.

  Under her arm, she could view the stealthy approach of a tall, dark-skinned man in khaki pants and boots. Her heart thumped throughout her whole contorted body. For a split second, Storm considered diving into the cramped back seat for protection. But then she’d be bottoms-up and ass-backward. An octogenarian could mug her.

  The man walked to a pickup truck in the next aisle. Storm let go of breath like a leaky balloon. She was dizzy with relief. Or hypoxia, she wasn’t sure. A rivulet of sweat trickled down her temple. The last couple of days were getting to her. She needed to get her feet on the ground again. In more ways than one.

  She backed out of the car. If anyone really had been watching, she would have heard howls of laughter. Her derriere, the only visible body part, had been bouncing around during the entire struggle to dig the pen out. She had probably looked like a one-woman volleyball game in a bushel basket.

  Storm heaved a sigh and steadied her weak knees. Okay, all she had to do was get on the plane. In the commotion, Lorraine’s list had fallen out of the purse and down beside Hamasaki’s leather case. Storm crammed it into one of the zipper pockets on the outside of her duffel because her handbag was filled so haphazardly that she couldn’t close it. Then she locked the car and bolted for the ticket counter with the duffel, the laptop, her purse, and Uncle Miles’s briefcase flapping on her thighs. She felt like a camel loaded for a Sahara crossing.

  Storm was the last one on the plane, but she made it. Like buses, the inter-island flights had open seating. The only remaining seat was in the last row by the window, next to a toddler. With a sigh of relief, she crunched her duffel into the overhead bin, clambered over the kid and woman in the outside seats, and since bending over in the tiny space was impossible, shoved her purse and laptop case under the seat with her feet. She buckled her seat belt and wiped her face with the back of her hand. It came away streaked with grit. She kept Uncle Miles’s briefcase clasped in her arms.

  The child next to her stared, then offered a gummy graham cracker without cracking a smile. The mother, who sat like a boulder on the aisle, faced stonily ahead. Her eyes darted, probably trying to catch the attention of the flight attendant in order to report a grimy, suspicious passenger.

  A flight attendant advanced, checking seat belts. She turned toward Storm and the frowning mother and tilted her head with a puzzled look. “Storm Kayama, right?”

  Chapter 12

  “Becky?” Storm did a double take, then grinned. She and Becky Allegrino had shared the same homeroom throughout high school. They’d sat next to each other in chemistry and passed notes about the professor, who was also the football coach. They agreed that he’d probably banged his head against too many goal posts. Though they’d shared giggles then, Storm hadn’t seen Becky since graduation. “I’ve wondered what you’ve been up to.”

  “Yeah, me too. How are you?” Becky’s smile faltered. “How’d you get those black eyes? And you’ve gotta stow that briefcase. I’ll do it for you, if you want.”

  Storm held onto the case. “Can I put it under the seat?”

  “Sure, if it fits.” Becky looked around, then lowered her voice. “Have you got time when we land to go get dinner and catch up on things? I’m off duty until tomorrow.”

  The mother on the aisle glared at the two women. “Sure, that’d be great,” Storm said. People were less rushed on the rural neighbor islands than in Honolulu. Old friends and family were important there; it would be rude to refuse her old friend. Plus, this would be a good beginning to a relaxed weekend.

  “I’ll meet you at baggage claim, then.” Becky left to prepare her passengers for take-off.

  Storm sat back and took a deep breath. She was on her way. From the window, she watched the receding coast of O’ahu and marveled, as always, at the brilliance of the waters and the shadows of the coral reefs beneath them. She watched a sailboat, tiny as it crashed through the swells of the Moloka’i Channel, and felt the tension seep from her shoulders. When the plane passed over the island of Moloka’i and she could see the two mountains that made up Maui, she closed her eyes and let her mind wander.

  She thought over the last few days. Events had piled up so fast that she was having trouble fitting them into a bigger picture. Lorraine had told her of an argument between Aunt Bitsy and Uncle Miles on the day he died. They weren’t saints, but a quarrel was pretty unusual. And she would never have imagined the family’s behavior at the reading of the will. Horrible to think that Hamasaki’s death might have been welcomed by one of them.

  This last week, was forcing her to reevaluate how the entire Hamasaki family related to one another. To her knowledge, Uncle Miles had never promised any pots of gold; she couldn’t imagine any of his children counting on it. But now she suspected she had been excluded from a number of family discussions.

  Storm’s throat tightened. She had believed for years that she was family. Today she had learned that the family had secrets they kept from her. Lorraine had even alluded to jealousy on the part of her step-siblings because Hamasaki had given her a job. Storm didn’t know how to deal with that problem. She’d have to ask Martin what he thought. And hope he would tell her.

  Meanwhile, she was practically sitting on the missing attache case, which she hoped would reveal to her the identity of Hamasaki’s visitor Sunday afternoon. For a moment, she wondered if maybe she’d better give it to Aunt Bitsy first. No, it had to do with legal work. Jealousy or not, that was still her domain. And Hamasaki had left it with her, in a way.

  Also, if the attack in the parking garage and the theft of Hamasaki’s papers from her home were related to Hamasaki and what he had been working on, then she was involved to a dangerous degree. The briefcase was definitely her domain.

  As Hamasaki had tried to teach her, information was power. She needed the answers to a number of questions in order to protect herself. Who was this sick client? Could he have been the person Hamasaki met on Sunday? Though her concerns had resonated with fear and conjecture when she’d shared them with the detective earlier in the day, she was beginning to suspect that Hamasaki had been murdered.

  Storm stared down at the blue ocean and pondered this idea. Abstract as it was, the very thought of someone snuffing out Hamasaki made her flame with anger.

  Storm knew Hamasaki. Accustomed to victories in boardrooms and the offices of the powerful, he would have confronted any person he had suspected of wrongdoing. It was his way. Though there were no hard facts to support her suspicions, she wasn’t just being paranoid. Everyone knew that she and Hamasaki worked closely together. If this person suspected Hamasaki of keeping documentation, then it would be reasonable for him to suspect that Storm had possession of it now.

  Storm chewed on her lower lip. The attac
ks in the garage and on her home had not been directed to her person as much as to obtaining papers and material Hamasaki might have given her. If there was a killer out there, it seemed likely that he—or she—didn’t suspect Storm of having any personal knowledge. She swallowed hard. The killer was right.

  It also appeared that this person knew of Storm’s lack of attention to detail and considered her a lightweight. This thought stoked both her anger and grief at Hamasaki’s death.

  She had one advantage: no one knew that she had the briefcase. The papers stolen from the floor of her home may not have given the thief what he had sought. Storm’s eyes followed the shadow of the plane on the sea’s surface. Though the answers were not obvious to her at this point, they might lie in the briefcase, or on Lorraine’s list, presently stuffed in the overhead bin.

  Just about everyone in the firm, in addition to several clients, delivery people, and a repairman who had been standing around, had seen Lorraine hand it over. A number of those people were probably interested in the attache, too. Storm shook her head. She had information someone was desperate to obtain, but did not have enough data herself to guess what it was.

  She leaned forward. The case was a big satchel style and she struggled to pull it from under the seat. The woman on the aisle gave her stink-eye that would have curdled milk. Storm ignored her. She rested the case on her legs in the too-small plane seat with the gaping mouth of the case at her chest level and popped open the catch. It wasn’t even locked.

  She didn’t dare stick her elbows into the territory of the kid next to her. The person in front of her was just about lying in her lap, so she couldn’t tip it over, either. Since she couldn’t see six inches past the top, she just plunged her hand in and rummaged.

  She gulped. The first thing her fingers encountered was an article she could identify without even seeing it. It was Hamasaki’s appointment book.

  Storm let the small leather book fall open. Not long ago, he’d filled these familiar pages with his scrawl. Just seeing his handwriting sent a pang through her.