CHAPTER 33

After an hour of snorkeling at Shark’s Cove, Josh and I are famished, so we head to Kua ’Aina Sandwich in Haleiwa for some burgers. We take a table outside and let the heat continue to have its way with us.

“Wanna see where I used to live?” the kid says after the meal. His face looks like an abstract painting, brush strokes of ketchup, mustard, and mayo beginning at his chin and working their way up past his nose.

“Sure,” I say, handing him a stack of napkins. “You know how to get there?”

He nods, wiping the one spot on his face that had remained flesh-colored.

“You missed a little,” I say, snatching the napkins from him and wiping his face myself. “Chicks don’t dig messy eaters.”

“I don’t care.”

“Maybe not. But I’m not letting you back in the Maserati looking like Heath Ledger’s Joker, so you’d better clean up.”

“WHY SO SERIOUS?” he says in his best homicidal clown voice.

It’s a moment before I catch myself laughing.

*   *   *

Josh’s empty house is a rather ramshackle two-story A-frame located between Waimea Bay and the Bonzai Pipeline on Ke Iki Beach. On either side sit bungalows hidden away by tall trees. We’re practically invisible from the road, so when Josh asks if we can look inside, I shrug my shoulders and look for a way in.

And so, using my Bank of Hawaii debit card on the warped front door, I commit my first act of breaking and entering since that night I was nearly killed by gunfire in Kailua last year.

“Mommy kept our house real clean, but it’s all dusty now,” Josh says when we first step inside.

I sneeze. Kid’s right. A quick tour and then I’ve got to get out of here, back into the stifling but clean Oahu air.

After a brief viewing of the kitchen and dining/living area, Josh takes me up the creaky wooden stairs. We peek into his mother’s bedroom, then head over to his.

“It doesn’t look the same,” he says, disappointed.

“It’s just a structure,” I tell him, staring out the room’s lone window. “In three decades I’ve never once lived in a place I thought of as home.”

Josh silently crosses the room and stops at the window overlooking the ocean. There are a pair of surfers paddling out past the breakers. “Over there,” he says, pointing to some rocks jutting out of the water. “That’s where they say my mommy died.”

As I stare at the spot where Katie Leffler met her end, Josh steps over to his closet and lifts up the rug inside. “What are you doing, kid?”

He lifts a loose floorboard and pulls out a pair of binoculars. “I forgot these here,” he says. “Mommy bought them for me. She was teaching me about the birds. We used to watch them together. I know, like, twenty different kinds. Every time we saw a new one, we wrote it down in a notebook.”

He hands me the binoculars. I dust them off with the tail of my T-shirt and hold them to my eyes. “What a horizon,” I say softly.

“What’s horizon?”

I hand Josh the binoculars and point into the distance. “See that line where sea meets sky?”

He nods but says nothing.

“There’s your horizon, kid.” So beautiful you could cry.

I take back the binoculars for one last look before we leave.

After a moment my gaze shifts from the horizon to one of the surfers in a wet suit and Wayfarers riding a large wave back in.

Son of a bitch. If it isn’t my good friend Luke Maddox.