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“I DIDN’T SAY SPYING. Atticus, that’s not what I told them.”
He laughed. “We don’t have the resources to read everything that goes through our servers. But sure, it’s all visible. I could read all your email if I had time.”
“I never use my Mahina email account for personal stuff,” I said.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I can see it all. Anything you do on our network. Even if you’re just using the Wi-Fi on your phone.”
“Uh oh,” Emma said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have written those emails about my dean.”
“What college?” Atticus asked.
“Natural sciences.”
“Oh, yeah, him. Don’t worry. No one likes your dean.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “in fact, someone called your dean and your associate dean Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.”
“I think that was me,” Emma admitted.
“Nice job, Emma,” I said. “Lewis Carroll reference. Very liberal-artsy.”
“Wait a second,” Pat said. “Is what you’re talking about legal? Isn’t there some expectation of privacy?”
Pat’s hostility didn’t surprise me. Pat had never approved of any of my suitors. He’d mocked Stephen Park relentlessly until I’d started dating Donnie. Then Donnie became the bad guy. Pat had marked my engagement to Donnie by presenting me with a copy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
“Privacy?” Atticus chuckled. “When you’re using your employer-provided email account? Nuh-uh.”
“Atticus, while you were not poking around in people’s emails, did you ever happen to see anything about Scott Nixon? Chair of the English department? He’s apparently disappeared.”
“Actually, yeah. Scott Nixon. I did see something about him. I mean, not that I’m looking on purpose or anything, but if you saw emails about a big lawsuit, with the chancellor on the distribution list? You’d be curious too. By the way, isn’t there some rule against you professors getting involved with your students?”
“Well, it’s not something you should ever do,” Emma said. “But I dunno if there’s an actual written rule against it. Do you know, Molly?”
“You mean something in the faculty handbook? I’d assume so. I never looked.”
“It’s not exactly the kind of thing you ask about during your job interview,” Pat said.
“So then what’s the latest?” I asked. “Have they found Scott? Or the student he supposedly ran off with?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t have time to read all your guys’ email. I just remember the one about Scott Nixon.”
“But you could if you wanted to,” I said.
“Yeah. I could.”
“Hey Pat, maybe you could put something about workplace privacy in your career advice book.”
“Or you could do a story about it for Island Confidential,” Emma said.
“You write for Island Confidential?” Atticus asked.
“Pat Flanagan is Island Confidential,” Emma said.
“Wow. Really? I read it every day. It’s the only real journalism on this island. Pat, you’re Island Confidential?”
Pat warmed up to Atticus after that, and the conversation turned to crime and crime reporting. Pat complained that even during the summer, when the crime rate went up, the really interesting crimes were few and far between.
“So far this month I’ve had a chainsaw was stolen from an unlocked storage shed, a missing ukulele, and some shoes taken off someone’s lanai. Try to make an interesting story out of that.”
“Might want to see where that chainsaw turns up,” Emma suggested.
We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about some of Mahina’s more notorious crimes. These included the Musubi Murder, the still-unsolved Cockfight Murders, the recent Karaoke Murders, and the time someone distributed windshield flyers with an unflattering caricature of Police Superintendent Pereira.
The windshield flyer case had never been solved, despite Pereira pulling most of Mahina’s police force from their duties and sending them door to door with a copy of the offending document. The fact that many of the officers seemed to have trouble keeping a straight face as they conducted their investigations had led some to conclude it had been an inside job.
During a pause in the conversation, Atticus suggested going for a walk down to the Bayfront. Emma took it as a cue to leave and urged Pat to do the same. Atticus and I strolled down toward the water, along the walkway in front of Mahina’s old-west style storefronts. Many of those were boarded up, but there were a few hardy survivors.
A musty ginseng smell wafted out as we passed Natural High Organic Foods, which had been in business since the early 1970s. There were more smoke shops and tattoo parlors than one might expect for a town the size of Mahina, and a New Age card and gift store that sold devices enabling the user to communicate with dolphins. Betty Jackson in the psychology department had long ago disabused me of any illusions about dolphins being nobler or more advanced than humans. Communicating with them, she had told me, would probably be about as enlightening as eavesdropping in a frat house.
“The check cashing store is new,” I said. “And I’ve counted three pawn shops. Depressing.”
“Yeah, but there’s other cool stores here,” Atticus said. “Hey, is that a home brew shop? Mind if we go in?”
“Looks like it’s closed.”
“Oh, yeah, Sunday.” We approached the dusty window.
“Not just closed for Sunday,” I said. “Look inside. There’s nothing there. Probably one of those businesses where the owner was really passionate about it and didn’t bother to check whether there were enough potential customers around who felt the same way. I see it all the time in my business planning class.”
“Aw, bummer. What do you think they shoulda done different?”
“I don’t know how much one little business could have done. Since sugar collapsed, this whole island’s lost its economic footing.”
“Except tourism.”
“Tourists prefer the other side of the island. Even my parents, which is kind of insulting, considering I live here.”
“And there’s the university. Aren’t universities supposed to be good for the economy?”
“They are. And believe me, I’m glad there’s a university here. I’m thrilled to have a tenure-track job. But it seems like all we’re doing is graduating more and more students into an economy that doesn’t need or want them.”
“I saw you haven’t been teaching business planning that long,” Atticus remarked as we walked on. “You like it?”
“You were looking up my teaching assignments?”
“Sure. It’s just the catalog information. Nothing secret.”
“The class isn’t what I thought it would be. I have to spend most of my time throwing cold water on people’s aspirations. Why would someone go to your sports bar, instead of Kimo’s Karaoke or the Pair-O-Dice? How many pitchers and plates of chicken wings would you have to sell to make rent and payroll? I’m a popper of bubbles, killer of dreams. Or so one of my online reviews described me.”
“Popper of bubbles, killer of dreams. You should put it on a t-shirt. Hey, I liked the one about you being half-human, too.”
“Pat wrote that one for me.”
We reached the end of the main drag, where the road turned into a narrow bridge. Atticus and I seated ourselves on a lava rock planter and looked out at the ocean.
“It’s so easy to talk to you,” Atticus said. “I feel like you understand me.”
“I’m not sure I do understand you. But I like you.”
I don’t know where I got the nerve to say it. But it was the right thing to say, apparently. Atticus leaned over and kissed me. His beard scratched my face, and the lumpy lava rock planter we were sitting on was definitely not designed to be sat on. Other than that, though, the kiss was pleasant enough.