Storm sat in her car for a few moments and read the back of Barstow’s card. Stephanie was her client, and she wouldn’t talk to him without telling Stephanie first. It might benefit Stephanie, though, if she could get a feeling for what he’d be willing to share with her. How he felt about Stephanie’s participation in setting up his successful commercial real estate business, for example.
Storm used her mobile phone to call Stephanie, but no one answered and Storm ended up leaving messages. She decided not to initiate a meeting with Barstow. If he wanted to talk to her badly enough, he could make an appointment like everyone else. But then, she hadn’t checked in to the office lately, and two of the missed calls on her cell phone had been from Grace.
Grace picked up on the first ring. “We’re so sorry to hear about your cousin. It was on the news. How’s that nice boy who was in the office last week?”
“Ben Barstow? Okay, as far as I know.”
“Storm, you’ve had some important calls. Just a minute.” Storm could hear Grace ruffling through papers.
“I’ve got a stack of message slips.” More rustling. “Here we are. Rodney Liu from the Hawaii Building and Construction Trades Council. That’s a big labor union. You better call that guy.”
“Must be one of Uncle Miles’ old clients.” Storm dug for a pen in the glove box and jotted the number on the back of an old gas receipt, the shiny kind the self-service machines spit at you.
“That’s what I thought. Okay, and here’s another number.” Grace read it off. “It was hard to understand this woman. I think she said her name was Pia, Puna, something like that.”
Storm jotted down this number, too, and was filled with an emotion she couldn’t identify. Anxiety, anticipation, a touch of fear. She labored to pay attention to Grace’s next messages, which were from the Public Defender’s office.
“Thanks, Grace.”
“You’re getting some good clients. Better get hold of Rodney Liu right away.”
“I will. You have any idea when Hamlin is planning to drive out here?”
“He told me to tell you when you called that he’d be on the road by six. He wants you to make dinner reservations somewhere nice.” There was a smile in Grace’s voice. “Get yourself a slinky dress. It’ll cheer you up.”
“Right.” Storm hung up the phone and sighed. Grace read her like the notes she’d spiked on her desk. The only clothes Storm had with her were the shift she’d worn when she’d visited Mrs. Shirome, now wrinkled and sweaty, two pairs of board shorts, her jeans, and two bikinis.
She looked around. The parking lot for Rosie’s Diner wasn’t full and no one seemed to be paying any attention to her. She called Rodney Liu’s number and the two numbers for the PD’s office and set up appointments for the following week.
She eyed the other number Grace had given her, then went into the call log on her mobile. Sure enough, there it was—twice. Grace didn’t give out Storm’s cell phone number to clients. It had to be Pua, Nahoa’s sister, and with her name came a flood of memories.
Storm laid the phone on the passenger seat, and gazed out the VW’s window into the dense branches of the overhead monkey pod tree. It had been many years and many tears. But she was a big girl now, she could do this.
Rochelle Pi‛ilani, Pua’s and Nahoa’s mother, had been one of Storm’s mother’s best friends. When Storm’s mother had been riding the roller coaster of her sweeping mood swings, Rochelle had been with her. Especially in the high times, the spending sprees to Honolulu, the opera fundraisers, the black tie events Storm’s dad shunned.
Storm had her own reasons for avoiding Rochelle, who was always perfectly coiffed, and intensely critical of those who weren’t. A stick, Rochelle would shake her head and cluck at Storm’s chunky twelve-year-old physique. Storm never did call her Auntie, the affectionate name for a close family friend.
Pua had taken after her dad. Sensitive and unpretentious, she and Storm were inseparable. Storm remembered how, only a few weeks after her mother’s suicide, Uncle Bert and Pua had invited her to go canoe surfing. A year before, she would have killed for this adventure, but now, with the whole neighborhood trying to console her, Storm would rather have slipped off to her secret spot in the sugar cane fields to puff stolen cigarettes, maybe even a little pakalolo, and try to sort out how she felt about life—and death.
That day, the waves turned out to be bigger than anyone expected. Any Hawaiian can tell you how unpredictable the ocean is. Bert, an experienced paddler, knew it as well as any one.
Storm suspected that at this point, her childhood memories were blurred and distorted. She remembered how the boat plowed through the crest of an overhead wave. It foundered to a halt so abruptly in the oncoming riff of curling water that she shot forward from her seat and banged her knees against the bow.
A salty deluge stifled her yelp of pain, and then the bow rocketed down the backside of another wave, only to crash into the face of a bigger one. Pua made a mewling noise, then Uncle Bert cried out.
“Try bail!” His voice was ragged and frantic.
She grabbed for the plastic bucket as it floated by, and scooped, again and again, until her shoulders burned.
Then Uncle Bert screamed again. “Jump!”
One moment, she heard Bert’s frenetic command, and the next she was in the water, watching the red hull of the upturned boat, parallel to the curl of the frothing breaker ten feet above her.
Then she was in the green room, the ocean’s lesson for ill-fated humans far out of their element. Tumbled like rootless kelp, the water pushed her down until her vision darkened. Without any feel for up or down, her eyes stayed open. It was this image that returned to her in nightmares, the darkening green. Powerless as a mote in space, she rolled through it. On and on, whirling weightless and without direction.
She would never know why the ocean spit her out a second before her convulsing lungs sucked in sea water. She didn’t even remember how the roiling waters dragged her across a reef, tearing the skin off most of her back and both elbows and knees.
When the rescue canoe picked her up and took her to shore, she blubbered to a bereft Pua about a wild pig that paced the shore, but she shut up when Rochelle, hysterical, shrieked that the accident was Storm’s fault.
Aunt Maile and Uncle Keone kept her home from school for the rest of the week. It wasn’t until she went back that she discovered that Bert had drowned, and Rochelle had packed up her entire household, taken her children, and moved to Kaua‛i.
Four years later, when Storm moved to O‛ahu, she wrote Pua, but never heard from her. Her own family assured her that she bore no responsibility for Bert Pi‛ilani’s death, and she hoped they were right. But the cracked patella she’d sustained from the accident still throbbed from time to time, and reminded her of a deeper ache.
So why was Pua calling her now? Did she know Nahoa had sent a client to her? She must know they’d been in touch. Why else would she phone?
Sadly, when Storm thought about what she might say to Pua, the heavy object she’d seen dragged from the surf yesterday came vividly to mind. She also felt a strong surge of regret about the package that had been delivered to Nahoa. She’d done nothing. She’d known, deep down, that the threat was more serious than a mere warning to stay away from a woman. But she’d rationalized, and ignored the prickling sense of peril that hovered around the lei o manō.