The storm’s eye was still a hundred miles to the southeast, but by five o’clock the wind along the coast was gale force, kicking up waves that broke across the lowest-lying roads, so that traffic patrol was keeping itself busy. They were out there in rain slickers and clear plastic ponchos, setting up cones and roadblocks from Hilo to Puna, turning cars around. There’d been radio calls all afternoon as the calm fell apart and the weather moved in, but that had just been background noise for Detective Nakahara. Interesting, but not his problem. He’d been in the station writing burglary reports. But he’d wanted to see it for himself, wanted to know what the island was in for, so on his way home, he detoured out to Banyan Drive, drove past the condos and hotels, and turned into the park that fronted the bay. A lone officer was at the edge of the soaked lawn, using yellow tape to cordon off the pedestrian bridge to Coconut Island.
The wind pulled at the tape, curving it into an arc between the bridge’s handrails. Nakahara’s headlights picked out geysers of white spray when the waves broke against the rocks under the bridge. Every time it happened, the officer ducked.
Before Nakahara could get out to help the officer, his phone rang. He checked the incoming number—Lieutenant Silva, calling from his cell.
“Sir,” Nakahara said. “You caught me going home.”
“I need you here.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Medical Center,” Lieutenant Silva said. “The basement.”
That meant the morgue.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Come around back—it’s how she got out.”
“She?” Nakahara asked.
But his lieutenant had already hung up.
There’d been lines of traffic outside the big-box stores—on the radio, dispatch was sending units to gridlocked intersections, and to a shoving match inside the Walmart—and it was even worse around the gas stations near the airport. But going up the hill toward the hospital, that all died away. Here it wasn’t just quiet. It was dark. The streetlights were out, and there were no fixed lights in any of the houses. Candle flames glittered in his peripheral vision. Until the storm blew out, the only people busier than the police would be the linemen from the electric company.
When he drove behind the hospital, he saw the lieutenant’s truck first, and then the man himself. The truck was parked in a space near the building, but Lieutenant Silva was at the back edge of the parking lot, where the banyans growing along the riverbank made it even darker. A woman in blue scrubs was next to Silva, and both of them were searching the grass with their flashlight beams. Nakahara parked and got out of his car, taking his own light from the loop on his belt.
“Do your best not to step on anything,” Silva said.
“Yes, sir—what are we looking for?”
“This.”
Nakahara crouched next to his lieutenant and looked at the illuminated spot on the ground. The grass was bent where someone had stepped on it. The wet soil held a small heel print, the press of bare toes. In the middle, a spot of blood glistened.
“What’s going on?” Nakahara asked.
“Dr. Redstone can tell you.”
They stepped back to the parking lot.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Dr. Redstone said.
The county didn’t have a full-time medical examiner, but she was in the rotation of doctors the chief would hire whenever the law required a postmortem. Like most doctors he’d met, Dr. Redstone’s usual demeanor was that of unflappable professionalism. But tonight, standing in the dark parking lot and listening to the whine from the hospital’s backup generator shed, she’d lost something. Her eyes were still searching the ground, and her salt-and-pepper hair was pulling free of the elastic tie she’d used to put it back in a ponytail.
“Back up and tell me from the start,” Nakahara said. “Why you called me.”
“The power went off at sunset, and the generators didn’t come on right away. It took fifteen minutes, and we were in the dark. In a hospital, that’s total chaos—I was in the morgue, but when the lights went out, I got a headlamp and a lantern, and I ran to the ER to pitch in.”
“Okay.”
“And that’s when it must have happened. I pulled the door shut behind me, and I heard it lock. Before the lights went out, everything in there was fine.”
“You’re saying someone broke into the morgue. During the blackout, while you were gone, someone broke in.”
“Or broke out,” Lieutenant Silva said.
“Give me a break, Lieutenant,” Dr. Redstone snapped. “We’ve been over that.”
“I’m saying something else,” Lieutenant Silva said. “Maybe someone was in there with you. Hiding. And after you left, he took what he wanted and broke out. That would explain the glass.”
“What glass?” Nakahara asked.
“God—this is giving me the creeps,” Dr. Redstone said. “Let’s go back inside. And before he sees the glass, he’ll want to see the freezer door.”
She started walking toward the back of the hospital, her light still scanning the pavement around her.
They used the stairs, because Dr. Redstone wasn’t entirely sure the elevators and the backup generators got along. One flight of bare concrete steps, the landings lit red by battery-powered emergency lamps over the fire doors. When they came through two sets of swinging doors and into the morgue, Nakahara would have known where they were even if the lights had been out. There was an untamed smell down here. It was heavier than the air. An invisible fog that spilled off the guttered autopsy tables and ran along the gently slanted floor until it settled in the drains and waited.
“I was over there when it happened,” Dr. Redstone said. She gestured to a small workstation with a desktop computer. A digital camera lay next to the keyboard. “When the lights went out, I mean.”
“And you went out the way we just came in?”
“That’s right.”
Nakahara looked back the way they had come. There was a clear plastic box bolted to the wall near the door. A yellow, handheld lantern standing there. Dr. Redstone was holding her headlamp in her right hand.
“You said he took something?”
“In here,” Dr. Redstone said. She led them across the main autopsy floor until they were standing in front of the walk-in freezer’s sliding steel door. Overhead, the hanging fluorescent lights were shivering in a current of air. “This was locked.”
It should have been secured with a brass combination lock that fit through a stainless-steel hasp welded to the door. The lock was broken and on the floor. Nakahara crouched, taking a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. He used it to turn the lock over. It hadn’t been cut with bolt cutters. Someone simply pulled on the door until the tempered steel latch shattered.
Nakahara stood up.
“Strong guy,” he said. “What’d he take?”
Dr. Redstone slid the door open, and a wave of frigid air crashed around their feet. She leaned inside and flicked on the light, which blinked awhile before it finally held steady. Then they were looking at two rows of steel shelves. A plastic-shrouded cadaver lay on each shelf.
“When the lights went out, she was right there,” Dr. Redstone said. She was pointing at a sheet of clear plastic on the concrete floor. “And when I came back, she was gone.”
“Now show him the glass,” Lieutenant Silva said.
Dr. Redstone slid the door shut as Nakahara came out of the freezer. They stepped over the pieces of the lock and went back through the morgue. There was a little office against the back wall.
“Who was she?” Nakahara asked.
“Rachel Ako,” Lieutenant Silva said. “You heard the reports?”
“No.”
“A fifteen-year-old. Hilo girl. Her grandfather reported her missing three days ago—you didn’t get that?”
“I’ve been working burglary. How’d she end up here?”
“This afternoon, she bolted out of the woods to cross Mamalahoa Highway and got hit by a car,” Silva said. “This is up near the national park. The car that hit her, it was a rental. A German couple driving. They called an ambulance, but it was too late for that.”
“These tourists—”
“They got to Hawaii this morning. When Rachel went missing, they were in Munich.”
“An ambulance brought her here, and then what?” Nakahara asked. “She died in the ER?”
“No,” Dr. Redstone said. “She was DOA.”
“Any witnesses besides the Germans?”
“No,” Lieutenant Silva said. “But there were officers on the scene and it was consistent. And you’ll be able to talk to the Germans. They’re still in town.”
Dr. Redstone opened the office door and turned on the light.
Maybe office was the wrong word, Nakahara thought. This was a storage area. There were cardboard boxes and broken wheelchairs. Plastic flowers in dusty vases. A desk was pushed against the cinder-block wall. Above that, a tiny window. On the outside of the building, the window would have been at ground level. Now Nakahara understood why he’d been feeling a breeze since entering the morgue. The window was shattered.
“Look at this,” Dr. Redstone said. She was pointing to a bloody footprint on the desktop. Small feet, Nakahara thought. You could almost fit them in your hand.
“And look outside,” Silva said. “Stand on the chair and look. All the glass is in the bushes. There’s none on the desk.”
“The window was broken from the inside,” Nakahara said. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“What do you think?” Dr. Redstone asked.
He looked at the footprint on the desk. There was another blood mark on the wall. Not a footprint, exactly. Just a scuff of blood, halfway between the desk and the windowsill. He pictured a fifteen-year old girl standing on the desk and smashing out the window with her palm. Climbing through, she would have put her foot on the wall for one last bit of purchase.
“This girl, Rachel—you’re sure she was dead?” Nakahara asked. “She couldn’t have been stunned?”
“Stunned, Detective?” Dr. Redstone asked.
“You hear stories,” Nakahara said, but now he was embarrassed. “People who get hit in the head, who get an electric shock—”
“Those are stories. Anecdotal. This is real. Let me show you what she looked like when she got to the ER.”
They were gathered around the computer, looking at Dr. Redstone’s morgue photos. Rachel Ako was a slight girl. Thin as a whisper, Nakahara’s grandmother might have said.
She was also a very dead girl. Nakahara could see that for himself, looking at the photographs as Dr. Redstone scrolled through the first five.
“First,” she was saying, “you need to look at this. This is her hip. It’s where the front bumper hit. You don’t need an X-ray to know it’s shattered. Hips aren’t caved in. You got a shattered hip, you’re not going to stand up. You’re not going to climb out a window, either.”
“But you hadn’t done the postmortem,” Nakahara said. “This is just what you can tell from the pictures.”
“That’s true. I never got the chance. But, look at this one—her head, where it hit the pavement.” She traced her finger on the monitor. “This, coming out here? You know what that is, right?”
“Her frontal lobe,” Nakahara said.
“When half your frontal lobe comes out into your hair, you’re not stunned. You’re dead.”
Nakahara hardly registered Dr. Redstone’s words. He was looking at the screen, which had moved on to the next picture. To take it, someone had rolled Rachel Ako onto her stomach. She was thin enough that he could see every bump in her spine. But what stood out like spilled ink was the rippling mass of scar tissue. This wasn’t a single wound, or a dozen of them, but hundreds of separate injuries. It would have taken years to do that, to build scars on top of scars. Most of this girl’s life, maybe, had been dedicated to making this.
“What about these?” he asked. “They didn’t happen today.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“Those are whip marks, aren’t they?”
“I think so.”
He turned to Silva.
“Three days ago, who was it that reported her missing?”
“Her grandfather.”
“That’s who she lived with?”
“I don’t know.”
“The file’s in your truck, or back at the station?”
“The station,” Silva said. “I didn’t know it was Rachel Ako until I got here.”
Silva followed him back up the stairs, and then they were standing behind the hospital again. It wasn’t raining yet. From the southeast, the county’s emergency sirens rose and fell as if the storm were an incoming air raid.
“How’d you find that footprint in the grass?”
“There’s a blood trail starting at the window.”
“Show me.”
They went to the broken window, and Nakahara photographed the shattered glass. The first blood spot was on the curb, and the next was fifty feet away. Then they were at the back edge of the parking lot, and Nakahara was photographing the footprint.
“If that’s her footprint on the desk, what do you think?” Silva said.
“Say you’re the guy, what would you do?” Nakahara answered. He put his camera away and got out his pocketknife. “You’re stealing a corpse out of a morgue. You need to get her out a basement window. If she’s stiff, you stand her on the desk, then lift her through. So there’d be a footprint.”
“What about this, and the ones in the lot?”
“Maybe he had to set her down,” Nakahara said. “If he was losing his grip, he’d set her down, then pick her up again.”
He opened his knife’s blade, and cut away the bloodstained grass. He put it into an evidence bag and stood up.
“This is the last one you found?”
“We went back as far as the river,” Silva said. “We didn’t see anything.”
Nakahara looked into the forest. The trees grew thicker as they approached the river, where the banks were choked with banyan trees and climbing devil’s ivy. The forest pulsed with a chorus of tree frogs. There was no use checking again, if Silva had already searched. It was too dark to find anything. Besides that, he couldn’t imagine someone carrying the dead girl back there. The river ran between low cliffs, and the current was swift as the water approached the falls.
“He must’ve parked right here,” Nakahara said. “At edge of the lot. He threw her in his trunk, in the backseat.”
“By now, she could be anywhere.”
Nakahara agreed with that. If she’d been missing since sundown, by now the guy could have driven as far as Kona. He looked back at the footprint in the grass, and then into the woods. It was too dark to see past the stab of his light.
“Do you think—”
Silva stopped talking and looked up. The tree frogs had gone silent, and the wind had dropped off. For a second, there was nothing. Just the hum from the generator shed, the rumble as the Wailuku River poured over the falls a quarter of a mile away.
“Shit,” Silva said. “Let’s get inside.”
Before they could move, the silence was blown to pieces. The rain was here now. Huge, wind-driven drops. The rain machine-gunned off the parked cars and the tin-roofed administration building. Nakahara followed Silva at a run, holding his evidence bags and camera close to his chest. By the time they reached the hospital’s back door, some of the puddles were already ankle deep.
At their highest setting, his windshield wipers were wholly unable to keep up with the rain. He was soaked, and he’d turned on the heater. At every stop sign, he could feel the car shuddering in the force of the wind. He followed Silva’s taillights, because they were all he could see.
He reached to the evidence bag on the passenger seat and felt the pieces of the shattered lock. The steel was thicker than his forefinger. Some men might have struggled to break it with heavy bolt cutters. So the man who’d thrown open the freezer door and taken Rachel Ako was strong. Uncannily so. Yet he’d climbed out of the morgue through a basement window that wasn’t quite twelve inches high. A strong man, then, but thin. Whisper thin, his grandmother might have said.
Nakahara reached to the heater and turned its dial all the way to the right.
He and Silva split the file in half and sat across from each other at the duty officer’s empty desk. The lights had gone out again, and the backup generators powered only parts of the building. The dispatcher was upstairs, and she was the only other person in the building. Every other cop in the department was out there, in the storm.
“Listen to this,” Silva said. He was holding a three-ring binder. “Her grandfather reported her missing on Wednesday. He said they’d had a ‘spat’—his word, it’s in quotes—and she left the house. He figured she’d come back, but she didn’t.”
“So she was a runaway. Those scars on her back, who’d blame her?”
“But that wasn’t the grandfather.”
“That’s in the file?”
Silva nodded and flipped a page.
“Her parents died four years ago. A fire in the middle of the night. An accident—there was a cigarette butt in the bed.”
“Okay.”
“This is on Maui. She spends two nights in a foster home until CPS tracks down the grandfather. The foster mother tells CPS about the scars on her back. But Rachel won’t ever tell anyone how she got them.”
Silva set down the binder and looked across at Nakahara.
“This isn’t ringing any bells, Detective?”
“Why should it?”
“Because four years ago, you were the guy who picked her up at the airport and drove her up to her grandfather’s house,” Silva said. He tapped the binder. “I’ve got your report right here.”
Nakahara shook his head, then reached across to take the binder.
“I don’t remember that at all,” he said. He looked at the report and saw his signature at the bottom. “Either way, there’s only one place to start.”
“The grandfather,” Silva said.
“I can think of half a dozen reasons he might not want an autopsy. Why he’d take the risk of breaking in, stealing the body.”
Silva stood up.
“They all boil down to the same thing—whatever he’d been doing to her, Dr. Redstone was about to find out,” Silva said. “We’ll take my truck.”
Clifford Ako lived past the paved portion of Amanu’ali Road, on the other side of the Wailuku River. The drive was no problem until they reached the dirt-and-gravel track, which had largely disappeared in a wash of mud and field runoff. There were groves of sandalwood and stands of bamboo, both of them whipping and bending in the wind. It was a long drive, Nakahara realized, but it wouldn’t be that long of a walk from the hospital. Not if you crossed the river and climbed the cliffs on the north bank and then bushwhacked through the forest on the other side. Then it was just a few miles, but they would be hard and muddy miles. Impossible without a light and a compass.
The radio was spitting static, and he looked up. He’d missed what the dispatcher had said. It must have been a call to Silva, because now he was reaching for the handset.
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve got Dr. Redstone,” the dispatcher crackled back. “She tried to call your cell but couldn’t reach you.”
“Put her on.”
There was a long, wind-blasted pause.
“I checked again after you left,” Dr. Redstone said. Her voice was tinny and distant. “Like you asked.”
“Checked for what?”
“For anything. Anything missing. Can you hear me?”
“We copy.”
“He took a sixteen-inch grossing knife.”
“A what?”
“Grossing knife—an autopsy knife. For taking muscle off bone.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s gone. It was right here, and it’s gone.”
“Okay, Dr. Redstone. I copy.”
Silva put the handset back onto his mount. He drove onward, his eyes focused ahead and his hands tight on the wheel. The air ahead of them was thick with rain, the headlights picking out flying leaves and airborne sticks. Everything was in motion now.
“I think this is it,” Nakahara said. “Turn here.”
“Now it’s coming back. You’re remembering.”
“Yeah.”
Silva turned into the barely discernible driveway. The ruts led down, into the darkness. Clifford Ako’s house was at the bottom of the depression. On a sunny afternoon, it would have been in the deep and cool shade of the mango trees that grew all around it. On this night, its yard was tar-black. Silva drove across the grassless yard and came to a stop in front of the porch. Nakahara had parked in the same spot four years ago. It had been daylight when her plane had landed, but by the time they had gotten here, it was dark. All of her things had been in a brown paper grocery sack, which she’d held close to her chest. She had said something to him before he got out of the car, before he walked with her to the front porch. He tried to remember it but couldn’t.
Now he and Silva were stepping out of the truck. There was no wind. Just arboreal silence, as though the storm was bending around this little spot of land. Overhead, the canopy was impenetrable. The ground was dry as Nakahara walked across the yard to the open carport. There was a pickup truck there. Nakahara laid his hand on the hood.
“Nothing?” Silva asked.
“It’s cold.”
“You better take a look at this.”
Nakahara came back from the carport. Silva was using his flashlight to point to the second step leading up to the porch. There was a muddy footprint. The small bare toes were rimmed in blood. They stepped around the mark, coming up onto the porch. Pieces of brass and steel were strewn around the front door. It took Nakahara a moment to realize he was looking at the doorknob and the deadbolt.
“No—this isn’t right,” Silva was whispering. “This doesn’t fit.”
Back at the station, they supposed Clifford Ako was their man. That he had broken into the morgue and stolen his granddaughter’s corpse because an autopsy would have uncovered something he wanted to bury. But Ako wouldn’t have ripped apart his own lock. That didn’t fit their theory.
Nakahara unzipped his rain jacket and drew his gun. He held it against his left thigh, the muzzle pointed down. Silva was right, and everything about this house was wrong. Using his flashlight, Nakahara nudged the door open. He stepped inside, his lieutenant close behind him.
“Clifford Ako?”
There was no answer, no sounds at all from the house. No subtle hum from phone chargers, no whir of a refrigerator. It was the kind of quiet that only came with a blackout.
“You smell that?” Silva whispered.
Nakahara nodded. It smelled of fresh-cut flowers and candle wax. Smoke and perfume, riding over something as dank as a drowned rat. The smell carried Nakahara backward. He was eight years old, standing in the little chapel at the Lehua Mortuary, watching a line of people approach his grandmother’s casket. In the army, and then the police, he’d learn harsher smells for death. But Lehua Mortuary had been his first brush, the one that lingered the longest.
“This way,” he said.
He led them deeper into the house.
There were two bedrooms. The smaller one held a dresser, a writing desk, and a narrow iron-framed bed. Rachel Ako lay on top of the bedcovers. Her wet hair had been washed and brushed. An hour ago, in the photographs, her head wound had been so clear. Now it might not have been there at all. She wasn’t naked anymore, either: She wore a long-sleeved white nightgown, a little trim of lace along the cuffs and at the ankle-length hem.
But for her parchment-paper face, and the misshapen angle of her hips, she might have been asleep. And then there were the candles and the flowers to think about. The candles flickered from each corner of the bed. Thousands of scattered flowers carpeted the floor. Plumeria and tuberose, the thick yellow ginger that grew in the shade along the riverbanks.
Nakahara crossed the room, stepping around the flowers. He knelt at the bedside and looked at Rachel Ako. He felt the hair rise up on the back of his neck, felt his stomach clench once. He could smell her over the island flower scent. Cold and wet, like something that bubbled up after a long time at the bottom of the lake. In his mind, she turned her head to him. Her eyes popped open, and they were as bright as silver coins.
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. It wasn’t like him to have thoughts like that. To be jittery on a scene. He raised his light and let it shine on her left hand.
“What is it?” Silva asked. He hadn’t come into the room.
“Nothing,” he said. He came to the door, walking backward, not taking his eyes from her. “I thought I saw something in her hand. But it was just a scrape—probably when she hit the pavement.”
“Okay.”
It was true, what he’d said. There was a deep and bloodless slice on her palm. But when he’d raised the light, the inside edges of the cut had glittered with shards of glass.
“What about the grandfather?” Silva asked.
“There—the master bedroom. Let’s go.”
They went down the hallway, their lights picking out a trail of small, muddy footprints. They led into the bedroom and then back out, to the bathroom. The bathroom was empty but there was steam on the mirror.
“I don’t know,” Silva said. “I don’t know about this.”
The bedroom door was closed, and it was locked. Nakahara reached up and felt along the top of the doorframe until he found the flat-bladed emergency key. He fit it into the doorknob and twisted it until he felt the spring-loaded lock disengage.
“Ready when you are,” Nakahara said. He looked at his lieutenant. The man was holding his flashlight alongside his gun’s barrel, both aimed at the doorjamb. They nodded to each other, and then Nakahara opened the door and stepped inside.
There was a bang from behind them, and they both swung around, guns up and flashlights roving. The hallway was empty. So was the living room.
“Quiet,” Silva said. “Do you hear it?”
Something wet was sliding down the tin roof. Nakahara lowered his gun.
“A mango,” he said. “I grew up in a house under a mango tree.”
“All right.”
Nakahara turned again, stepping back into the master bedroom. When he brought his light to bear, the first thing he saw was Clifford Ako.
The man was on the floor, faceup. He was between the bed and the wall, and he was half covered in a sheet.
“Is that a grossing knife, do you think?” Silva asked.
“I don’t know. It looks about sixteen inches long.”
It was hard to tell just how long the blade was, because a lot of it was still inside Clifford Ako. The tip had gone in just below his navel. He might have been in the bed when it happened. There was blood on the mattress in a fan-shaped pool. Thrashing, he’d fallen to the floor with the sheets tangled around his legs. Nakahara put his fingers on the man’s jugular but couldn’t find a pulse. He crawled between the body and the wall and leaned down so that his ear was directly over the man’s nose and mouth. While he waited for a breath, he watched the man’s chest. There was nothing. He got to his knees and then to his feet.
“Dr. Redstone can tell us when she gets here,” Silva said, “whether that’s her knife or not.”
“What’s she drive?”
“What?”
“You saw the road, coming up. You can’t get up it without a four-by-four.”
“This can’t wait.”
“You’ll have to go get her,” Nakahara said. “Bring her back.”
“And you?”
“I’ll wait here. Keep the scene.”
“All right.”
Coming down the hall, they turned their lights into Rachel’s room as they passed it. She was still on the bed, but two of the candles had gone out. Nakahara tried to remember what her face had looked like a moment ago. He should have taken a picture. Something to use as a point of comparison. Because it seemed, now, like the corners of her mouth had tugged back a little farther.
It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was close.
Silva rolled down the truck’s window and leaned out, motioning Nakahara over.
“Look,” he said. “The angle of the knife—in the stomach? Maybe we were right after all.”
“He did it himself?”
“You’ve heard of seppuku.”
“Maybe we should wait for Dr. Redstone on that, too,” Nakahara said. “Let her make that call.”
“I’m just saying. Most likely, this is over.”
After Silva drove off, Nakahara waited in the carport. He didn’t want to stay in the house with the bodies. He used his light for a while, checking the woods around him. Cats’ eyes shone back at him, green and yellow. There were at least a dozen pairs watching him. But after a while, his light began to fade. He turned it off to save it.
He stood in the dark and listened to the cats creeping through the leaves.
Four years ago, he’d taken the left turn onto Ako’s driveway, had come down the hill and into the shadows beneath these trees. Rachel had been eleven. Her paper bag was on her lap, the few things left from her parents’ house. Someone had washed the clothes for her, but Nakahara remembered smelling the smoke. And now he remembered what she’d said to him as he parked in the dark yard.
Please. He’s the one.
He’s the one, all right. He remembered, now, how anxious he’d been to get this done so he could go home. The one who’s looking after you, from here on out.
He was a police officer, not a taxi driver. He should have been asking questions, following up on her prompt.
Instead, he’d gotten out of the car. He’d come around and opened her door. End of discussion. Maybe he’d walked her to the porch, had rung the bell for her. But he hadn’t asked to come inside. He hadn’t tried to find out what kind of life might have been waiting for her, what kind of man lived in this shadowed house with his rotting mangoes and mangy cats.
There was a bang from the house, followed by a long, wet slide.
He turned on his light and scanned the front porch. Nothing had changed. He saw the pieces of the lock, the dirty screens. He wondered if Rachel Ako was still smiling. He wondered if the other two candles had gone out. Maybe she was sitting up now, her bare feet on the floor. Maybe the smile had spread wide enough to show her teeth.
“I can’t believe how quiet it is down here,” Dr. Redstone said. They were crossing the yard, three abreast. Silva had brought bigger lights from the hospital. “It was wild on the road. And pouring.”
“It’s been quiet here,” Nakahara said.
There hadn’t been a drop of rain or a stir of wind. Just the cats in the shadows and the thumps of mangos falling.
“There’s a coroner van coming behind us,” Silva said. “But they have to pick their way. It’s slow going.”
“We’ll load them when they get here,” Dr. Redstone said. “Have you photographed the scene?”
“Not yet.”
“Then we can do that now.”
It was five a.m. before Nakahara got home. The weather service was saying the storm had turned north, that it would miss the island. But trees were still coming down along the highways. The power was intermittent, and if it went out, it might stay out for hours. Like Clifford Ako, Nakahara lived at the end of a long road. The electric company wouldn’t get out here for a long time.
At the sink, he washed his hands under warm water, using liquid dish soap until he couldn’t smell the frangipani scent of the flowers, the bite of candle smoke.
“Have a drink,” he said. He hadn’t lived alone long enough to have stopped talking to himself. “Make it a big one.”
He went to the pantry and took out the bottle of Johnnie Walker, and he found a box of crackers that hadn’t been opened. He poured two fingers of the scotch into a water glass, finished it off, and then poured another.
“You could have gone inside,” he said. “She practically begged you to.”
He took his drink and went to the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes and threw them in the hamper, then took the robe from its peg on the bathroom door.
Wrapping it around himself, he caught a blur of motion in the bathroom mirror—pale flesh, still wet from the rain. He swiveled to the mirror, but he was just looking at himself.
Back in the kitchen, he finished the second drink. He’d ridden in the coroner’s van on the way back to the hospital, sitting between the two body bags. Dr. Redstone had turned around, facing him from the front seat.
“It was my knife,” she’d said. “But the wound—it could’ve been self-inflicted.”
“Could have been or was?”
“Could have been. That’s all I can say.”
“Did it kill him?” he’d asked. “There was blood, but not very much.”
“I think when we do the autopsy tomorrow, we’ll find out it was a heart attack. That after he went down on the floor, what really killed him was his heart.”
“You’re not doing the autopsy tonight?”
“Not tonight. These two are going back in the freezer—with a new lock.”
Nakahara poured a third Johnnie Walker and was opening the crackers when his phone rang. Not the landline, but his cell. He answered without looking at the number, and recognized the voice right away. He’d just been thinking about her.
“I tried calling the lieutenant but couldn’t get him,” Dr. Redstone said.
“Okay.”
“I need you to come back to the hospital.”
“You need what?”
“It’s urgent.”
“Just tell me.”
“I’d rather you see it for yourself.”
“You’re kidding,” Nakahara said. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” Dr. Redstone said. She was whispering. “I’m telling you—I turned my back for one minute. That’s all, just one minute.”
“And she’s gone?”
“Gone.”
She hung up, and Nakahara steadied himself against the counter. He poured the scotch down the sink. He saw the island from above, the stretch of untouched forest between his house and the hospital. It wouldn’t take that long to cover the distance at a dead run.
He looked up. There was something different, something wrong. It took him a moment to place it, but then he realized. The wind had stopped. Overhead, the rain was still lashing against his tin roof. But as he stood looking at his reflection in the kitchen window, the rain stopped. It didn’t fade to a patter; it simply shut off, as though his house had fallen into a bubble that existed outside of the storm. He had enough time to think about his gun on the bathroom counter, to wish he had kept it close at hand. But when the lights went out and he heard the first sharp metal pop from the front door, he knew there was no time left. His mistakes would go uncorrected.