Closer Than Blood

honeymoon must have been over before they got off the plane from Seattle. Kiwana lingered only a moment.

“Don’t get me started,” Tori said.

“You make me sick sometimes. You act like you’re tough, but you are weak. A little boy. A goddamn middle- aged man-boy who doesn’t know how to take care of his wife. Yeah, you make me sick, Zach.”

“Tori,” he said, his voice holding a measure of anger, but as quiet as he could be.

“I don’t care if she hears me,” Tori said.

“She means as much to me as that bitch you’re banging back home.”

“I’m not banging anyone. I love you.”

“You don’t know what love is and you don’t care about me.” A door shut and Zach appeared on the lanai. He caught a glimpse of Kiwana down below on the patio, but he didn’t acknowledge her presence as she hurried the lamp fuel to its storage location under the stairs.

“I’m sorry about all of that,” he said. Kiwana turned to see Zach right behind her.

“Not a problem,” she said.

“Sometimes sunshine makes people cranky. Too much of a good thing, you know.” He smiled at her. It was a sad smile, meant to convey appreciation of what she was saying without betraying his wife with too much of an apology for her behavior.

“Trade winds are supposed to pick up,” she said, looking past him, the awkwardness of the encounter passing in the breeze.

“That’ll be nice,” he said.

“The morning will bring a better day than today. That’s just how it is here on the North Shore. Every single day is better than the one that preceded it.”

“Sounds like you should be working for the Chamber of Commerce or something,” he said. She smiled at Zach.

“Actually, I’m on the board. Have been for twenty years.” Her demeanor was disarming. So much so, he didn’t expect the next words from her mouth.

“Your wife is maintenance high, isn’t she?” He looked at her quizzically.

“You mean high maintenance,” he said.

“And, yes, she is.”

“Of course you’ve known this all along.” He felt a little redness and it wasn’t sunburn.

“Yes, I have.”

“She’s pretty,” she said.

“Yes, very.” Kiwana turned the key on the storage locker.

“Pretty isn’t always easy to live with.” He nodded. Kiwana told him good night. Though they were in the middle of their stay, she would never see him again.

If Kendall Stark had been surprised by the candor of the Pacific Islander in pearl-decorated slippers and a fuchsia-and-bird-of-paradise-patterned shift, she didn’t say so. She sipped her tea, the sweetness no longer nearly as cloying as it had been before the ice cubes began to melt.

“You call it like it is, don’t you?”

“As much as I can. At that moment, I felt sorry for the guy, but I wanted him to know that whatever he’d gotten himself into was his own doing. You know?” Kendall nodded.

“Tori is beautiful, no doubt, but so are these.” Kiwana touched a necklace of shark’s teeth that she wore low, almost into the slightly crinkly cleavage that spilled over the front of her dress.

“So you think she had something to do with Zach’s death.”

“It isn’t for me to say.”

“But you want to say something about it, don’t you?”

“More tea?”

“No, thanks.” Kendall left her eyes on Kiwana, demanding an answer with a smile on her face at the same time.

“You know what I think. I told the police. I cannot add any more. I wasn’t on the beach. I didn’t see the accident.” Kendall asked Kiwana about the photograph of the paddle.

“Do you want what I know or what I think?” Kendall nodded at her and sipped her tea.

“Thinking is good, but what do you know?” She looked upward, pondering what she knew.

“I know of only one thing for sure. When they went off that morning, I sent them with boogie boards and paddles.”

“So I saw,” Kendall said, still conjuring up the image of the photograph.

“No, what you saw was one paddle.”

“One paddle,” Kendall repeated.

“The police only recovered one paddle. Hers. The other one was gone.”

“Lost in the ocean.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Paddles are small and the Pacific is enormous. I know what you’re getting at.”

“I know—not think—that the paddle would have come ashore right there. The current is dependable as Sunday dinner with Grandma.” Kendall sized her up. Kiwana was a no-nonsense type and her certainty was convincing.

“So you’re suggesting that the missing paddle was something else. A weapon.”

“I’m not Hawaii 5-0, Detective Stark. I’m a landlady. All I know is that I made a note of the missing paddle and I billed Tori for it when she returned to the mainland. She put up a real fuss, that one. She never paid me.”

“You are tough,” Kendall said, with enough of a rise in her voice to convey a touch of humor, a little irony. Kiwana didn’t care much for it.

“You can think whatever you want. But I’d still like to be paid. Maybe you’ll pay. She’s your friend’s twin sister. I’ll go get the bill.” Kiwana got up and went inside. Kendall watched a trio of sea turtles toss like green Frisbees in the surf. When Kiwana returned, she handed Kendall a handwritten bill and she found herself digging into her overstuffed purse for her checkbook. It was an old debt that Kendall was sure should have been forgiven long ago.

“I’m a businesswoman,” Kiwana said.

“Your friend’s sister got the best of me those years ago. Now the score is settled. You pay. We’re even.” Kendall was tempted to say that the score between Tori and Lainie could never be made even, but she refrained from doing so. It could never be settled fairly between her and Tori, either.

Kendall drove through Haleiwa with its macaw-colored shaved ice and overpriced beachwear before heading up the coast toward the place where Tori and Zach had spent their last moments together. She had a map and GPS in her rental car, but didn’t need either. Oahu was an island with mountains so rugged that there was no way, and probably no need, to traverse them with a highway. The melty-hot roadways hug the coast, and though the speed limits are ridiculously slow, there usually is no rush to get anywhere. She parked in a small lot across from the mosquito-buzzing small planes of the Dillingham Airport. Save for the noise of shorebirds, the surf, and the small sightseeing planes, the beach felt desolate. Kiwana had told her only the locals really got that far out of the way. Tori had asked the night before things went so wrong where they could go to celebrate their marriage “as if we were on a desert island all to ourselves.”

“So I told her where to go,” she had said.

“Not really where to go, if you know what I mean. Now I wished I’d done just that. When I had the chance, you know.”

“We can’t like everyone,” Kendall had said.

“No, we can’t. God wants us to. But in my years doing what I do, I have to accept what I cannot change. That woman was one of those.” Kendall walked over the leaf-littered sand to where the foam of the waves lapped things clean every day. She went past a couple of young men with fishing spears and a cache of beer in a Styrofoam chest. A few steps closer on the hot sands and she could see they were younger than she thought, no more than fifteen. Kendall was certain the beer and the spears were a bad idea, but she said nothing. She looked down at the photo of the beach taken by the Honolulu Police Department the afternoon of the accident. Her eyes ran the flat line of the horizon. A lone surfer plied the waves breaking a mile offshore where coral and basalt had formed a broad