Kawika felt his decision didn’t reflect any satisfactory principle; it just seemed to accord with Kimaio’s advice: “Always conduct yourself the way that five years from now you’ll wish you’d conducted yourself.” Still, the decision had a messy habit of sleepwalking. Kawika wasn’t sure he’d ever reach the end of its unpleasant consequences.
The worst, of course, was that even though he’d solved the crime—in fact, precisely because of that—he couldn’t talk about the solution with anyone. He’d found it on his own, with no tips from informants, apart from Edgar Allan Poe. But Tanaka didn’t want to hear Kawika’s discoveries. That was clear. Tanaka had resolved the investigation to his own satisfaction, and Kawika knew part of Tanaka’s satisfaction lay in punishing those who’d tried to harm Kawika—Michael Cushing and S&R.
All this, especially his indebtedness to Tanaka, silenced Kawika completely. What could he say to Patience, for example, after his day in the Ka‘ū Forest Reserve? And after Tanaka had gone public with a story Kawika knew to be false? Nothing, despite having lived almost the entire investigation with her. He couldn’t expose Tanaka, nor ask Patience to keep secrets as corrosive to the soul as his. Much less, he thought, could he ask her to do so and still love him. And thus, with Patience as with Tanaka, he recognized—bitterly—that he’d chosen to let intimacy fail him rather than risk a great plunge in reliance on it. Like Fortunato’s murder itself, the corner into which Kimaio and Tanaka had painted Kawika had little to do, in the end, with Hawai‘i. But it was Kawika’s own corner, and if a way out existed, he couldn’t find it.
Patience didn’t stop visiting the Big Island. She counted herself a kama‘āina, after all, and resilient. She reluctantly accepted the official account of Fortunato’s murder and never felt sure exactly how the discoveries she and Kawika had made in the Methow Valley actually related to it. She managed to overcome her reporter’s urge to investigate further; she couldn’t be a character in her own feature story. And she wasn’t ready to confront Kawika.
Patience half convinced herself that Kawika had provided just a transitional relationship, that they never could have lasted. Friends told her the same thing. She’d already known, from marriage, that sometimes relationships can get broken in ways that can’t be fixed. And this relationship was certainly broken. She did grow more cautious, however, and she did teach herself to sit still. Yet she never stopped wondering.
In time, Patience made love again at the Mauna Lani and even awoke at night to find her lover deep in thought, staring at the ceiling fan. But she never again walked out on her lanai, opened her yukata, and pressed a man’s head to her bare breasts. That had been a sacrament, one she felt she’d received, not given. She would recall it in the small hours of the morning, when she held her cup of coffee and lifted her gaze to the sunrise striking the summit of distant Haleakalā. She tried not to look at the elevated tee box a few yards away.
When Patience’s father next shook hands with Jarvis Wong, his old friend, he felt overwhelmed with wistfulness, with thoughts of what might have been. That same firm handshake made him dizzy with images of haole flesh joined with Hawaiian, the flesh of his flesh with the flesh of Jarvis’s.
Kawika’s stepfather Pat also saw things in a wistful way, although none of his flesh was involved. He, too, wondered what might have happened had Patience and Kawika chosen to be together. But he knew it was pointless. “A truck might have hit them the first day,” Pat said to Kawika’s mother, Lily.
Lily shook her head. “A truck did hit Carolyn and Kawika,” she insisted. “She’s here in Washington now. If they’d stayed together, he’d be home.”
“Maybe,” Pat allowed, “but a truck might’ve hit him here too. And anyway, maybe he is home.”
A truck of sorts did hit Mr. Shimazu. KKL’s collapse left him humiliated, not just ruined. His investors provided him a teller’s job at one of their retail banks in Tokyo. And they made sure he took it. A teller’s job with no chance of promotion.
No truck hit Jarvis. But he did feel bruised, believing Kawika must have failed in some unspoken way. He wanted to embrace his boy again, comfort him, but Kawika stayed resolutely in Hilo. Jarvis felt a bit awkward with his friend Tanaka, and even more awkward when next he encountered Carolyn and, a year later, Patience. Jarvis loved them both, in his avuncular way. He didn’t know what to say. Nor did they. They just hugged, each young woman with the massive older man.
The Mauna Lani Resort, after some internal discussion, posted on its website a simple statement that no features of its famous golf courses were intended to suggest Hawaiian cultural sites. At about the same time, Tanaka arrested Bingo Palapala, the official who’d granted the bulldozing permit, on public corruption charges because he’d solicited a bribe from Fortunato for the consulting firm Palapala secretly co-owned. Because of the bribe, Palapala went to jail even though the consulting firm’s report itself seemed otherwise legitimate and did prove convincingly that the boundary marker or altar Fortunato destroyed wasn’t a heiau.
But once the Fortunato case was closed, and despite his earlier threats, Tanaka never bothered with the Murphys, nor did he expose their lawyer Ted Pohano as Ted Pohaus from LA. He simply despised them.
After waiting a while, just to be safe, the Murphys quietly reached an accommodation with the heirs of Chief Ku‘umoku through Pohano. They bought KKL’s land out of bankruptcy for a fraction of what Fortunato paid.
