His beleaguered lungs still struggling for breath, Josh Malani surrendered to the blackness.
“My Jeff is a good boy,” Uilani Kina insisted. “My Jeff wouldn’t just take off. Something’s happened to him.”
Cal Olani nodded sympathetically, but the gesture was nearly automatic. After fifteen years as a cop, he’d long since learned that there wasn’t a mother alive whose son wasn’t “a good boy.” It made no difference what the charge might be, or how damning the evidence.
“My son is a good boy,” Mrs. Kina said again.
Still, as he looked around the tidy house that Uilani Kina kept, he didn’t see any of the typical signs that a teenager was likely to be a troublemaker. On a side street above Makawao, the frame house sat in the midst of a well-kept garden. The patch of lawn in front was mowed, and though a few chickens pecked at the ground in a coop next to the house, they weren’t running wild. Uilani’s husband operated a small garden supply shop down the road in Makawao, where Jeff worked after school except during track season. Aside from a couple of incidents when he’d threatened a few haoles — but hadn’t actually done much to make good on his threats — Jeff had never been in any serious trouble. Still, he was at the age when boys start wanting to show their independence, and had it not been for the discovery of Kioki Santoya’s body yesterday morning, Cal would probably have tried a little harder to reassure Uilani Kina that her son would turn up by the end of the day. As it was, though, he had to take the boy’s absence more seriously. “I’ll put out an official missing persons report this afternoon,” he promised, though he knew the news was out about Jeff all over the island. He closed his notebook and, putting it back in the inside pocket of his uniform jacket, he said as gently as he could, “Just try not to get too upset, Mrs. Kina.”
“If it wasn’t for Kioki—” Uilani Kina began, but couldn’t bring herself even to finish the thought. A slim wraith of a woman with soft features framed by flowing black hair, she shook her head sadly. “I don’t know what Alice is going to do. He was all she had, and now …” She struggled to compose herself. “What were those boys doing that night?” she asked, her eyes searching Cal Olani’s face for an answer. “Did something happen? Did they get in a fight or something? Was someone mad at them?” She shook her head, clucking her tongue softly. “Who could get mad at them? Such good boys.” Her voice changed, and Cal Olani had the feeling she was talking more to herself than to him. “Even Josh Malani. What can you expect with parents like that? I feel so sorry for him.…” Her voice trailed off again, but her liquid brown eyes remained fixed on the policeman. “Find Jeff for me,” she pleaded. “Please find him for me.”
Back in his car a few minutes later, with the memory of the distraught woman’s plea still fresh in his mind, Olani kept hearing echoes of her question: Did something happen?
And he also remembered the faces of the four boys he’d talked to at the high school yesterday afternoon. The way their eyes had darted toward Josh Malani before they answered his questions, as if seeking his advice or his permission before they spoke.
And the new boy — the one Cal couldn’t remember having seen at all before yesterday — hadn’t actually answered his questions with anything more than a noncommittal shrug. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was just about time for school to be letting out. Maybe he’d swing back there and have another talk with those three. But just as he made the decision, the radio in the car came alive and he heard the dispatcher calling him.
“Car five here,” he said into the microphone.
“I have a report of an abandoned car, Cal,” the dispatcher told him. “Down in the park near Spreckelsville. You anywhere close?”
“Above Makawao,” Olani replied, then told the dispatcher what he was planning to do next.
“I think you might want to take this abandoned car report,” the dispatcher told him. “We’ve run the plates. It’s an eighty-two Chevy pickup, registered to Joshua Malani.”
Olani felt an uneasy chill ripple over him. “How long’s it been there?” he asked.
“Not very long,” the dispatcher replied. “The woman who reported it says it wasn’t there this morning.”
“Then why is it being reported as abandoned?” Olani asked. Who would report a truck the first time he saw it? After a day or two, maybe, but … The dispatcher’s voice cut into his thought.
“The keys are in the ignition, and his wallet was left on the front seat.”
The uneasy chill that had come over Cal Olani congealed into a feeling of dark foreboding. “Ten-four,” he said. “I’m on my way.”
“It certainly took you long enough.” The woman was sunburned and overweight and swathed in a wildly patterned muumuu in a particularly hideous shade of lavender. She made no effort to hide her displeasure as Cal Olani swung out of his patrol car nearly half an hour after he’d received the dispatcher’s call.
“Now, Myrtle,” her husband said, trying to soothe her. He sported a shirt that matched his wife’s muumuu, and a sunburn even more purple. “You have to remember, this is Maui, not Cleveland.” He offered his hand to Cal Olani. “I’m Fred Hooper, and this is my wife, Myrtle. We’re staying in a condo down that way about a mile.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of Spreckelsville. “I told Myrt she shouldn’t bother you with this, but—”
“Nobody goes off and leaves a truck with the keys hanging in the ignition, and their wallet just lying out on the seat where anyone could come along and pick it up,” Myrtle Hooper broke in, silencing Fred with a single quick gesture. “At least they don’t in Cleveland, and I just don’t believe things are that much different out here.” As Cal Olani started toward Josh’s truck, both Hoopers trailed after him, Myrtle still talking. “Something isn’t right about this. I know Fred thinks I’m being silly, but a mother knows these things.” They had reached the pickup, and as Olani turned to look questioningly at Mrs. Hooper, she pursed her lips. “We looked in the wallet, of course. We thought we might find a telephone number or something.” She sighed deeply. “Just seventeen. Such a shame.”
“Now, Myrt, we don’t know what happened,” Fred began, but once again his wife silenced him with a sweep of her hand.
“Of course we know what happened,” she said. “It’s happening to kids all the time now. Teenage suicide. I read about it in Time magazine.” She shifted her gaze to Cal Olani. “His clothes are on the beach,” she said. “At least I assume they’re his clothes. There’s no one else around here. And we put his wallet back on the seat of the car, exactly the way it was when we found it,” she added as the policeman peered into the truck’s open window.
Just as the woman had said, a worn wallet was lying on the seat of the truck, and the keys were hanging in the ignition. Picking the wallet up, Olani checked the driver’s license himself.
Josh Malani.
There were a few dollar bills, a student identification card, some worn pictures, and various scraps of paper with girls’ phone numbers written on them, but little else.
Moving on to the beach, Cal Olani found a pile of clothes, also just as Myrtle Hooper had described. There were a pair of worn jeans, a T-shirt, Jockey shorts, socks, and shoes.
The jeans were on the bottom, then the T-shirt and the underwear, with the shoes resting on top of the pile, the socks tucked inside them.
Very neat.
Very tidy.
And from what Cal Olani knew of the boy, not at all like Josh Malani.
Unless Josh had been trying to say something.
Wordlessly, Olani went back to the truck. Shoved behind the driver’s seat was a slightly damp towel, wrapped around an equally wet bathing suit.
Even if Josh had a dry bathing suit, wouldn’t he have taken his towel down to the beach if all he was planning to do was go for a swim?
Of course, as Myrtle Hooper had pointedly implied, if the boy was planning to go into the water and not come out, what would be the point of having the towel on the beach?
He searched the cab of the pickup once more, looking for a note, but even as he hunted he knew he wouldn’t find one. A little too reckless, always a bit too wild, Josh Malani wasn’t the kind of kid who’d leave a note behind. Not the kind of kid, either, who’d commit suicide. Yet the evidence seemed pretty strong that that was exactly what he’d done.
He went back to the beach, where Mrs. Hooper waited for him, a faintly smug expression on her face. Cal Olani found himself disliking her intensely: a woman who was more concerned about having her opinion validated than she was about what might have happened to a seventeen-year-old boy.
“There’s some footprints, too,” he heard Fred Hooper say. “We were careful not to disturb them.”
