Page 43 of Talk Story

The arguing stopped.

Then a long silence. Water trickled somewhere deep. My pulse beat in my ears. Beside me Keone had gone very still, his big frame coiled, his eyes fixed on the black gap between the boulders.

“Maui Police Department! Come out now with your hands on your head and you will not be harmed. There is nowhere to go,” Malia repeated.

“All right.” A woman’s voice, angry but resigned—it was Madison. “All right. I’m coming out. Don’t shoot. I’m coming out.”

“Hands where I can see them,” Malia called. “Slow.”

A pale shape resolved out of the dark. Madison Chang picked her way around the boulders, her hands spread wide and empty. Her slacks were filthy at the knees, her hair lank and frizzy with cave damp. She’d left the derringer behind or lost it; her hands were bare and dirty, fingernail polish chipped. She appeared to be, for the first time, a real person and not a magazine ad: a frightened, exhausted woman on the edge.

“Where’s your father?” Malia kept her weapon on the entrance, not on Madison. Souza moved in and took Madison’s wrists, drawing her clear of the cave mouth and cuffing her with quiet efficiency.

“Dad won’t come out.” Madison’s voice broke. “I told him it’s time to give up, it’s over, all of it—I told him to just stop. But he won’t. He says there’s another way out. Deeper in. He says the lava tube goes through to the other side of the ridge—and he’s going to get out there. I’m scared for him.”

A chill rippled down my spine that had nothing to do with the cool cave air.

“Madison—does he have a light?” I asked.

“A headlamp.” She was crying now. “He took the good headlamp and he went back in. To the narrow part. Where the water is.”

The narrow part where the water is.

Uncle Kalani’s voice came back to me as clear as if he stood at my shoulder, the way he’d said it that first day in the second chamber, facing the black throat of the passage: “Don’t go further in. The deeper chambers require proper protocols for respect and permission. We haven’t brought what’s needed.” He’d said it quietly, but it hadn’t been a suggestion. It had been a man who tended the bones of the ancestors telling us that past this point the rules changed, and that you did not go into that dark casually, and you did not go in unprepared.

Victor Chang had gone in there alone, in a panic, with a headlamp and nothing else.

“We have to go after him,” Souza said.

“Wait.” I caught Malia’s eye. “Uncle Kalani, the kahu, forbade going in there. Not superstition. He said you don’t go past the second chamber without the proper protocols—and he meant the practical kind as much as the sacred.”

Malia’s jaw worked. She was caught between a fleeing suspect and a matter of cultural respect—not to mention safety.

“He could be heading for a drop he can’t see,” Keone said grimly. “Or a sump. The water back there goes somewhere.”

And then, from deep inside the cave, somewhere past the second chamber, past the narrow place, from down in the watery dark where Uncle Kalani had told us not to enter—we heard Victor Chang scream.

The sound rose through the rock, distorted, far away, and horribly clear all at once, a man’s voice cracking high in terror with nothing of dignity left in it—a short, raw wail that was cut off, swallowed, suddenly gone. Then a heavy, final thud I felt in my chest more than heard.

A clatter chased it: rocks on stone, the rush of something falling.

We stood frozen at the cave mouth in the bright clean morning, four of us and one weeping daughter, straining to hear into a silence that promised nothing good.

“Chang!” Malia shouted into the dark. “Victor Chang, respond!”

The cave gave her back only the trickle of faraway water.

I stared at the black gap between the boulders, and the cold I felt was bone-deep. Somewhere back in there, a light had gone out—I knew it the way I’d known he’d come to the valley in the first place, a knowing that arrived ahead of its reasons. No headlamp beam would survive a fall like he’d had.

Malia keyed her radio. “Where’s that bird? Over.”

Static, then Lei, wind-torn and sounding close, the thrum of rotors bleeding through the signal. “Two minutes out. I’ve got a paramedic and two more units inbound by road behind me. What’s your situation?”

“We’ve got one female in custody and one male suspect lost somewhere in the deep cave system. We heard him cry out. He’s not responding.” Malia’s voice stayed flat and professional. “Advise. A witness warned us off going deeper past the petroglyphs passage—it’s unmapped and sounds like water is in the tunnel. I’ve got no rope rated for recovery, no cave gear, and not a lot of lights.”

“Do not send anybody into an unknown tunnel without gear, that’s how we lose more people. But if he’s alive and hurt back there, every minute counts. Your call on scene. I’m one minute out. Over.”

“Copy that.” Malia lowered the radio. She stared at me, and at Keone—two who knew this ground, who’d been through the first chamber, who’d heard the kahu’s warning with our own ears. Somewhere back in the dark a man was injured or already dead. A larger law had caught up to Victor Chang in the one courtroom none of us had jurisdiction over.