Page 5 of Talk Story

Lani stumbled in, and now I could see the dark stains clearly—crushed flower juice, green smears of broken plant matter, dirt. Her face was stricken. “Ms. Pearl sent me,” she gasped, one hand braced on the door frame. “The Heritage Garden—someone’s destroyed it.”

The room erupted into chaos.

Mayor Ilima’s composed expression gave way to something she didn’t bother to conceal—real distress. The Heritage Garden was Pearl Yamamoto’s life’s work, and Pearl was one of Ilima’s oldest friends. “Mr. Chang, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, precise and controlled even now, “I need to attend to this matter.”

“Of course, of course,” Chang said. He stepped back from the podium with the graceful ease of someone who had not been interrupted, though I caught the flash of annoyance behind his eyes before his expression resettled into polished concern. “We have all the time in the world to discuss the exciting possibilities ahead.”

Ilima’s gavel hit the podium. “This meeting is temporarily recessed.” She caught my eye across the crowd with a command I’d come to recognize—a small, imperious nod that said ‘find out what happened’ without using words.

I was, apparently, on retainer for a new case.

Chairs pushed back. The crowd began to move. Keone and I left the building.

Victor Chang emerged from the side door of the community center, already on his phone. “Yes, a minor delay. Nothing to worry about . . .” He walked toward the parking lot where a sleek rental car waited, a young woman in resort wear leaning against it and examining her nails.

Uncle Kalani appeared at my elbow, making me jump.

He was watching Chang cross the parking lot. “Interesting,” he said quietly. “The petroglyphs disappear, and he appears. The garden is reported vandalized.”

“You think they’re connected?” I watched Chang say something to the woman—his daughter, maybe, judging by the resemblance. She straightened, unhurried, and got into the car. “I don’t see how yet.”

“In Hawaii, everything is connected.” Uncle Kalani touched his ti leaf lei, a reflex similar to the way I touched the ring. “Like a fisherman’s net. You pull one string, and the whole thing moves. And tightens.”

Keone appeared at my other side. “Garden, Trouble?”

“Garden,” I confirmed. “Hop in,” I told Uncle Kalani, clicking Sharkey’s doors open. The big white SUV had developed a faint smell of cat food from a bag that had gotten left in the back seat two weeks ago, but it was cooler than outside now that we’d had rain. Uncle Kalani climbed in without complaint.

Tiki materialized from the hedgerow beside the parking lot with the confidence of a cat who had been conducting her own reconnaissance and was now prepared to join the official investigation. She bounded into the back seat and arranged herself on Uncle Kalani’s lap before he’d finished closing the door.

The dignified kahu looked startled. Then, cautiously, he stroked her. Tiki cranked up her engine—that deep, resonant purr that sounded less like a cat and more like a small tractor. Uncle Kalani’s stern face acquired a smile that didn’t entirely soften the gravity of his eyes, but softened the corners of his mouth.

“I’m sure there’s a story behind that nickname,” he said, watching me in the rearview mirror as I pulled out of the lot.

“Which one?” I hit the turn signal.

“Trouble.”

Keone snorted a laugh. “Only I get to call her that, and it refers to Kat’s tendency to end up in the middle of things.”

“True, dat,” he said. “Been hearing about that tendency since you arrived in Ohia.”

I had no rebuttal to this statement of fact.

From his lap, Tiki shot me a look of smug satisfaction.

The Hana Highway was a two-lane thread of broken asphalt and unlikely beauty. After the rain shower, the foliage along the shoulder had gone electric green, every leaf oversaturated, the red and orange of the roadside heliconia almost cartoonishly bright. We passed a stretch where a waterfall came right down to the road’s edge, a thin curtain of white floating on a black rock face. Then the forest opened up toward the coast and the smell of ocean came through the windows—clean and sharp and cold from the deep, a smell that Keone said was “the island breathing.”

I thought about petroglyphs and parking lots and a man in a white linen suit, and the way the kahu beside me had said everything is connected, like he was confirming a fact he’d been waiting for the rest of us to notice.

The Heritage Garden occupied a promontory above Hamoa Beach, set back from the road by a long driveway lined with torch ginger and bird-of-paradise. Pearl Yamamoto’s family had maintained it for three generations, a living archive of Japanese-Hawaiian botanical history that included plantings brought by her grandparents and species gathered over decades of Pearl’s own research and advocacy.

Or it had been all of that. Right now, it appeared a Tasmanian devil had gone through it with malice aforethought.

We arrived after Ilima and Lani who were driving Pearl. The gravel lot held a handful of cars already; word traveled fast in Ohia, and several people had apparently followed the commotion directly from the community center. The afternoon light was going golden and sideways through the trees, which would have been beautiful under different circumstances.

The gate hung crooked on its hand-forged hinges, bent outward from what looked like something heavy driven against it. Beyond it, the garden’s stone-lined paths were churned with boot prints, and the lush plantings on either side showed the haphazard damage of something done in anger or haste—pointed destruction. Specific things targeted. Others left alone.

The massive old plumeria at the garden’s center was still standing. The bronze crane statue beneath it that had witnessed Keone going down on one knee to propose—which I’d photographed approximately forty times—was toppled, its elegant neck bent, one wing broken off.