by Hester Young
In the morning, I wake up foggy headed but calm. I peel back the curtain, find the sun has transformed the backyard from a black, shadowy mouth to a light-filled meadow. I can see exactly what’s out there waiting for me, and it’s nothing worse than a field of dew.
Maybe they’re right, I tell myself sleepily. Maybe it was a pig sniffing around outside my bath, after all.
I unlock the sliding door and step out onto the balcony. Rae’s already there, ruminating. From her grim expression, I think at first that she’s nursing a hangover, but when she catches sight of me, her lips form the kind of hard line that always brings bad news.
I yawn, still too drugged to feel worried. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”
She holds up a small white rectangle. “I found this on the railing over there. Safe to say you didn’t put it there?”
I stare at the railing, an easy fifteen feet off the ground, and then at the object in her hand. Through the haze, I feel a slow, creeping dread.
It’s my phone.
friday
twenty
He came back.” Fear sweeps away any lingering effects of my sleeping pill as I realize what the reappearance of my phone means. “He came back in the night. The Watching Guy. He was right here, outside my room.”
Rae bites her lip. For once, she has no ready joke, no trace of amusement lurking in her dark eyes. “I am so sorry, Charlie. We should’ve listened to you last night. I mean, God, if something had happened . . .” She doesn’t complete the thought. “Who is he? Do we have any idea?”
“The same pervert hanging around my bath last night, I’d guess.” I shudder. At some point, my stalker must have returned to Koa House. Somehow he hoisted himself up onto my balcony and left behind my stolen phone. He was just feet away from where I lay sleeping. “How did he even get up here?” I demand. “Look how high it is!” I glance over the side and get my own answer. “Oh. That frigging trellis.”
Rae opens the Photos app and hands me the device. “You’ll want to see this.”
“Want” is the wrong word, but I swipe through the hundreds of new photos left on my device. One thing I’ll say for my stalker: he has a good eye. Some of his pictures are actually quite beautiful. A papaya, sliced neatly in half. A wooden crate laid out in a shaft of sunlight. Various close-ups of brilliant green geckos. It’s not as if I can actually appreciate his artistic soul, however, especially once I see the photos of myself.
Some, like the ones he took of me exiting Marvel’s store, I can place at a specific time and location. Others are maddeningly unclear. His propensity to use the zoom feature produces close-ups of me talking or laughing with no real context, just something blurry and green in the background or vaguely wooden. From the time stamps, they weren’t all taken at Koa House. But one was. A dim photo from early Wednesday morning depicts me sleeping in the Bamboo Room, face barely discernible against a grainy pile of blankets. From the strip of curtains at the edge of the frame, he didn’t actually step inside my bedroom, but the knowledge that he confined his activities to my balcony is hardly comforting.
He was there. He was watching me.
“It’s got to be one of the Yoon boys,” Rae muses. “Or maybe Victor. David and Thom could’ve done it, obviously, but . . . I can’t imagine they have that level of interest in their female guests. I’m guessing this dude’s been watching you from the woods, waiting for your light to go off at night.”
“Thanks, Rae. Way to help me sleep.”
She shrugs. “It narrows things down, doesn’t it? We’re looking for someone who knows those woods.”
“There could be a lot of people who know those woods. For all we know, there’s a homeless guy from Wakea Ranch’s cult days living out there. Some wackadoo Naomi grew up with.”
“Possibly.” Rae turns thoughtful. “I guess we can’t eliminate Naomi from the list, either.”
“Naomi? Why would she be following me around?”
“Maybe she knows you’ve been looking into what happened to Lise. Her son’s suspected of killing this girl. Could be those protective mama instincts kicking in, trying to scare you off.”
“So she posts flowers to my Instagram account and watches me sleep?” I pace the balcony. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Rae leans against the balcony railing and frowns at the Yoon property. “This person who’s been following you—maybe it’s one of the people you saw signaling at night from the woods.”
“Uh, it better be the same person. How many crazies can you have roaming around out there? Unless . . .” I stop. “Those light signals have to involve one of the Yoons, right? It’s their land, after all.”
Rae nods. “Naomi, maybe? It could be Victor’s signal to her.”
“No,” I say. “If Victor wanted to visit, he could walk through the front door. Naomi has a phone. They can arrange their meetings like grown-ups. The meetings in the woods must involve Adam or Elijah. If Adam has any connections outside of his mom and Raph, I’d love to know about them.”
“Elijah doesn’t have any friends, either,” Rae points out. “Not since Lise went missing.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Lise is his only friend. What if she’s the one sending those signals?”
Rae’s brow furrows. “I don’t think Elijah’s got her tied up to a tree somewhere and she’s giving off SOS signals, if that’s where you’re going with this. David said they’ve been seeing lights in the woods for months, since long before Lise disappeared.”
I let out a breath. “I’m not saying she’s captive. We’ve been assuming she was killed or kidnapped, but what if she really did just run away? What if she’s out there at night signaling to Elijah?”
“Brayden and Frankie did say she snuck out a lot,” Rae murmurs. “She and Elijah could’ve developed light signals a while ago.”
“Right. Elijah told the police she broke up with him, but he could’ve been lying. Maybe he and Lise had a whole plan. It wouldn’t take much for her to live out in those woods. A tent, basically. Elijah could bring her food now and then, and she’d be set. Think about it. She flashes her light a few times, they meet up and hang out all night when no one can see them.”
“Not a bad existence,” Rae says wistfully. “Kind of like Thoreau, but with a romantic twist.” She shakes her head, unconvinced. “Thing is, Lise wouldn’t just up and leave without a good reason. Why would she take off without bringing any stuff? Why let everyone believe the worst, let Elijah take the blame?”
“I don’t know.” I’m not sure how to fill this hole in my hypothesis. Lise had friends, a good school, parents who loved her. Why would she be so anxious to leave her life? What could be so bad at home that she’d rather abandon everything than stick around?
“She was talking to Marvel about statutory rape just a couple weeks before she went missing,” Rae says. “What if she was pregnant? She’s a minor. She couldn’t get an abortion without telling an adult, and that might’ve meant outing the father.”
I shake my head. “I read an article about abortion laws recently. Hawaiʻi is one of a dozen states that doesn’t require parental consent from minors.”
“Well, something was not right in that girl’s life. Maybe . . . it’s a bigger something than we thought.”
I swallow. Until now, I’ve allowed myself to believe that Lise was having a consensual, albeit illegal, sexual relationship with an older guy. But if that were true, why would she need to flee her home, her family? They should have been her safe place. She wouldn’t run away from them unless . . .
Unless the threat was coming from within.
I remember what Marvel told us, Lise’s odd questions regarding statutory rape. It’s like she was trying to figure out what kind of power she had over him, Marvel said. Trying to find out how bad she could break him, and whether or not she really wanted to.
Statutor
y rape. Sexual intercourse with an individual too young to consent by law. Marvel imagined it to be a recent occurrence, a fifteen-year-old months away from being legal. But what if this relationship began when she was much younger? What if it was initiated by someone too close for her to refuse? A teacher, a coach. A parent.
I don’t want to believe it, don’t want to entertain such awful ideas that have no clear, hard evidence. Yet it would explain so many things. Her disappearance, yes, but also how she developed into such a different person from her twin. The drug use, the promiscuity. And it would explain why Lise’s father has shown zero interest in discovering her whereabouts.
One look at the queasy expression on Rae’s face, and I know we’ve arrived at the same ugly thought.
“Victor,” I murmur. “Maybe she was running from Victor.”
* * *
• • •
MY FIRST INSTINCTS are to stay out of it. If Lise really did flee an abusive parent, the last thing in the world I want to do is find her and send her back to Dad. But if we’re right about Victor, nonintervention is not an option. Not with Jocelyn still living at home.
Victor has had ample opportunity to get acquainted with the woods of Wakea Ranch. That scene I saw by the hammock—what if those were his eyes through which I saw? What if he was out there spying on his own daughter and these unnatural urges he’d been nursing finally won out? The possibility makes me sick.
Rae and I need to help these girls. We need to find Lise and figure out what’s going on, and we have just forty-eight hours left on the island to do it. Our options are limited: locate Lise ourselves, or find someone with information that can lead us in the right direction. Yet we have so many loose ends, I don’t know how to begin tying them all together.
I grab a sheet of notebook paper from my bedroom and jot down our questions, Rae peering over my shoulder as I go:
Who’s flashing lights at night in the woods?
Who stole my phone? Why did they give it back?
Who did Raph see lurking around the woods at night?
Why was Lise asking about statutory rape? Who was she involved with?
Where is Lise? Is she alive?
Who else knows where Lise is?
Isaac would be grinning ear to ear if he could see me now, totally immersed in this case, just as he planned.
“I say we go into the woods tonight,” Rae suggests. “See if we can catch whoever’s been sending signals. It’s not a lock, obviously, but David said he sees them pretty much whenever he’s up late, and you had a vision about flashlights, so . . .”
It’s not the most attractive option, given our uncertainty about who or what we’ll find—Noah would shit a brick if he got wind of this plan—but we have little else to go on.
“Okay,” I agree. “In the meantime, we should have another chat with the people close to Lise. See if anyone had any suspicions about Victor.”
I think for a moment about who to target. Those most likely to know about Victor—Sue and Jocelyn—are the least likely to say anything. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of Sue. As intelligent as she is, could she really have remained oblivious to the sexual abuse of her daughter? Probably, given her blind spots about Naomi. For better or for worse, Sue has decided to remain in her marriage. She could’ve been passively complicit in something terrible.
As for Jocelyn, I have no idea what kind of dysfunction she’s grown up with, but she’s on her path to Stanford. Two more years and she can leave that house behind forever. If there’s something off in her household, she has no reason to share it with me. We’re better off finding someone more peripheral to Lise’s life, someone who saw her when her guard was down.
“She might’ve said something while drunk or stoned,” I tell Rae. “Something that hinted at problems at home or plans to run away.”
“You want to hit up Frankie and Brayden again?”
“Might as well. They can at least give us the names of some people Lise hung out with.” Above us, the wispy clouds have begun to disperse, revealing patches of blue sky. “Who knows? Maybe there really was an older guy she was seeing, and this whole Victor thing is bullshit.”
“Maybe.” Rae’s fingers dance across the screen of her phone for a few minutes, hunting down her stoner friends. “Okay,” she announces. “I’ve got nothing on Frankie, but according to Twitter, Brayden left half an hour ago to go surfing at the Isaac Hale Beach Park. If we hurry, we can still catch him.”
“He posted all that on Twitter?” I roll my eyes. “Jesus. At least I make my stalker work for it.”
twenty-one
It’s cloudy when we get to Isaac Hale, and the air feels pregnant with rain. Rae quickly spots Brayden’s beat-up van parked in the lot. We make our way down to the concrete pier where a few enterprising surfers are catching waves in the bay. Even I can see this is no place for novices; the dark lava rocks don’t make for a welcoming shoreline and the rough waters rise up taller than a person, ready to have their way with the uninitiated.
Rae scans the whitecaps and soon hones in on Brayden’s long locks and sunburned torso. “There.” She points to a figure paddling out. “We’ll get him when he comes in.”
Not a bad plan, but Brayden shows no signs of returning to land any time soon. Rae watches him catch a wave while I craft a rather misleading text to Noah. Found my phone outside this morning, yay! Will call you & kids tonight. When Brayden begins paddling out again for another wave, I decide there’s no point in our both waiting for him.
“I’m going to have a look around,” I tell her. “Maybe Brayden’s sugar mama came along today.” Sage strikes me as a person who knows things, although getting her to share them could be a challenge. I don’t know whether to applaud or frown at a woman in her forties who shacks up with a guy barely older than her son, but Sue did urge me to look into Lise’s drug connections. From the sound of it, Sage has her hand in all kinds of cookie jars.
If Rae’s a little miffed about being left behind as the lookout, she doesn’t say so. She assumes a seat on the concrete pier and watches the surfers, her feet dangling into the choppy water.
I follow the path away from the bay to see what else is going on in the park today, but apart from a middle-aged man doing yoga, the scene is pretty tranquil. An empty playground. A bathhouse. A grassy area with picnic tables, palm trees, and a handful of feral cats. Some kid who must work for the county roams around collecting stray trash. Either Sage elected not to join her boy toy this morning, or she’s out there surfing with him.
I’m about to return to the pier when the kid gathering trash looks up. His face, I realize, is familiar.
“Kai?”
He squints, taking a second to place me. “Oh. Hi.”
Sage’s son is not a bad find, not bad at all. He must have caught a ride over with Brayden.
“No school today?” I ask.
“Nah. It’s Eco Day. We’re supposed to get out in the community and do something to help the environment or whatever.”
“And here you are. Good man.” The mom in me can’t help but observe that he should’ve brought gloves. I watch him scoop up a plastic bottle and stuff it into his trash bag. “How does the school know you actually did it?”
“The kids who board sign up for projects, and they get chaperones. But I’m a commuter, so it’s mostly honor system. My mom just signs a paper.” Kai shrugs, as if embarrassed to be caught doing work he could so easily get out of. “I can pick up trash for an hour, I don’t mind.”
I smile. “It’s a nice thing to do. Can I help you?”
“I guess . . .” It’s obvious that Kai doesn’t want my company, but he’s too polite to say so. He produces another garbage bag from his pocket and hands it to me. “Anything you see around, just grab.”
We work in silence for several minutes, drifting to separate areas until I notice him stru
ggling with some broken glass. “Don’t touch that,” I advise as he reaches for the tiny pieces with his fingers. “Let me get some wet paper towels from the bathroom.”
Moments later, as he dabs at the last shiny splinters of glass, I know I’ve got him where I want him.
“No Jocelyn today, huh?”
“Nah. She’s doing some recycling thing with the Environmental Club. She won’t be back until the afternoon.”
“How’s she holding up?”
Kai looks as though he doesn’t understand the question.
I press my advantage. “When I talked to her in town the other day, it seemed like the thing with her sister is hitting her pretty hard.” Jocelyn, of course, said no such thing. But Kai doesn’t know that. And he’ll be more likely to talk to me if he thinks Jocelyn already has.
Kai stares at the glittery slivers on his paper towel. “Joss is okay. I mean, she seems all right.”
“Yeah? From what she told me . . .” Though there’s no one else around, I lower my voice, as if taking him into my confidence. “Well, there’s obviously been trouble at home. She must have talked to you about it.”
Kai’s blue gaze flicks across me warily. “Aren’t you a journalist? I thought you were writing something about her dad. Shouldn’t you be talking to him?”
“I’m an investigative journalist,” I say, although that’s stretching the truth. “Sue Nakagawa has a lot of questions about her missing daughter. She wanted me to ask around.”
Kai snatches a candy wrapper off the ground. “I already talked to the police.”
“I’m not a cop, Kai, and I don’t work with cops. I’m just trying to help a mother find some answers.” I move squarely in his path, forcing him to look at me. “You and I both know there are things you couldn’t tell police about. Things about Brayden, about your mom. Stuff you and Lise were involved in.”