The Flaming Luau of Death

by Jerrilyn Farmer

  “I’ll call you, Honnett.” As I may have mentioned, it’s hard to know what to do with an old boyfriend who wants you back.

  We had always been an odd pairing, Chuck Honnett and me, a homicide detective and a Hollywood party person, the straight arrow and the liberal. The age difference was a factor too, I guess. Honnett was forty-four and wary about dating a much younger woman. But our good points had always outweighed the bad. He was so strong and intelligent and sincere. We meshed in the best sort of ways, mentally, emotionally, physically. He admired me. He took me seriously. I lightened him up. I drew him out. We were great together in bed.

  But then it turned out that he wasn’t, in truth, quite as divorced as he’d led me to believe. There were reasons why Honnett hadn’t left his sick wife completely in the lurch. Sure. There are always reasons, aren’t there? But he had lied. And our relationship went to hell. I told him I needed some time to think about where the hell we were going. And I still needed time. And space. And distance.

  So we ended our call. He asked me to please stay out of trouble, and I promised I would, but as I pressed the END button, I had a brief flash of the broken lamp and the bloodstain on Holly’s bedspread.

  What if the two events were connected? What if the jerks who sent the threat to Holly knew she was coming to the Big Island and staying at the Four Heavens Resort? It’s not like we didn’t have reservations in our names. It’s not as if I hadn’t made several thousand plans, all with an e-mail trail of confirmations and receipts. And what if they sent that man to attack her?

  Or what if I was just getting completely paranoid?

  I spotted Wesley talking to Keniki, perhaps quizzing her on more advanced hula techniques. Azalea and Daisy were seated at one of the round red-and-white hibiscus-print-topped tables, daintily sampling skewers of grilled delicacies, surrounded by all the beachboys. Holly was sitting cross-legged up on the bamboo bar, laughing with the bartender. I shook my head and tried to get back to the “no-worries Maddie” I had been only a few minutes before.

  Taking a hand-glazed plate, I walked over to our sushi chef and checked out his offerings. The name tag on his clean black apron said MORI.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “What can I make for you?” he asked, alert. He was an older Japanese man with lively eyes.

  “You decide.” My father had a theory. Whenever he took our family out to dinner, he told us to order the house specialty. He figured if they sold enough of it, you had a good chance that it would be fresh. My dad, the pragmatist.

  “You like tako su?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, smiling. “I like everything.”

  I watched as he prepared the octopus, cucumber, and seaweed in vinegar. I took a taste and said, “Fabulous.” Next, he expertly prepared a small dish of chilled puree of edamame, creamy steamed soybean, with flash-fried lotus root garnish topped with a sprig of shiso leaves. “This is heaven,” I told him.

  Wes walked across the sand and sat on the stool next to me. “Holly is too excited to eat,” he reported, looking her way.

  “She isn’t too excited to sip, though,” I pointed out. We both watched as she accepted another large coconut from the bartender down the beach.

  “Ah, well. Youth,” he said.

  “You have to try some of this. Our sushi chef is a master, Wes.”

  The gentleman behind the counter smiled modestly. We watched as he worked on a beautiful presentation, making a fresh plate featuring Toro, Hamachi, Kanpachi, Hirame, Aji, Tako, and Anago. He completed the dish, a traditional Japanese arrangement marked by the Zen ideals of simplicity, harmony, and restraint, and presented it to us with a slight bow.

  “I’ll share some of hers,” Wes told Mori, looking at my huge plate.

  “This wasabi is excellent,” I said, taking another small, perfectly prepared mound of rice, topped with a sparkling fresh piece of raw yellowtail. “It has a fiery yet sweet aftertaste. It’s fresh, isn’t it?”

  Wes bit into a matching piece of sushi and relished the subtle flavors. “I think this is the best wasabi I have ever tasted.”

  “It must be from Japan,” I decided. Wasabi is the spicy hot root, or actually a rhizome, which is traditionally grated and served with sushi. But despite the huge popularity of Japanese restaurants in the U.S., the delicate and pungent flavor of fresh wasabi is practically unknown to Americans. Almost all the wasabi served in the United States is actually a mixture of mustard and horseradish that’s been dried and then reconstituted, because wasabi is a highly controlled crop. It can only be grown in the Izu Peninusula and in the Nagano region of Japan, and the growers there guard the plants like gold, not wanting anyone anywhere else to grow them.

  “In Japan, we have many nicknames for wasabi. You know one nickname for wasabi?” Mori asked. “Namida.”

  “Tears,” Wes translated for me.

  “Yes. Very good,” Mori said. “Tears for the fire of the taste!”

  “Do you get it flown in?” Wes asked Mori.

  “You like?” The chef looked at Wesley, approving his compliment. “I get from my nephew. I get you some.”

  “It’s amazing,” I said, trying another kind of sushi, my tongue feeling the spreading warmth from the tiny dab of wasabi that flavored the piece.

  “I get you some,” he repeated for me, grinning at our reaction.

  “Nowadays, sushi is known as raw fish on a slab of rice,” Wes explained to me. “But actually sushi means vinegar-flavored rice that is rolled with vegetables, fish, or pickles, then wrapped in nori—dried seaweed—and sliced into rounds, or Norimaki.”

  “You know too much,” I said, popping another perfect piece into my mouth.

  “There are different sushi formats: Nigiri (handshaped), futo (thick), maki (rolled), temaki (handrolled), and chirashi (scattered on top of the rice).”

  Our chef behind the counter kept grinning his wide grin, nodding his head.

  “You are my favorite teacher, Wesley,” I said with affection. “And you cannot beat the atmosphere here.” We were seated just ten feet from the waves, with a curtain of stars overhead.

  Just then the drums began beating again, loud and slow.

  We turned to the stage.

  “Will the fabulous bride come up on stage, please?” The bandleader, a very cute Hawaiian boy, was at the microphone. He called out, “Holly! We need you now.” Lots of furious drumming came from the three guys on percussion.

  The rest of our gang stopped whatever we were doing, here and there along the beach, and headed toward the stage, whooping it up for Holly. We jostled together, sitting on mats on the sand down close to the performers, clapping along to the beat.

  This was Holly’s special moment. She was all smiles as she made her way to the stage, joining the boys in the band. In her cute bikini top and hip-hugging shorts, she danced a little hula for our entertainment.

  We all howled our approval.

  “Holly, you’re getting married in two weeks, we hear,” said the head beachboy, Matt.

  “Yes!” Holly yelled.

  We all cheered.

  “That is bad luck for us boys,” Matt said, and we all laughed and catcalled from the audience.

  “But now the time has come!” he said to her.

  “For what?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  At the back of the stage, two of the musician/dancers put down their drums and picked up sets of pu’ili, a Hawaiian instrument like a split bamboo rattle. They produced rhythmic rustling sounds by tapping the pu’ili against one another’s bare shoulders and arms.

  “Ah,” said Marigold, “they are acting just like bull elephant seals.” Her sisters all giggled. “The strong males battle for dominance, for the right to rule the harem.”

  Meanwhile, the other musician picked up an ipu and began pounding it on the mat, getting a variety of haunting, primitive sounds from the traditional Hawaiian dried gourd instrument.

  Matt looked at Holly as she danced onstage for us, cl
owning around. “Maybe you’re not too sure you should settle down yet,” he said and winked. “So here is something to help you decide. Do you have a man at home like one of these boys?”

  Three new dancers, bare except for loincloths and the leaves encircling their ankles and wrists, made their bold entrance. Their chests and arms and legs were tough and muscular, their faces and bodies painted in primitive symbols. They held long knives in the air, fire covering both ends. Holly took one look at the blades and the flames and the almost-naked men and rushed off the stage. We all screamed with laughter.

  “At last,” Wes whispered to me. “Here are our Samoan Fire Knife Dancers.”

  “Those are not knives so much,” I commented to Wes, “as flaming batons.”

  “They’re swords,” he corrected. “With, you know, two flaming ends.”

  I eyed Wes, wondering if I was about to be treated to the entire history of the Samoan Fire Knife Dance, but he left me with just the basics. “Popularized by Uluao Letuli Misilagi in the forties and fifties. They called him ‘Freddie’ Letuli after Fred Astaire.”

  “You can’t make this stuff up.”

  Wes looked taken aback. “No, of course not.”

  Onstage, the dancers were doing all sorts of outrageous things with their fiery swords. By now they had two flaming knives each and were performing some intensely crazy maneuver where they placed one blazing knife in their mouth while jabbing and thrusting at each other with the other. The drums beat incessantly, pounding a furious rhythm. We all felt the heat of the fire each time a flaming knife swung by, as we were seated so close to the stage, and with just enough alcohol in one’s blood, one could imagine one was on a primitive beach in ancient Samoa, enjoying a night out with the tribe.

  “Maddie?”

  I almost jumped. Holly was speaking close to my ear.

  “Yes, Holl?” I smiled up at her. “You enjoying your Fire Dancers, sweetie?”

  “The most,” she said. “Who could not like flaming sharp things?”

  Wes and I beamed. A few feet away, blazing knives were being thrown to and fro.

  “I wanted to show you something, okay?”

  “Of course,” I said. “What is it?”

  Holly unfolded a paper napkin. I had ordered some custom-printed ones, and they had turned out rather well. They were yellow, with hot pink lettering. They featured a little picture of a skewered shish kebab on fire, and the words said: HOLLY NICHOLS’S FLAMING BACHELORETTE LUAU, and then the date.

  “You like?” I asked.

  “I love,” she said, “but look at this.” She turned the paper napkin over, and I noticed she had drawn two small sketches. By the dim light of the flickering tiki torches, I wasn’t sure I could make out what she had drawn.

  Wes pulled the napkin closer and looked up at her, surprised. “What’s this?”

  “Maddie asked me to think about that man. She wondered if I remembered anything else about him.”

  Wes flashed me a glance, but asked Holly, “Where did you see this?” he asked.

  I pulled the napkin close and saw two symbols: It looked like Asian writing of some sort.

  Not far from us, there were swords of flame twirling high into the air. We couldn’t help but look up, even as we chatted back and forth about Holly’s napkin, pausing until the dancer caught the baton and we heard no hiss of singed flesh.

  “It’s the design I saw on that man’s T-shirt. The one who grabbed me in my room.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive. There’s a car parked out near the road that had a sticker with the same exact symbols. I’m good with design, Maddie. I copied it down to show you. I know these are the same marks that were on that guy’s T-shirt.”

  “Those are kanji characters,” Wes said. “These two are pronounced yama and aoi.”

  “Really?” Holly looked relieved. “It makes sense to you?”

  “Yama aoi. It translates,” he continued, “to mountain hollyhock.”

  We looked blank.

  Wes said, “It was on the guy’s T-shirt, you say. I guess it could be the name of a business.”

  The fact that Wesley knows how to read Japanese and is familiar with kanji is just something we have learned to take for granted. In fact, it is easier to think of the handful of things the man doesn’t know than to catalog all the ancient arts he has mastered.

  “Mountain hollyhock?” I was puzzled.

  “Mountain Hollyhock,” Holly repeated, but her voice was shaky. “Well, that’s impossible.” Her face looked pale in the low light. “That just can’t be.” She was beginning to sound pretty upset.

  “What is it, Holly?”

  “It’s just…” She stammered, looking the worse for wear. “It’s just that that was my nickname.”

  I stared at her.

  “Yes. I’m telling you! Mountain Hollyhock.”

  “What? Somebody actually called you Mountain Hollyhock?”

  “Yes. Years ago. Like a private nickname. The super weird thing is, it was Marvin’s nickname for me. All through senior year.”

  “Marvin Dubinsky?” I asked, floored. I had to speak up louder, because the drums onstage were working up to their finale. “Your husband Marvin Dubinsky called you Mountain Hollyhock?”

  “Let’s just refer to him as my prom date, okay?” Holly suggested, her voice strained. “Anyway, listen. Marvin used to write me little poems in haiku. He used to joke that I was as tall as a mountain.”

  “That’s romantic,” Wes said.

  I smiled. Boys were so clueless.

  Holly added, “…and my real full name is, well, you know. Hollyhock. So…”

  This whole thing was extremely, blazingly, scarily weird. We looked at one another, thinking it all over.

  “Mountain Hollyhock,” Holly repeated, looking fairly spooked. “I guess it could just be a coincidence, right?”

  What are the odds that a random creep is gonna show up, hide in a girl’s hotel room, and pounce on her while wearing a T-shirt bearing a Japanese phrase that refers to this same girl’s obscure high school nickname? And all on the day she received a threatening e-mail trying to track down the high school dude that gave her that nickname.

  Just then a sword, which was on fire, went shooting out across the stage, but this time it wasn’t caught by the waiting dancer it had been aimed at. This time it came sailing out into the audience, sort of straight at us.

  With some unsuspected hidden primitive island instinct, my hand jutted out at just the right second.

  The men on the stage stopped drumming, aghast. The Samoan Fire Knife Dancers stopped in midstep.

  I caught the fire knife, no problem, and our entire party just clapped their merry little brains out—Gladiola wildly whistling with two fingers in her mouth—absolutely sure this had been part of the grand finale all along.

  And that’s when the creepiest idea came to me in a flash of smoky inspiration. What if Holly’s missing maybe-husband Marvin Dubinsky was actually here on the island?

  Like

  (Liz)

  No matter what was going on with Holly’s former prom date, Marvin Dubinsky, I refused to let it interfere any further with our luau. We’d deal with everything that needed taking care of tomorrow—the threatening e-mail, the glasses I’d found in Holly’s room, and even the Mountain Hollyhock kanji. So I kept my suspicions to myself, and the party went on. A few hours later, Wes and I sat together, and this time he needed consoling.

  “So now I am totally bummed,” Wes said. “I didn’t need to hear from my freaking neighbor back home. I don’t want my everyday L.A. madness to seep into this groovy Hawaiian escape. The lesson is: no cell phones in Paradise.”

  “A lesson some of us already know,” I replied, looking up at him.

  It was midnight in Hawaii, but 3 A.M. L.A. time, and I was beat. We had resisted Daisy and Azalea and the rest of the sisters urging us to join them in an impromptu midnight swim. The ocean is just too big and dark
at night. I shivered, contemplating deep-water oogie-boogies, watching Holly and Marigold and Gladdie frolic in the surf by moonlight. Dainty little Liz was out there too.

  Wes and I had pulled canvas beach chairs right up to the edge of the water and faced the dark sea. We sat together and watched the flow of the tide bring forth gentle wave upon wave, racing up the sand. One with the gumption to lap our bare feet arrived only about every seventh or eighth wave. Behind us, the beach had been cleaned up. Keniki and the party crew had packed up the tables and chairs, the platters and grills, and called it a night.

  Wes knocked coconuts with me and took a final swig. “I’m going to leave my cell phone off from now on.”

  “Your neighbor left a message?”

  “Elmer is really angry at me, Maddie. You should hear him yourself.” He tried to hand me his little silver phone, but I put my hands up, shielding my face.

  “Bip-bip-bip!” I chirped. “Remember the lesson. Remember the lesson.”

  “Right. No cell phones.” Wes shook his head. “I need a twelve-step program.”

  “Like, what’s this guy Elmer’s problem?” I asked, commiserating.

  “He hates me.”

  I had never liked this neighbor, but he and Wes had seemed very chummy since the day several months ago when Wes bought the house two down from Elmer’s. This house was in a particularly cool section of Hollywood, up on a hill behind the Hollywood Bowl. The only access to the homes in this neighborhood was by an old elevator in a tower, and atop the hill, there were no roads, only sidewalks. When Wesley moved in, he had brought his new neighbor, Elmer Minty, a basket of fresh baked goods, and the old guy had lent Wes a power tool. It was that sort of friendship.

  “He heard you might be moving?”

  Wesley bought fixers. Wrecks. Houses no one else wanted. He’d find an aging, run-down, distressed jewel of architecture in one of L.A.’s old neighborhoods and then, after doing careful research, he’d commit his money and hard work to recapturing its glory days. He insisted on preserving all the period details. He and his work crew restored the broken fixtures and cracked tile work and moldings. They replaced missing items, when necessary, with authentic chandeliers and drawer pulls and whatnots that Wes scouted out from his favorite antique salvage dealers. He would devote days to hunting for authentic period replacement pieces rather than just rip it all out and install something easy to find and cheap and new. What Wes was really passionate about was more like fine historic home restoration rather than just gutting and rehabbing, and in a city with lots of cashheavy superstars looking for a special nest and a ten-year boom in real estate prices, it had developed into a lucrative side business.