Primitive Secrets

by Deborah Turrell Atkinson

  Becky had taken her to a local tavern known for its homemade Hawaiian food. When Storm had lived on the Big Island, she was too young to be allowed inside, though in high school she’d used a fake ID a couple of times. The place looked different now, but the changes were due to an adult perspective, that of one who wasn’t as fixated on checking out the construction workers’ tight jeans.

  Though no longer exciting and forbidden, the Grill was still dark, woody, and filled with the yeasty odor of beer. It was just what Storm needed, a departure from the Caesar salads and double lattes of the city. The single room was comfortably dim. The tables, which filled the floor adjacent to a bar crowded with the same type of guy she’d ogled a decade ago, were lit with those candles in the plastic net-covered globes. The one on Storm’s table was faded red and gave Becky’s cheerful face a ruddy glow.

  Storm relaxed and drank the beer she’d allowed herself with dinner. Becky was on her second, but the beloved Donnie was picking her up.

  By the time Donnie showed up, the women were up-to-date on life after high school. All their old friends had been discussed; who’d had how many babies and divorces. Storm pushed her plate away with a contented sigh and ordered haupia pudding for dessert, even though she’d have to work off all that coconut milk tomorrow. Becky and Donnie shared Keoki coffees and nuzzled each other. The jukebox had gone from a ballad by the Cazimero Brothers to a Willie Nelson love song.

  It was time to hit the road; this romantic stuff was making her lonely. She thought about Hamlin’s legs in his running shorts and how he had seen the police cars at her cottage and dropped by to see if she was okay. It seemed like a long time ago, now.

  Storm excused herself and went to the women’s room. She passed down the narrow hallway lined with a couple of pay phones. A lean, muscled fellow let his eyes run down her body, then turned his back to her and cradled the mouthpiece in one hand. He wore low-slung, baggy jeans. She could see a hint of the crack in his bottom. Ten years ago, she might have enjoyed his flirtatiousness, but tonight she kept her eyes straight ahead, thinking that she’d rather anticipate someone’s unclothed physique than see it slouching in a bar.

  When she returned, Becky and Donnie were nearly sitting in each other’s laps. It was definitely time to go. Storm gave Becky a hug and told her to call when she was on O’ahu.

  Storm started her rental car, a metallic blue tin can with an engine. At least it didn’t have any holes in the floor, which is more than she could say for her own car. It also didn’t have cockroaches that dove for cover when the interior lights went on, which wasn’t bad for a Hawai’i rental car. The air conditioner and defroster appeared to work well, too, for which she was grateful. Rain had begun to fall and the night was as dank and murky as the inside of a just-swilled Budweiser bottle.

  Storm hadn’t driven Highway 19 along the northern coast of the Big Island for several years. Laupahoehoe, Pa’auilo, Honoka’a: all were scenic post office crossroads with the majority of their inhabitants on welfare since the sugar refineries had closed. Big Island people were rich in spirit and culture, but hurting economically.

  Headlights glimmered about a half-mile behind her. Though it was nice not to feel alone on the highway, it would probably be safer to maintain her distance from the driver behind if he’d been drinking with his friends. This road, with its blind hairpin turns and narrow viaducts, was known for deadly accidents. Most of them involved people who had been drinking.

  Storm wished it were day, or at least a moonlit night. She would be able to see the depth of the chasms she crossed and the ubiquitous waterfalls that crashed into the streams hundreds of feet below her. Now, the only way she could tell that she was on a bridge was by the glowing guardrail and the impenetrable void beyond the scope of her headlights.

  The lights of the car behind her flashed in the rearview mirror. Storm gave her own car a bit more gas; the driver had gained on her while she’d been peering into the dark and slowing down on the muddy curves. She was almost to a straight part of the road, though by the solid double yellow line and the vanishing guardrail, she knew it wouldn’t last long.

  The driver behind crept up steadily. Storm slowed down. Maybe the idiot would just go around her.

  He gained ground. Soon he was just a few feet behind her, his lights blaring into her rear window. The car seemed larger than hers, some kind of full-size, older sedan. She squinted. There was no way she could see its color, let alone the driver. Storm reached up and flicked the rearview mirror to the night setting. Better in terms of glare, but she still couldn’t see into the car. She waved her hand in a drop-back motion.

  The jerk. Hurrying on a road like this doesn’t get you there faster. It gets you dead. Storm steered into a curve marked only by the sinuous path of the double yellow line and the flash of guardrail reflectors on her right. The reflectors disappeared to the left in a sharp curve, then flickered through the mist.

  The rain fell harder. Storm slowed to a crawl. The driver behind flashed his high beams directly into her car.

  Storm drew in a sharp breath. His bumper was mere inches from hers. This was not only stupid and dangerous, it was pissing her off. Storm reached for her cell phone, which was in her purse. It would take the cops a half hour to reach her, but dialing 911 would make her feel better. And maybe seeing the phone at her ear would make this moron back off. At the same time, she rolled down her window and yelled into the night, “Pass me, asshole!”

  His bumper thumped hers. At first she couldn’t believe it; she thought she’d driven over a rock in the road.

  He bumped her again, hard enough to jolt her car toward the edge of the narrow road.

  “Jesus,” Storm whispered. She dropped the phone onto the seat. With cold fingers, she grabbed the steering wheel with both hands. Slowly, she lowered her foot on the accelerator.

  Her own headlights revealed only a few feet of slick black pavement ahead, but she couldn’t help glancing into the rearview mirror for a glimpse of the car behind. His bright headlights were not weaving, as she expected a drunk’s would. Their brightness flooded her car with the intensity of a searchlight. She could barely see the road ahead.

  She sped up. The tailing car sped up, too. Storm went faster; the car came within inches of her bumper, then fell back a foot or two. For a second, she reached out with one hand for the phone, which had moved across the seat toward the passenger side door.

  A low silver guardrail glinted ahead at a right angle to her path. The road veered sharply to the left, making another hairpin turn over a chasm. Storm could hear her own tires wail on the pavement. She seized the steering wheel and struggled to ease it into the turn. The rear wheels slid toward the guardrail and she clenched her teeth and prayed. Her foot lifted instinctively from the gas pedal and she felt the car respond to her control. She let go of a pent-up breath.

  The pursuer’s engine raced toward her. Oh, God, I can’t take another hit, she thought. The guardrail’s a foot from my outside fender.

  The car butted her bumper. Storm’s body jerked forward against the restraint of the seat belt.

  Her rental compact hopped ahead, its wheels out of contact with the road. The phone fell with a tiny thunk into the space between the seat and the passenger door. “No!” she screamed, her voice thin and lonely.

  Afraid to slow down and too petrified to speed up, she drew close to the sharp turn on the other side of the gorge. Her hands clenched the steering wheel like a lifeline on a sinking ship. Cold sweat trickled down her torso and seeped from her palms. Her breath rattled in her throat.

  The little car gripped the road again and Storm whimpered with relief. The road straightened for a hundred yards, then the double yellow line veered right. Another bottomless abyss loomed beyond the scope of her headlights like a black wall filled with the confetti of falling raindrops.

  The bright lights behind filled her car as the big sedan shot toward her. With a moa
n of terror, she jammed her foot onto the accelerator and prayed that the curve ahead was a gentle one. She was too afraid to breathe. Her sweating hands slipped on the steering wheel.

  She gained a car’s length on the sedan and sped toward the turn. The road glistened; mud blurred the yellow lines. Her windshield wipers batted ineffectually at the water streaming across her vision. She couldn’t see more than five feet in front of the car’s hood. She had to slow down.

  Storm tapped the brakes. Once, then again, as she followed the weak flicker of the guardrail reflectors around a steep curve. Her own headlights bounced back to her from the falling rain, unable to penetrate the black night. When the sedan slammed her, Storm’s head whipped forward. Instinctively, her foot played the brake pedal despite the confusion of all her senses. Brakes squealed, and she couldn’t tell if they were hers or those of the car on her tail.

  Storm gasped with terror and stomped on the accelerator. With a shudder that carried through the car, the little car’s tires screamed on the muddy road. Her hands clutched the steering wheel like a hawk’s talons on its prey. The car fishtailed toward the cliff. Storm strained at the steering wheel, willing the car toward the yellow line, away from inky oblivion.

  Behind her, the big sedan sped up, then rammed her again. Closer to the rail at that moment than Storm, he grazed the outside corner of her bumper. Pushed by the mass of the pursuing vehicle, Storm hurtled across the lane for oncoming traffic, fighting now to keep her car from smashing into the wall of glistening rock on the other side of the road.

  She overcompensated and skidded back across the road into the path of the sedan. His engine roared, and then his car crashed into her left rear fender.

  Storm lost control. For a moment, time slowed while she cranked the wheel and stood on the brake. Her tires howled and the car pounded the guardrail, then ricocheted and spun. Storm screamed.

  The sound of tortured rubber and the snarl of the sedan’s engine sped toward her.

  She leaned into the car door with every fiber of her body and mind, trying to force the wheel away from the cliff. Her car had spun to face the other car, which careened across the road in front of her. Storm punched the accelerator so that her car hopped closer to the cliff in a last-ditch effort to avoid a head-on collision. Two inches from the vertical wall, she swerved into the oncoming lane, then overcorrected in a skid that rammed her front fender into the sedan’s rear quarter panel.

  The sedan slammed into the bent guardrail. The rail had held against impact once, but the second time and the bigger car were too much. The metal tore with a shriek that shredded the fabric of night. Then all was quiet. Silence and blackness closed over the road.

  Storm let her car crawl to a stop. She turned off the key and sat with the car straddling the yellow lines, unable to move from the middle of the road, gasping softly while her headlights pointed two feeble beams out over the ocean.

  It was a while before she heard the surf beating the cliffs below. A sliver of moon peeked through a gap in the clouds. Rolling waves glinted faintly out at sea.

  The rain had stopped and the night was silent but for the sound of her own ragged breathing. If the broken edges of the guardrail hadn’t swayed gently against the night sky, she would have wondered if she’d lost her mind.

  Terrified of the edge of the cliff, Storm’s eyes strained into the blackness beyond the guardrail. She put on the emergency brake as hard as it would go and forced herself to get out of the car. One step at a time on quivering legs, she tiptoed toward the gaping hole in the rail. Nothing was beyond; no little ledge with a branch like in the movies. Clouds covered the moon again. She could see no further than a few feet below her, a view that was as unfathomable as the depths of space.

  Chapter 15

  Storm’s hands shook so that she could hardly turn the key in the ignition. Tears ran down her face and the reflectors between the yellow lines looked like stars wavering before her. Trembling, she crawled along for an undetermined length of time before she realized that she was lucky her car still ran. When she noticed philodendrons the size of her living room bordering both sides of the road, her mind clicked into a higher gear. She saw a few lights glittering in the distance and sped up to twenty miles per hour.

  Good, Laupahoehoe, a crossroads big enough to pull safely off the road. There it was, a Laundromat, post office, and general store. The store and post office were closed up tightly; one person sat in the Laundromat, spellbound by a supermarket tabloid. Storm rolled to a stop in the gravel parking lot.

  She knew her phone was someplace in the bottom of the car. Lying on the seat to feel around on the floor, she felt like curling up in a ball and staying there. The shakes began to roll through her again. When her fingertips touched the rounded, friendly shape of the phone nestled under the passenger seat, Storm moaned with relief.

  Her hands trembled so badly that she could barely punch the numbers, but she got through to 911 and reported the accident. She told the dispatcher that she was uninjured and where she could be reached, then hung up.

  Then she sat for a moment and stared, unthinking, into the warm glow of the Laundromat. Someone had died on that lonely dark road, the second person in a week with whom Storm had had contact.

  The ante had been raised. Surely Hamasaki had been murdered. And whoever was after her thought that Hamasaki had chronicled his concerns, knew that an attorney with Hamasaki’s experience and connections would build a case before striking. She, in this person’s view, knew what it was. And it had to be big enough to commit murder. She doubted that poor Tom Sakai’s case was sufficient. Was it Hamasaki’s meeting with S.O.? So what? That only led back to Tom Sakai.

  Storm looked around the dark, empty parking lot. The only noise was from the toads belching mournfully in the tall foliage. She searched the briefcase again, but aside from a couple of pens and laundry receipts, the only files were Ray Tam’s and Tom Sakai’s.

  She sniffled. The back of her hand wasn’t adequate for her runny nose. Storm turned and rose on her knees to reach into the back seat for her duffel. When she got it in her lap, she flicked on the overhead light and dug for a wad of tissues. Instead, she pulled out a crumpled sheet of typing paper that she had jammed inside.

  Lorraine’s list. Storm cleared her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt and studied Lorraine’s neat script. Even if the list had precipitated the car chase, it hadn’t caused the earlier robberies.

  Lorraine had written Friday at the top of the page, and the first name under it was Mrs. Hamasaki. She’d placed question marks next to the times, but Aunt Bitsy had called twice, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. For the morning call, Lorraine had written 9:30. That must have been the one when she and Hamasaki had argued.

  Lorraine had noted a half dozen or so other people, too. Some of the names were familiar: O‘Toole, Meredith Wo (HKC, Canningham (DCC, and some clients familiar to Storm from working on Hamasaki’s cases with him. He had a meeting with Wang, which was fairly common.

  Nothing struck Storm as unusual, though she didn’t understand the meaning of the letters following Wo’s and Cunningham’s names.

  Sherwood Overton wasn’t on the list. If Storm assumed that Overton was the late meeting, then the call from O’Toole might be significant. She figured that Hamasaki hadn’t given Tom Sakai’s case to Meredith Wo because he couldn’t yet reveal that O’Toole had been to see him. So how had Wo known that a cancer patient had visited Hamasaki? Then again, Lorraine knew it, too, so perhaps information had leaked inside the office.

  Storm was going to have to make some leaps of faith. Unimed, the HMO, was a common link between several of the most powerful people on Lorraine’s list. It was a good place to start digging for information.

  She flicked off the overhead light and listened carefully to the simple, reassuring noises of the night. Aunt Maile and Uncle Keone would be starting to worry about her. Suddenly impatient, Storm
looked up the empty, dark highway, started the engine, and skidded from the gravel onto the road. It wasn’t far to their home. Why wait any longer for the police in this lonely place? She could call them again later.

  The rest of the trip was uneventful, though Storm sped past while visually scouring any dark turnouts along the highway. When she made the left turn to head up the slopes of Mauna Kea to Pa’auilo, she paused at the lonely intersection and peered into the night behind her car. The dark was impenetrable; mountain mists had descended from the cooler heights to stifle sounds and veil all but the nearest lights. Storm would never be able to spot a tail if she had one; she’d have to trust the menehane to protect her from here to Aunt Maile’s and Uncle Keone’s house.

  She headed up the half-paved, half-graveled road. Old stands of eucalyptus and koa were the same, but the potholes had multiplied. When she passed the post office and general store, she had two more miles to go. Living room lights of houses perched near the roads endowed the route with the ephemeral characteristics of Brigadoon; Storm could imagine the elves in the clearings.

  The people who lived in these woods vowed that certain areas were kapa, or forbidden. As a child, even Storm had seen fireballs, a signal that the night-marchers approached, and smelled the sweet warning aroma of gardenias and pikake. Though the diaphanous lights were most likely the result of subterranean methane, the ghosts of Hawaiian warriors patrolling the slopes of the volcano were a myth that even modern folk hesitated to challenge. Too many old-timers told stories about members of their families and the marchers. Most people who had lived on the mountain for more than a generation wouldn’t think of doubting the legends.

  Storm’s eyes scanned the sides of the rutted road, opaque past the arc of her headlights on the stout tree trunks. Despite the chilly mist, she rolled down her window and took a deep breath of the eucalyptus-scented air. Sometimes the trade winds brought a whiff of sulfur from the live volcano on the other side of the mountain, but not tonight. She turned onto a drive barely marked by a beat-up blue mailbox perched in the same old cockeyed position on its PVC pipe. That was to keep the newspaper from getting wet; Storm doubted that mail delivery had started in the past few years. In fact, most people relied on their trips to the post office. It was how they kept up with local news.