Lana'i of the Tiger (The Islands of Aloha Mystery Series)

Copyright
© 2012 JoAnn Bassett

All
rights reserved.

No
part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

First
published by JoAnn Bassett

Green
Valley, AZ 85614

http://www.joannbassett.com

This
book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this book are
purely fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is
coincidental. Further, this story takes place on the island of Lana’i, Hawaii,
which was recently purchased by a new owner. The author assumes many changes
will occur on the island as a result of the new ownership. Hopefully, they will
all be changes for the good.

First
distributed in the United States of America

Also
by JoAnn Bassett:

“THE
ISLANDS OF ALOHA MYSTERY SERIES”

Maui
Widow Waltz

Livin’
Lahaina Loca

MAI
TAI BUTTERFLY

Discover
the latest titles by JoAnn Bassett at

http://www.joannbassett.com

CHAPTER
1

Living on the dole isn’t all
it’s cracked up to be. Neither is living on the lam. I ought to know, since I
was doing both after I stuck my beak in some pretty deep
kukae
back home
on Maui. I got sucked into a witness protection program and banished from the
island because I knew too much. Unlike the lepers, I didn’t get sent to
Moloka’i, but darn close—the next island over, Lana’i. So there I was, just hanging
out, waiting for the government to finish its undercover sting on a nasty Mexican
drug cartel and round up the usual suspects.

The feds assured me if I kept
out of sight while they put their case together for a grand jury they’d return
me, safe and sound, after I’d testified. If I didn’t go along with the program,
then I was on my own.

I’m a big fan of
self-preservation, and the word on the street was the cartel had put a price on
my head. The insulting part was my scalp price was pitifully low—a kilo of Maui
Wowee. The guy I’d fingered was ground floor on the proverbial totem pole so my
testimony wasn’t going to be bringing much to the party. Wanting me dead was
probably more about the cartel sending a message to other potential snitches
than worrying about what I’d say. But times were tough. There were plenty of
low-lifes on Maui who’d snuff their own grandma for a key of weed. So after
about two minutes of pondering, it was pretty much a no-brainer for me to take
the feds up on their offer.

Lana’i is only eight miles away
from Maui, but it’s light years away from normal. First of all, everything’s
different. There are hardly any people, only thirty miles of paved road, and
one very rich guy owns the whole darn island—literally. The place even
smells
different. Up in Lana’i City, they’ve got more pine trees than palm trees.
That’s because it’s about sixteen hundred feet above sea level and bone dry.
I’d been sent there in mid-November. With Christmas just around the corner, the
pines and cool misty air gave the place a kind of New England holiday charm. In
Dole Park they’d strung hundreds of lights on a humongous pine to make it look
like a giant Christmas tree. But I wasn’t having any of it. I didn’t want
Christmas in Vermont, I wanted to be home.

The feds didn’t expect me to do
much while I waited. I was supposed to just sit around and keep my head down.
This made the time tick away at a distressingly slow pace. Back home I’m a
wedding planner, and Christmas is my peak season. You’d be amazed how many
brides think they’ll save money by rolling the ceremony and honeymoon into one.
Truth is, nothing comes cheap in Hawaii. My standard fifteen-percent commission
had allowed me to live quite comfortably as long as I had weddings on my
calendar.

But my day planner was blank.
I’d pawned off my upcoming clients to competitors—a painful experience—and left
under cover of darkness. My old life was in a kind of suspended animation. It
was like those dead rich guys who have their heads frozen assuming one day
somebody will thaw them out and stick ‘em on a new body. My house in
Hali’imaile was being cared for by my roommate and my shop in Lahaina was
shuttered, awaiting my return. To squelch curiosity about my whereabouts, my
contact for the Witness Security Program, or WITSEC as the feds call it, had
concocted a rumor that I was busy doing a hush-hush wedding for a reclusive
zillionaire in Las Vegas. Busy? Hardly. 

But I
was
pre-occupied. I
had to learn a bunch of stuff in short order. Like a new address, a new name,
and a new life story. I’d hoped I’d be allowed to invent my own story. You
know, something sexy like I’d come to Lana’i to write my next best-selling
vampire novel, or I was the wife of a Saudi prince and I’d had to flee my
palace in Riyadh to avoid being stoned to death after being picked up driving
the Bentley in the desert.

But no, the sorry tale I’d been
given was simply I was a new military widow and I’d come to Lana’i to rest and
recover from the shock. That sort of jived with the frugal lifestyle the feds
had cobbled together for me, and it allowed me to lurk around not saying much,
since I was in mourning.

My name on Maui is Pali Moon.
Okay, that’s not my so-called ‘real’ name—not the name on my birth
certificate—but it’s the name everyone knows me by over there. For my time on
Lana’i, the feds gave me a
haole
name to go along with my
haole
looks: blondish brown hair, hazel eyes and tending toward wiry body-type. My
new name is Penny Morton. For some goofy reason they thought keeping my
initials the same would help me remember it. And Penny kind of rhymes with
Pali, so I guess it works. But the Morton part made me think of salt. And salt
made me think of earth, and thinking of earth made me think of the Hawaiian
word for land, ‘
aina
.  That’s what I am, a
kama’aina,
a
native-born Hawaiian. And like most Hawaiians, I’m a homebody. So although
Lana’i was home to some really nice folks, it was in no way home to me.

On that Tuesday three weeks
before Christmas the phone in my rented house began to ring. Calls I got were
usually a wrong number, or somebody butt-dialing their cell phone, but I lunged
across the living room to answer it. Why not? It was the biggest event of my
day.

“How’s it going, Penny?” It was
Detective Glen Wong of the Maui County Sheriff’s Department. He was my WITSEC
contact. “Just thought I’d check in and see how you’re doing.”

I envisioned him drawing a line
through an item on his to-do list that read,
Check in with PM.

“I don’t know how much more of
this I can take,” I said. “I’ve been here more than three weeks now. How’s it
going with the grand jury?”

“You know this isn’t a secure
line,” he said. “Are you asking me when we’re going to get those tickets to
Disney World?”

“Yeah, whatever.” ‘Disney World’
was our code for my testimony before the grand jury on the mainland. I didn’t
think I had enough information about the cartel to make the trip worthwhile,
but Wong had convinced the feds I did. That was why they’d granted me the
all-expenses-paid island getaway. 

“Well, your cousins tell me it’s
best to wait until after the holidays,” Wong said. “They say it gets crowded
during school breaks. We’ll probably be looking at going sometime after the
first of the year.”

“Tell my
cousins
to hurry
it up. I’m tired of waiting. I can’t imagine sitting here twiddling my thumbs
until January. I want to see Minnie and Mickey
now
.”

There was a pause. “Your cousins
know best, you know. It’s their party.”

“Look, I seriously can’t take
this waiting around anymore. It’s bad enough I don’t have anything to do. But I
don’t know anyone here. I’m starting to talk to the walls. And, worse, they’re
starting to talk back.”

“That’s your own fault, Penny.”

I figured his next line would be
a snarky comment about how I’d brought this on myself by snooping in police
business and pissing off a homicidal drug lord, but he surprised me.

“You ought to get out more,
maybe find a job. I hear they’re hiring seasonal workers at the hotels over
there. I can send you a copy of your résumé if you’d like.”

When he said ‘send’ he didn’t
mean email. I wasn’t allowed to have a computer. Wong and I did everything the
old fashioned way, by snail mail, cash, and government hand-outs.

“You have a copy of my résumé?”

“Absolutely, Penny. And it shows
nobody can tidy up a hotel room better’n you.”

“And I speak English.”

“Yeah, that too. Go talk to
them. With your credentials, you’re as good as hired.”

***

On Friday, with fake résumé in
hand, I took the shuttle bus up to the Four Seasons Lodge at Koele. It’s only a
few blocks up the road from Lana’i City, but it’s about as far up the food
chain as you can get. The whole place is done up in what they refer to as
Hawaiian Plantation-style, but it looked more English manor-house than
pineapple farm worker to me. The lobby was spacious and polished, like no one
up there ever did a lick of work in their life. I half-expected the dude at the
front desk to send me packing when I showed up in the only half-decent outfit
I’d brought with me, a pair of baggy off-white polyester pants and a
garage-sale tunic. But he simply smiled and directed me down the hall to the
housekeeping supervisor’s office.

“Hello, Miss Morton,” said the
woman behind the messy desk. She stood to shake my hand, then sat back down and
scooped a pile of papers to one side so she could fold her hands in front of
her. The badge on her uniform identified her as
Kate
, but that name
seemed as fake as Penny Morton. The woman was clearly Southeast Asian, probably
Filipino or Thai. Hard to believe her parents had dubbed her Kate or even
Katherine at birth.

“Thank you for meeting with me,”
I said reaching across the desk to shake her hand. Since I’d been self-employed
for going on three years I was a little rusty on interview etiquette, but she
smiled and gestured for me to sit down so I guessed I was doing okay.

“May I see your résumé?” she
said. “I usually get them in advance, by email.” She shot me a look that made
me squirm as I handed over the single sheet of paper.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t send it to
you earlier. I’m afraid I don’t have a computer.”

“No computer? On Lana’i? How do
you manage?”

Good question. “Well, I expect
I’ll be getting one soon. I just moved here.”

She sat back and took a couple
of minutes to peruse the résumé. I took the opportunity to check out her
office. The windowless room was tiny, about eight by ten. It was painted that
industrial shade of white called ‘eggshell,’ and the only furniture was her
desk and chair and the rather creaky wooden guest chair I was sitting on. The
wall behind her was papered with government-issued posters about worker’s
rights, minimum wage, equal opportunity, and what-not. They were printed in
both English and Spanish.

“It looks like you’ve had quite
a bit of experience in the hotel industry, Miss Morton.”

“Please call me Penny, and yes,
I’ve pretty much done everything.”

“But you’re applying for a
housekeeping position,” she said. “I’m surprised. You know it doesn’t pay as
well as working in the restaurant or in guest services.”

“Oh, that’s all right. You see,
I’m a recent widow, and lately it’s been hard for me to deal with people. I see
a honeymooning couple and I just…” I broke off, and tried out a little routine
I’d been practicing in the bathroom mirror. It involved blinking my eyes really
fast while I sniffed and tightly pursed my lips. At first it felt pretty
contrived, but after a little practice I’d gotten it down to where I hoped it
looked at least somewhat convincing.

She reached behind her, picked
up a tissue box and handed it to me. Snap! Looked like I might need to come up
with an Oscar speech after all.

“I’m so sorry to hear of your
loss,” she said. “You’re so young.”

“Yes, well, my husband was in
the military, so it wasn’t totally unexpected. But still, it’s a shock.”

“I can’t imagine,” she said, slowly
shaking her head. “So, do you have a shift you’d prefer? We’re hiring for both
check-out cleaners in the mornings and turn-down service at night. Some people
prefer coming in early and getting work out of the way so they can be home for
their….” She stopped short, as if realizing I might really start up the
boo-hooing if she mentioned husbands or kids. “…uh, so they can be home for
their afternoons.”