Carol Clark - Burned

“Jason, can you stand it!” Carla laughed. “I’d love to meet whoever lives there.”

“Yeah, well I don’t think they want to meet you.” Jason held open the restaurant door for his fiancée. They stepped inside. The dark wood walls, large vases of tropical plants obviously cut from the lush gardens outside, and sweet cool air immediately soothed customers-not that many people in Hawaii needed soothing, but plenty of tourists who hadn’t yet unwound did. It was already late for lunch, and the restaurant was quiet. There were three people sitting at a corner table.

Carla’s happy-go-lucky mood quickly evaporated. “I knew it!” Carla whispered to Jason. “Look over there! They’re not eating at a friend’s house! Those two rotten ladies lied to us!”

Gert and Ev looked up from their seafood salads. Ev inhaled sharply when she saw the couple they had ditched at the airport. Gert turned to her and calmly put her hand on her sister’s. “I love this hotel. It’s charming, but there aren’t enough activities for our group.”

Ev looked blank, then smiled. They couldn’t have heard what we were talking about, she realized. They just walked in a second ago. “You’re absolutely right, Gert. We’ll never book any rooms here for our group. But they do make a mean seafood salad,” she exclaimed in a loud voice.

For a moment the young man at their table looked at them quizzically, but he had learned not to ask any questions. Boy oh boy would he be glad when this project was over.

W hen Regan hung up the phone with Jack, she once again looked quickly through the newsletters. There were ten of them, the last one with all the unflattering pictures and questionable captions published just two weeks ago. Regan couldn’t find anything that would make someone want to murder Dorinda Dawes. Of course some would argue that merely publishing bad pictures could be grounds for murder, especially lousy pictures of Hollywood stars. But there weren’t any stars in the newsletters. If they were staying at the hotel, they would have avoided the camera.

Regan looked again at the picture of Will and his wife, Kim. She was very pretty and had a dark tan, long, straight black hair that almost reached her waist, and large brown eyes. Regan wondered if she was Hawaiian. She also wondered if she had seen this photo yet. Probably not if she’s been away for several weeks. So Kim is coming back to her mother-in-law, an embarrassing photo in the newsletter from her husband’s place of employment, and a husband who’s afraid he may lose his job. Swell. Welcome home, honey.

Regan was anxious to talk to Will, but not while Jazzy was around. She picked up the Spirits in Paradise magazine, which she had only gotten a chance to glance at before lunch. Dorinda had profiled a guy named Boone Kettle, a cowboy from Montana who had moved to Hawaii a year ago. Regan turned to the article. A picture of fifty-two-year-old Boone, handsome and rugged and perched atop a horse, filled the page. He had a job leading horseback riding tours on a cattle ranch on the Big Island.

The piece was several pages long. It talked about how the winters in Montana had gotten on Boone’s nerves. He came to Hawaii on vacation and decided that this was where he wanted to live. It was tough, but he managed to get a job at a cattle ranch and was now celebrating his first anniversary in Hawaii. The worst thing about moving, he said, was leaving his horse. But his nephew brought the animal to live on his farm, and Boone planned to visit Misty at least once a year.

Regan dug out the interisland directory from the drawer of the night table and looked up the number of the ranch where Boone worked. She pulled out her cell phone and made the call, hoping she might catch him in. The girl who answered told Regan to hold on, that he had just gotten back from a ride. “Boooooone!” she screamed. “Booooooone! Phooooooonnnne!”

For a moment Regan held the phone away from her ear, afraid that if Boone didn’t hurry, the girl would scream again. Then she could hear the girl saying, “I have no idea who it is.”

“Aloha, Boone Kettle here,” he said, his voice sounding gruff.

Regan considered how incongruous it sounded for this Montana cowboy to say “aloha.” She brushed that thought aside. “Hello, Boone. My name is Regan Reilly, and I’m doing some work for the Waikiki Waters Resort where Dorinda Dawes worked writing their newsletter-”

“It’s such a dang shame about her,” Boone interrupted. “I couldn’t believe it when I read the story in the paper. But I do think she had a thirst for danger. She was a bronco that needed to be broken.”

“What do you mean?” Regan asked.

“Who did you say you are?” Boone inquired.

“Regan Reilly. I’m a private investigator working for the manager of the Waikiki Waters Resort. I wanted to know if maybe she talked to you about what was going on in her life-”

“I get it. You mean if there was anything she said that would indicate someone might want to off her.”

“Something like that. What makes you think she had a thirst for danger?”

“She told me she felt a little frustrated. When she was hired by the manager, she thought it was to liven things up at the Waikiki Waters. But as it turned out, if you’re writing a newsletter about a hotel and their guests, everything in it has to be hunky-dory. The hotel doesn’t want gossipy things written about it, and the guests don’t want ‘spicy’ tidbits written about them. So Dorinda’s hands were tied, and she was a little bored. She was even a little worried that they might not want to continue the newsletter when her contract was up. I know she was worried about making enough money to live in Oahu. She said she was going to be writing one profile a month for the magazine but was intent on starting her own gossip sheet-something with the word ‘Oahu’ in the title. Truth be told, she hinted that she wanted to get into something a little juicier.”

“Juicier?” Regan prodded.

“Something with a little more bite. She wanted to find out what’s going on behind all the fancy hotels and the private homes. She felt the newsletters were puff pieces. The profile she did of me was good. Did you read it?”

“Yes. It was great.”

“Yup. Good picture, huh?”

“Very good picture, yes. Boone, did you spend much time with Dorinda?”

“She came up here three times. I took her out on a horseback ride. She was a pistol. Whew-ee! She wanted me to take her on the most difficult trails. I obliged. We had fun and then went to dinner.”

“What did she talk about at dinner?”

“You know, I think she was lonely because she never stopped talking about herself. Maybe that’s because we’d been talking about me all day. She told me a little bit about her life back in New York. Oh, I remember one thing she talked about that might be of interest. She said that she was trying to decide who would be the subject of her next profile, and there was a guy who kept bugging her to write about him but she didn’t want to.”

“What did he do?”

“Something with Hawaiian clothing.”

“What about Hawaiian clothing?” Regan asked quickly.

“He was designing them or something. But Dorinda felt he was too much of a capitalist. He had a lot of money, so it wasn’t like he had to succeed at a second career in Hawaii. He never has to work again if he doesn’t want to. So she didn’t think he was a good candidate for the Spirits in Paradise. Neither did the editor of the magazine. But they liked old Boone!”

Regan couldn’t believe it. Could Boone be talking about Jazzy’s boss?

“It sounds like Dorinda opened up to you,” Regan commented.

“I’m a good listener. I guess it’s from all those years sitting around the campfire.”