The Burning Island Read online

  I pick up one of Lise’s stones, a polished black sphere that looks like onyx or obsidian. Micky would like this piece. I roll the ball around my palm, trying to feel the girl who once owned it, the girl in the hammock with the long hair.

  I feel nothing. Only darkness. Only cold.

  “I thought I might find you here.”

  Startled by Sue’s voice, I drop the black sphere. It falls to the floor with a loud thunk and then rolls under Lise’s bed. Internally cursing, I turn to face Sue, who sits just outside the doorway wearing an enigmatic expression that rivals the Mona Lisa’s.

  “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to snoop, I—”

  “Of course you meant to snoop.” She cuts me off before I can embarrass myself with an implausible excuse. “You think I don’t know why you’re here?”

  “Wh-what?” I blink. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not as trusting as my husband. I know what you’re after.” She wheels a little farther into the room, blocking my exit. “Missing children. That’s your specialty, isn’t it? That’s why you chose Victor.”

  I wish that I could melt into the floor. “Sue. It wasn’t like that.”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence.” Sue speaks with crisp displeasure. “You flattered my husband with false promises of some little article, wormed your way into our home, and now here you are, going after the thing you really want. I’ve been watching you all night, wondering how you’d come at it, but this? You’re a novice.”

  I can’t argue with that. “I really am writing about your husband,” I say meekly. “I wasn’t lying. What happened is, my editor, he—”

  “Save it. I don’t want to hear a story.”

  I stare at my feet, ears burning.

  “I have just one question, one question for you to answer, and we’ll forget about the rest of it.” Sue leans forward in her chair. “Can you find her? Can you find my daughter?”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE KITCHEN, Sue and I work side by side, washing and drying dishes. I scrub barbecue sauce from plates that she then wipes clean with a dish towel. The task is mostly for show, an activity that explains our absence to Rae and Victor, but I’m glad to have something to do with my hands. Our busyness forms a barrier between us that makes it easier to speak.

  “I have to say, your CV is a bit of puzzle,” Sue says. “Outdoor Adventures, a true crime book, and then your work for that awful woman’s magazine . . .”

  “Sophisticate.”

  She takes a wet dish from me. “You’re all over the map as a journalist.”

  “I like to think of that as versatility.”

  She snorts. “I imagine you do. And now you have a metaphysical bent, it seems.”

  I reach for another plate and attack it with my sponge. The woman is getting under my skin. “Finding that boy in the desert had nothing to do with my career,” I tell her. “I don’t know where you get your information, but I’ve never claimed to be a psychic.”

  “Good. I’d avoid that word, if I were you.” She glances at me. “It’s a loaded one in our home. I can’t even count all the fights Victor and Lise had.”

  I stop scrubbing. “Fights about psychics?”

  “Well, Marvel, mainly. Victor wanted Lise to stay away from Marvel Andrada. She’s a crazy old woman with a business near the school.”

  “Lise spent time with her?” That would explain the tarot cards and crystals in her room.

  “Too much time.” Sue nods. “The woman is a swindler. Marvel had my daughter ready to drop out of school and open some little restaurant. It was ridiculous, and Victor told them so. We were not about to see our child throw away her future on the advice of some charlatan.” She places her dish on the counter behind us and waits for me to finish with another. “For the record, I don’t believe in fortune-tellers, either.”

  “If you think I’m full of crap, why are you asking me for help?”

  “You get results,” she says. “Three children are alive because of you, that’s what the news reports say.” She points a finger at me. “I still don’t believe you have magical powers. But your methods are irrelevant. I just want to know about Lise. I want to know what happened.”

  “I don’t know what I can do for you, Sue. I’m only here for a week.” I put down the sponge and hand her the final dish. “Even if I found some kind of answer . . . it might not be the answer you’re looking for. It could be bad. She could be—”

  “Dead?” The word falls hard from her lips, and I can see the woman bracing herself against its impact. “I think she is.” Sue wraps her soggy towel around the dish, refusing to meet my eyes. “They haven’t found her yet. Maybe they never will. But I know my daughter. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “Then you think Victor’s wrong about her coming back.”

  “Of course Victor’s wrong. He doesn’t live in reality, haven’t you realized that by now? Anything difficult or ugly—he ignores it. Carries on like nothing’s wrong.” Sue can no longer suppress the edge in her voice. “Let me tell you about my husband. Lise had been missing two weeks, the police were calling us in, rumors were flying around town about Lise’s boyfriend—I thought I’d lose my mind. What does Victor go and do? The Ironman triathlon, just like he’d been planning. And he places!” She’s caught somewhere between fury and admiration for this feat. “Nothing gets in his way. He believes what he wants to believe. And what he wants to believe is that our daughter ran away.”

  “She’s sixteen. Isn’t that a possibility?”

  Sue dismisses that out of hand. “Not for Lise. Jocelyn, maybe, she’s a planner. But not Lise. She’d never make it this long on her own.” Her hands curl into fists. “My daughter’s dead. I just want to know why.”

  “Closure,” I murmur, trying to be sympathetic, but the word seems to leave a bad taste in Sue’s mouth.

  “Closure?” she repeats with an incredulous laugh. “Damned if I know what that is.” She runs a hand down one of her pale, bony legs. “In my dreams, I can walk, you know. Run, climb, kick—all of it. Eight years in this chair, but in my mind, in my sleep, I’ve still got use of my legs.” She shakes her head. “There is no closure, no tidy endings. There’s what you have and what you wish you had and how you live with the distance between the two.”

  Before I can respond, Victor pops his head in from the patio. “Sue? Are you almost done washing up?”

  “We were just about to join you.” She wheels over to me and grasps my arm, pulls me in close. “Tomorrow evening. Five o’ clock.” Her voice is low. “Drive up to the UH-Hilo campus and ask for the Sciences and Technology Building. We can speak in my office. There are things I need to tell you.” With that, Sue pivots her chair neatly toward the lanai and resumes her role as hostess.

  I pull the plug from the sink and watch the soapy water drain, not sure what to make of the Nakagawas. There are too many secrets in this house.

  I’m dumping the sink sludge into the garbage when I hear something. The front door opening, footsteps on tile. A female voice. I glance over my shoulder and freeze.

  In the foyer, a teenage girl stands kicking off her shoes. Her gaze sweeps the home for signs of people. At the sight of me, some stranger in her home, she wrinkles her nose. One eyebrow arches upward.

  I know this face, this girl. It is the face that gazes out of every picture on the wall. It is the girl in the hammock, the one I dreamed of.

  Lise Nakagawa has returned.

  ten

  Lise?” Her name catches in my throat. Is she real? Am I having a vision, seeing a ghostly projection so vivid I can no longer separate the living from the dead?

  But the girl in front of me is very much of the flesh as she ushers her tall boyfriend inside and casts me a look of mild irritation. “I’m Jocelyn,” she says. “Who are you?”

 
I put my hand to my chest, try to laugh at my thumping heart. “Of course you are. I just . . . I didn’t realize you two were twins.”

  Identical twins. That explains Jocelyn’s apparent absence from the photographs, at least. All this time I thought I was surrounded by images of Lise, I’ve been looking at two different girls. Odd that they never appeared together, though.

  “I’m Charlotte Cates with Outdoor Adventures magazine. I’m writing an article about your dad.”

  “Cool.” Jocelyn almost pretends to care. “Well. Me and Kai are going to hang out in my room.” She grabs her boyfriend by the sleeve and moves to leave, but Victor ducks back into the house before she can make her getaway.

  “You’re home.” He rubs his chin. “It’s getting late. I hope your homework is done.”

  “All of it,” Jocelyn reports. “And I finished my history paper tonight, which isn’t even due until Friday.”

  “Good.” Victor eyes Kai, and I know he’s remembering his earlier conversation with Sue.

  Despite his Hawaiian-sounding name, Kai is the whitest of white boys. Brown hair, startling blue eyes, and, apart from a light dusting of freckles, incredibly pale skin. If he were my son, we’d be buying sunscreen in bulk at Costco. Caught in the middle of a father-daughter moment, Kai stares at the floor and rubs the back of his neck, a Noah-like gesture that makes me feel irrationally protective of him.

  Victor, meanwhile, squares his shoulders as if trying to imitate the Authoritative Dad in a fifties sitcom. “Where did you two go tonight?”

  “I had swim practice after school and then we just hung around the library and did homework,” Jocelyn tells him patiently. “It was not, like, a big, exciting evening.”

  “Did you have dinner?”

  “At the cafeteria. Ember let us use her meal card.”

  Ember? I think. Do the GMO-hating parents of San Francisco now send their children to private schools on the Big Island?

  “And how was the swim meet?” Victor has no intention of letting his daughter disappear with her boyfriend.

  “It was just practice, not a meet, Dad, and it was fine. The meet’s on Thursday, remember? Four o’ clock. You said you’d be there.”

  “Oh. Yes.” His facial tic makes a brief appearance. “You know it’s a school night, Jocelyn. Kai should get back home.”

  Kai glances at Victor and then his girlfriend, trying to figure out if he’s been officially kicked out.

  “Don’t make him go,” Jocelyn pleads. “His mom is there with Brayden, and they are so gross together.” When Victor seems unmoved, she tries another tack. “Come on, Dad. You’re always telling me to make good choices and hang with good people. Shouldn’t that apply to Kai as well? He’s trying to make a good choice. Brayden’s a drug dealer. Do you really want Kai spending time with drug dealers?”

  “He sells weed, Joss,” Kai says, half under his breath. “Not heroin.”

  Victor scratches his head, already exhausted. “It’s almost nine o’clock, and we’ve got company tonight,” he says. “You two can catch up at school tomorrow.”

  “No problem, Mr. N.,” Kai says, already bolting. “See ya, Joss.”

  His departure does nothing to quell Jocelyn’s resistance. This girl may have lost the battle, but she’s not done waging war.

  “Dad.” Her voice turns calm and rational. She knows her father, knows how best to sway him. “Can we talk about this, please? I think you’ve been making some knee-jerk decisions about Kai without considering all the evidence.”

  Sensing this is not an issue that will be quickly resolved, I slip out onto the lanai and extract Rae. By the time we retrieve our shoes and make it to the door, Jocelyn has begun to argue her case in numbered points. Victor stands transfixed as she runs through the list of reasons her separation from Kai constitutes a grave injustice.

  Her arguments are threefold. One, despite his deadbeat mother, Kai is struggling to be an upstanding citizen and needs the support of families like the Nakagawas. Two, Jocelyn has proven through a long history of academic success and personal integrity that she won’t allow her relationship with Kai to negatively impact her schooling. Three, her father’s concerns stem from issues he’s had with her sister and have no bearing on how she, Jocelyn, has consistently behaved.

  Sue wheels inside during the third point and quickly shuts her daughter down. “This is not a debate,” she says. “When your father tells your boyfriend to go home, then he goes home. No discussion required. Now go to your room. I don’t like how you’re behaving around our guests.”

  Jocelyn’s mouth forms a thin line of fury, and for a few seconds I think all hell will break loose. But the girl knows better than to go toe-to-toe with her mother, at least in front of Rae and me. Without a word, she marches off to her bedroom, leaving the four adults to make our awkward good-byes.

  “All that girl needs is a briefcase,” Rae remarks as we walk through the dark toward our car.

  “Right? Victor and Sue have their hands full.”

  “You know we’re next. Bad teenagers can happen to good people.”

  “Ugh. I know.”

  Rae and I exchange apprehensive glances, imagining the years to come, wondering how adolescent hormones will transform Zoey and Micky and Tasha into young women we can scarcely recognize, young women with bodies and minds largely beyond our influence, young women with unknowable thoughts and needs and desires.

  Young women who could, like Lise, disappear without a trace.

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, I see her again. The girl from the woods.

  His gaze slips over mine, pulling me along. A parade of images drifts by like a daydream. Watching her. Always watching. His thoughts are my thoughts, and that thought is, I wish.

  She sits on a park bench in the square, bent over a textbook, her mouth twisting upward in one corner when she’s thinking hard. I wish.

  She relaxes on a beach, digging her toes into the sand, surreptitiously adjusting her bikini top so that it falls evenly across her small breasts. I wish.

  She leans against a car, chatting with the young female driver through an open window, thumb hooked into the pocket of her ass-hugging short-shorts. I wish.

  She is everywhere. Her bare shoulder, her earlobe, that pale strip of torso when she stretches. Sometimes I’m close enough to touch her, but I can’t. I know I can’t. Those are the rules.

  Never mind the way her smile seems to invite it, the way her leg tilts open, almost imperceptibly, in my direction. I know the rules, of course I do, but in time I begin to wonder, So what if I break them? So what?

  And then the images change. She’s still on her park bench, still relaxing on a beach or leaning against a car, but I’m no longer thinking, I wish. Because I’ve made up my mind. Now I know, I will.

  I wake up in the dark of Koa House, my sheets damp with sweat. Released from his stare, I now feel sullied, his desire dark and viscous on my skin. I sit up in bed and turn on a light. Sift through my vision for something useful, something telling. Find nothing to identify this boy or man. I still don’t know whose gaze I’ve been inhabiting, and there are other questions now, just as burning.

  I thought some terrible fragment of the past had revealed itself in that first dream, was pointing me to Lise. But what if I’m not seeing the past at all? What if this scene has yet to come? What if the girl in the woods is still very much alive?

  She could be Jocelyn.

  tuesday

  eleven

  The day begins with a six a.m. text from Isaac, who still hasn’t figured out time zones or simply doesn’t care. Have a good meeting yesterday? Feeling inspired?

  I throw my phone across the bed and watch it bounce on the plush mattress. “Bastard. You aren’t getting a book from me.”

  I already regret this whole trip. They say
running away from your problems doesn’t solve them, but I tried anyway. Now here I am, more than two thousand miles from the nearest major landmass, living proof that you can’t escape yourself. Not only have I dragged Rae into my personal disaster, but I’ve left Sue Nakagawa clutching to the possibility that I might uncover something about her missing child. Could I have handled this any worse?

  I step onto the balcony and inhale the fresh air. It’s still Hawaiʻi, I remind myself. No reporters, no kids, and you’ve got plenty to get started on the Victor profile.

  The morning is cool and gray. I find myself glancing periodically at the woods, searching for some sign of the elusive Yoons. Rae is still asleep, her body amazingly resistant to jet lag. I hope she’ll understand if I spend much of my day at work, trying to spit out the basics of my article.

  From the patio below me, Thom and David’s voices float up. The couple who was supposed to arrive today has canceled their stay in the Paradise Suite with no advance notice; David intends to charge them full price. He and Thom run through the items they will need for breakfast, and after a brief debate about fruit, David tasks Thom with picking up a pineapple from the market.

  I lean over the balcony, seizing the chance to catch Thom alone. “Hey! Can I tag along?”

  Thom squints up at me. “Sure!” When he lifts a hand to his forehead, I can just make out the words on his T-shirt: Hyperbole is the best thing ever. “Can you be ready in five minutes?”

  I can and I am.

  Though Thom drives his little Yaris one-handed most of the way to the market, I don’t feel unsafe with him at the wheel. He seems to know every curve of the road, and he shares trivia about the town residents as we pass by.

  Enoch Keely is a Jehovah’s Witness. Keoni Carvalho and his wife breed rare exotic orchids. Marijo Sato’s childhood home in Kalapana was claimed by lava back in the eighties.

  That last fun fact gets my attention.

  “Is there any danger of volcanic activity here?” I ask.