The Bone Field Debra Bokur (novels for beginners .txt) 📖

Walter saw any good reason to acknowledge it immediately. The fact that the leash’s Velcro collar hadn’t been secured around the boy’s ankle was odd, as the cost of surfboards made leashes a practical necessity for recovering one after a fall. If he was correct about his unofficial identification of the body as local surfer Kekipi Smith, he knew that the family included five children and that a good surfboard had likely been a luxury.

Something stirred in Walter, and his voice lost its edge of sternness. “Right, then,” he said. “Something here isn’t adding up.” He turned to Hara and nodded. “Good observation, Hara. Time for Detective Mhoe to get her tattooed-warrior ass over here. Let me have your cell phone. Mine’s over there on the beach somewhere. You can look for it while I’m talking.”

Hara handed over his phone and stepped toward the edge of land that fell away to the cove where the body had been found. Walter punched in his niece’s familiar number, beginning the climb up the steep path leading from the sea to the parking area above. She needed to see the body in the full context of its surroundings, before it was taken away, while the boy’s ‘uhane, or spirit, was still lingering in the place where he had died.

“And tape off this area,” Walter yelled after Hara’s retreating back. “We might have a crime scene on our hands.”

CHAPTER 2

Detective Kali Mhoe stretched her fingers down as far as possible, her lean, muscled legs wrapped around the thick lower branch of the old mango tree in her yard in the small village of Nu’u, near Hana. She could almost touch the ground with the tips of her middle fingers, where the ends of her long ebony hair mingled with the thick grass at the tree’s base. From her upside-down position, the horizon was reversed, and she watched as a bug labored through the green blades toward the edge of ocean-sky.

Kali had spent a lot of time in this tree when she was a child, dreaming of the day when she’d be tall enough to reach the ground, and being warned by her grandmother from the front porch that not only was tree climbing unladylike, but it was also a guarantee of broken bones. She smiled to herself. Her thirty-fifth birthday had just passed, and she’d yet to break anything.

Being outside, hanging from the tree, was far preferable to being indoors, sitting at the wooden kitchen table, which doubled as her desk. She’d been up for hours, and things were not progressing well with the presentation she’d been working on, which was to be given in conjunction with an adult night course the following spring at the University of Hawaii’s Maui College. Besides her detective status with the Maui Police Department, she held a degree in cultural anthropology and was a recognized specialist in the cultural and spiritual traditions of Hawaii—a unique insight and perspective that often proved useful in her role as a detective.

Her grandmother, the renowned author and historian Pualani Pali, had left her this house and, by extension, the mango tree. It was also Pualani who had identified Kali as her community’s next kahu, a spiritual leadership role traditionally handed down from grandparent to grandchild, which had been revealed to the older kahu by subtle signs that included Kali’s natural interest in plants, her rapport with animals, and her dreams and visions, which were often layered. Pualani had confirmed Kali as her family’s next kahu when she was five years old, after Kali had insisted that a sea turtle had warned her of a coming tsunami, which had indeed arrived soon after, with deadly flooding.

She pulled herself upright, grasping an upper branch, and dropped gracefully to the ground. The movement caused her dog, Hilo—the enormous offspring of a Weimaraner and a Great Dane—to raise his head briefly from his stretched-out position in a patch of sunshine.

The water beyond the lawn was tinged with grayish green. Bobbing gently on its surface was an old fishing boat badly in need of a new coat of paint. The name Gingerfish could just be made out along the length of the stern, and Kali felt a familiar sense of relief to see the boat still at anchor where she’d left it. Walter had purchased it from a friend moving to the mainland, and Kali had offered to let him keep it at the rickety dock at the edge of her property. Walter spent a great deal of his free time aboard in a comfortable deck chair, plucking away at a vintage ukulele, while she continued to point out the need to replace the aging anchor chain. So far, the only measurable progress was the amount of rust that had accumulated along its length.

The dog trotted beside her as she walked across the lawn to the cluster of papaya trees that separated her three-acre property from the neighbor’s yard. She reached for a ripe fruit, then twisted it slightly until it came loose in her hand. There was a hlau partially obscured by the papaya trees’ branches. The small shelter, with its roof of dried palm fronds, offered minimal protection to the unfinished canoe resting on sawhorses beneath it, caught forever in its half-carved form, unlikely ever to be completed.

Kali looked away from it, afraid of stirring up the memories it carried of her late fiancé, Mike Shirai. She took the papaya inside, placed it on the kitchen counter, then opened the refrigerator door and gazed idly inside. There was some rice and shrimp from yesterday’s dinner and a bowl of limp sliced pineapple that should have already been eaten.

The papaya, she decided, would have to do for breakfast. While coffee brewed, she cut open the fruit. The soft orange-hued interior was filled with dark seeds that ran the length of its center, and she scraped these from their nest. The juice trickled onto the counter as she