“Get back to work.” Donovan recognized that tone. He’d just lost Lani’s brother to whatever muse was whispering in his ear.
Nate’s only response was a vague murmured agreement as he added a small, still unnoticeable baby bump. Although he’d wanted to shout the news of his impending fatherhood from the rooftop to the world, or at least to their friends and families, he’d agreed to respect Tess’s desire to wait a few weeks before revealing her pregnancy.
He wondered what Donovan would say if he’d told him that he understood his problem, all too well. His writing had suffered while he’d been trying to not only convince Tess they were meant to be together but worrying about keeping her alive long enough for her to agree to marry him.
After yesterday’s test strip had come up with a pink plus, he was finding it more and more difficult to live with a mind swirling with horror.
“You have a contract,” he reminded himself as he returned his attention to the computer screen. “A deadline. Baby stuff to buy.” Which, having married friends, he knew was a lot of stuff. The crazy thing was that he was actually looking forward to it, but he’d rather surrender his left nut than attend a baby shower. Which he wouldn’t have to do, being a guy. Would he?
Putting that worry aside, he stuck on the noise-blocking earphones and was rewarded by the imagined sound of dogs baying eerily through a swirl of thick, icy Puget Sound fog.
He was back on track. Immensely gratified, after making a mental note to go online and order some of those books about what to do when you’re expecting, he began tapping away at the keys, leaving his best friend to handle his own romantic dilemma.
* * *
As the deserted beach caught the last moment of evening sun, Donovan Quinn opened one of the downloaded test books and went to work, determined to put Lani and her colorful but highly distracting family out of his mind.
He spent most of the night and the early part of the next morning poring over the sample interview questions. Unfortunately, his thoughts kept drifting around the corner to her beach house, and by the time Kenny Palomalo had delivered a decent, low-mileage Taurus with a full tank of gas and only minimal rusting and he left to meet with Lani’s friend, Donovan couldn’t remember a single thing he’d read.
The meeting, which took place over a diner breakfast of fried Spam, hash browns, and eggs, was uninformative and explained why the police chief hadn’t been interested in her story. All the signs pointed to the conclusion that this Ford guy was nothing more than a douche with itchy feet.
Having spent eight years drifting around the South Pacific, the nine months Taylor Young’s fiancé had spent on the island was the longest he’d settled anywhere. With marriage looming in the new year, he’d undoubtedly felt the noose of unwanted responsibility tightening around his neck and had taken off before he suddenly found himself buying furniture, making mortgage payments, and losing diving and surfing time to attending parent-teacher meetings and kids’ soccer games.
On the surface, that’s all the case amounted to: another woman growing a little wiser the hard way. But something had been nagging at the back of Donovan’s mind since Taylor had first arrived at the restaurant thirty minutes late, with that vague, obviously concocted reason for having been on Oahu he hadn’t bought when Lani had told him about it. She did not, he noted, name the so-called chocolate supplier she’d supposedly been meeting with.
After insisting that her fiancé wouldn’t have jilted her, she gave him a recent photograph of the guy and promised to let him know if she remembered anything he might have said that would shed some light on his disappearance. Outwardly, she was cooperative. She was also lying, Donovan concluded as he drove toward the library on the windward side of the island.
Over the years working for the Portland Police Bureau, he’d dealt with a great many liars, and he’d bet a month’s salary that the lissome Taylor Young was another. That she was hiding something was obvious. But what? And why? He might have only agreed to talk to her for Lani, but damn if this case didn’t have him unwillingly intrigued.
11
He found Lani seated in a green meadow, surrounded by a group of wide-eyed children. Her cotton sundress, emblazoned with brilliant orange and gold poppies, billowed about her, making the flowers appear to have sprung from the fragrant volcanic earth. A creamy hibiscus was tucked behind her ear. Donovan couldn’t remember ever seeing anything so lovely.
“He was a very nasty giant,’” she read aloud to the avid young listeners, “forever sticking his tongue out at people and calling them names.”
“Just like Johnny does,” a young girl piped up.
“I do not,” an obviously rankled boy, whom Donovan took to be the accused, shot back.
“Do, too.”
“Do not!”