LITMIR.BIZ

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repeated the sheriff’s update and added, “Herman drove out there without telling anyone, which concerns me. He didn’t mention anything to you?”

      “Nope. I’ve been up most of the night thinking on it. Would it be possible he was meeting someone to fetch a new batch of okolehao?”

      “He would have mentioned it. Plus, he still has a few bottles left,” she said.

      “Yes, but you know how much it’s worth these days, now that everything’s being rationed. We both know he’s a shrewd businessman.”

      True. Okolehao was a Hawaiian ti-root moonshine, but some of the locals also used pineapple, taro, sugarcane or rice. Just up the road, Waipio Valley had become a hotbed of illegal okolehao production during Prohibition. Violet hated the stuff.

      “I feel like he would have told me. But I suppose it’s possible.”

      She wanted to believe him, and wondered if Herman had gone down into the valley to meet someone. There was a Hawaiian man down there he had mentioned once or twice. And maybe the river had overflowed and he was stuck down there. It made sense and was about the only thing that could possibly, remotely, hopefully have been true. But truth, she was finding, didn’t always want to be known.

      “I’m heading over now to talk to the sheriff,” he said.

      Violet dropped down on the cracked red paint of the front step. She watched him walk away. Unable to do anything else, she lay back and let the tears come. Setsuko sat next to her and held her hand while she went numb from the inside out.

      * * *

      Just before lunchtime that day, Ella called out, “Mama?”

      Violet rushed to the pune’e. “Good morning, love. How you feelin’?”

      There was a new vacancy in Ella’s eyes, like someone had taken an eraser and removed all the brightness, leaving a dull brown. Ella didn’t answer, just closed her eyes and rolled to face the wall.

      Setsuko had slipped on an apron and said from the kitchen, “Ella, I have your favorite. Rice cakes.”

      Violet began to wonder if Ella’s condition might not be a sickness at all. The timing was peculiar. Disease is in the mind, her father used to say, never allowing anyone to skip chores because of a sniffle or miss school due to a burning throat. As though you could think yourself well. Was it possible that we could also think ourselves sick? Violet reminded herself that Ella had been playing at the Codys’, so what could she possibly know?

      “Did you happen to see Daddy yesterday afternoon? Before he drove off.” Ella shook her head. “Did he say anything to you at all yesterday about going someplace in the afternoon?”

      In the silence between them, her fear began to spread.

      “Honey, I need you to talk to me.”

      “My tummy hurts,” Ella whispered.

      “Setsuko, would you mind fixing some poi?”

      A voice inside was telling Violet that the two incidents were connected. Her tough little girl suddenly seemed so fragile. “Where were you when the other kids were looking for you?”

      “I had a good hiding place. I told you that,” Ella said.

      Violet watched the rise and fall of her ribs. Tenderness rushed through her.

      “Sometimes, when you hold things inside, it can make you feel sick. Is that what’s happening?”

      Ella shook her head again, limply.

      Violet let out a big sigh. “We can keep it just between you and me, but I need you to tell me anything that seemed out of the ordinary. Even if you don’t think it matters.”

      “There’s nothing to tell.”

      She prodded Ella for more information, but Ella refused to answer. Frustration was building up inside, causing every cell in her body to hurt. She wanted to scream.

      * * *

      When Sheriff Souza returned, his face had bad news written all over it. He didn’t waver as he asked her to accompany him into the kitchen and swung the door shut. Her heart dropped.

      He chewed on his lower lip for a moment before speaking. “Now, I can’t say that we found anything conclusive, and there was plenty of rain last night, but we combed the area around his car and there appear to be some broken bushes. And blood. Just a small amount, but it was near the edge of the overlook.”

      The word blood was all she heard. “Did you look below? Could he have been hurt and fallen?”

      She pictured the cliffs. Lofty, vertical slabs that plunged straight into the roiling blue. In some areas, small outcroppings of land jutted out.

      “Anyone falls, they end up in the water. Or on the rocks. We didn’t see a body on the rocks.”

      A body. She felt herself unraveling at the seams and had to check to make sure her upper half was still connected to her lower half. Strangely, she felt as though she were listening to a radio detective show. Herman dead was impossible. Husbands were not allowed to die. Especially young ones. Especially hers.

      The words came out in a whisper. “Luther thinks Herman went into Waipio with someone for okolehao. That blood could have been from anything, couldn’t it? A pig, a goat.”

      “Could have been. I sent Boy Rapozo down to check. No one coughs down there without him knowing about it. Gonna have the blood tested. Do you know his type?”

      “O.”

      The ringing in her ears ramped up and Violet focused on Souza’s bristly mustache and the way his lips jutted out underneath. How his gaze moved around the kitchen, trying to find an anchor.

      “Thank you, Sheriff.”

      “We’ll get to the bottom of this. People don’t just disappear in Honoka’a. Not on my watch.”

      As it turned out, they did. The only lead that turned up was from a chicken farmer up the way who claimed he heard two gunshots that afternoon. But even he couldn’t be sure from which direction they had come. Speculation in town was rampant. Herman worked for the Japanese. A moonshine deal had soured. He was gambling on cockfights. Working for the FBI.

      That people thought someone as upstanding and well liked as Herman could be a spy boiled her insides. But she had to admit most things Japanese did have a special place in his heart. His secretary was Japanese, he boasted that some of his best teachers were Japanese, and many of his friends were Japanese. He liked Japanese food, drank Japanese wine, and grew Japanese sweet potatoes in his garden. But did that make him a spy?

      Violet swayed back and forth between her own two theories. One was that he might have been on watch for the Hawaii Rifles, and been ambushed by the Japanese while out patrolling along the cliffs. But no one else had seen anything suspicious and no one else had up and vanished. The other idea was that he had upset someone in the spirit business, because he had on several occasions voiced an interest in making his own. She had argued against it.

      “How will it look if the school principal is also a moonshine distributor?” she had said.

      “Honey, it would just be for a few of us around here. And we could use the extra money to buy more land.”

      “Not a good idea,” she’d insisted.

      If only she could find his calendar, which he also used as a sort of journal. It was not on his desk where it usually was and had yet to turn up. Either he had it with him, or someone took it. This was the one piece of information that didn’t fit. How could someone have taken it? Sheriff Souza had interrogated everyone in the school on this small fact, reasoning that if someone had taken the journal, someone had access to his office.

      For an entire week, Ella wouldn’t eat solid food and Violet took to feeding her spoonfuls of chicken broth and rice. She refused to go back to school, and so Violet had to bring her to

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