My suitcase is already packed when I wake to brilliant sunshine. I packed it at three o’clock in the morning, after tossing in bed for hours, because I figured I might as well do something useful if I wasn’t going to sleep. And it worked! When I climbed back into bed my nerves went still, as if the act of packing had flipped some switch inside me from on to off.

How my head aches. How stiff and sore the length of my body. I long for coffee, but that means going downstairs to face the desk clerk, so instead I wash and dress. It turns out the hour is only just past six o’clock, so I have plenty of time to make the boat to Oahu. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at my reflection in the mirror. I’m wearing a white shirt and navy slacks, and a cardigan sweater knotted around my shoulders in case of draft. Underneath the collar of my shirt, the necklace lies against my skin. I guess I’ll have to face Leo again, on the boat, but I figure he’ll be busy at the wheel. When we arrive, I can slip away in the bustle, and Leo will go to visit his uncle at the hospital in Honolulu, on the other side of the island, and that will be that.

Now here’s a funny thing. To think I was knocking bits with Irene Lindquist’s own stepson! What a gas. What a way life has of connecting you by invisible threads with other human beings. On the other hand, how could I have guessed they were related? Leo’s mother was a local girl, he explained last night as he buttoned his shirt, a native Hawaiian with whom Olle fell in love when he first arrived in Hanalei as a healthy young globe-trotting whippersnapper a quarter-century earlier. Leo was born seven and a half months after they married, or something like that. I didn’t dare ask Leo how she died; at such a moment, it hardly seemed tactful. Anyway, he was already halfway out the door, rushing off to the Lindquist house to get the full story from his father and Irene, who had returned from Oahu once the doctors had stabilized Uncle Kaiko.

Uncle Kaiko. Of all the dumb luck in the world.

I rise from the bed and unlatch the suitcase. Buried between the shirts and the underwear, the small leather-bound diary has the electricity of an artifact. I smooth my fingers over the top and sides to remind myself that it’s real, that Sam Mallory’s fingers rested here, too, that he lived and breathed and requires some kind of justice.

The clock says a quarter to seven. Time to go.