I close the suitcase and lift it from the luggage stand. Pick up the matching leather satchel that holds my portable darkroom equipment, my notebooks, my hairbrush, my jar of Pond’s cream.

The door creaks when I open it. The stairs creak too. I suppose they send some warning of my approach, because Irene Lindquist is already on her feet when I reach the foyer.

“Good,” she says. “You’ve already packed.”

Lindquist has left her beat-up yellow truck at home today. Instead she’s driving a fast little ragtop Buick, cherry-red, creating such a monumental draft that I can’t hear a thing, and half the time I can’t even see through my hair that blows every which way. We roar past the harbor. I catch a glimpse of the passenger ferry, two or three customers lined up at the gangplank, though not Leo in his sharp navy uniform, the one I tore off him yesterday evening. He’s probably in the deckhouse.

The car curves up the bay and around the point, past Lumahai Beach of yesterday morning, until we come to a sprawling white house overlooking the ocean, surrounded by porches and flowering shrubs and a few clusters of mature palms.

“Nice place,” I say, when she shuts off the engine.

“We call it Coolibah. You’ll be staying in the guest cottage.”

“Oh, I will, will I?”

“Not that I don’t trust you, Miss Everett,” she says dryly, “but this was the deal, remember? If we’re going to be sharing secrets, I’m going to keep you where I can see you.”

“Are we going to be sharing secrets?”

She opens the car door and removes her sunglasses. “Probably. Now collect your things and follow me.”

It occurs to me, as I follow this legendary woman down the lawn to a cottage, that I have somehow lost the upper hand in this match and that perhaps I never had it at all. The cottage is tiny, and a fresh coat of white paint can’t quite disguise its ramshackle character. Irene tells me, as she opens the door, that this was the original building on the property, when she bought it from some fellow who had thought to make a fortune in pineapples, and discovered too late that he had a brown thumb.

“We don’t have many guests, so I’m afraid it’s not all that up to date.” She flips on a light, and boy was she telling the truth. There is an ancient canopy bed with a yellowing counterpane and two flat pillows, a dresser nobody wanted, a braided rug my great-aunt Mildred would call old-fashioned, a general air of dust and must. Even Lindquist looks taken aback. She inspects the interior of a Victorian wardrobe and frowns. “I suppose I’ll have Lani come down this afternoon and freshen it up a bit,” she says.