“It would have been ever so much easier for us if he’d been convicted of something,” Olive said. “Frawley sort of hinted that he’d committed some serious offenses. But nothing stuck. He’d slipped away—blameless. And why?”

“Bulletproof,” Sharkey said.

“How does that happen?”

Max Mulgrave had been stopped, he’d been cautioned, but he’d always been let off, it seemed. A man living on the edge—a vagrant—subjected to stops or searches, with a history of drug use, who’d never been busted. He had no rap sheet, and yet if he’d had one, how simple it would have been to add detail to his life in Hawaii.

That he’d been stopped was a help in knowing more, but he was blameless as far as the law was concerned.

Ask the cops, Frawley had said, with the smirk of admiration some men have for lawbreakers who escape arrest. The cops know him.

Olive reminded Sharkey of that. Sharkey said, “My memory’s junk.”

“What about that cop who wrote the report—the one that came to Waimea the night it happened?”

“My head’s not right.”

Sharkey had thrown himself onto his sofa, looking broken, in an odd twisted posture of visible discomfort, his eyes turned toward the window, his body slashed by sunlight, something sacrificial in the way he lay slumped and vulnerable, like a man abandoned. He was staring at a tree in the gully below his house.

“I saw an owl there once—a pueo,” he whispered, too softly for Olive to hear. “It’s good luck to see one, because they’re endangered.”

Olive said, “He told us his name.”

“I totally spaced.”

“He said his father was a surfer.”

“Ray-Ban,” Sharkey said, after a long silence. “Goofy-foot.”

“I don’t even know why I’m asking. That guy Stickney made us a copy of the police report. His name will be on it.”

New to the United States, a malihini—a newcomer—they called her at the hospital, and still new enough in Sharkey’s life to be insecure, often surprised by his moods, uncertain of the depths in his mind, and uneasy in the disorder of the house—his house, his plants, his chickens, his geese—she kept her composure by using her nurse’s training as a meticulous record-keeper. You did not exist as an alien without paper to prove it: every scrap added to your identity, every ticket and receipt to your plausibility. And since the accident she’d begun to regard her attention to the details of her life with Sharkey as the diagnostic notations at the top of a fever chart.

She was a girlfriend, without provable status, and she often thought of Sharkey dying in his bed and the authorities saying to her, “Who are you—what are you doing in this house?”