The Presence

CHAPTER 20

Josh Malani had no idea where he was going as he roared out of the school parking lot. All he knew was that he had to get away.

Already the tingling he’d felt in his body when he breathed in the ammonia was fading away, but so was the fury that had boiled up in him when Michael had torn the bottle from his hands.

What the hell was he doing, getting pissed off at Michael? Michael was his best friend.

Michael had saved his life.

Michael had only been trying to help him.

And what had he done? Blown his stack and taken off.

Terrific!

So now what?

Home was out — no way was he going to go there until at least five, when his mom would be home from work and he wouldn’t have to be alone with his dad.

Maybe he’d just go to the beach for a couple of hours. He always felt a lot better after going for a swim, and then he’d come back just before school let out and find Mike.

He’d apologize, and then they’d figure out what to do about Jeff Kina. Maybe Mike was right — maybe they really should go tell the police where they’d been the night Kioki died.

By the time Josh came to the floor of the valley between Haleakala and the West Maui mountains, the strange discomfort in his chest had started up again, and as he headed out toward a park on the windward side where few people ever went during the week, another fit of coughing gripped him. Then, with the same frightening breathlessness that had come over him at the school once again descending on him, he pressed hard on the accelerator, determined to get to the beach, where he could take in the trade winds blowing in from the ocean. So focused was he on his struggle to overcome the choking airlessness, that Josh never noticed that the car behind him sped up, too, keeping perfect pace with his truck.

The ammonia, he thought. Michael was right. His chest was aching painfully now, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to get enough air into his lungs. As he pulled the truck to a stop in the empty parking lot behind the beach, he was gripping the wheel hard with both hands, partly against the terrible fiery pain spreading through him, but even more to keep himself steady.

His knuckles, already white with tension, were starting to turn blue, and now, when he looked out to sea, he could barely even see the horizon.

Everything seemed to be getting blurry, and the brightness of the afternoon was fading, even though a moment ago there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky.

Out.

He had to get out of the truck and down onto the beach. If he could just get that far, he’d be able to breathe again, and lie down and rest for a while, and then this strange attack would pass. He’d be okay again. He fumbled for the door handle, found it, and slid out of the driver’s seat. But instead of landing on his feet, his knees buckled beneath him and he crumbled to the ground, sprawling out in the dust.

He was panting, gasping for breath, but with every movement of his diaphragm, it felt as if his lungs were being seared from inside with a blowtorch.

Dying!

He knew it now, knew it with a terrible certainty.

The darkness was closing around him, and the pain was growing worse, and he couldn’t breathe at all.

He reached out, flailing, searching for something — anything — to hang on to, to cling to, as if the act of clutching something in his hands could stave off the horrible suffocation that was claiming him.

He tried to cry out, tried to scream for help, but all that emerged from his throat was a whispered moan.

Then, as the darkness closed around him and the last of his strength deserted him, he felt a new sensation.

It was as if he was being lifted.

Lifted up, and carried away.

His beleaguered lungs still struggling for breath, Josh Malani surrendered to the blackness.

“My Jeff is a good boy,” Uilani Kina insisted. “My Jeff wouldn’t just take off. Something’s happened to him.”

Cal Olani nodded sympathetically, but the gesture was nearly automatic. After fifteen years as a cop, he’d long since learned that there wasn’t a mother alive whose son wasn’t “a good boy.” It made no difference what the charge might be, or how damning the evidence.

“My son is a good boy,” Mrs. Kina said again.

Still, as he looked around the tidy house that Uilani Kina kept, he didn’t see any of the typical signs that a teenager was likely to be a troublemaker. On a side street above Makawao, the frame house sat in the midst of a well-kept garden. The patch of lawn in front was mowed, and though a few chickens pecked at the ground in a coop next to the house, they weren’t running wild. Uilani’s husband operated a small garden supply shop down the road in Makawao, where Jeff worked after school except during track season. Aside from a couple of incidents when he’d threatened a few haoles — but hadn’t actually done much to make good on his threats — Jeff had never been in any serious trouble. Still, he was at the age when boys start wanting to show their independence, and had it not been for the discovery of Kioki Santoya’s body yesterday morning, Cal would probably have tried a little harder to reassure Uilani Kina that her son would turn up by the end of the day. As it was, though, he had to take the boy’s absence more seriously. “I’ll put out an official missing persons report this afternoon,” he promised, though he knew the news was out about Jeff all over the island. He closed his notebook and, putting it back in the inside pocket of his uniform jacket, he said as gently as he could, “Just try not to get too upset, Mrs. Kina.”

“If it wasn’t for Kioki—” Uilani Kina began, but couldn’t bring herself even to finish the thought. A slim wraith of a woman with soft features framed by flowing black hair, she shook her head sadly. “I don’t know what Alice is going to do. He was all she had, and now …” She struggled to compose herself. “What were those boys doing that night?” she asked, her eyes searching Cal Olani’s face for an answer. “Did something happen? Did they get in a fight or something? Was someone mad at them?” She shook her head, clucking her tongue softly. “Who could get mad at them? Such good boys.” Her voice changed, and Cal Olani had the feeling she was talking more to herself than to him. “Even Josh Malani. What can you expect with parents like that? I feel so sorry for him.…” Her voice trailed off again, but her liquid brown eyes remained fixed on the policeman. “Find Jeff for me,” she pleaded. “Please find him for me.”

Back in his car a few minutes later, with the memory of the distraught woman’s plea still fresh in his mind, Olani kept hearing echoes of her question: Did something happen?

And he also remembered the faces of the four boys he’d talked to at the high school yesterday afternoon. The way their eyes had darted toward Josh Malani before they answered his questions, as if seeking his advice or his permission before they spoke.

And the new boy — the one Cal couldn’t remember having seen at all before yesterday — hadn’t actually answered his questions with anything more than a noncommittal shrug. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was just about time for school to be letting out. Maybe he’d swing back there and have another talk with those three. But just as he made the decision, the radio in the car came alive and he heard the dispatcher calling him.

“Car five here,” he said into the microphone.

“I have a report of an abandoned car, Cal,” the dispatcher told him. “Down in the park near Spreckelsville. You anywhere close?”

“Above Makawao,” Olani replied, then told the dispatcher what he was planning to do next.

“I think you might want to take this abandoned car report,” the dispatcher told him. “We’ve run the plates. It’s an eighty-two Chevy pickup, registered to Joshua Malani.”

Olani felt an uneasy chill ripple over him. “How long’s it been there?” he asked.

“Not very long,” the dispatcher replied. “The woman who reported it says it wasn’t there this morning.”

“Then why is it being reported as abandoned?” Olani asked. Who would report a truck the first time he saw it? After a day or two, maybe, but … The dispatcher’s voice cut into his thought.

“The keys are in the ignition, and his wallet was left on the front seat.”

The uneasy chill that had come over Cal Olani congealed into a feeling of dark foreboding. “Ten-four,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

“It certainly took you long enough.” The woman was sunburned and overweight and swathed in a wildly patterned muumuu in a particularly hideous shade of lavender. She made no effort to hide her displeasure as Cal Olani swung out of his patrol car nearly half an hour after he’d received the dispatcher’s call.

“Now, Myrtle,” her husband said, trying to soothe her. He sported a shirt that matched his wife’s muumuu, and a sunburn even more purple. “You have to remember, this is Maui, not Cleveland.” He offered his hand to Cal Olani. “I’m Fred Hooper, and this is my wife, Myrtle. We’re staying in a condo down that way about a mile.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of Spreckelsville. “I told Myrt she shouldn’t bother you with this, but—”

“Nobody goes off and leaves a truck with the keys hanging in the ignition, and their wallet just lying out on the seat where anyone could come along and pick it up,” Myrtle Hooper broke in, silencing Fred with a single quick gesture. “At least they don’t in Cleveland, and I just don’t believe things are that much different out here.” As Cal Olani started toward Josh’s truck, both Hoopers trailed after him, Myrtle still talking. “Something isn’t right about this. I know Fred thinks I’m being silly, but a mother knows these things.” They had reached the pickup, and as Olani turned to look questioningly at Mrs. Hooper, she pursed her lips. “We looked in the wallet, of course. We thought we might find a telephone number or something.” She sighed deeply. “Just seventeen. Such a shame.”

“Now, Myrt, we don’t know what happened,” Fred began, but once again his wife silenced him with a sweep of her hand.

“Of course we know what happened,” she said. “It’s happening to kids all the time now. Teenage suicide. I read about it in Time magazine.” She shifted her gaze to Cal Olani. “His clothes are on the beach,” she said. “At least I assume they’re his clothes. There’s no one else around here. And we put his wallet back on the seat of the car, exactly the way it was when we found it,” she added as the policeman peered into the truck’s open window.

Just as the woman had said, a worn wallet was lying on the seat of the truck, and the keys were hanging in the ignition. Picking the wallet up, Olani checked the driver’s license himself.

Josh Malani.

There were a few dollar bills, a student identification card, some worn pictures, and various scraps of paper with girls’ phone numbers written on them, but little else.

Moving on to the beach, Cal Olani found a pile of clothes, also just as Myrtle Hooper had described. There were a pair of worn jeans, a T-shirt, Jockey shorts, socks, and shoes.

The jeans were on the bottom, then the T-shirt and the underwear, with the shoes resting on top of the pile, the socks tucked inside them.

Very neat.

Very tidy.

And from what Cal Olani knew of the boy, not at all like Josh Malani.

Unless Josh had been trying to say something.

Wordlessly, Olani went back to the truck. Shoved behind the driver’s seat was a slightly damp towel, wrapped around an equally wet bathing suit.

Even if Josh had a dry bathing suit, wouldn’t he have taken his towel down to the beach if all he was planning to do was go for a swim?

Of course, as Myrtle Hooper had pointedly implied, if the boy was planning to go into the water and not come out, what would be the point of having the towel on the beach?

He searched the cab of the pickup once more, looking for a note, but even as he hunted he knew he wouldn’t find one. A little too reckless, always a bit too wild, Josh Malani wasn’t the kind of kid who’d leave a note behind. Not the kind of kid, either, who’d commit suicide. Yet the evidence seemed pretty strong that that was exactly what he’d done.

He went back to the beach, where Mrs. Hooper waited for him, a faintly smug expression on her face. Cal Olani found himself disliking her intensely: a woman who was more concerned about having her opinion validated than she was about what might have happened to a seventeen-year-old boy.

“There’s some footprints, too,” he heard Fred Hooper say. “We were careful not to disturb them.”

Olani moved closer to the neatly folded clothes and looked down at the sand. A single set of footprints led toward the water, disappearing where the surf — gentle today — had washed them away. Shading his eyes from the sun’s glare on the water, he peered out at the ocean, searching for signs of someone swimming, but saw no sign of Josh or anyone else. Not that he had expected to; his gut was already telling him that Josh Malani was dead.

“It’s tough for them,” Fred Hooper said softly, his eyes, like Cal Olani’s, fixed on the sea. “Not like when I was a kid. We didn’t have to worry about anything. Grow up, raise a family, retire, and come to places like this. But what do the kids have to look forward to now? Drugs, and gangs, and getting shot at when you’re just minding your own business.” He was quiet for a moment, then: “I wish we’d gotten here a little earlier. Maybe if he’d just had someone to talk to, it would have helped, you know?”

Cal Olani rested his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Maybe it would have,” he said. But as he started taping the area off to keep the people who’d been attracted by the presence of his squad car from messing up the site before it could be photographed, he wondered. Would talking to someone really have helped?

Yesterday, neither Josh Malani nor any of his friends had been interested in talking about anything.

Now Kioki Santoya was dead, Jeff Kina was missing, and Josh Malani had apparently drowned himself.

What the hell was going on?