Read Maui Widow Waltz (Islands of Aloha Mystery Series) for Free Online Page A

close to the edge. I’ve been called ‘stupid,’ ‘mean,’ and even expletives
so blue I wondered if they’d use that same mouth to kiss their groom. So, in
the scheme of things, I rated Lisa Marie’s snippiness at about a six- minus.
    I carefully looked through her
consultation folder—front, back, and all the pages inside. In the contact
information area she’d provided her local address as simply, ‘Maui’—no hotel
name, not even a town. Like most visitors, she probably didn’t know the street
address of where she was staying. Most likely she’d been picked up by a taxi or
a hotel shuttle at the airport and they’d whisked her off to her resort. But I
was surprised she hadn’t bothered to even fill in the name of the place.
    A few minutes before three o’clock,
I locked up and headed over to Farrah’s store.  Farrah kept a tiny black
and white TV under the counter ostensibly to watch for storm reports, but most
of the time it was tuned to the afternoon soaps. I didn’t see her right away,
so I peeked around the counter to see if the TV was on. On the grainy screen a
tall, clean-shaven man in black tie and tails was berating a woman dressed in
what appeared to be some kind of French maid’s outfit. They cut to a close-up
of her, and I watched as she narrowed her eyes and raised her arm into position
for a dramatic slap. The camera pulled back in time to show him catching her
arm mid-whack.
    I was becoming somewhat engrossed
in what was going on when the picture went blank and a gray channel ID screen
popped up indicating breaking news. Farrah came out from the back room, humming
and carrying a Sex Wax counter display. She nodded in greeting, but continued
her humming.
    She made her way over to the two
wooden stools behind the counter, sitting on one and patting the seat of the
other to indicate I should join her. At the end of her song, she held the note
in a lingering finish.
    “ Mahalo for the hush,” she
said. “I think it’s bad juju to not finish a song.”
    “Sure. What was that?”
    “ In Dis Life . You know—Iz.”
    “Right.” Okay, she’s my friend and
all that, but the woman cannot carry a tune. She could have said it was the
Star Spangled Banner and I would’ve agreed.
    She leaned over and turned up the
volume on the TV but it was still silently displaying the ID screen. When the
sound came on, a booming voice blasted out of the tiny speaker.
    “We interrupt our regularly
scheduled programming to bring you the following special report”. The
screen flipped to an image of an empty podium, festooned with microphones
displaying not only the call letters of television channels 2, 4, 8, and 9 in
Honolulu but also the major mainland television networks, including CNN.
    “Wow. Your missing dude must be
some kind of celebrity over on the mainland,” she said.
    “Yeah, I guess. And I thought he
was just some under-the-radar computer nerd who’d struck it rich.”
    A Honolulu police officer in a
glowing white short-sleeved dress shirt stepped up to the mic. Even on Farrah’s
feeble TV I could see the heavily starched creases that dissected his shirt front
into three equal parts. His above-the-pocket badge flashed a brilliant white
when it caught the sunlight.
     “Testing, testing,” he said
tapping the mic. His eyes were pulled into a self-conscious squint.
    “I’m Lieutenant Muro, Public
Information Officer for the Honolulu Police Department. I’d like to welcome my
colleagues from the Governor’s office, from the Counties of Maui and O’ahu, the
Coast Guard, and members of the press. At this time we have an update on the
disappearance of Bradley James Sanders, founder and president of DigiSystems
Corporation in Seattle. Mr. Sanders was here on vacation when he disappeared
off the Maui coastline sometime after nineteen hundred hours the night of
January thirty-first. His rental boat was recovered, unmanned, on the beach at
Kapalua at oh-six hundred hours the next