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island to island.
    “Daldo Fortunato tells me he’s making you a new surfboard,” McCully said.
    “In exchange for taking over his son’s paper route.”
    “The one who just joined the marines?”
    “He wants to go to Vietnam.”
    “Now I remember. He’s the one who was kicked out of Castle High.”
    “They’re sending him instead to California and so he tried to resign from the marines, but they said no. You can’t just resign, they said.”
    “Why did he want to go to Vietnam?”
    “Orval said it’s because of the grass. He has a plan to develop a new kind of marijuana seed.”
    McCully looked at her. She was not trying to be funny, although she knew that what she was saying was funny. Besides, she was telling the truth.
    “You’ve always talked about the importance of our agricultural economy,” she said, trying not to smile.
    “Didn’t anyone else want the paper route?”
    She shook her head.
    “But it’s worth a surfboard?”
    “Daldo makes the best sticks on Kaua‘i.” She pronounced it in Pidgin, “steeks,” and he finally laughed.
    They could hear Mitsuya chopping vegetables in the kitchen. The chopping was surprisingly in time with the Sousa march.
    “Something quite mysterious has happened,” McCully said. He had temporarily restored her frail sense of well-being, so she was not prepared when he went on to ask, “Were there people here in the house when your mother and I were away?”
    “I think so,” she said, very low and still.
    “Was there a party or something?”
    She was silent.
    “Some things are missing, there are burns in my clothes. It doesn’t make sense.” He was not trying to entrap her, but in his guileless way, he was mystified. “I found a pair of woman’s undergarments in the pocket of my bathrobe, and I don’t believe they belong to Mother.”
    Mamie felt herself begin to perspire. She looked at him, forcing herself to stare into his sunburned face. She was afraid. She had awakened every morning since Hiroshi disappeared with the anxiety that something just like this would happen. She would lose Gertrude now, and whatever was left of her mother’s affection, and, worse, even McCully would be disgusted by her. She had instinctively come to realize that although she and Claire had been deliriously happy on theirhoneymoon with Gertrude and Benjie, McCully, and especially Mary, would be shocked by it.
    “Someone was here, but it was all right. Not a party.”
    “Someone?” He was so intent on the curiousness of it that he still did not notice that she was very upset.
    “I cannot tell you,” she finally said.
    “You can’t tell me?”
    “It was Gertrude and Benjie,” she said, hanging her head.
    “Benjie Furtado, the cop?”
    Her father’s slowness to understand made it worse for Mamie. She wanted to leap to her feet to shout angrily that it had been blissful while they were away, shouting as if it were his fault that she had been so happy.
    McCully shook his head in amazement.
    “Gertrude is going to marry him,” she said, wringing her hands.
    McCully finally saw how much she suffered. “Well, good,” he said cautiously, trying to understand her distress. He took her hand.
    “I couldn’t stand it, Father,” she whispered, “if anything happened to them because of me.”
    “Nothing will happen, dear,” he said, stroking her arm.
    She let him calm her, and she believed him when he said that he would take care of everything. He made her promise that she would not worry. She saw that he was still mildly troubled by what he could only guess had happened, but she knew that she could trust him.
    They walked across the lawn to the beach. He had his arm around her shoulder. It was windy and some Hawaiian children waiting for the boat to Ni‘ihau were throwing sand. They ran away when they saw McCully, as if they were not allowed to play on his beach.
    McCully and Mamie walked down to the wooden dock and were back in time for dinner.
    Mamie and Claire