Unsound (A Lei Crime Companion Novel) (3 page)

“Tell me too.” She wouldn’t be pried out of the doorway, though I’d angled my body and held the door so she’d get the message.

“I don’t think it’s anything serious, but we’re keeping an eye out and I’m going to use the money from this job to put in some security measures at my office.” I told her about the lineup of odd items outside my door.

“I don’t like it,” she said immediately. “That’s a huge red flag, especially in your line of work. Please call and put that security system in today. I’ll grease the wheels to get you a check as soon as possible. Keep my private number on your cell.” She rattled it off.

I went back to the desk, fumbled around for a Post-it and a pen. I had to have her repeat the number. I kept my back to her so she wouldn’t see me blinking back tears and how bad my hand was shaking as I wrote it down, the numbers almost illegible.

“Thanks,” I said when I was pretty sure my voice was steady. I turned back around and there she was again, giving me a hug. Whispering in my ear.

“Hang in there. You’ll get through this.”

I felt her strength, smelled her smooth black hair with a hint of coconut shampoo, and then she was gone, waving from the door. “I’ll get you the rest of that information. Call the security company today, please, so I don’t worry about you.”

“Okay,” I said, through stiff lips, and she closed the door.

I was alone. I checked the clock—I had fifteen minutes before I had to leave for my private practice office and the first therapy appointment of the day.

I walked deliberately back to the door and locked it, checking that the window shade was down. I picked up the box of tissues, lay facedown on the couch, and let myself have a good cry into the cushion, padded by Kleenex.

The fact that a detective was concerned about my weird stalker had me scared too. The last thing I needed right now was a stalker complicating the shreds of life I had left. That grief I’d been suppressing and distracting rose up to swamp me again.

I craved a drink. The nerves in my body were reaching through my skin, questing through the air and reaching for it like vibrating, hungry antennae. Fortunately, I knew I had an emergency bottle of vodka locked in the file cabinet. After five minutes of full-blown howling, I sat up. Blew my nose, wiped my eyes. Went back behind the desk, unlocked the cabinet. I took out the bottle, unscrewed the top, and downed several big swallows of Grey Goose.

The relief was immediate. A bomb of warmth went off in my belly, roared down along my veins, and my twitching nerves settled like a cobra into a snake charmer’s basket. I savored the feeling for a long moment and took another swig, resting the cool bottle against my forehead. I screwed the top back on, slid it into the drawer, locked it.

I got on the intercom to Captain Ohale. “Bruce, I need who you guys recommend for home and office security,” I said when he picked up.

“So you decided to put in a system?” I heard him flipping through the fat Rolodex on his desk. “We hear good things about Hi-Alarm.” He gave me the number. “They have good response time and sensitive systems, and I hear they’re reasonable. I’m glad you’re doing this. I was going to offer to front you something for it.”

“That doesn’t actually make me feel much better. Detective Freitas was concerned too. I have an alarm system at home, but do you think I should do something more?”

“Send your company out for a full system check and upgrade,” he said. “It can’t hurt. I want you to feel safe and secure. We need you to deal with our stress, not the other way around.”

I chuckled, but I knew it sounded wobbly. “I’ll feel better when all these things are in place. Thanks, Bruce.”

I made the calls to the two alarm companies and ordered a new, full system with video recording for the office and an upgrade to the house system.

I stood and picked up my briefcase. Discovered that I felt better. Calm, clear, ready to face the day—and also ready to have another swig of Grey Goose. But I wouldn’t. I wasn’t an alcoholic. Just going through a rough patch.

On my lunch break, eating a yogurt and an apple at my desk, I scanned Freitas’s file. She’d put together three stapled pages of background and history on each suspect. I’d need more, preferably some audio or video footage of their interviews or surveillance. Seeing the subjects really helped with my assessment process—the way they spoke, moved, their mannerisms and demeanor. The best scenario was always to do my own interviews, but there was no way to do that in a lot of these law-enforcement cases.

The first possible embezzler, Randy Pappas, was a midfifties vice president whose background was in marketing. Financial pressures presented themselves in the form of multiple children in college. I definitely knew how those pressures felt. I used my pen to underline “financial pressures.”

That made me think of Richard and remember again that first breathless stab when he’d told me, “I’m leaving you.”

I hadn’t seen it coming. I’d known there was a continental drift going on, that middle-aged, less-than-thrilling rut, but we’d just finished Chris’s senior year of high school. It had been a whirlwind of applications, deadlines, the trip to visit his chosen school—our alma mater, University of California, Santa Barbara. The graduation, the parties, the departure in a flurry of leis and excitement had finally ended, and I’d had a big case on Oahu. Richard had taken Chris to his dorm in California, gotten him settled, and flown out to Vegas, where his lover was performing at one of Cirque du Soleil’s semi-fixed shows—a factoid he’d told me upon his return.

“I waited to tell you about this until Chris was settled at UCSB,” Richard said. “I didn’t want this to interfere with his transition to college.”

“Wow,” was all I remembered saying, as he went on to tell me he’d been seeing this woman for two years, and he’d filed papers to divorce me that morning. I could have the house if I took over the payments, and he was sure we’d both be better off in the end.

“You don’t really love me anymore, either,” he’d said. And in spite of my paralysis, my overwhelming panic at such an upheaval, I realized that much was true. I was in the habit of thinking I loved him, and that had gone on for twenty years. Honestly, it had been good enough for me.

I wrenched my thoughts back to the present and grounded myself in my surroundings: papers on the desk before me, pen in my hand. My cool, cream-walled private office with its good impressionistic Hawaii landscapes surrounding me. The leather couch, my armchair, my desk, and interesting work to do. A bottle of water at my elbow and another appointment on the way. These things had not changed even though the ex, as I’d decided to call him now and forever, had changed everything else.

I just have to keep on keeping on
. Another of my therapeutic sayings, right there to bite me on the ass.

I stood up and hugged Alison. I’m short at five foot three inches, but she was even tinier. She’d always reminded me of a dandelion, a slim stem of body with a fluff of bleached-blond hair and nothing much to hold her down but the huge black purse she toted around—and used to shoplift.

Alison was a kleptomaniac, and she couldn’t look sweeter or less likely to steal. She had big blue eyes and a Southern accent that pegged her as a
Hawaii transplant, if the lacquered nails and jangly jewelry didn’t give that away first. She’d stolen everything from diamond bracelets to a flat-screen TV, and she’d never been caught.

“Thanks, Dr.
Wilson.” We’d just finished our session. I’d been experimenting with hypnosis with her—kleptomania is an anxiety disorder, and it’s resistant to treatment. None of our substitute behaviors seemed to beat the craving, obsession, and triumph cycle that she had going, setting off a cascade of feel-good brain chemicals as she “stuck it to the man” every time she stole. At least we’d identified her triggers—feeling frustrated or lonely.

I wished I could hypnotize away my own craving for booze. It wasn’t a bad idea.

“Keep me posted. Please remember to track each day—triggers, how bad the cravings were, did you use your alternatives or give in, et cetera.” I walked her to the door that led to the outer office, and Alison spotted the row of items on the inside of the exit door.

“Hey. That’s my dog’s collar,” she said. “At least I think it is.” She went over to the lineup of items, picked up the rhinestone-studded collar. “Yeah. The name tag came off a while ago. I thought it must have just fallen off somehow. How’d it get here?”

“I don’t know. I found it outside.” My heart lurched—what did this mean?

“Oh. I guess I had it in my purse and must have dropped it or something. Well, see you next week.” She tucked the collar into that bottomless black bag and left with a little wave.

Well, good. One item had an explanation.

I followed her to the door and watched Alison walk to her car, a late-model BMW, and throw the big purse in. Pippi, her white toy poodle, had jumped up and had her paws on the dash. Alison reached into the bag and put the collar on the dog. She looked over and saw me watching, waved again. I waved back.

Mrs. Kunia drove up in her rusty blue Ford truck as Alison pulled out. Her husband, Frank, had built a wooden box on the back where he stored his tools, and a cluster of ti leaves dangled from the license plate for luck. A bumper sticker read
,
slow down. this ain’t the mainland
.

Apelila Kunia got out, a tall, heavy woman in her late sixties, wearing a knee-length muumuu and rubber slippers. She made her deliberate way down the gravel path toward me, carrying a papaya the size of a bowling ball.

Mrs. Kunia’s daughter had died a few years ago of a drug overdose, leaving her and her husband to raise the children—a girl, twelve, and a boy, ten. Henry, the ten-year-old, had been killed accidentally by Frank six months ago in a hunting accident involving his rifle.

“Hi, Mrs. Kunia,” I said, holding the door open. “Come on in.”

“Brought you something.” She put the gigantic papaya into my hands. “You look like you need to eat.”

I laughed. “Thank you! I probably do. It’s beautiful.” I shut the door behind us, followed her into the inner office, where she took her shoes off at the door, walked in, and sat on the couch. I set the papaya on my desk, where it stood upright, majestic as a sculpture. “Did you grow it yourself?”

“Farmers’ market.”

It was going to be one of those nonverbal days, then. I settled myself into my armchair with my clipboard on my lap and my pen at the ready. “Tell me how you’re doing this week.”

A silence stretched out.

Mrs. Kunia, the strong, sturdy Hawaiian woman with her cracked heels and hands rough from work, stared at the designs left by Alison in the little Japanese sand garden on the table. Finally, she reached forward to pull a handful of tissues out of the box beside the sand garden. She spread the tissues open over her palm, layering them over one another in a precise stack. When the stack was of a suitable thickness, she pressed the tissues to her face and let out a sob.

What a sob. It was deep, aching, a wrenching sound that brought tears to my eyes too, echoing as it did my own grief. I got out of the chair and sat beside her on the couch. I stroked Mrs. Kunia’s back in little circles as she wept.

She saved it all for this office. She held it in and held it together as she must, for her husband who was eaten with guilt and for the twelve-year-old granddaughter, wild and angry as a cornered mongoose. But here she let it all go.

I was there to witness her pain. Validate it. Support it.

It cost me to empathize with the pain of clients, to genuinely share it—and yet nothing less seemed to heal as powerfully; nothing less seemed to honor what they’d been through. Sometimes I wished I’d worked in the time of the old psychodynamic model—detached from the client behind the couch with a clipboard, a therapist who could do a crossword, say “uh-huh” and “interesting” and send a bill.

Mrs. Kunia cried for two-thirds of the session, and when she was done, she pulled out a new stack of tissues and wiped her face with them. Little strands of her thick silver hair had come loose from the topknot on her head and clung to her cheeks. I got up and opened the little fridge, took out a cold bottle of water and handed it to her. “Fluid replacement.”

She gave a bark of laughter, unscrewed the lid, and drained half of it. “Thanks, Dr.
Wilson.”

“I didn’t do anything. You’re the one doing all the work.” It’s something I tell clients often. The work is theirs; I am just a facilitator, holding the emotional container for what needs to be processed, reflecting their own healing back to them so they can understand it better. That’s why I don’t worry about “engaging” clients, keeping them coming back. I’m here and solutions are here, but I won’t ever work harder than my clients—because only they can do what needs to be done.

“Frank left.”

“Oh no. Why?”

“He feels so bad. He says we’re better off without him, especially with Maile still blaming him for the accident.” Maile, the angry twelve-year-old who refused to come to my office. I let a long moment go on, wondering if she had anything more to add. She did. “I worry he’s going to kill himself.”

“Where did he go?”

“To a hunting shack he uses. It’s on the mountain.” The “mountain” was nearby Kilauea Volcano, where pig hunting is allowed in the park year-round with a license.