Kauai Temptations Read online

  Contents

  Kauai Temptations

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Thank You

  Kauai Stories

  Kauai Temptations

  A McKenna Mystery

  Terry Ambrose

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2014 by Terry Ambrose

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-0-9859540-2-4

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover photograph by Kathy Ambrose and is reproduced by permission. Book design by Kathy Ambrose.

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to the victims of identity theft. I am one of you. I never expected to have someone steal my identity. I wondered why more could’t be done to find the perpetrators. And I wanted justice.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I need to begin by thanking my wife, Kathy Ambrose, for her continued support. Being married to a writer can get lonely, but she continues to encourage me each day. Next to me, she’s read this manuscript more than anyone and has used up more than one red pen in making corrections.

  One of the things about life that always amazes me is how serendipitous it can be. I happened to meet Michael Varma at the 2013 California Writers Conference. He happened to mention that his sister lived on Kauai. I asked if she would mind reading the manuscript for local flavor. He put us in touch and I found out she not only lives on Kauai, but is also an editor. So, thank you Michael for the connection and thank you Pam Varma Brown for your excellent editorial help.

  I’m one of those writers who depends greatly on early readers and for this novel, I’d like to thank the St. Phillips Neri Writers Group (consisting of Mary Ellen Barnes, Molly McKinney, Clark Lohr, Ellie Nelson, Shirley Sikes, Bert Steves, and Jim Turner) for helping me through those early drafts.

  Some of the more recent readers who gave me feedback include members of the Rancho Bernardo Writers Group (Peter Berkos, Mark Carlson, Debra Friend, Lillian Herzberg, MaryJane Roe, and Joanna Westreich.) Two other writers also helped by reading the final version of the novel: Jenny Hilborne and Brae Wyckoff. I appreciate every single suggestion you made. Any errors that remain are solely my responsibility.

  Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge the island and people of Kauai. It is truly a special island and the people who are there must work especially hard to live in such a beautiful place. Kauai is perhaps the one place where I feel truly centered and the island holds a special place in my heart. The events that take place in this novel are completely fictional. But, if you’re intrigued by the Garden Isle and its people and would like to hear their true stories, see the information about “Kauai Stories” at the end of the book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The Hawaiian language doesn’t include a word for crappy day, does it?”

  My friend Alexander, who was born and raised here on Oahu, laughed. “That something we leave to you haoles.” He gave me a bright smile, the one wide enough to cause the little laugh lines around his mouth to crinkle as he pointed at the bold text on his navy blue tee. “Slow down, brah. You live too fast.”

  As a relative newcomer to the islands, a mere five years and counting, I was only beginning to wrap my head around that concept. If I lived to be 113, another 50 years, maybe I’d learn to live that way. As it was, today’s crisis came in the mail. Overdraft notices from my bank. And yes, that was plural.

  Nearly a dozen pink slips of paper, all addressed to me, Wilson McKenna, littered the glass top of my wicker dining-room table. They totaled nearly $4,000. Once upon a time, a very long time ago on the mainland, I’d been a bill collector and skip tracer. I thought nothing of calling the people who received the little “duns” schmuck or dirt bag or flake. Now I was the schmuck, so those references weren’t quite as funny.

  I had no clue as to who had written the checks in question or pulled me back into the financial services world on the opposite side of the credit equation. For once, I realized how frightening these things were.

  There was no aloha, no mahalo, or thank you, for my business. Each notice, which had arrived in its own envelope, was a little ransom note for my credit record. “Hey, Mr. Moneybags, if you don’t follow our directions, your precious little bank account is a goner.”

  I had two simple choices. The first, paying up, was impossible. The second was to let the bank declare me a blight on their profit picture. Choosing the latter option would force the bank to sanitize their good name. In corporate-speak it would mean clean up their profit picture by removing said blight from said profit picture by the addition of appropriate fees, penalties, and black marks on my credit. I navigated my way through phone-tree hell, all the while envisioning my bank account in a body bag.

  “Account number, please.”

  Jeez, talk about sounding like a pit bull. I gave her the number.

  “One moment.”

  Had she gotten a memo about me already? She sounded perfectly capable of sinking her bite into my financial private parts until I screamed for mercy and coughed up whatever blood the bank thought I owed. “Look, Miss, I didn’t write these checks.”

  “One moment.”

  Keyboard sounds in the background emphasized the obvious. This pit bull came equipped with teeth and claws. She growled. Maybe she’d only cleared her throat, but it sounded as though she was preparing for her next customer meal. “Mr. McKenna, are you denying writing these numerous checks which have overdrawn your account?”

  Ouch. When she put it that way, even I hated myself. My jaw felt tight. “I may be 63, but I’m not senile. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t write those checks.” My adrenaline level was spiking somewhere in the “about to die” range and my sweating palms made the phone feel slippery in my grasp. Not normal, not for me. I wiped my free hand on my khaki shorts, then switched the phone to the other hand. This time, I used the back of my “I hate L.A.” T-shirt to dry the sweat.

  “Then who did?”

  “How the hell should I know?” I had to admit one thing, the pit bull had put me on the defensive without breaking a sweat. “I’ve been gone for a week. I got back today and
picked up my mail. I didn’t know anything was wrong until I got your little ransom notes.” Oops.

  She snarled, “Those overdraft notices are to let you know that you have overdrawn your bank account. It’s my job to make arrangements with you. Or, you can make a deposit sufficient to cover your overdraft.”

  While I silently mimicked her “it’s my job” line with a prissy face, Alexander snickered, then scolded me with an index finger he waved back and forth. My gut reaction was to insult her for having an obviously short and insignificant job description. The problem was, I’d been on the other side of this call far too many times to count and knew how many fish that would net me. “But I didn’t write those checks.” Crap, talk about sounding whiny.

  She, on the other hand, became matter-of-fact. “You’d have to take that up with the branch.”

  Uh, okay. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Oh, wait, I had. “I don’t have time to traipse into town. I’ve only been home for a couple of hours. I need to get some things done for both of my employers before they send me their own little pink notices.”

  “You need to speak to the branch unless you’re going to make arrangements for a deposit.”

  Her business tone, the same one I’d used so many times pissed me off. I slammed down the phone. “Bitch.”

  With the exception of the check incident, it was a typical Tuesday afternoon in paradise—eighty-seven degrees outside, sun shining, but willing to take a quick break for an intermittent rain shower, and gentle trade winds caressing the palms along the shore. Inside my little condo living room, however, the cold hand of a big financial institution’s clerical error had picked my wallet clean. I could tell they’d gotten not only my wallet, but also my self-confidence, because I felt a chill run through the room.

  I’d spent a week on the mainland trying to sort out an old relationship, and now, here I was, trying to reconcile my past while my bank hit me with this. My job as an apartment manager kept my financial situation in order, but it was the freelance writing job I’d snagged a few months ago that got me up each day. It felt important, unlike dealing with cranky tenants.

  Alexander watched me with consoling eyes. He’s a common mixture here, a blend of cultures from various corners of the world, all having learned to coexist on this small cluster of mostly dead volcanoes. We were surrounded by thousands of miles of water, so aloha was an important concept. Alexander had learned it as a child; he was seldom flustered or angered. He had the genetically bronzed skin of someone born to live in the sun, whereas I was the guy who slathered on sunscreen for an hour of sitting by the pool in the shade. He, his wife, and their two little keiki were a classic modern-Hawaiian family. On the other hand, I was the island runaway who hadn’t yet figured out how to fit in. Still, we’d found a common bond. I sensed that he wanted to tell me to practice a little aloha, work it out. Screw that, I was ticked.

  He said, “Maybe you lost it? Wrote a bunch of bad checks by mistake.”

  I glared at him.

  He grinned. “Just kidding, brah. I think you need go to the bank. Get this straightened out.”

  I hate it when he’s right. “I suppose, but I don’t have time. I’ve got to get an ad in to rent that vacant apartment, I’ve got to get the carpets in there cleaned. Then, I’ve got to come up with an idea so I can write a story for the paper. I haven’t written anything for them since the story on Willows.” My return to glory had helped me set new goals—even some new expectations. Now I had to live up to them. So how come I sounded like such a whiner? Again.

  “By the time you through complaining, you could have this all done, yah? Let’s go.” Alexander picked up the notices, put them into a neat little stack, and handed them to me. His hand was steady, his voice calm like the low surf in a protected bay.

  He was right, bitching about this wasn’t going to make it go away.

  During the short drive to the bank, Alexander encouraged me to talk about my trip to the mainland. I’d gone to deal with emotional baggage I’d been carrying around for years. As part of my self-prescribed “therapy,” I’d even gotten a new drivers license, which I’d let go after nearly running down a kid over a year before. I still didn’t have a car, but at least I could drive legally. Maybe not well, but legally. Instead of filling Alexander in about the trip, I dwelled on the notices.

  Parking, as usual, was impossible in Honolulu. So, when we got to the branch I assured Alexander I wouldn’t blow the place up, make death threats, or even close my account in frustration. That last one would be easy since if I did close the account they’d want their four grand. Despite my fears that without Alexander around to steady me I might do something rash, I assured him I could catch a bus home. Oddly enough, he believed my lie and dropped me off on the street corner in front of the bank. Alone. By myself.

  Inside, a woman at the first desk referred me to the manager, Mr. Vernon Box. Box stood to greet me as I approached. He was short, had graying temples, which were topped off by slicked-back hair reminiscent of styles seen mostly in old gangster movies. Given my situation, the gangster analogy seemed to fit. I definitely felt as though I’d been held up by Box and his band of tellers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses perched halfway down his nose, which I almost thought might be a prop to make him appear more intelligent. After all, he spent his time either peering over them in my general direction or pushing them back into place. He did make a weak attempt at apologizing for the “pit bull incident,” but blew the moment by concluding with, “but they have a tough job.”

  Got it. Bad behavior was excusable if you had a good reason. I guess that meant my articles for the paper about the Willows’ murder trial could have been much less objective given that I’d almost been his last victim. Using Vernon’s rationale, I could threaten to blow this place up—I was having a bad day. The thing is, I knew the pit bull’s frustration. As the saying goes, been there, done that.

  “I want to get to the bottom of this, Mr. Box.”

  “Vernon, please. We’re all about the aloha spirit here. That was the hardest thing about going to a mainland school. Everyone in the L.A. scene is so . . . uptight . . . yah?”

  “Uptight. Right. I mean, yah. Sure. What school?”

  He raised his eyebrows and gave me a mischievous grin. His face lit up when he raised two fingers in the “V” for victory sign. “Fight on!”

  Ah, USC. I raised my voice to a falsetto pitch. “Go Trojans.”

  Vernon missed my display of forced enthusiasm because he was preoccupied with his computer. He shoved the glasses up on his nose and tapped on the keys, hitting a magic combination that displayed images of what looked like my phantom checks. His brow knitted itself into a ribbed sweater. “That’s odd. The first returned item is number 1201, payable to Kauai Day Spa.”

  I snorted. “What? A day spa? On Kauai? When?”

  “Three days ago, the 18th. What about Island Electronics? That’s number 1202. Same date.”

  “I’ve been in L.A. for a week.”

  He scratched his chin and gave me a quizzical look. “Odd, yes?”

  I felt heat rising at the back of my neck. Odd? Hardly. Someone had screwed up and they were costing me time. “I told you, I was on the mainland. You want to see my boarding pass?” I glared at him, unsure of what I’d do if he called my bluff because I’d ditched the damn thing.

  “No, no. I believe you. There’s also 1203 through 1211. Did you recently order new checks?”

  “Before I left. I thought they’d arrive after I got home.”

  “Did you receive them?”

  “They weren’t in my mail.”

  He massaged his nose with one finger, then found another spot, this one on his right ear, that must have also needed a little stimulation. “Something’s not right.” He tapped a few other magic keys, brought up a card with my signature, then flipped back to the screen with the checks. “It looks like a woman’s signature, yah? See how loopy it is? Yours is much more shaky.” He blushed as though he’d be
en caught with his hand in the till.

  I said what he’d been thinking. “Like an old person’s.” Yeah, I had a few other old person traits, too. A few wrinkles, graying and thinning hair, but not obese. I still had my own teeth and could walk a couple of miles without having to stop for oxygen or call an ambulance. On the flip side, I think I’ve also qualified for a Honolulu restroom frequent flyer card.

  “Sorry.” He glanced back to the computer to avoid immediate eye contact.

  That’s when I remembered the telephone call. “A girl from your branch called—Bonnie, Tawny, whatever. Because I had checks in transit and wasn’t around, she was going to put a fraud alert on my account.”

  He removed his glasses, carefully placing them on his desk. For the first time, I had his complete and undivided attention. “A fraud alert? You must be mistaken, yah?”

  “She did that, right? She called while I was in L.A.”

  “We have several ladies in the branch: Margret, Ingrid, Anne. You must be mistaken about the name.”

  “No, it was one of those girly names that ends in an ‘e’ sound. Anyway, she said someone had attempted to access my account by ATM. She gave me the account number and told me the amount of the charges. It was, like, four hundred and something. When I told her I hadn’t accessed any ATMs, she said she’d reverse the charges and file a fraud report.”

  “That was it? Nothing more?”

  “She said she needed to confirm she was talking to me, not a stranger. I gave her my Social Security number.” I stopped cold, realizing what I’d done. I had exposed myself—not to Vernon and his entire staff of Margrets and Annes and Ingrids, but to a thief. “Oh, shit.”

  Someone was having a party on Kauai—on my bank account.

  He took a deep breath. “Was your mail held at the post office?”

  This time, it was my turn to blush.

  He winced. “Mr. McKenna, I’d say you’re the victim of identity theft. Held mail is vulnerable. You’re certainly not the first to have this happen. Someone must have seen your checks and stolen them, figuring it would take time for you to figure out what happened. Did your checks have your phone number printed on them?”