Page 41 of Shark Cove

“Yes. I’ll turn it off to save the battery.” Harry did so and put the phone back in the safe. “At our family meeting with your dad tomorrow, we’ll talk about when you can get it back.”

“When does Dad arrive?”

“Midmorning tomorrow. I plan to meet him, and we’ll have lunch and talk. I want you to be at the house at two p.m. for our family meeting.”

“Okay. I’ve got no plans. Where’s Dad going to stay?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll see what he’s comfortable with when I pick him up.” A quiver in Harry’s voice.

Malia hoped her mother wasn’t hurt again. “Good night, Mom.”

Harry trailed her hand over Malia’s head, down the long waterfall of tousled curls hanging down her back. “Sleep well, honey.”

“You too.” Malia squelched a twinge of guilt. Her mom would freak if she knew what Malia and Blake were doing later.

Waiting for eleven p.m. to roll around and her mom’s light to go out seemed to take forever. Fresh guilt twisted Malia’s guts: Harry would hate that she was sneaking out to spy on Leonard William; and yet—she might be able to find out something more, and at least she’d be with Blake.

Malia tossed and turned, steeling her resolve.No more kissing. Period. She was going to find Camille and clear things up with her friend before the relationship with Blake went any further.

At ten-forty-five, Malia crept out of her room and down the stairs. She dug around in the utility drawer in the kitchen and found the little penlight they kept there and sighed with relief that it still worked.

Malia exited through the kitchen to the garage door into the backyard, as that made less noise than the front door, slipped her shoes on, and stepped into the dew-cooled grass under the fat silver quarter of moon. She hardly needed the penlight with the moon so bright. She zipped up her black sweatshirt and pulled the hood up over her head, breaking into a jog as she moved down the driveway.

The little country road was a deserted ribbon bordered by tall grasses and wire fencing, all of it rendered monochromatic by moonlight. She continued down the road and spotted the Mercedes already in the pullout. She sighed with relief as she opened the door and slid in.

“Midnight raid on Lahaina Harbor, here we come.” Blake was a black shadow in the driver’s seat. He turned on the ignition and the lights on the panel lit his face.

“Thanks for doing this.” Malia put her hands in her lap and squeezed them together to keep from reaching over to hug him.

“I hope it’s worth it. Any trouble getting out of the house?”

“No. Surprisingly easy. Mom also let me look at my phone. No messages from Camille.” She was still troubled by the message from Camille that she'd received on the Wallflower phone.

“What do you think that means?” Blake drove forward gently, slowly accelerating as they left Malia’s house.

“I’ve been trying to put myself in her shoes. She’s alone, disoriented. She grabs the guard’s phone and texts me at the Wallflower number. Why didn’t she just call 911?” Malia said, as they turned and headed toward the highway going into Lahaina.

“Maybe she did. But maybe she couldn’t speak aloud without alerting the guard?”

“Why wouldn’t she keep texting everybody she could think of, including me?”

“We’re all used to having contacts and speed dial. It’s hard to remember numbers you haven’t seen in a while in the heat of the moment.”

“Good point. She could have texted everyone’s number she could remember, and we wouldn’t know it. The Wal-Flwr number is set up so people can do it by the letters instead of numbers, so maybe that’s why she sent the text there and not to my regular phone. But now I don’t know whether it was a hoax or not, because of all those other goofy texts I’ve been getting.” Malia told him about the texted “Camille sightings” in all sorts of places. “They’re turning it into some crazy ‘Where’s Waldo?’ game, like this is some kind of joke.”

“I don’t think anyone thinks it’s serious anymore.” A frown showed between Blake’s brows in the reflected light from the dash.

“Yeah, because everybody thinks she’s at a fat farm right now. I got on the blog enough to delete all the posts except the ones about finding Camille, but I haven’t updated it since the post about her being at the camp. I’ve done all I can right now. I fished around with Mom to see if she’d heard anything new, but she said no. That makes me think MPD didn’t take my phone-in call as Camille seriously, or they’d have notified her.”

“Crap,” Blake said.

They entered the outskirts of Lahaina. The former whaling village, now an enclave of art galleries and tourist shopping, sprawled along the coastal edge of the island. Blake turned down one of the side streets, empty after ten p.m. “Let’s park and go to the harbor on foot.”

“Sounds good.”

They found a public parking lot, and Malia was glad of the moon overhead once again as they left the car to a town filled with rustling shadow. Coconut palms made a ghostly rattle overhead as thin clouds scudded across the moon. Malia shivered, and didn’t resist as Blake took her hand.

“I still don’t know what you’re expecting to find,” Blake whispered, as they walked briskly along the worn asphalt road toward the harbor.

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