Page 81 of Forgotten Promise

“My cousin, Mark, he’s the oldest, but he’s kind of a fuck-up, you know what I mean?” Liam said.

“Absolutely,” John agreed.

“My uncle insists he has potential, and he does. He’s smart. Dropped out of MIT, but my uncle acts like he graduated.”

“What was he studying at MIT?”

“Electrical engineering. I’m a licensed electrician. I make good money. But I just went to a trade school so it’s like it doesn’t count.” Liam was getting worked up, which was great.

“Wait, wait, so your uncle thinks his dropout son is better than you, when you’re the one with the skilled profession?” John said, much of his outrage on Liam’s behalf genuine. The thing that made his job so hard was that he could usually see where people were coming from, could empathize with the reasons behind the bad decisions. That ability was also part of what made him good at his job.

“Right?” Liam leaned forward, elbows on the small table John had found for use in his mock interrogation room. “And so my uncle pressures my dad, who pressures me, that I should let Mark tag along on some of my jobs. Because maybe Mark will think it’s interesting enough that he’ll want to do it too.”

John shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the audacity. Honestly, he sort of couldn’t.

“And if he did decide it was interesting enough for him,” Liam went on, “I would have had to vouch for him to my boss.”

“So you bring him with you to work. Here, at Hale’ekolu.” They’d already been over this once, and John needed to redirect if he didn’t want this to devolve into cousin-bashing.

“Yeah. I brought him for a few days, including the day I was redoing some of the wiring in the old hotel. They’re upgrading to energy-efficient fixtures and adding more lighting, and that wiring was too old, with way too many junctions for that.”

“Where do you have to go to do that? Were you on the roof?”

“In the ceiling, actually. There’s not much space. You can’t even really sit up, but if you lay flat you can get it done.”

John knew that from experience, since he and Makani had investigated the other side of the hatch.

“You and Mark were up in the ceiling?”

“Yeah, and then Mark isn’t paying attention to what he’s doing, and he puts a knee through the drywall. I’m thinking shit, because the restaurant is still open, and I just messed up their ceiling, which means they’ll have to close while we fix it. But Mark checks and he says he’s not over the restaurant. That he’s over a storage room.”

“And did you go over and look in, see what was in the room?”

“No.” Liam shook his head. “I didn’t.”

Liar. He absolutely looked. But John nodded.

“I told Mark to leave it, that I’d ask the drywall guys to fix it, but he says he’ll fix it. I just…I just needed to finish my stuff, so I left Mark to it.”

“And this was all in one day?”

Liam looked down at his hands. “No. Mark came back with me a couple days in a row. He went down into the storage room. Said he couldn’t fix it all from above. But I never went in. Never.”

That, John believed. He was pretty sure Liam saw the gold, knew what his cousin was going to do, and turned a blind eye.

“Mark fixed it. He even painted the drywall patch he made. He did a good job.”

John leaned in. “But it’s not a patch, right? It’s actually more of an access hatch.”

Liam blanched. “It was just so he could get in because he said the door into that storage room was locked from the outside, so he had to go in and out through the ceiling.”

“Or you could have told your boss, told the hotel, what happened. They would have opened the door for you to fix it.”

Liam looked down at his hands. His fingers were shaking.

“Mark fixes the hole,” John said, pulling back from the accusations. “You finish the rewiring in the ceiling. Then what?”

“Then…nothing. I was done at that point. I got assigned to a different project with the understanding I’d come back, toward the end of the renovation, to help with some of the installs, but the electrical prep work was done.”

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