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Lost Lagoon

Hawaii was just as tourist-y as I’d been warned but, as I drove my rental car away from the airport and out of the city and through the countryside to the tiny family-run inn deep in the trees, I found it even more beautiful than I’d imagined.

I parked in the three-car lot (one space taken by a station wagon with Lost Lagoon Resort Cottage in a sticker on its driver’s-side front door.

My bags weren’t very heavy — I pack light, and warm-weather clothes are lighter than average, so I carried them in myself and plopped them next to my feet at the reception desk.

“Aloha, Mrs. Grant!”

The desk clerk greeted me with an artificial smile. She was beautifully tanned, and her hair shone like sun-bleached gold, but she was eerily thin. She looked healthy and unhealthy at the same time. My stomach tied itself into a knot like the knots I had come on vacation to avoid for a week.

“How old are you?” I asked, pulling the register to myself and picking up the pen.

The girl’s eyes widened and she cut them left and right, her smile fixed in place. “Eighteen,” she said.

“Have you been working here long?” I signed the book, noting that there was a respectable stream of clientele from the mainland and the islands.

“It’s my family’s place.”

“Just you and your mom and your dad?”

“Yes.”

The door behind the girl opened and a middle-aged woman came out, black hair cut short, eyes thick with shadow and mascara, lips red and glossy.

“I hope there’s no trouble here,” she said, giving the girl a smile like a papercut.

“No,” I said. “What trouble could there be? Your girl was just making a new guest welcome.” The knot in my gut tightened. I knew her. Did she know me? I had been Miss Anderson then, and she had been Annette Brower. Mrs. Paul Brower.

“That’s good,” she said. The girl edged away from her by a millimeter. Not many people would have spotted it, but I did.

I held out my hand. “I’m Gracie Grant.”

The woman shook hands with me, her grip firm, her smile warm, her look direct and guileless. “And I’m Honoree Poole. My husband, James, is the cook around here. He should have lunch ready in about half an hour.”

“That’s great,” I said. Paul Brower had been handy in the kitchen, too, an expert in fire and knives.

Honoree Poole turned to the girl who had checked me in. “Take Mrs. Grant’s bags to her cottage,” she said. “And don’t be long.”

“I won’t.”

I wondered if the girl could even lift my bags, as thin as she was, but she had no trouble.

As soon as we were out the door, I said, “I know these people from way back.”

She shied away from me.

“No,” I said, “not as friends. I used to work for CASA — Court Appointed Special Advocates representing at-risk children.”

She stopped. I stopped, too.

She said, “I’m eighteen. I’m not a child anymore.”

“No,” I said, “but you’re pretty much a prisoner, aren’t you?”

“They’re my folks.”

“No,” I said. “They aren’t.”

“They’ve always been my folks.”

“Have they?”

While she opened and closed her mouth, trying to find something that would come out, I opened the back door of my car.

“Let’s go,” I said. “You’re an adult. You can leave if you want to. They’re going to leave, too, as soon as I make a phone call. People have been looking for these two. I’d bet money that people have been looking for you, too.”

I took my bags from her and tossed them into the car. Then I pushed her in.

As I pulled away, I saw Mrs. so-called Poole pelt out the front door, yelling something, but I couldn’t hear her. All I could hear was the girl in the back, saying, “People have been looking for me? People? Looking? For me?”

She had real folks somewhere and, by God, we would find them.

MY PROMPT TODAY: A nightmare a friend told me about

MA