Free Shimura Trouble by Sujata Massey

down on refined sugar.”
    “Whatever,” Kainoa said. “And regarding your crazy family business, don’t even think about it no more. You got enough going on with your father. You don’t need more life troubles.”
    “What do you mean by that?” His tone had startled me.
    Kainoa looked at me. “You want to stay in good health, keep up your running, go swimming, try the honey in your latte. Where you might get hurt is going somewhere you shouldn’t, especially on this side of the island.”
    “Are you talking about the Pierce lands?”
    “No, I’m not.” Kainoa looked at me levelly. “I’m talking about the past. And it’s just a tip, because I’d hate to see a nice girl like you get hurt.”
    HAD KAINOA BEEN threatening me? I wondered as I lounged in the pool with my father a few hours later. No, I decided. It was just the language gap between us. All of a sudden, I wished I really was a kamaaina, and not just another hapa-haole stumbling her way through misunderstandings.
    The sun had warmed the pool to the most amazingly pleasant temperature, and the sky was beautiful and cloudless. The sun was high, but gentle trade winds kept me from overheating. From my supine position, I heard rumbling. Someone was talking; my father, no doubt. He was the only other person in the pool with me, and he’d been talking almost nonstop, all through the morning’s workout of exercises taken from my new bible, Move and Groove Past Your Stroke !
    I felt a hand slide under my back, and I jerked upright to find myself looking not at my father, but a much younger Asian man with spiky, gangster-style hair and small eyes with a strange glint in them. His upper body was typically hairless, but it was puffy with flab, atypical for any Japanese man, especially one in his twenties. And, unbelievably, he kept his hands under my back.
    “Need help float?” he said in a heavy accent—not pidgin, but Japanese.
    “Get away!” I twisted away, sputtering, because I’d swallowed a bit of water at the shock of the touch.
    “Wakarimasen,” he said, and lounged on a blue Styrofoam noodle, the kind of water toy children were more likely to play with.
    So he definitely was Japanese, and he was pleading that he didn’t understand English. I didn’t bother continuing the conversation in either language, but splashed back to my father, who was lounging against the pool wall, reading.
    “Did you see the Japanese guy with the noodle? He just touched me!”
    “Oh really? That’s Jiro Kikuchi,” said Uncle Hiroshi, who had been lounging in a chair wearing a sun-shielding visor that covered almost his whole face. “If he likes you, maybe that’s a good thing!”
    “What?” I was incensed.
    “He’s the developer’s son, Rei,” my father said. “We met earlier when you went into the restroom. I was just talking with him in Japanese, and then for a few minutes with his roommate.”
    Now I remembered what Kainoa had said about the younger Kikuchi and his caregiver. I followed my uncle’s gaze to a short, bronzed man in his thirties with thick black razor-cut hair wearing a Speedo suit and reading The Annals of Psychiatry behind a pair of dark sunglasses.
    “Did the roommate mention that he’s a psychiatrist?” I asked, recalling Kainoa’s information.
    “Yes, how did you guess?” my father answered. “His name is Calvin Morita, and he’s just like you, Rei, partly Japanese and partly American. He went to Yale for his undergraduate and medical degrees. Since you didn’t care for Kikuchi-san, shall we introduce you to Dr. Morita?”
    “No!” I got out of the pool and found a chair far away from the matchmaking brothers, where I buried myself in The Waikiki Widow, the Juanita Sheridan novel that was next in the series I’d started on the plane. I hadn’t finished two pages before Calvin Morita strolled over.
    “Are you Doctor Shimura’s daughter?” he asked with the long vowel sounds of the Midwest. I nodded warily.
    He