Free Going for Kona by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

into it.
    “I hope I can get you to take some of this with you, Mom.”
    I had foisted bursting sack lunches on Adrian’s parents that morning when I drove them to the airport, but their packages were grains of sand plucked from an endless beach. I wanted to lay my face on the granite countertop and sleep. I doubted I would ever care about food again.
    Mom grabbed a rag and some Clorox spray. “Don’t worry. We don’t have plans to leave anytime soon.” She sprayed the bare spots on the counter she had just cleared and started wiping them down. I dry-swallowed the lump of a thousand useless things I wanted to say. She had stayed two weeks after Sam was born, and I’d thought I had postpartum depression until she left.
    My phone rang. Annabelle? No. HPD. I went outside to take the call away from my mother’s ears and censure.
    I like our backyard better from inside. It’s lush with elephant ears and birds of paradise around the ponds, but the neighbors have too many dogs and we get their stink and spillover flies. I slapped at a mosquito and walked across a narrow rock bridge to the deck. I turned back to the ponds. They were low on water, and the pump made a futile sucking noise.
    “Detective Young?”
    “Good guess. Hello, Michele. You left me a message to call you back.”
    As I turned the water on for the pond at the faucet behind the deck, a strange feeling bubbled up and burst in my chest. I didn’t want to let go of being Adrian’s wife. I didn’t want to become just Michele. “Mrs. Hanson, please. Yes, thank you. I wanted to tell you that I think I saw the car that hit Adrian, at the funeral after you left.” I stood up at eye level with our empty birdfeeder. I’d deal with it later.
    “Really? What makes you think that?”
    I had expected him to sound thrilled, and instead he sounded almost blasé. It rubbed me the wrong way, but I sat on it. Maybe he’d perk up. “In the twenty-four hours before my husband died, I kept seeing white Ford Tauruses. Maybe the same one. When I asked him about it, he said the owner was a nut job and we needed to talk about it later. And then you came to my office, and of course later never came. Well, I saw another white Taurus at the funeral.”
    “What’s the license plate number?”
    I jiggled the empty propane tank that fueled the mosquito trap. “I don’t know.”
    “Do you know the name of the owner?”
    “No. But Adrian did, I think. And there’s something else. There was a woman that was kind of stalking Adrian, and I think she might drive a car like that.”
    “Kind of stalking?”
    “Yes, she came to our book launch party and was all over him, then she showed up at the Juniper offices the next day and followed him to a GNC.” I sat down at the deck table and watched a blue jay splash water on its back and shake its wings. A hummingbird darted into the feeder, and I eyed the container, expecting it to be empty, like me and everything else, but the sun shone through its bulb of red nectar. Papa.
    “Why did she come to your office?”
    “She said we’d advertised a job on Craigslist, but we hadn’t. I think she was looking for Adrian.”
    “He doesn’t work there, does he?”
    I slapped at another mosquito and missed. “No, but some people assume he does, because Juniper publishes his writing.” Detective Young didn’t say anything, so I added, “Her name is Rhonda Dale.”
    Still the detective didn’t speak.
    “Don’t you believe me, Detective?”
    “I believe you’ve seen this car, and I believe you’ve seen a woman named Rhonda Dale. You don’t have the information to identify the car, or anything to tie the car or the woman to Adrian’s death, though.”
    “But—”
    “I have new information for you. An eyewitness came forward this morning. We have a statement with a description of the incident and the vehicle. And it isn’t a Taurus, or even a woman.”
    My mouth fell open.
    “Are you still there?”
    “Yes.” It came out