Free Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_04 by Death in Paradise Page A

home, do whatever I had to do, fight whomever I had to fight.
    Pierson shook loose another cigarette, lit it, but his eyes never left my face, calculating, bright, hard eyes. “You know something, lady? If I was you, I’d be damn careful.”

five
    T he jeep squealed to a stop. I stared at the bar swung across the road and the stark sign:
    Â 
    NO TRESPASSING
    Â 
    I’d known the way would be barred. This was simply the first challenge.
    I jumped down. The dark red dirt glistened greasily. The cane growing on either side of the narrow lane rustled in the light breeze. The cane was so tall, I stood in dusky shadow. Despite the languorous warmth of the air, I shivered.
    I pushed the bar wide, jumped back into the jeep. When I drove past the barrier, I didn’t stop to close it. Not because I was impatient. I kept going, driving faster and faster, red dust boiling from beneath the wheels, because if I drove slowly, I might turn back. I might not have the courage to persevere.
    Fear rode with me.
    Not only the bone weakening fear of danger. I knew danger awaited me at journey’s end. Yes, I was afraid. But not simply of danger. I was tormented by a more complex fear, webbed like the silky strands spun by an industrious spider, a tendril of terror, a strand of anxiety, a wisp of apprehension, a thread of fright, all combining in a tremulous mélange of dread.
    Oh, dear God, what was I going to learn at journey’s end?
    In the innermost recesses of my heart, I knew that I feared not so much learning the truth of Richard’s death as the truth of his life.
    What, finally, had Belle Ericcson meant to my husband? And could I bear to know that truth?
    But I had to go on. A quick memory glittered in my mind, bright as a diamond: the softness of Richard’s eyes on our fifth wedding anniversary; his eager smile as I unwrapped his present, a slim book of Millay’s sonnets. I remembered, too, with a heart-wrenching clarity, the exquisite passion in our union that starry night.
    Now the field of cane was behind me and the rusty red road began to climb, curving and twining, clinging to the edge of the rising escarpment.
    Up and up and up. The cliff fell sharply away from the rutted roadway. Jutting up from the sides of the valley were trees and ferns so intensely green they glittered like sunlit prisms of jade, vivid enough to make the eyes wince and seek relief in the arch of softly blue sky.
    I eased the pressure on the accelerator as I came around a curve. The road widened just enough for an outlook. Abruptly I braked, pulled to my right and stopped. I turned off the motor. My chest ached as if I’d run up that rising road.
    No sound broke the quiet. I looked out over the valley to another ridge and beyond it to another and another. This wasa Hawaii far removed from the bustle of Honolulu, wild and open, no sign of people or habitations, only rocky cliffs and emerald valleys.
    Kauai is called the Garden Isle with good reason. It is pastoral still with an innocence and simplicity that I had to delve back to a child’s memory of rural France for comparison: narrow blacktopped roads and cars traveling sedately; towns, not cities; sweeps of rolling land unspoiled by high-rises. Kauai has yet to be consumed by the tourism that has devoured Oahu. Travelers come here in search of breathtaking loveliness and peace.
    But I had not come to Kauai as a tourist seeking its beauty: dazzling gold trees with blooms more yellow than butter, chinaberry trees with clusters of pale pink or soft-azure flowers, magnificent banyans with hundreds of aerial roots; or the endlessly fascinating and awesome sea, crashing with inhuman force against outcroppings of jagged midnight-black lava, eddying in tidal pools behind barrier reefs, running in swift and dangerous currents, sometimes gentle, sometimes deadly.
    I came seeking vengeance, understanding, release.
    As I stared over the tropical growth, overwhelming in its