Broken Ferns (Lei Crime ) by Toby Neal Page B

Rosario Matsumoto Texeira. Your granddaughter.” It felt important to say her full name, though her tongue tripped across its unfamiliarity.
    “Lei.” He seemed to be gathering his thoughts, adjusting. “I am happy to hear from you.”
    “Oh really?” She let the pause spin out, waiting to see what he would say next.
    “Yes. You must have gotten my number from Wayne.”
    “I did. He says you live in Honolulu.”
    “Yes, out by Punchbowl.” The extinct crater, site of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, was an easy, striking landmark in Honolulu. “I have a house. The same one your mother grew up in.”
    “Okay.”
    “I have been following your career. Congratulations on the FBI.”
    “Oh. Well. Thanks.” Lei felt her throat close on all the questions—why hadn’t they ever contacted her, found her when she was a child, when their daughter, Maylene, was descending into the darkness of her addiction? Why had they let her go to her aunt (though that had been the right place) without even a word or a card in all those years?
    “I bet you wonder where we were all those years,” he said, seemingly reading her mind.
    “Kind of, yes.”
    “Your mother, Maylene, she was a great disappointment to us. To your grandmother Yumi, particularly. Yumi, she never did see eye to eye with Maylene, and she didn’t want to seem like…” His voice trailed off.
    “Like she approved of her choices.”
    “Right, as you say. And we lost track of Maylene after Wayne went to prison. I didn’t even know what was happening until we had a call from the police department that she’d died, that you’d gone into foster care with your aunt. And Yumi, she said Maylene had made her choices.”
    Lei closed her eyes, reached forward to pick up the disc, rubbed it. She realized in that moment that at some point in the last few years, handling something when stressed had gone from a coping technique she needed to a habit. She set the disc down.
    This conversation was way harder than she’d imagined. She wondered what the hell her father was thinking, bullying her into calling.
    “But I never—I never agreed with it. I always wanted to find you.” Soga’s voice had a vibration in it—age or grief? It was hard to tell.
    “Why didn’t you?” Lei burst out, feeling the sting of tears at the back of her eyes, thinking of those early years with Rosario in California, a Hawaii girl getting used to a new school, teased for her unique, multiethnic looks. Even a birthday card, one of those sparkle-covered puppy ones, would have meant so much to her back then.
    “Yumi, she had her ways.” Suppressed emotion colored his formal tone with the richness of regret. “I should have contacted you anyway. I’m so glad you called, because I can say I’m sorry.”
    Lei imagined how hard it was for him to say those words. To a first-generation Japanese man of his age, such admissions were a sign of weakness—and proof she mattered to him.
    “It’s okay. It was what it was.” A variation on the phrase her therapist Dr. Wilson had often used to help her accept the unacceptable.
    “I imagine Wayne told you—your grandmother is gone now.”
    “Yes. And I’m sorry I never knew her.” Lei cleared her throat around the tightness there. “Even if she never wanted to know me.”
    “It’s not that.” He sighed, a long, sad sound. “Yumi, she was proud.”
    “Well, I do have something to ask you. Something kind of hard.” Lei straightened up a bit. Maybe he’d confide in her if she just came out with it, if she was vulnerable first. “Wayne told you I was abused by a man named Charlie Kwon?”
    A swift intake of breath. Her grandfather hadn’t expected that. “Yes.”
    “Well, you must also know his murder is unsolved. I have to tell you something.” Lei steeled herself, picking up and squeezing the white-gold disc so tightly that the embedded diamonds dug into the pads of her fingers. “I visited him the day he died. To tell