I'm Kona Love You Forever (Islands of Aloha Mystery Series Book 6) by JoAnn Bassett

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    “ He and Loke live there?”
    “Yeah. They got a nice place. A real nice place.”
    She rang me up and I hauled my stuff to the car. The beer was cold so I toyed with the notion of taking it back to the B & B before it got warm, but then reconsidered. We didn’t have a refrigerator in our room but there was bound to be one in the breakfast room. When I got back from the coffee farm I’d ask if they’d mind holding it for us.
    “ Naturally Kona” turned out to be over ten miles away, in Kealakekua. I’d used the GPS on my phone, but still I missed the turnoff from the highway and had to double back. The place was marked with a discreet wooden sign about the size of a garbage can lid. It had been nailed to a fence post at the entrance to a rutted dirt road. The road ran ma kai , or toward the ocean, from the highway. I turned down the dirt road and bumped along, feathering the brakes on the steep incline.
    A minute later I was passing row after tidy row of coffee trees. The trees weren’t tall, maybe eight or ten feet at the most. They’d been trimmed to nearly perfect spheres of shiny emerald green leaves. Beneath the trees the ground was grassy, but between the rows the earth had been recently tilled, revealing dark reddish brown soil. The orchard resembled an artist’s rendering of Eden; everything healthy, tidy and vibrant. There was nary a weed or bug in sight.
    I drove up and parked in the gravel lot. A hand-lettered sign that read, “Coffee Tours” pointed to a two-story building on the other side of the lot. It was a barn-like structure painted dark brown with white trim. They’d set up a covered area outside the barn with a sign designating it as the tasting room. The tasting area consisted of a corrugated roof over four long tables. The first table held four stainless-steel air pots alongside stacks of tiny white paper cups. The second table held a display of photos and artifacts showing the Kona coffee growing process. The back two tables were used to showcase a sampling of coffee-themed items for sale. No one was out there, which seemed pretty trusting to me. At the far end of the tasting area, a door marked, “Gift Shop,” led inside the barn.
    I went inside.
    “I’m looking for Loke Vick,” I said to a woman in back. She was putting price stickers on mugs featuring the “Naturally Kona” logo. I shot her a toothy smile. “Is she available?”
    The woman took my measure, as if deciding whether I was there to serve her a subpoena or to interview her for a feature story in Coffee Talk . Seems my cheeriness won out.
    “I’m Loke,” she said. “How can I help you?”
    “Is there somewhere we could talk, in private?”
    She glanced around the store. We were the only people in there.
    “This is about as private as it gets,” she said. “A tour just went out so I’m not expecting anyone for another fifteen minutes.”
    I dug Lili’s bogus birth certificate out of my beach bag purse. “I’m sorry to bring this up, but it seems you had a baby girl eighteen years ago. According to public records, she died shortly after birth. Is that correct?”
    Her eyes widened as if I had come in to serve her subpoena and she’d been accused of a particularly heinous crime. She turned away.
    “Again, I’m sorry ,” I said. “But there’s been a development.”
    She turned back. Her cheeks had reddened and her eyes were now narrowed in fury. “How dare you come in here asking a question like that? I don’t even know your name.”
    Oops. Seems I’d forgotten the first rule of civility. At least introduce yourself before you go crashing into someone’s heartbreaking past.

     
    CHAPTER 12
     
    After I introduced myself and explained why I was there, Loke seemed to calm down a little. She led me to a back corner of the gift shop where they’d placed four cozy upholstered armchairs around an actual “coffee table” on which they’d placed an air pot of the “Coffee of the Day.” She