CHAPTER 19

.19.

The "special" ginger ale at the Malibu Inn was the color of a tarnished sunset and burned like a well-kept secret. We were sitting at a corner table with a view, and I watched the October light turn the Pacific into a sheet of hammered brass.

The Inn wasn’t crowded, but the people who were there kept performing nonetheless. I recognized a few faces from the silent screen. Men with brows too heavy for their own good and women whose eyes were wider than the law allowed drifted toward our table like ghosts drawn to a new light, murmuring condolences that sounded more like auditions. 

They weren't mourning the man, of course; they were paying tribute to the Karlsen name. Each handshake was a subtle "kissing of the ring," and Jimmy accepted it with a mask of practiced Hollywood grace that made my skin crawl.

I sat there, the "Stingray" out of water, watching the way he leaned into the whiskey in ginger ale skin. We couldn't talk. Not really. The air was too thick with the scent of French perfume and the greasy smell of celluloid sympathy.

When the last of the "mourners" finally retreated to the bar, Jimmy stood up, the chair scraping against the floor with a jagged, ugly sound.

"Let's go," he said. The "ginger ale" hadn't calmed him; it had just sharpened his edges.

Back in the Auburn, the sea breeze tried to peel the smell of the Inn off us. I looked at the red dash, then at the hard line of Jimmy’s jaw.

"Where to now?" I asked.

"Stella Maris."

I frowned, the university degree itching in the back of my brain. "Stella Maris, as in Polaris? Or do you mean the novel? The Pickford movie?"

Jimmy scoffed, a dry, bitter sound that was lost in the roar of the engine as he threw it into gear. "Neither. Maybe all of them. Stela Maris is the old man’s hideout in the colony. He didn't name it. The woman who wrote the movie about the novel did. Frances Marion. Ever heard of her?"

I had heard of Frances Marion. I'd even read that she was the writer behind Mary Pickford's success. Would I ever be that successful? 

"She sold the lease to the old man a few years ago," Jimmy continued. "He kept the name because of the star. Polaris, not Mary Pickford. Or maybe because he thought he was the only one of us who knew how to navigate the dark."

He drove us into the Malibu Movie Colony, a cluster of houses huddled in the dunes like wealthy refugees from a studio backlot. He stopped in front of a Spanish Revival place. White stucco, red-tiled roof, hit the eye with a modesty that felt almost aggressive after the Mayan fortress on Mulholland. It was a one-story sanctuary draped in bougainvillea that looked like spilled wine against the white walls.

"Nobody was allowed here. Not my uncle, or the board, definitely not the press," Jimmy said as he fumbled with the key. "Not even Mother. He gave a key to me, but I had to tell him every time I wanted to spend the weekend here."

Inside, the house smelled of salt air and old cedar. The living room was wide and open, with windows that looked straight out at the surf. 

I followed Jimmy into a small study and stopped. There were no photographs of governors here. No portraits of starlets or silver-haired titans. Just a desk, a window, and a pair of binoculars. It was the room of a man who wanted to be a spectator for a while, just an old Dane warming his bones in the sun.

"This was his refuge," Jimmy said, almost as if he'd just read my mind. "He used to say a King needs a place where he can take off his boots."

We settled in; Jimmy retreating to his old bedroom like a wounded animal, and me tossing my bag in the guest room. I found him a few minutes later in the living room, staring at the waves with a glass of the real stuff in his hand.

Then, we heard it.

A rhythmic, metallic chuff-chuff-chuff echoed from the driveway, followed by the unmistakable, clattering clack of a planetary transmission. It was a 1923 Ford Model T "Centerdoor" Sedan, the kind of car that belonged in a museum or my historian father's driveway, not a millionaire’s beachfront.

The front door didn't just open; it was sidestepped. A woman in her early fifties irrupted into the room. She was dressed in the practical, modest attire of a housekeeper, but the scarf around her salt-and-pepper hair was a riot of tropical colors; a defiance in silk. Her face was a map of lived-in lines, her eyes keen and steady, the kind of eyes that see the rot in a house long before the walls start to lean.

The woman didn't say a word. I guess she didn't have to.

She walked straight to Jimmy, and the glass nearly slipped from his hand as he stood. She folded him into a hug that wasn't about etiquette or "nerves." It was a primal thing: a mother’s embrace for a son who she thought had been lost at sea. 

Jimmy buried his face in her shoulder, his eyes snapping shut, and for a second, the "Danish Prince" disappeared. He was just a boy who’d finally found the shore.

I watched them from the shadow of the hall, thinking of the society orchid back in the Hills who needed medicine to face the day. This woman wasn't an orchid. She was made of Koa; resistant to the rot, hardened by the fire, and it seemed, capable of looking a volcano in the eye and telling it to stand down.

There was a peculiar, quiet relief in that scene for me. I’d pulled Jimmy out of the Pacific, but as I watched her hold him, I realized he had another Kahu after all. One who had been waiting for him to come home.