My Kind of Town
>> Ala Moana Beach Park Mysteries and miracles
This goddess business was getting harder and harder to take for HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes. The man lived on logic. He looked up from his note pad as if Jimmy Ahuna had just announced he was leaving today on an alien space ship. "Come again?"
Jimmy, retired from the Pearl Harbor Shipyard, was glowing. "At's right, bruddah, Ho'ola invited to come stay in her valley. I cannot believe my luck either."
Gomes wasn't thinking luck, he was thinking weirdness.
Dr. Laurie Tang, already late for work at the Queen's ER, still couldn't pull herself away. As a physician, she believed in science and reason. The ER was reality times 10. And yet medicine also taught her that unexplained things happen. There were times when a patient survived and the only real explanation she could come up with was "miracle." She had seen such mysteries over and over. So like Gomes, she relied on logic and the reality of the here-and-now. But unlike the hulking detective whose religion began and ended at St. Philomena Catholic Church, Laurie believed in a broader spirituality. It was a kind of vague, unknowing belief that some other world, other powers existed. So the last thing she expected to see was a big, brown, naked deity walking around Ala Moana Beach Park.
"Where is Ho'ola's valley?" she said.
"It's where you never grow old."
"OK, Mr. Ahuna, just so I got this straight," Gomes cut in, reading from the precise script in his note pad -- not an easy thing to do while shaking your head in disbelief. "So you saw the sub twice, once before at Queen's Beach and then today." Meaning the WWII-vintage Japanese mini-sub that surfaced at the Diamond head end of the park minutes ago, lifting Laurie out of the water in the last yards of her swim. "At's right."
"And then the woman we saw inside the sub ..." The woman who was kissing the head of the lone occupant, who turned out to be a skeleton. "She just disappeared. Nobody else out of hundreds of people saw her except Dr. Tang, me and you ..."
Jimmy nodded.
"And you say she is Ho'ola, goddess of life."
"At's right again. Rescuer, healer, saver, preserver."
"Hey!" Laurie said. "There she is now!"
Sure enough, there was Ho'ola, 50 yards away, beckoning to a guy who was jumping onto a mo-ped, glancing over his shoulder and vrooming away from the goddess as fast as he could. He wore wrap-around shades and a Dodgers cap pulled down low, and from this distance neither Gomes nor Laurie recognized Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com