My Kind of Town
Something familial
>> Queen's Medical CenterThe moment Grace Ah Sun took the wrinkled paper from her nephew Quinn and saw the small photo of Clarence "Bobo" Ah Sun, her hands began to tremble. "My God, what are you kids up to?!" Grace said, horrified.
"I don't know, Auntie. All I got is questions, no more answers."
"This man ..." Grace practically threw the paper -- a photocopy of a Star-Bulletin Police Blotter item from 1981 -- back at Quinn. She wiped her hands together, as if trying to wash away filth.
"Auntie, I don't even know how it got in my room, OK? I did ask Lily to go to the State Library earlier and do research on the Ah Suns in the newspaper archives, but that was the last time I saw her."
Quinn studied the photo. Bobo was darker than Quinn's father and uncle, but he saw something familiar, something familial. And now he read carefully about the missing person report filed for "popular entertainer Clarence 'Bobo' Ah Sun." Tony Martinez of the band Mauka Showers filed the report and was quoted as saying that he and Bobo talked "all the time," but it had been a month since they last spoke. "That's not like him," Martinez said. "I'm worried."
"Auntie, who's this Bobo?"
None of the truthful answers would do anyone any good, Grace thought, trying to get her emotions under control. Well, there was one honest thing she could say. "He was a cousin. Shortly after that item appeared, he sent a postcard from the Caribbean. I think it was in Dave Donnelly's column. Anyway, he was working on a cruise ship, alive and well."
But if that's all there was to it, why did Quinn's father deny any knowledge of Bobo?
>> It had been a busy morning in the ER. A woman in Waipahu was stabbed by her fiance, another guy had a stroke while playing golf at Ala Wai and three people were involved in a car accident in the Pali Tunnel. So it was late by the time Dr. Laurie Tang and ER charge nurse Van Truong sat down for lunch.
Van had worked with Laurie for a long time and knew her well. And something was different today. She was wondering how to raise such a personal question when Dr. Aeschylus Wong walked into the lunch room waving a copy of the afternoon Star-Bulletin.
"Well well well," he said and dropped it on the table with a thud. There was Laurie in a photo on Page One, wearing an electric blue swimsuit, looking up at a hunky guy wearing only red Birdwell surf shorts. That explained the good doctor's mood today. She was ga-ga in love.
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