Romancing the wrong woman on a moon-lit Hawaiian night?
Ah! Danger!!
(I firmly believe that the best way to sell a book is by letting people read some of the story.)
(A segment wherein Honolulu Homicide Detective Steven Ke'aloha Shaw picks up the wrong woman at the disco Ah Sin at the Queen Liliuokalani Hotel on Kalakaua Avenue.)
They walked toward Diamond Head, he on the ocean side and she between him and Kalakaua. The Hawaiian night was warm and alive. An ivory moon had risen to face the sea. The sand had cooled off, the surf still surged, the trade winds rustled the palms, and the night smelled of jasmine and ocean.
On her side Waikiki was a hundred hotels and thirty-five thousand hotel rooms, and at night it became a giant emerald city of bright lights, a great wall of incandescence to complement the black ocean.
"Tell me again your middle name."
"Have you forgotten it already?"
"Ke'aloha," Annie said, this time mispronouncing it. "I've never known a Ke'aloha before. Hawaiian is a beautiful language."
"My grandmother always said Hawaiian sounds like rainwater running over rocks down a mountain stream. Ke'aloha," he told her.
"Ke'aloha," she said correctly. "Ainahau," she tried.
"Ainahau. In Hawaiian, Ainahau means the place of the hau trees, those trees with the golden blossoms, but the real pride of Ainahau are its banyans, those Kaiulani banyans near the Aina Stream. They are named after the Princess Kaiulani."
"And who was the Princess Kaiulani?"
"She was the most beautiful woman of all the Hawaiian royalty. She was the Princess of the Peacocks, the Rose of the Ainahau. Born to be the Queen of the Hawaiian Islands. Princess Kaiulani was a true Hawaiian princess, although she was also half-Scottish. Her mother was Princess Miriam Likelike, a descendant of King Kamehameha the Great, the Father of his Country, and the youngest sister of King David Kalakaua, the sixth king of Hawaii. Her father was Archibald S. Cleghorn, the world-famous botanist, and his prized creation was the Ainahau, a garden built for his daughter on part of their family estate in Waikiki."
"The Ainahau? The hotel?"
"All this was fifty years before the hotel. A century ago the Ainahau was the finest botanical garden in the world, at a time when most of the Waikiki peninsula was a swamp, just taro patches and duck ponds. That one there, for instance, and all the other really tall ones."
"Ah Sin's duck ponds?"
"The beach itself was empty, except for some wooden shacks and some cocopalms. Some of those cocopalms are still alive today, still living on the beachfront lawn at the Ainahau Hotel."
Annie made a grand gesture that went beyond the ivory moon above the beach. "The princess grew up here."
"Yes. A fairytale childhood in the shadow of Diamond Head. She had servants and governesses. By the time she was seven, she was an accomplished horsewoman. She had her own pony and even more exotic pets, like white peacocks."
"Is she the Ghost of Ainahau?"
"Sometimes people in love can see the Princess walking on a moonlit night through her garden, when the air is heavy with the smell of night-blooming jasmine."
"Oh god!" she breathed.
"She loved the jasmine so much, the Hawaiian people named its blossom pikake in her honor." He touched the necklace of white flowers around Annie's neck. "You're wearing pikake. Very delicate. Very fragile, and it doesn't last long. It turns blue at the lips when it dies."
Steve had taken Annie along the beach until now they were opposite the beachlawn of the Ainahau Hotel. He changed their course and brought them close to a huge banyan tree that covered much of the manicured lawn.
"Robert Louis Stevenson lived about here. The Cleghorns entertained many famous people, but their favorite guest was Stevenson. He was drinking buddies with King Kalakaua and lived in a grass shack at Ainahau while he struggled to finish 'The Master of Ballantrae.'"
Steve told her the story as he had heard it as a child. How Princess Kaiulani was Robert Louis Stevenson's special friend. How the sickly world-famous author and the lovely teenage princess sat here beneath the banyan trees, sipping tea and listening to the peacocks, and the Scotsman would tell the young Kaiulani stories about faraway places and long-ago times.
"He adored the beautiful princess and wrote poetry about her. He called her 'the island maid, the island rose, light of heart and bright of face, the daughter of a double race.'"
They stood beneath the banyan tree in the center of the Ainahau Hotel's beachfront lawn, and they were hidden from the guests inside the hotel by its great aerial roots.
Annie stroked the bark. "And this is the same tree?"
"You can smell the jasmine, can't you?"
She looked into him, her eyes boring deep into his soul, and his balls spun around in his scrotum, and his scrotum tightened like drying leather, and his throat went dry.
"What happened to her?"
"A tragic death at the age of twenty-four." Steve hesitated melodramatically before finishing. "She died unloved. She never had a man."
Annie raised an eyebrow. "Never?"
"She died without ever making love."
Steve stared at her without blinking, as unflinching as a hunter, daring her, and she stared at him as if she could look through him, and her eyes urged him towards her.
Her voice was veiled and sad. "How terribly, terribly tragic."
"So her ghost haunts young lovers."
She touched his arms with velvety fingers. "Are you related to the Princess?"
With an effort, Steve kept talking. "My great-great grandmother was her kuma hula, her hula teacher. She taught the Princess the hula. Secretly, of course. The missionaries frowned on the hula. It was too sensual, too romantic."
"How romantic was it? How sensual?"
“Lick your lips.”
She licked her lips, never taking her eyes off his.
Then Steve kissed her, and Annie let him. Her arms came around his neck. He felt the curve of her breast under his hand. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears. He wanted this woman as much as she seemed to want him.
(His life will never be the same.)
From the novel MURDER IN WAIKIKI, available at the Kindle Store. Less expensive writings are also available.
Enjoy good writing tonight in the privacy of your home.
Best wishes,
Fred Zackel
author of ...
COCAINE & BLUE EYES
CINDERELLA AFTER MIDNIGHT
CREEPIER THAN A WHOREHOUSE KISS
A DEATH IN KEY LARGO
TOUGH TOWN COLD CITY
&
MURDER IN WAIKIKI
All (and more) are available on Kindle and smashwords
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