nice. If you want them, it would help Leelee get through the month if you could give her some cash for them.”
I paused. “You remember how to change a diaper?”
My mother laughed. “Who do you think taught Liliha and Tatiana? What, this girl has a baby?”
“Yeah, and she seems overwhelmed.”
She said she’d drive right over, and I hung up feeling I had done a good deed for both of them. My father’s declining health had meant that my mother had to curtail a lot of her activities, including volunteering as a docent at the Bishop Museum, and helping Leelee would be a nice project for her. It could also keep her from going to any more rallies where she might get shot.
I made a couple of notes, told Leelee my mom was on her way over and promised we would be back in touch. “Let’s go back to what we were talking about before,” Ray said, as we walked away from the house. “What do you think the burglar was looking for?”
“She had a lot of old newspaper articles,” I said. “Now, I wish we’d taken all that stuff into evidence, but at the time it just looked like junk.”
“You remember anything about what she had? Was it about 54 Neil S. Plakcy
Kingdom of Hawai’i?”
“No, it was all older stuff,” I said. “Genealogy. Some birth and marriage announcements. Like from her family. And there was some stuff about volcanoes, places destroyed by the lava flows.”
“Didn’t the old folks say she came from some place that had been wiped out?”
“Yup. So those could just be personal stuff, mementoes.”
Ray thumped the steering wheel. “Maybe the burglar didn’t find what he was looking for—that’s why he ripped everything up and that’s why he took all those albums and folders.”
“We should go back and see if Edith owned any property, had any bank accounts, that kind of thing.”
We stopped at a Zippy’s for lunch on our way back to headquarters, and over teriyaki burgers Ray asked, “What do we know about Edith, anyway? People say she came from some little town on the Big Island, destroyed by lava. Convenient, isn’t it?
You think that’s the truth?”
“We can check it out. Leelee seemed to think all Edith had was her Social Security. If she still owned some property on the Big Island, the killer could be looking for deeds or bankbooks.”
I made a couple of notes, and then we relaxed and ate. They were playing an album I recognized as Hapa’s Surf Madness from the late 90s, and I tapped my foot along to their ‘50s hipster version of the Hawaii Five-O theme.
After lunch, we went back to headquarters, and I looked online for whatever the state had on Edith Kapana. The database of birth records indicated she had been born at home in 1935
in a small town called Opihi. I searched map sites but couldn’t find it, eventually discovering, from an Star-Advertiser article in the online archive, that the town had been wiped out a year ago by an eruption of Kilauea.
According to the article, Opihi was a tiny hamlet populated by a handful of Native Hawaiian families. They led a hardscrabble MAhu BLood 55
life, farming and fishing. When their homes were destroyed their way of life went with it. They relocated or moved in with distant relations, like Aunty Edith did. In a much later article, a reporter who interviewed Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, the leader of Kingdom of Hawai’i, pointed out that he had been born there, though he had moved to O’ahu before the destruction.
Edith didn’t have any bank accounts that we could find, and she only owned a small piece of land in Opihi which once had a small house on it. The record indicated the property had been condemned after the lava destroyed it. She had one brother, who died years before. I tracked his life, discovering that he had moved to Honolulu in 1958, married and bought the house in Papakolea. He and his wife had two children: Elizabeth, born in 1959, and Amos, born in 1960.
Elizabeth Kapana died in 2007; I found an obituary for
I paused. “You remember how to change a diaper?”
My mother laughed. “Who do you think taught Liliha and Tatiana? What, this girl has a baby?”
“Yeah, and she seems overwhelmed.”
She said she’d drive right over, and I hung up feeling I had done a good deed for both of them. My father’s declining health had meant that my mother had to curtail a lot of her activities, including volunteering as a docent at the Bishop Museum, and helping Leelee would be a nice project for her. It could also keep her from going to any more rallies where she might get shot.
I made a couple of notes, told Leelee my mom was on her way over and promised we would be back in touch. “Let’s go back to what we were talking about before,” Ray said, as we walked away from the house. “What do you think the burglar was looking for?”
“She had a lot of old newspaper articles,” I said. “Now, I wish we’d taken all that stuff into evidence, but at the time it just looked like junk.”
“You remember anything about what she had? Was it about 54 Neil S. Plakcy
Kingdom of Hawai’i?”
“No, it was all older stuff,” I said. “Genealogy. Some birth and marriage announcements. Like from her family. And there was some stuff about volcanoes, places destroyed by the lava flows.”
“Didn’t the old folks say she came from some place that had been wiped out?”
“Yup. So those could just be personal stuff, mementoes.”
Ray thumped the steering wheel. “Maybe the burglar didn’t find what he was looking for—that’s why he ripped everything up and that’s why he took all those albums and folders.”
“We should go back and see if Edith owned any property, had any bank accounts, that kind of thing.”
We stopped at a Zippy’s for lunch on our way back to headquarters, and over teriyaki burgers Ray asked, “What do we know about Edith, anyway? People say she came from some little town on the Big Island, destroyed by lava. Convenient, isn’t it?
You think that’s the truth?”
“We can check it out. Leelee seemed to think all Edith had was her Social Security. If she still owned some property on the Big Island, the killer could be looking for deeds or bankbooks.”
I made a couple of notes, and then we relaxed and ate. They were playing an album I recognized as Hapa’s Surf Madness from the late 90s, and I tapped my foot along to their ‘50s hipster version of the Hawaii Five-O theme.
After lunch, we went back to headquarters, and I looked online for whatever the state had on Edith Kapana. The database of birth records indicated she had been born at home in 1935
in a small town called Opihi. I searched map sites but couldn’t find it, eventually discovering, from an Star-Advertiser article in the online archive, that the town had been wiped out a year ago by an eruption of Kilauea.
According to the article, Opihi was a tiny hamlet populated by a handful of Native Hawaiian families. They led a hardscrabble MAhu BLood 55
life, farming and fishing. When their homes were destroyed their way of life went with it. They relocated or moved in with distant relations, like Aunty Edith did. In a much later article, a reporter who interviewed Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, the leader of Kingdom of Hawai’i, pointed out that he had been born there, though he had moved to O’ahu before the destruction.
Edith didn’t have any bank accounts that we could find, and she only owned a small piece of land in Opihi which once had a small house on it. The record indicated the property had been condemned after the lava destroyed it. She had one brother, who died years before. I tracked his life, discovering that he had moved to Honolulu in 1958, married and bought the house in Papakolea. He and his wife had two children: Elizabeth, born in 1959, and Amos, born in 1960.
Elizabeth Kapana died in 2007; I found an obituary for
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