SHADOWS IN PARADISE ~PROLOGUE~ The news is sure to rock the island where peace is cherished and aloha reigns. Tomorrow’s headline in the Maui News will not be about a legislative issue or a North Shore swell, or some hideously unnecessary new resort. Tomorrow’s headline will be about Kiri Kilohana, a warm-skinned eleven-year-old local boy with eyes as soft as morning mist that was abducted from his home by a stranger. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen here. This island, this hallowed respite from the violent everyday realities elsewhere, is safe harbor to children. Today, all of that has changed. Today, July fourth, the bubble has been shattered. Neighbors on Kiri’s street and the one behind it reported that they had noticed a red compact car cruising, maybe a Ford Escort, driven by a man they’d not ever seen before. Haole. White man. Maybe late thirties. But they gave it hardly a thought. After all, on a holiday relatives are visiting relatives. Friends are visiting friends. Kiri and his little sister, Lehua, had been playing in the backyard, running through fields of automatic sprinklers turned on by their father for a little hot afternoon fun. Kiri had his shirt off, and his chest glistened from the sweet wetness. He was half Hawaiian, half Portuguese, with beautiful dark skin and charcoal eyes. He was wearing only a pair of aqua blue Local Motion swimming trunks with a cheerful hibiscus print as he frolicked in the spray. Lehua, her waist-long black hair whipping her petite body with water, giggled with glee. How she adored her big brother. Off in the not-too-distant, the Pied Piper melody of the ice cream man wound its way through the neighborhood and cried out to the children, just slightly off-pitch like a music box running low on batteries. “Ice cream!!!” Lehua and Kiri answered the call in chorus. They spied their mother through the kitchen window putting dishes away and galloped to the outside wall. "Mom!” Kiri called through the window, “Da ice cream man is here! Can we get something? Please?” She smiled with a chuckle and met them outside with a handful of one dollar bills. With almost a frantic frenzy the two children tore off down the street, looking this way and that, in search of the elusive music. Ten minutes later, prizes in hand, Kiri and his seven-year-old sister danced home, giggling and singing Eddie Murphy’s ice cream song: “I have some iiiice cream!” Sweet melting milk dribbled down Kiri’s arm but he didn’t care. Lehua flashed a playful smile at him, pointing at his mess, and Kiri laughed back at his sister who now sported a chocolate moustache. The music of the ice cream man faded away as the music of their laughter and song rose – and the car approached with stealth, neither of the children noticing until it was less than five feet behind them. They were at their own property line, just stepping onto their backyard turf when it happened. Slow motion clips of film, it seemed like. Kiri turned his head. The stranger leapt. Lehua screamed. Inside, Mrs. Kilohana looked up from her dishes in horror. A platter crashed to the floor. The stranger dragged Kiri, his arm crooked around the boy’s neck, back to the waiting open door of his car, threw him in and shut the door with the lock depressed. Lehua froze. Their mother gave chase across the back yard as the driver door slammed and the car sped away leaving swerving black streaks from the burning rubber of the tires in its wake. A cracked waffle cone and a blob of ice cream lay abandoned on the sidewalk. And just that quickly, Kiri Kilohana disappeared from view forever.

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