For a minute or two, I stand without blinking, the way the Magdalen must have stood inside the tomb of Jesus. Is that blasphemous? But the feeling’s the same, I think. When you step inside a space that is sacred, the way the inside of that Rofrano Sirius feels to me. I can’t explain it. I can’t tell you what queer, otherworldly electricity hovers in the air. As I lift my camera and take the first photograph, I flinch, because I understand I’m transgressing some taboo, I am crossing the boundary between profane and holy. Still I snap the pictures. I must. Because I have no flash, because I wouldn’t use one if I had it, I’ve got to open the aperture wide and hold myself still. Click, click, click. Outside the metal skin, Kaiko groans and fidgets. I emerge some minutes later and close the hatch behind me. Climb down from the wing and aim the lens at the exterior. Click, click.

“Now can we split?” begs Kaiko.

“Like a banana.”

“You’re not going to send those photos to some newspaper, are you?”

“My God, of course not! That would be a terrible waste.”

“Waste of what?”

“This is gold, Kaiko. Don’t you see that? Pure gold.”

We emerge into the sunlight. I grasp the edge of the door and slide it shut. Both of us look this way and that, to see if we’ve been observed, but the surroundings are quiet and green and motionless.

“Janey,” Kaiko says, in a serious voice, “I shouldna done that. You got to promise you won’t tell anyone.”

I tuck my camera and my notebook into my knapsack. My heart’s still thundering, my fingers shake. “Not a soul. You have my word.”

But I don’t ask him why, after a decade tucked in a shed, Irene Foster’s custom Rofrano Sirius should have not a speck of dust upon her skin, inside or out.

The cat enjoys riding in the basket of my bicycle as we trundle up and down the road from Kilauea to Coolibah, passing through Hanalei in between. Sometimes I check the post office again in the afternoon, before doubling back to Coolibah, but today I cycle straight back and calculate the hours until nightfall, when I can take out my developing equipment and turn that film into photographs. Already the whole episode has the texture of a dream, something my brain cooked up out of fantasy. Did I really just stand inside the cockpit of Irene Foster’s missing airplane? Did I really just climb down from its wing and snap a photograph of its snub nose?

So enraptured am I, I hardly notice that the ferry should be coming in about now, has probably already docked, until I’m skidding past the little pier, wobbling my bicycle around the few departing passengers, and hear my name called over the racket.