No midair explosion made sense; the pilot’s throat had been slit. More than reason enough for the crash. And this short but powerful-looking woman here—Ella—had recovered the body. Philo agreed with the detective’s assessment that hers had been a heroic effort.
He and Patrick wandered away from the debris and entered the tiny church through a side door, intact save for one tall window caved inward, its glass shattered, the wood frame dangling. It was the window nearest the church’s pulpit. Something had jettisoned through the glass and its wood crossbars, hit the floor, and skidded against the pulpit itself, and was now covered in flies: the head and neck of a boar with tusks.
“Poor Pumba,” Philo said.
“Sir?”
“Bad joke. Forget it, bud.”
They wandered through the church’s interior. A familiar arrangement: pulpit and altar in front, wooden pews facing them, row after row leading to the rear, could hold maybe two hundred people. The paint on the walls and ceiling was peeling, and dust swirled in the shafts of sunlight that connected the pews to the windows. Dust had settled on the pews, the tables, the pulpit, the altar, everything. They wandered down the center aisle, toward the back, the small church steeped in shadows. Wainscoting with ornate carving and tangerine-colored stain graced the bottom half of the rear wall. A door in the back wall opened outward into the congregation, its keyed lock affixed eye-level, securing it to its frame. Safe space, Philo surmised, maybe for church artifacts and holiday decorations, the door wide enough for a lawn tractor or something larger to fit. Philo tugged at the lock, but it didn’t give.
“It’s Philo Trout, isn’t it?” A female voice startled them from behind.
Ella’s call to him was from the altar area. She continued her quiet entrance, passing the pulpit, moving up the center aisle, her face stern. They hadn’t heard her enter the church.
“Sorry, but yes. And I guess we’re snooping, ma’am. A hazard of the crime scene cleaning business. Another set of, you know, eyes after law enforcement leaves. And you’re Ella. They tell me you’re a hero.”
Ella and her stern expression stayed a course down the center aisle, soon reached him and Patrick. “Far from a hero,” she said. Round head, narrowed, smoky eyes, and the whitest of unsmiling teeth. She’d spoken to them with her chin raised, because she’d needed to. But her tough countenance soon faltered.
“Chester, the pilot, he, um…”
She choked up, tears forming, her aggrieved face softening. “He was a close friend. I did what I had to do, but he was hala already…” Her scowl returned. “More than gone. Murdered.”
She wasn’t tall enough to turn this into a stare-down, her head barely reaching Philo’s shoulders, but she was doing her best despite the height disadvantage. “Why are you here, Mr. Philo Trout?”
Direct. Skeptical. Parochial. He admired her when he first saw her on the beach, she of indiscernible age, best guess forties-fifties, and he liked her even more now. Fiery personality, fireplug physique. She could no doubt both start fires and put them out.
“Like I said, my company cleans up after nasty events like this back on the mainland, in and around Philadelphia. Messy, hazardous situations, some accidents, some not. We mostly handle crime scenes after the cops are gone. Hardcore stuff. We try to make it like it never happened.”
“I got that, but the damage is in the front of the hale pule.”
“The what?”
“The church. Why are you back here?”
A fair question. “Sometimes there’s more damage than people realize, in places they don’t notice. And when we clean crime scenes, we sometimes find things people overlook.”
He didn’t pry, like ask her why she was skeptical about their wandering. Her right to be, of course; they were trespassers, all of them, plus it might also be cultural. A natural, healthy skepticism, from the island’s hundreds of years of isolation.
“How old is this church?” Philo asked, his eyes panning the ceiling, the windows, the walls.
“Eighteen-nineties,” Ella answered, then focused more on Patrick, watching him give a hard pull at the lock on the tall storage door before moving to the far aisle. He followed the aisle toward the front of the church, got a closer look at another side window, on the same wall as the one blown out by a boar’s jettisoned head. Patrick ran his hands over the clear glass panes and the window’s puttied edges, the putty ancient, cracked, and missing in spots. Ella’s stare was now less stern, more curious. “Your friend. His look, it’s like he’s a lost keiti.”
“A what?”
“Child.”
“He’s in the zone, in investigative mode. He’s also an amnesiac, from a brain injury. He’s Hawaiian, but he has no memories of himself prior to a few years ago. We’re here in the islands on vacation to see if anything looks familiar to him.” Philo raised his chin, called to Patrick. “Anything interesting, bud?”
“No other breaches I can see here, sir,” Patrick answered from aside the destroyed window. “Nothin’ else neither, sir.”
The “nothin’ else” related to Patrick’s search for his identity, shorthand to mean he had no latent memories of this place.
“You need someone to help board up this window, ma’am?” Patrick said.
“That won’t be necessary. My husband Ben will have someone take care of it. But thank you. Kind of you to offer.”
Philo absently ran his hand along the top of a church pew, a reflex. He came away with a layer of dust, looked at it, then brushed it off his fingers. Ella didn’t miss the gloveless white-glove inspection.
“That was rude, Mr. Trout. It’s volcanic ash. It’s tough for the island to stay on top of it, there’s always so much. Centuries of it. Resettles everywhere. You’re wearing out your welcome in here, sir. Outside now, please.”
Ella marched them back to the group congregating near the helicopter remains. A sporty aircraft, the flight deck seating was
