The Reef

gear, Ray in cotton slacks and polarized glasses. Ray was already busy with his compass, marking the position for his ship’s daily log.
    “We’re not going to moor here.” Matthew swept hisgaze over the sea, noting the pretty catamaran carrying tourists on a snorkeling cruise from Nevis to St. Kitts. The cheerful sound of the ondeck band carried festively across the water. “We’ll use the buoy as a line and move inshore toward Mount Nevis.”
    While Ray nodded and scribbled the marks, Matthew continued. “Tate can make sketches of the bottom, and we can read them as we go.”
    Ray slung the binoculars around his neck and studied Matthew’s determined face. “You’re thinking of VanDyke.”
    “Damn right. If he gets wind of us, he’s not going to be able to drop right down on the wreck. He won’t know the distances or the landmarks we select, or even if we’re diving inshore or offshore of the buoy. That gives him plenty of possibilities to work through.”
    “And buys us time,” Ray agreed. “If this isn’t the Isabella —”
    “We’ll soon find out,” Matthew interrupted. He didn’t want to speculate. He wanted to know. “One way or the other, we take precautions.” He pulled on his flippers as he spoke. “Come on, Red, let’s move.”
    “I needed to reload my camera.”
    “Forget the camera. We’re not developing any film.”
    “But—”
    “Look, all it takes is one clerk passing the word along. Take all the pictures you want, but no film gets sent off until we’re finished here. Got the board and graphite pencil?”
    “Yes.” Assuming a nonchalantly professional pose, she patted her goody bag.
    “Let’s dive.”
    Before she’d adjusted her mask, he was in the water. “Impatient, isn’t he?” She sent a quick smile toward her parents that revealed only a portion of the excitement humming through her. “Keep your fingers crossed,” she told them, and splashed into the sea.
    Following his trail of bubbles, she dived deep. Her inner sensor told her when she’d passed thirty feet, then forty. She began to make note of the landscape of the seafloor,knowing her assignment was to sketch it carefully. Every bed of sea grass, every twist of coral.
    With her graphite pencil, she began to reproduce them, meticulously keeping to scale, marking distances in degrees, resisting the urge to add artistic flourishes. Science was exacting, she reminded herself even as she watched the dance of an angelfish duet.
    She saw Matthew signal, and waved back querulously at the interruption. Efficient sketches took time and care, and since he was the one who’d insisted on them rather than photographs, he could damn well wait. When the clang of his knife on his tank intruded again, she cursed him mildly then stowed her board and pencil.
    Just like a man, she thought. Always come here, and make it now. Once they surfaced, she’d tell him just what she thought of the arrangement. And then . . .
    Her thoughts trailed off, went limp as her suddenly numb fingers, as she saw what he was investigating.
    The cannon was the lovely pale green of corrosion and alive with colonizing animals. She snatched her camera and recorded it, with Matthew at the mouth. But that didn’t make it real. Not until she had touched it with her own hand, felt the solid iron beneath her exploring fingers, did it become real.
    Her breath exploded in bubbles when he grabbed her, swung her around. Tate prepared herself for an exuberant embrace, but he was only pointing her toward the rest of the find.
    More cannon. This was what the magnetometer had recorded. As Matthew towed her along, she counted four, then six, then eight, spread over the sandy floor in a rough semicircle. Her heart spun into her throat. She knew that cannon often literally pointed to a wreck.
    They found her nearly fifty feet south, crushed, battered, and smothered by the drifting sand.
    She’d been proud once, Tate thought as she plunged her hand into the sand and felt the soft give of worm-eaten wood. Even regal like the queen she’d been named for. For so long, she’d been lost, a victim of the sea that had come to be a part of its continuity.
    Broken, what was left of Isabella —for Tate never doubted it was the Isabella —was spread over more than a hundred feet of seabed, buried, encrusted. And waiting.
    Her hand was steady enough as she began to sketch again. Matthew was already fanning, so she alternated her drawing with quick snapshots