The Reef

forty. His dark-brown hair was sprinkled with gray and tended to curl. Behind the lenses, his eyes were the color of honey, and usually distracted. There were character-building lines that fanned from his eyes and scored his brow. He was tall, broad-shouldered and just a little clumsy. As usual, his shirt was wrinkled.
    Tate thought he looked a bit like Clark Kent approaching middle age.
    “Hayden?”
    He grunted. As that was more than she’d expected, Tate took a seat directly across from him, folded her arms on the table and waited until he’d finished muttering to himself.
    “Hayden?” she said again.
    “Huh? What?” Blinking like an owl, he looked up. His face became quietly charming when he smiled. “Hi. Didn’t hear you come in. I’m recalculating the drift. I think we’re off, Tate.”
    “Oh, by much?”
    “It doesn’t take much out here. I decided to start from the beginning.” As if preparing for one of his well-attended lectures, he tapped papers together, folded his hands over them.
    “The side-wheeler Justine left San Francisco on the morning of June eighth, 1857, en route to Ecuador. She held one hundred and ninety-eight passengers, sixty-one crew. In addition to the passengers’ personal belongings, she carried twenty million dollars in gold. Bars and coins.”
    “It was a rich time in California,” Tate murmured. She’d read the manifests. Even for a woman who had spent most of her life studying and diving for treasure, it had boggled her.
    “She took this route,” Hayden continued, tapping keys on the computer so that the graphics mirrored the doomed ship’s journey south through the Pacific. “She went into port at Guadalajara, discharging some passengers, taking on others. She pulled out on June nineteenth, with two hundred and two passengers.”
    He pushed through copies of old newspaper clippings. “ ‘She was a bright ship,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘and the mood was celebrational. The weather was calm and hot, the sky clear as glass.’ ”
    “Too calm,” Tate said, well able to imagine the mood, the hope. Elegantly dressed men and women parading the decks. Children laughing, perhaps watching the sea for a glimpse of a leaping dolphin or sounding whale.
    “One of the survivors noted the brilliant, almost impossibly beautiful sunset on the night of June twenty-first,” Hayden continued. “The air was still and very heavy. Hot. Most put it down to their nearness to the equator.”
    “But the captain would have known then.”
    “Would have, or should have.” Hayden moved his shoulders. “Neither he nor the log survived. But by midnight on the evening of that beautiful sunset, the winds came—and the waves. Their route and speed put them here.” He took the computer-generated Justine south and west. “We have to assume he would have headed for land, Costa Rica by most accounts, hoping he could ride it out. But with fifty-foot swells battering his ship, there wasn’t much of a chance.”
    “All that night and all the next day, they fought the storm,” Tate added. “Terrified passengers, crying children. You’d hardly be able to tell day from night, or hear your own prayers. If you were brave, or frightened enough to look, all you would see would be wall after wall of water.”
    “By the night of the twenty-second, the Justine was breaking apart,” Hayden continued. “There was no hope of saving her, or of reaching land in her. They put the women, the children, and the injured in the lifeboats.”
    “Husbands kissing their wives goodbye,” Tate said softly. “Fathers holding their children for the last time.And all of them knowing it would take a miracle for any of them to survive.”
    “Only fifteen did.” Hayden scratched his cheek. “One lifeboat outwitted the hurricane. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t even have these small clues as to where to find her.” He glanced up, noticed with alarm that Tate’s eyes were wet. “It was a long time ago, Tate.”
    “I know.” Embarrassed, she blinked back the tears. “It’s just so easy to see it, to imagine what they went through, what they felt.”
    “For you it is.” He reached over and gave her hand an awkward pat. “That’s what makes you such a fine scientist. We all know how to calculate facts and theories. Too many of us lack imagination.”
    He wished he had a handkerchief to offer her. Or better yet, the nerve to brush away the single tear that had escaped to trail down her cheek.