The Reef

wants, and what we’re going to have.”
    “Why is it so important? This wreck, this necklace?”
    “Because we lost something that summer, Tate,” he said quietly. “More than the fortune that thief stole from us. More even than Buck’s leg. We lost the joy in what we’d done, what we could do. We lost the magic of what could be. It’s time we got it back.”
    She let out a sigh. How could she fight dreams? Didn’t she have her own, still? The museum she’d planned for, hoped for, most of her life. And someday she’d see it realized. Who was she to try to block her father’s one abiding wish?
    “All right. We can go back, just the three of us.”
    “The Lassiters are part of it now, just as they were then. And if anyone has a right to find that wreck, and that amulet, it’s Matthew.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it cost him a father.”
    She didn’t want to think of that. She didn’t want to be able to visualize the young boy who had grieved helplessly over his dead father’s body.
    “The amulet doesn’t mean any more to him than a means to an end, something to be sold to the highest bidder.”
    “That’s for him to decide.”
    “That makes him,” she corrected, “little better than VanDyke.”
    “He hurt you that summer. Matthew.” Gently, Ray took her face in his hands. “I knew there was something between you, but I didn’t realize it had cut so deep.”
    “This has nothing to do with that,” she insisted. “It has to do with who and what he is.”
    “Eight years is a long time, honey. Maybe you should step back and take another look. In the meantime, thereare things I need to show you, all of you. Let’s get everybody into my den.”
    With reluctance, Tate joined the group in the warmly paneled room where her father did his research and wrote his articles for diving magazines. Deliberately, she moved to the opposite end of the room from Matthew and settled on the arm of her mother’s chair.
    With the windows open to the scents and music of the sound, it was just cool enough to indulge in a quiet fire. Ray walked behind his desk, cleared his throat like a nervous lecturer about to begin his speech.
    “I know you all are curious about what prompted me to begin this venture. All of us know what happened eight years ago, what we found and what we lost. Every time I’d dive after that, I’d think about it.”
    “Brood about it,” Marla corrected with a smile.
    Ray smiled back at her. “I couldn’t let it go. I thought I had for a time, but then something would remind me, and set me off again. One day I had the flu, and Marla wouldn’t let me out of bed. I passed the time with some television and happened across a documentary on salvaging. It was a wreck off Cape Horn, a rich one. And who was backing it, who was pulling in the glory, but Silas VanDyke.”
    “Bastard,” Buck muttered. “Probably pirated that one, too.”
    “Might have, but the point is, he’d decided to film the proceedings. He wasn’t on-camera much himself, but he did talk a little about some of the diving he’d done, other wrecks he’d discovered. The sonofabitch talked about the Santa Marguerite. He never bothered to mention it had already been found, excavated. The way he told it, he did it all, then being the generous soul he is, donated fifty percent of the proceeds to the government of Saint Kitts.”
    “In bribes and kickbacks,” Matthew decided.
    “It got my blood up. I started researching again right then and there. I figured he’d gotten one wreck, but he wasn’t going to get the other. I spent the better part of two years digging up every snatch of information I could find on the Isabella. No reference to that ship, that crew,that storm was too small or insignificant. That’s how I found it. Or, how I found two very vital pieces to the puzzle. A map, and a reference to Angelique’s Curse.”
    Carefully, he lifted a book out of the top drawer. Its cover was tattered and held together by tape. Its pages were dry and yellowed.
    “It’s falling apart,” Ray said unnecessarily. “I found it in a used-book store. A Sailor’s Life. It was written in 1846, by the great-grandson of a survivor of the Isabella.”
    “But there were no survivors,” Tate put in. “That’s one of the reasons the wreck’s been so hard to find.”
    “No recorded survivors.” Ray stroked the book as though it were a well-loved child. “According to this, stories and legends the author transcribed from his