Treasures Lost, Treasures Found

ever to disappoint him. Kate knew, though it had never been discussed, that her father wanted her to become head of the English Department within ten years. That had been the extent of his dream for her.
    Had he ever realized just how much she’d loved him? She wondered as she shut her eyes, tired now from the hours of reading her father’s handwriting. Had he ever known just how desperately she’d wanted to please him? If he’d just once said he was proud…
    In the end, she hadn’t had those few intense last moments with her father one reads about in books or sees in the movies. When she’d arrived at the hospital, he was already gone. There’d been no time for words. No time for tears.
    Now she was on her own in the tidy Cape Cod house she’d shared with him for so long. The housekeeper wouldstill come on Wednesday mornings, and the gardener would come on Saturdays to cut the grass. She alone would have to deal with the paperwork, the sorting, the shifting, the clearing out.
    That could be done. Kate leaned back further in her father’s worn leather chair. It could be done because all of those things were practical matters. She dealt easily with the practical. But what about these papers she’d found? What would she do about the carefully drawn charts, the notebooks filled with information, directions, history, theory? In part, because she was raised to be logical, she considered filing them neatly away.
    But there was another part, the part that enabled one to lose oneself in fantasies, in dreams, in the “perhapses” of life. This was the part that allowed Kate to lose herself totally in the possibilities of the written word, in the wonders of a book. The papers on her father’s desk beckoned her.
    He’d believed in it. She bent over the papers again. He’d believed in it or he never would have wasted his time documenting, searching, theorizing. She would never be able to discuss it with him. Yet, in a way, wasn’t he telling her about it through his words?
    Treasure. Sunken treasure. The stuff of fiction and Hollywood movies. Judging by the stack of papers and notebooks on his desk, Hardesty must have spent months, perhaps years, compiling information on the location of an English merchant ship lost off the coast of North Carolina two centuries before.
    It brought Kate an immediate picture of Edward Teach—Blackbeard, the bloodthirsty pirate with the crazed superstitions and reign of terror. The stuff of romances, she thought. Of romance…
    Ocracoke Island. The memory was sharp, sweet and painful. Kate had blocked out everything that had happened that summer four years before. Everything and everyone. Now, if she was to make a rational decision about what was to be done, she had to think of those long, lazy months on the remote Outer Banks of North Carolina.
    She’d begun work on her doctorate. It had been a surprise when her father had announced that he planned to spend the summer on Ocracoke and invited her to accompany him. Of course, she’d gone, taking her portable typewriter, boxes of books, reams of paper. She hadn’t expected to be seduced by white sand beaches and the call of gulls. She hadn’t expected to fall desperately and insensibly in love.
    Insensibly, Kate repeated to herself, as if in defense. She’d have to remember that was the most apt adjective. There’d been nothing sensible about her feelings for Ky Silver.
    Even the name, she mused, was unique, unconventional, flashy. They’d been as suitable for each other as a peacock and a wren. Yet that hadn’t stopped her from losing her head, her heart and her innocence during that balmy, magic summer.
    She could still see him at the helm of the boat her father had rented, steering into the wind, laughing, dark hairflowing wildly. She could still remember that heady, weightless feeling when they’d gone scuba diving in the warm coastal waters. Kate had been too caught up in what was happening to herself to think about her father’s sudden interest in boating and diving.
    She’d been too swept away by her own feelings of astonishment that a man like Ky Silver should be attracted to someone like her to notice her father’s preoccupation with currents and tides. There’d been too much excitement for her to realize that her father never bothered with fishing rods like the other vacationers.
    But now her youthful fancies were behind her, Kate told herself. Now, she could clearly remember how many hours her father had