Another wave came, covering his shoes again. This time he got wet halfway to his knees. Tide’s comin’ in, he told himself.

Maybe he didn’t even have to jump in. Maybe he could just stand there til the ocean got high enough that it just opened its mouth and swallowed him up. Like that Jonah in the Bible. Fella’d got swallowed up by a fish. He’d liked that story when he was a kid. His mother had read it to him. He’d pictured old Jonah sittin’ there in the fish’s belly. How’d he breathe in there? he’d asked his mother, and she’d told him it was a sin to question the Good Book.

His mother was dead now. Heart attack. He remembered her funeral. Lots of flowers, big white ones. They sang “Amazing Grace” and he’d cried.

Thinking about it, he cried again.

Hudson set the pages on the tray in front of him and smiled. He checked his watch. Three o’clock. He’d been traveling for—he counted in his head—almost eleven hours. Thirteen, really, since he’d arrived at the airport in New Haven two hours before his seven o’clock flight. The ticket counter hadn’t even been open yet.

Connections in Philadelphia and San Francisco had brought him, finally, to the last leg of the trip. He’d considered driving from San Francisco, taking Highway 1 down the coast. He’d heard it was a beautiful drive. But it would have extended his journey by several more hours, and he was anxious to get to Monterey. He’d waited long enough.

He picked up the pages again and neatened them. They were copies, of course. The originals were safely stored in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator in his apartment in New Haven. It was a trick he’d learned his first week in graduate school. Always keep whatever you’re working on in the freezer. It’s the one thing that doesn’t burn in a fire.

He didn’t know if this was, in fact, true. But everyone did it, and so did he. Even though theses and dissertations could now safely be stored on multiple electronic devices, safe from the possibility of destruction by fire, actual paper was still susceptible. He’d scanned them, of course, and did have them stored on at least four different drives, each in a separate place. But there were still the originals. Those he had to safeguard. And so they sat in the freezer, in a plastic bag next to the ice cubes and the ever-present box of Otter Pops that Marty kept there.

He would have liked to bring the originals, but that wasn’t possible. Already they were fragile. He’d been lucky to find them in readable condition at all, considering where they’d been stored. They should have been nothing but fragments. He shuddered even thinking about that. If they’d been destroyed ...

He couldn’t go there. They hadn’t been destroyed; that was all that mattered. He had found them. And now he was going to prove that they were as important as he believed they were.