This, too, had changed. The kitchen she remembered had had a paint splattered floor, with the only usable counter space being a tottering picnic table. The floor had been stripped and varnished, the cabinets redone, and scrubbed butcher block counters lined the sink. He had put in a skylight so that the sun spilled down over the picnic table, now re-worked and re-painted, with benches along either side.

“Did you do all of this yourself?”

“Yeah. Surprised?”

So he didn’t want to make polite conversation. Kate set her briefcase on the table. “Yes. You always seemed content that the walls were about to cave in on you.”

“I was content with a lot of things, once. Want a beer?”

“No.” Kate sat down and drew the first of her father’s notebooks out of her briefcase. “You’ll want to read these. It would be unnecessary and time-consuming for you to read every page, but if you’d look over the ones I’ve marked, I think you’ll have enough to go by.”

“All right.” Ky turned from the refrigerator, beer in hand. He sat, watching her over the rim as he took the first swallow, then he opened the notebook.

Edwin Hardesty’s handwriting was very clear and precise. He wrote down his facts in didactic, unromantic terms. What could have been exciting was as dry as a thesis, but it was accurate. Ky had no doubt of that.

The Liberty had been lost, with its stores of sugar, tea, silks, wine and other imports for the colonies. Hardesty had listed the manifest down to the last piece of hardtack. When it had left England, the ship had also been carrying gold. Twenty-five thousand in coins of the realm. Ky glanced up from the notebook to see Kate watching him.

“Interesting,” he said simply, and turned to the next page she marked.

There’d been only three survivors who’d washed up on the island. One of the crew had described the storm that had sunk the Liberty, giving details on the height of the waves, the splintering wood, the water gushing into the hole. It was a grim, grisly story which Hardesty had recounted in his pragmatic style, complete with footnotes. The crewman had also given the last known location of the ship before it had gone down. Ky didn’t require Hardesty’s calculations to figure the ship had sunk two-and-a-half miles off the coast of Ocracoke.

Going from one notebook to another, Ky read through Hardesty’s well drafted theories, his clear to-the-point documentations, corroborated and recorroborated. He scanned the charts, then studied them with more care. He remembered the man’s avid interest in diving, which had always seemed inconsistent with his precise life-style.