“I saw the buoys you sent up.” Kate moistened her lips and relaxed, muscle by muscle.

“Two more cannons. From the size of them, I’d say she was a fairly small ship. It’s unlikely she was constructed for battle.”

“She was a merchant ship.”

“Maybe. I’m going to take the metal detector down and see what I come up with. From the stuff we’ve found, I don’t think she’s buried too deep.”

Kate nodded. Delve into business, keep the personal aspect light. “I’d like to send off a piece of the planking and some of the glass to be analyzed. I think we’ll have more luck with the glass, but it doesn’t hurt to cover all the angles.”

“No, it doesn’t. Don’t you want your present?”

At ease again, she smiled. “I thought you were joking. Did you bring me a shell?”

“I thought you’d like this better.” Reaching into his bag, Ky brought out the bottle. “It’s too bad it’s not still corked. We could’ve had wine with peanut butter.”

“Oh, Ky, it’s not damaged!” Thrilled, she reached out for it, but he pulled it back out of reach and grinned.

“Bottoms up,” he told her and turned the bottle upside down.

Kate stared at the smeared bottom of the bottle. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “It’s dated. 1749.” Gingerly, she took the bottle in both hands. “The year before the Liberty sank.”

“It’s another ship, maybe,” Ky reminded her. “But it does narrow down the time element.”

“Over two hundred years,” she murmured. “Glass, it’s so breakable, so vulnerable, and yet it survived two centuries.” Her eyes lit with enthusiasm as she looked back at him. “Ky, we should be able to find out where the bottle was made.”

“Probably, but most glass bottles found on wrecks from the seventeenth and eighteenth century were manufactured in England anyway. It wouldn’t prove the ship was English.”

She let out a huff of breath, but her energy hadn’t dimmed. “You’ve been doing your research.”

“I don’t go into any project until I know the angles.” Ky knelt down to check the fresh tanks.

“You’re going back down now?”

“I want to get as much mapped out as I can before we start dealing with too much equipment.”

She’d done enough homework herself to know that the most common mistake of the modern day salvor was in failing to map out a site. Yet she couldn’t stem her impatience. It seemed so time-consuming when they could be concentrating on getting under the layers of silt.