“Yeah, they’re something,” Jess agreed, and she meant it. She’d missed Deception Cove when she’d left it, every damn time. There’d been nothing to come back to but rain and rain forest and Ty’s damn schemes, but she’d never been able to find anything she liked better. Even now the prospect of leaving to flee Kirby Harwood made her anxious.

“Come on,” she said, starting up the beach. “I’ve got a hunch I know where Ty left that package.”

They picked their way through the rough sand and over the rocks, dodging tide pools filled with urchins and tiny hermit crabs. Worked their way north around the end of the beach, a little rock outcrop and a couple of flat rocks like tables where Ty said you could suntan if the weather was good.

The going got tougher when you got past the table rocks, the forest encroaching almost to the water, the overgrowth dense and the land beneath unforgiving. Jess and Burke had to edge their way over the booming surf; she looked back and saw Lucy on the table rock, staring after them, her big brown eyes wide and concerned. For a moment Jess feared the dog would try to follow, but the dog wasn’t that dumb; she circled a couple of times and lay down on the table rock, her head on her paws, watching Jess and Burke navigate the terrain and no doubt thinking how foolish they were.

There was another rocky point up here, as the land curved north toward the top of Dixie Island’s C shape. The forest fell back a little, and there was a cradle of rock, and in the middle there was weedy dune grass studded with rocks and driftwood and dead trees. And there was something else, too, in the middle of that grass, something Ty had been eager to show her.

“Check it out,” he’d said, helping her down from the rocks and into the grass, leading her across to where the trees blocked the sunlight. “Did you ever see anything like this before?”

For a moment she didn’t see anything, just grass and rock and the forest beyond. But she looked closer, went into the shade and let her eyes adjust, and she realized that what she’d thought were dead trees were actually something else.

Ribs, they looked like, a massive, mossy rib cage, and for a second she thought Ty had found a whale’s skeleton. But the ribs were wooden, and here and there she saw iron. This was man-made. Farther into the forest, more and more planks of wood curved up from the spine. This was a ship, or it had been. Now it was a wreck, and a big one.

Burke figured it out much faster than she had. “Must have been some ship,” he said. “How old, do you figure?”