I reach the end of the beach without encountering anybody, but according to McNally there’s another beach to the left, on the other side of Makahoa Point. Lumahai Beach, it’s called, which is a rather lovely name, I think, and somewhere I’d like to surf for that reason alone, if I liked to surf at all. It hints of the moon, of the mysterious.

I replace my shoes on my feet and begin the climb up the rocks, across the neck of the point, thick with trees, palms and that kind of thing. I don’t know much about flora, to be perfectly honest; you won’t find a single artful landscape among my published photographs. Just people and buildings and machines and the odd animal, when the subject is willing and the occasion requires it. So don’t ask me what species of tree I’m passing, what kind of branch I’m pushing aside as I step into a patch of cleared earth off the coastal highway. A dilapidated yellow Ford sits to one side. The tire prints appear fresh. A footpath leads westish, behind a piece of wood shaped like an arrow that says beach.

I follow this track downward through the trees until it opens up to a pristine ocean beach, deserted except for a pile of clothes near the edge of the sand, and a person in a long, dark bathing suit hurtling down the barrel of a perfect bow wave.

As I expected, this person is a woman, and when she trudges to shore she doesn’t look all that surprised to see me there. Her hair is short and prematurely silver above a tanned, lined, scarred, firm, freckled face that might be any age from thirty-five to sixty. I think it’s strange that she doesn’t take any trouble to disguise herself. Why hasn’t she been discovered here before? Is it the gray hair, or the scars, or the fact that you don’t expect her? You never do find what you’re not looking for, even the woman at the center of one of the world’s great mysteries, who was once the most fascinating, the most photographed female on earth.

She’s tall, maybe five foot eleven, topping me by two or three inches. She carries the surfboard under her arm like it’s made of balsa wood. She plants it in the sand and slicks back her wet hair and waits for me to introduce myself. I find I’m not nearly as nervous as I expected. Nothing more than a flutter of excitement, even though I can plainly see it’s her, it is the mysterious She, that I’ve found her at last. There’s no mistaking that height, those cheekbones, those sharp, hooded eyes that have regarded me from a thousand photographs, although I never realized they were quite so blue.

“Mrs. Lindquist?” I ask.