If Brody had been a teetotaler, Michael might have been an alcoholic. Oedipus? Who knew? Well, all of this had brought him here, and a lovely place it was.

If only he did not make his living at the bottom of the sea....

As soon as Ellen was unpacked, Michael dragged her down to show her the ketch. Her name was Neptune's Folly. She was, Michael said, a famous old Bahama cruiser, donated to their conch-study project by the Ministry of Fisheries and funded by a grant.

During the Cape North Regatta many years ago, Ellen had lost her taste for anything that sailed. The second shark had seen to that. But she was a New Englander, born to the sea. She had cruised the coast of Maine with her father as a girl, in a gaff-rigged ketch like this one, only smaller.

She understood the very boats she feared. In Neptune's Folly she sensed a wanderer, doomed to placid cays and still lagoons, straining at her spring lines to be free.

Michael picked at bubbled varnish on the boom. "She needs work. No funds. I'd hate to trust her past the Point."

Nestled against Neptune's starboard bow was a midget submarine, painted pink. A salt-streaked rubber dinghy was tied to the ketch's stern.

They entered a stately, old-fashioned pilothouse. A huge computer screen stared greenly at racks of test tubes and specimen bottles. A battered wooden icebox had a dart board on its door. A few beer posters hung on the bulkheads.

The compartment was jammed with cameras, diving tanks, face masks, and regulators.

An enormous black man was sitting at a workbench, soldering an intricate circuit with fingers that dwarfed his work. He stood up and bowed; he was Jake McCay, Mike's partner and the boss of the Fisheries' Conch Project. He spoke with the lilt of the Bahamas behind his careful words. Mike joined him at the lab bench, discussing some electronic device they were working on. Ellen moved across the cabin.

At the chart table a girl was laying out playing cards. She was absolutely beautiful. She had skin of café au lait and big brown eyes peppered with golden flecks. Her body, under an island print, was flawless. When she turned from her cards, she smiled like a reigning queen.

"I am called Louisa, Mrs. Brody," she said, holding out her hand. Her accent was faintly French. Ellen decided that she was Haitian. "So you are Ellen Brody! Eh bien, you look younger than your son."

Ellen grinned. "That's the nicest thing I've heard in many a day."

Louisa's eyes, searching and tender, narrowed curiously, then widened as if in fear. "Mrs. Brody? Are you quite all right?"

"Why, yes...."

But suddenly she was not. A coldness started from her stomach, worked its way up to her chest, invaded her arms and legs, and she was shivering in the warm Bahamian air.