Perhaps an unsuccessful break-in by the party of divers who had died here? But local scuba divers hired by the Ministry of Tourism had found their bodies far from here, in a forward passageway. It was said on Whiskey Cay that the first of them to die had been a woman, lost in a labyrinth of passageways forward, and that her husband had gone after her, and then another diver, and then the last.

Their lights had failed while they swam through the maze, and they had panicked and drowned when their tanks ran out.

Creak... thump... The door closed, opened, closed, opened, with just enough room for a man to inch through. Not this man, though....

He was suddenly terrified at what might be behind the door. He glanced at his watch. At sixty feet, his time was up. He'd be lucky if he didn't get the bends; it would be fine therapy for his mother's fears of diving if he ended in a Nassau decompression tank, writhing on the floor.

As calmly as he could, he swam to the hole in the hull. The sand was building again, and as he squirmed free of the ship, the current caught him and he barely made the sub.

He climbed aboard Neptune's Folly and told Jake they had lost their last transmitter in the wreck.

"Damn! What do we do now?"

"Wait until he comes out, I guess."

Jake went to get a beer.

***

It was ten A.M., Carla Brody was deep into her work, and everything was going wrong. The trip to Amity had delayed her, her deadline was coming fast, and the metal was fighting her.

The blue-white flame of her welder's arc shone faintly through the thick glass of her mask. The smell of ozone was heavy in her studio, and sparks jetted off like meteors.

The view through the glass never gave her any sense of the whole. She was like a blind woman examining an elephant. She cut the arc and threw back her helmet. The bead of the weld was perfectly symmetrical: not a defect. Now a new arc of steel swept outward from the trunk of her grand design.

Masterpiece or junk? She was never sure. Was Cellini? Bologna? Verrocchio? She had no idea. There were no signposts in sculpture.

What guided her was a sixth sense of too-muchness. No critic had ever attacked her for being ornate. She slapped everything on and subtracted from that, cutting and grinding, toward the end, in a shower of shooting stars. Seldom, during this final phase, did she add.

Some days she was indecisive, but usually she was unerring in her sense of what was not needed. Not today, with her rebellious iron and steel.

She glanced out toward the water. Ellen was doing the bay windows on the main house, but Carla was damned if she'd feel guilty about that.