She could feel the heat of the sun room. The bells pealed from the church, providing Brody, who had quit going, with his usual Sunday guilt.

"It was the fish, all right," Mike moaned. "It was your stupid little minnow—"

"Mike," warned Brody, "knock it off!"

Mike tried to get up, but another cramp seized him and he lay back, shivering. "Why'd Sean have to catch the frigging thing?" He groaned and glared at Ellen. "And why'd you have to cook it? For breakfast, for crying out loud! There wasn't even enough there to eat, just enough to poison everybody!"

Sean defended his catch. "It was a regular-sized fish. And it didn't poison me or Dad or Mom!" Sean stalked off, head held high.

She shook down the thermometer and put it into Michael's mouth. She took his pulse: eighty. He asked what time it was. Brody looked at his watch. "Nine-twenty."

Mike sat up as if galvanized. The thermometer fell from his mouth. "Nine-twenty? I got to be at Town Dock at ten! Suited up!"

Gently Brody pushed him back, and Ellen reinserted the thermometer. "You aren't going anywhere, Cousteau. Not in the ocean, anyway—with cramps, already."

She took out the thermometer. Normal. High pulse but no temperature? She looked into his eyes.

He was sick, all right, but it wasn't Sean's fish or her cooking. He was scared of his first ocean dive.

He had sneaked out when his dad had left and made that dive, and afterward the terror had apparently left him—clamped its teeth into her guts—and now he earned his living at the bottom of the sea.

Was Thea sick with fear of something too?

She found that she was pacing like a tigress.

"Sit down, Mom, please," begged Michael. "I'm calling Dr. Stanford down on Crooked Island."

She sat down in a rattan chair, then got up immediately. She looked toward the dock. Clarence and William were tying up Neptune's Folly in the pouring rain. The boat had been forced back by the storm, thank God, or she'd be here with Thea all alone. Carla had phoned that she was trapped by the weather in Nassau; she would spend the night with her agent and his wife.

Mike was in the kitchen now, on the silly, hand-cranked phone.

But Dr. Stanford had left Crooked Island the previous night. He was somewhere off on an island they called Great Exuma, and Michael was suddenly calling Hoagie for his plane. Then the truly bad news came: Calypso Charters was grounded by the storm.

The thunder arose, the shutters chattered in the wind, and Ellen chattered, too; she couldn't seem to stop. "Michael, just because we're in the tropics doesn't mean it's something tropical. You still have flu and chicken pox, like everybody else."

"I didn't say it was tropical, Mom. But she's hardly been sick in her life."

"She probably caught a bug, Mike. Deenie said her sister's sick."