Fortunately, they had been able to save Danny Ray’s truck. They headed directly back to the Miss Rosalie, while I stopped at Wang Cho’s House of Delight and picked up a bounteous spread of food.

After the guys had showered, fed, and rested a bit, we loaded into Danny Ray’s truck and my rental car and drove through the darkened streets of Savannah to Bob Martin’s cabin on Dutch Island. I followed along as Danny Ray led us to the place without a single hesitation or wrong turn. When he pulled into, and stopped, in a narrow dirt drive that seemed to disappear into a blackened jungle, I got out and unlocked a sturdy gate made of two steel posts set on either side of the drive with the bar of the gate being made of a length of four-inch diameter steel pipe. We pulled both vehicles through the gate, which I then closed behind us.

We drove for almost a hundred meters through a tunnel of vegetation, arriving at last in a clearing of about a half an acre. Sitting just at the edge of the salt marsh, where the land dropped off with a ragged edge, was an old shack, its tin roof shining dully in the light reflected by the low clouds. The place had the feeling of utter desertion. Far away, across the marsh, where the salt creek made a sweeping bend back to the east, I could see the faint night-lights from a few of the Dutch Island mansions.

“Danny Ray, let’s leave your truck here and we’ll go back in my car. Okay?”

Both men silently nodded their heads, and I realized I had been speaking in a whisper.

“There’s no need to go in the cabin yet,” I continued. “We’ll head back to the boat, get a few hours’ sleep, and then set out before daylight. When the sun comes up, all I want anyone to know is that Miss Rosalie is gone.”

“Right,” whispered Parker.

“Ch-ch-ch-check the dock,” Danny said in a low voice.

“Good idea. Lead the way,” I said.

Danny Ray guided us by a narrow boardwalk that ran along the side of the cabin. A set of stairs led down the steep bank of the bluff to the dock below. I walked to the end and peered down at the water. As Bob had said, the dock was set in a cut in the bank. The cleft in the shore was maybe thirty feet wide at the mouth, tapering sharply as it plunged landward, and was perhaps seventy-five feet deep.