She drew the chart of Takarava from the chart drawer, risking his wrath as she nudged him aside to slide it out. She spread it on the salon settee and studied it. “Hey, Mitch, we don’t have to go into the pass. The village is right at the start of it. You can tie up to a concrete wharf—”

“In a six-knot current?” He smiled, patiently enough considering the trouble she was giving him. His sight must have worked out well. “No, honey. I am hoping to anchor in a quiet little piece of a large and calm lagoon. Not the middle of the Colorado River. I am hoping for no French Navy, no frigging smog, and most of all, no other goddamn yachts. Now, you want to climb up there and see if you can find it?”

He had told her to look for a cloud-bottom which might be tinted green with reflected light from a lagoon. At 1 P.M., against all her inclinations, she was forced to study a cloud formation off their port bow.

The formation she studied was a caveman squatting with great round haunches, tending streamers of rain as if watching a fire. His bottom was tinged with green.

As she peered at the horizon beneath him, it turned, despite her hopes, to a sawtooth fringe of palm trees, much longer than she had imagined. It stretched, it seemed, across half the southern sea. The atoll enlarged with frightening speed.

“Land ho,” she sang down mournfully. He popped topside and swept his eye along the comb-toothed length of the atoll. She climbed down and their glances met. He seemed as impressed as she was with the sweep of the palms: the silent question was, suppose they’d come on it, or one like it, at night?

They dropped the sails and powered for an hour along the reef. Somewhere there was supposed to be a wreck, marked on the chart, which might identify the island as the right one and give them a landmark for the pass too. They stayed well offshore: there was no way to judge their distance from the palm trees without a complicated series of bow-and-beam bearings. Mitch was too busy looking for the alleged wreck to undertake them. They kept easing in to see better, and then out when they got scared, for they had no way of knowing, really, where the undersea reef began.

At three-thirty, with his glasses trained on the shore, he let out a yelp. “There she is!”

He handed her the binoculars. She ran the glasses along the monotonous palms. The wreck jumped into the field of her view: high and dry and completely naked, a brick-red hulk bleeding rust. It was steel, a trading schooner or square-rigger, piled up, probably, before her father was born.