“It’s not like you were in the Navy or the Coast Guard.” But Antonia’s halfhearted attempt at humor didn’t seem to work even with her, and she abandoned it. “I don’t know what to say. Now what? I still have my flares. We can always try to alert a passing boat.”

Hank continued to gaze out at the water, not liking this development, then glanced at her. “Where’s your kayak?”

“We can’t both take it. It’s just a one-person kayak—”

“Antonia, I didn’t make a mistake. My boat should be here, and it’s not.” He studied her, her skin quickly going pale again, ghostly, her eyes taking on the strain he’d seen in her yesterday when he’d first arrived. Her muscles were visibly tight, and he guessed she was thinking along the same lines as he was—that his boat wasn’t missing by accident. “You know I didn’t screw up, don’t you?”

“My kayak’s over here off the beach.”

She hoisted her backpack high onto her shoulder and, with a nod of pure determination, set off across the wet sand, back along a sloping dune. Hank followed her with the two other packs, and she led him into a stand of pitch pine.

“Mind the poison ivy,” she said, pointing to a vine of it streaming up one of the pines.

Her kayak was tucked among the trees. It was a sleek red touring kayak, obviously expensive, obviously new. Fat drops of rain splattered on its unscratched finish. Hank noticed rain shining on Antonia’s hair, felt it splatting on his shoulder, the top of his head. Except for the occasional lull as the storm moved north, the weather conditions would get worse—far worse—before they got better.

“The paddle.” She almost couldn’t get the words out and had to pause to clear her throat. “Hank, the paddle’s not here.”

“You left it with the boat?”

She nodded.

“When?”

“When I arrived. I haven’t been back here.”

He turned over the long, narrow kayak, but the paddle wasn’t under it. Antonia checked the brush and the surrounding area without success. Hank absorbed what had transpired so far—his boat gone, her kayak paddle gone.

“Maybe the wind blew the paddle away,” she said lamely, then sighed, some of her physician’s calm and decisiveness restoring itself. “If someone finds your boat adrift, there might be enough time for them to launch a search before the hurricane gets here.”

“It won’t be that easy to put the pieces together. The boat belongs to friends of mine in Chatham. They said I could borrow it anytime, and I did. They’re in Prague right now. It’ll take a while for authorities to sort all that out.”